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httpknjoon · 4 years

Text

once again │myg; 1

plot│ How can an eight year relationship turned as a bitter past? Can such thing can be rekindled once again? After your friend invited you to come to your home country after a long time, you decided to visit for three weeks. In three weeks, many things can happen. Including meeting Min Yoongi once again.

genres│ angst, little fluff over there, exes!au

word count│3.4k

pairings │yoongi x reader, taehyung x reader (esp in this chapter)

masterlist | once again — preview

Are you nervous? Happy? Excited? Sad? Or angry?

You don’t know.

Wheels were rolling everywhere. Some people seem to be struggling and hurrying with their own kinds of stuff. While others are just sitting peacefully, knowing that they are still early for their flights. On the other side, you were sitting on a cold, metal, airport seating. Looking around, you were waiting for someone to arrive before you leave.

“Is everything okay? I mean, your stuff? You already have everything you should bring right?”

You panned your eyes to your side. Naeun, your best friend, is looking at you worriedly with her puffed eyes. You nodded with a tight-lipped smile and wandered your eyes around the place again. Naeun watched you at first. She knew you were waiting for someone. And she was also aware that you were nervous based on how your fingers fidget on your luggage’s handle. You kept on biting your lower lip unconsciously.

“Did you two talked already? Did he said he’s going?” Naeun asked.

“Yes and no.” You answered, already knowing who she was talking of. “Yes, we talked. I told him that we can work on our relationship as long as we have our phones or laptops. But, you know how Yoongi feels about goodbyes, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But, I am just hoping that maybe he will drop by to hug or kiss me for one last time.” You sighed deeply, looking down.

A month ago, you were over the moon after receiving an e-mail that you passed for a job as a column writer for a magazine. It was your dream job. Plus, you will be traveling to a new country, Canada. You were literally going to the other side of the world, a thousand miles away. The main reason why your boyfriend was literally against you, accepting this job, in the first place. You and Yoongi have been together for eight years but this will be the first time that you two will be far from each other.

“Good evening, passengers. This is the pre-boarding announcement for flight YYZ 2308 to Toronto, Canada. We are now inviting passengers to begin boarding at this time. Please have your boarding pass and identification ready. Regular boarding will begin in approximately ten minutes. Thank you.”

Only ten minutes left. You were still hoping for Yoongi to come. Squeezing your eyes close, you secretly prayed for him to maybe arrive somewhere here.

“I think you should go,” Naeun said.

“No, I still have a few minutes.” You tried to sound positive and waited over and over until...

“This is the final boarding call for passengers booked on flight YYZ 2308 to Toronto, Canada. Please proceed to gate 2 immediately. The final checks are being completed and the captain will order for the doors of the aircraft to close in approximately ten minutes. I repeat. This is the final boarding call for passengers booked on flight YYZ 2308. Thank you.”

“Okay.”

That was your final call. You and Naeun stood up from your seats. Naeun began crying once again as she hugs you before you board your flight.

“Take care there, Y/N. Don’t overwork yourself. Don’t skip meals, okay?” Your best friend told you, sounding like a parent to her child.

“Thank you so much, Naeun. I’ll try calling you when I arrive there. I will miss you and everyone. Tell them that I’ll miss them too.” You hugged her tightly.

The hug did not last long and you are now proceeding to Gate Two. The attendant greeted you after you handed your boarding pass and identification card.

“Wait, Y/N.”

Yoongi was the one who runs to you since you were already in the line. His chest was heaving as he hugged you.

“You came.” You were still in disbelief.

“Yeah, I’m kinda late but I want to see you before you leave,” Yoongi whispered. “Take care of yourself while being there, okay? Do well with your job. Call me when you get there.”

That’s when you cried. Two weeks ago, you and Yoongi have been fighting since he cannot let you go there. But you explained your reasons and goals. Back then, Yoongi just agreed with a nod, not saying much and already admitting your win. Now, Yoongi is here, cheering you for your plans. You two hugged as tight as you can before leaning your foreheads together.

“I love you so much. Thank you so much, Yoongi.” You sobbed.

“I love you too,”

For the last time, both of you shared a short but sweet kiss. You smiled as you let go. The flight attendant smiled at you after handing you your identification card. You knew she already has seen a hundred of this same scene you and Yoongi made. You looked at Yoongi for the last time and you wave him a hand while showing you his gummy smile. It made you smile more, knowing that he supports you and you will be calling him once you landed in Canada.

The loud ringing of your phone woke you up. You shuffled on your bed, looking for that noisy device. Your face scrunched. It took you two more minutes to finally find it under some pillows. It was only 6:30 AM, you can't think of someone who will call you this early. But, your eyes immediately lit up as you read who was calling you early in the morning.

“Good morning!” You are already in good vibes as you greeted the caller.

“Good morning, love. Did I call you too early?” His voice is still raspy, indicating that maybe he just woke up too.

“No, it’s fine. I did not hear my alarm clock minutes ago.” You answered, now sitting on your bed.

“Nice! Let’s go to work together, okay? I’ll pick you up later. Let’s buy breakfast on the way.”

“Okay, okay. Love you.”

After the call ended, you immediately went straight to your bathroom. This is how your day began. It has been four years since you had your job as a column writer and you no longer work in Canada. Three years ago, you were offered to work in the magazine’s main office in New York City. And of course, you said yes. It was the total dream that came true for you. You haven’t visited Seoul ever since you left. You were busy and after things changed in between those years, you never had plans of coming back again. You and your best friend, Naeun, never lost in touch anyways. You two always talk through video calls with her little girl, Jina.

‘Will be there in five minutes.’

You read your boyfriend’s text just after you just blow dry your hair. Your makeup was already done and you started fixing your hair for a simple side braid. Minutes later, you were already leaving your apartment in your office clothes and classic black heels. Your eyes were quick to spot the familiar black car in front of your apartment building. One of its windows rolled down, revealing your boyfriend.

“Let’s go?”

You smiled before opening the door to the passenger seat. As soon as you got in, you gave him a quick kiss on his lips.

“So, where do you want to have breakfast?” He asked as he drove.

You went silent and started thinking, “Maybe we should drive-thru into that coffeehouse.”

“You said that you don’t drink coffee.”

“I don’t. But, I heard that they sell great pastries too, Tae.” You responded.

Taehyung did not say anything and turned the wheel to the coffeehouse. He was the one who ordered after you told him what you want. You almost squealed because of excitement when you smelled the delicious smell of freshly baked muffins that you got.

“Thank you, love.” You placed a kiss on his cheek before giving a bite of the chocolate chip muffin. “So good.”

Taehyung could not help but giggle at how cute you look. Tiny crumbs of the bread were left on the side of your lips.

“Hey, be careful about eating. You might re-do your make up after that."

"Then, I will re-do it later. It's just so good."

You grinned once again, not aware that there is some evidence of chocolate on your front teeth. Your boyfriend just laughed and continued driving. Not long after, you two arrived in your office building. You work in the same magazine. Taehyung’s job is a creative director, suited for his artistic mind.

“Was the chocolate gone? How do I look?” You asked him after cleaning yourself up.

“Lovely.” He smiled.

You rolled your eyes, “Yeah, I remembered that I should not have asked you.”

“What? Why?”

“You will always say I look great even though I look shitty.”

You heard him chuckle, “You do look great anytime, love!”

The two of you strolled side by side inside your building. You met your other co-workers in the elevator. When the door opened to the fifteenth floor, the whole place is still quiet and empty. Each of you went to your own cubicle and desks. Since you have been working in this magazine for three years now, your working place was already personalized by you. Many neon-colored sticky notes were placed on the wall. A picture frame sat beside your computer desktop, showing an image of you and Taehyung.

After fixing your things, you began working on your last document. The topic that was given to you was quite hard for you though you experienced a few parts of it. You tried researching and interviewing other people about it, hoping that you will be able to make something from it. But, you found it hard. So, you just type whatever in your head. You thought of asking Claire, your editor in chief, to change your topic. But, on the other side, you also thought that maybe it can help you to explore more. You tried processing every information you got and type it all away. You got busy that you did not notice a phone notification from a particular person.

"Hey, Y/N."

You looked up from your computer screen. It was Jane, your co-worker, and friend.

"Me and Henry’s eating out for lunch. Do you and Taehyung want to join?” She invited you.

"Hmm? What time is it already?" You asked since you never really bothered watching your time while working.

"It's almost one in the afternoon."

“Oh, okay. I’ll join it.”

You stood up from your chair and secured your document to your computer. You picked up your phone and wallet from your bag.

“But, I will still ask Tae if he is joining.” You added.

Taehyung is in his shared office with the magazine’s design team. Since they have a glass wall, you already spotted your boyfriend all alone focused on his desktop. It looks like his other colleague already left for lunch. You knocked three times on the glass, making him look up to you. You mouthed ‘let’s have lunch’. Taehyung was quick to get your sentence and left his work.

“You seem so focused there, love.” You told him as you and Taehyung stay behind your two friends.

"Yeah, the team decided a new theme for this month's issue. I had to change many things with my latest work."

Taehyung kept on talking while you thought of checking your phone. And there, you finally noticed the message you received a couple of hours ago. It was from Naeun, asking you to give her a call in your free time. You and Naeun never lost communication in between those years and it’s not new that she messaged you like this. This time, you feel like Naeun has something to tell you. But after checking the time there in Seoul, you thought that maybe you should call her later.

Henry and Jane lead you to the newly opened restaurant, not too far in your building. You only ordered a chicken salad and tomato soup. While eating, they started talking about what they are currently working on. The four of you shared ideas and opinions to help one another until they asked you about yours.

“My topic is extremely hard for me right now.” You told them.

“Oh, that’s new. You always do good research with your subjects.” Henry responded.

“That’s right. Why? What is it all about?” Taehyung also asked.

You did not hesitate to answer since you expected that maybe they can share their own experiences too. But what Jane had told you took you back for a bit.

“Hey, I think that’s easy. I’m sure you got through a break up before. Hmm? You will get some pointers from that.”

It’s true that you already got through a breakup before. But, you are sure that you will not get anything from it. Your article topic was completely missing with the first and only break up you have encountered. The old memories from the past crashed inside your head again. Your heart began beating like crazy again as you

“Love?”

Suddenly, Taehyung held your unconsciously balled fist. You were clutching it too tight that your knuckles turned white. A hint of worry was found in his expression.

“Are you okay?”

You sighed before nodding slowly. Taehyung played with your fingers by pinching each one of it softly, a thing he always does to calm you down when stuff like this happens. The lunch did not take any longer. You and your friends went back to your jobs.

“Are you okay now?” Taehyung asked as you sat back to your swivel chair.

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that." You said sincerely.

You felt sorry that he still has to deal with you having an issue from your past. But Taehyung held your hand again and left a kiss on your forehead.

"You don't have to be sorry. I will always understand."

The day went on. You ended up writing nothing since you cannot focus. You tried anything to type something. Your article was left just like what it was before you had your lunch break. It felt like your head is going to burst while forcing it to focus on your article.

The whole ride back home with Taehyung was silent, only the radio produces a noise. You chose to stay in Taehyung's place for dinner. He said he will order some fast food meals. As soon as you got home and get changed with your boyfriend's clothes, Taehyung called for a food delivery while you contact Naeun. Maybe it will help you to think less.

"Finally! I thought you did not read my message." Naeun said on the other line.

"Well, sorry. I thought that maybe I should call you after you wake up there. Remember? Time difference?" You scoffed.

"Oh, okay. Sorry. Anyways, Y/N, can I ask you a favor?"

You can imagine Naeun acting cute with her puppy eyes just for her tone.

"Sure, just don't make it something illegal or what." you joked, making you both giggle.

"Can you please, please, pretty please come here in Seoul? Maybe just a visit?"

"What?" you almost whispered.

You did not expect that even though you know you should have. It was the first time Naeun begged you like this after you left and you understood her. It's been years.

"Come on, Y/N. Everyone here misses you! Especially the gang. Jina, Me, Seokjin, Namjoon, and... Yoongi." She was obviously unsure of the last one since the tone of her voice changed.

"Yeah?"

That was the only thing you can say. There is a part of you who wants to say yes because of course, you miss them too. But there is also the other half of you who is extremely anxious and just wants to decline Naeun's request. You are afraid to see Yoongi again after four years. And you hate how crumbled your mind is.

You heard Naeun let out a big air from the other line, "Listen, if this is about Yoongi, I swear. It's been years! I'm sure he will be happier to see you again than act something bad because you guys broke up. I'm sure that everything will be cool."

"Are you sure?" You were biting the insides of your cheeks. Still, you're glad that she's aware of you and Yoongi.

"Of course! We just want to see you again! You can bring your boyfriend if you want."

As if he heard it, Taehyung sat beside you on the couch. He is playing something on his phone. You looked at him as you talked again.

"Yeah?" You were still unsure. "I-I will think about it or check my schedule or something."

"Okay, Y/N. We just really miss having you here. Love you. Miss you so much!"

"Miss you too."

That's when you ended the call. Taehyung stopped with his game when you noticed you were done already with the call. He can see how troubled you are.

"Naeun and my friends want me to visit them there." You opened up.

"Oh, that's great. Right?" He smiled but you frowned even more.

"Yup, but I'm having thoughts again." You fiddle on the hem of his big shirt you're wearing.

"Well, do you want to talk about it?" Taehyung's voice was gentle.

You looked at him, thinking if he will be comfortable with this conversation you two are having.

"Are you sure?" you asked him and he smiles once again. "I mean, I know I should not be anxious about this. Especially now that I have you and we are together. But, my ex is there and I don't know what can happen."

Taehyung engulfed you with a warm hug. You rested your head on his chest while he repeatedly slides his hand with your hair.

"I know that you feel kind of awkward for telling me these kinds of stuff about your ex but remember that I am your best friend too. I am willing to hear anything and everything from you. I am happy that you are opening up to me like this and I think it would be a great idea to go visit them again."

"Really?" You asked, still snuggled under his neck.

"Yes. It was your home and they are your friends. I am sure you miss them so much too."

You removed yourself from and looked at him.

"And what about Yoongi? Are you okay with him? I mean, we are in one circle of friends. Will it be fine for you?"

Taehyung cupped both of your cheeks, "Love, I trust you. I understand that you two have been together for almost a decade but I trust you. I know that you will never do such a thing. Right?"

You can see how Taehyung is sincere with everything he said. He gave you a peck on your lips and hugged you again.

"Anyways, think about it. If you're uncomfortable with going back there. Then, it's fine. They will understand."

You hugged him back. The amount of comfort Taehyung gave you for today was amazing. Even though every trouble you had today was connected to your past.

Yoongi.

He is now a part of your past, right?

You thought. Reflecting on what Taehyung said. Maybe visiting your old place will be a great idea. Maybe it will result in something wonderful despite the past.

Maybe.

"Three weeks leave?"

Your editor in chief, Claire, looked up from you after reading your letter. You felt a little nervous though Claire was never strict. But, it was your first time requesting leave and you thought that maybe the days you requested were too long.

"Uhm, yes. But, I will still write and pass my articles and research through e-mail. I am just staying back home for weeks." You explained.

"Okay, I see." Claire nodded, looking back to your letter. "I think this was the first time you ask for a leave. Please, correct me if I'm wrong."

"Oh, yes. This is the first time."

"Okay. You can take your leave. Just send your works through e-mail and we'll be fine." She smiles friendly. "When will you be taking your leave?"

"Three days from now."

Three days later, you are now standing in the line for boarding with your luggage. You took a cab going to the airport. Taehyung cannot come with you since he still has to go to work but he lets you wear a hoodie of his to make you feel he is 'with you'. That's what he said. He asked you to update him with your departure and arrival. Even now, before you leave, you sent him a picture of you pouting. It willl be a fourteen-hour flight and you cannot text him between those hours.

Now, you sat on your seat inside the plane. There's an extremely tiny voice inside your body that says, "No, don't go back there. Past is past." But there was also the larger one who blocks it with "Go, Y/N. It's time to face the past again."

Your head was a little less messy than last week. And you hope that staying in Seoul for three weeks will only bring good memories. You hope that you'll finally find an answer to the article topic you still writing on.

🍒 taglist 🍒 < @ladykadyrova @scalubera @biaswreckeedbybts @scentedsope @whocaresarchives @craftymoonchaos > <and if you anted to be added for next chapter's taglist, leave a reply 🦋>

author’s note │i hope you enjoyed the first chapter of once again! this one may be full of taehyung and y/n moments but next following chapters will include more yoongi and their gang. let me know your thoughts!!

masterlist

#bts au #bts angst #bts smut #bts fluff #bts imagine #yoongi angst #yoongi smut #yoongi fluff #min yoongi #once again #httpknjoon #bts x reader #bts

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fific7 · 4 years

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That Swept-Back Hair

Billy Russo x Reader

@omgrachwrites 500 Follower Celebration

AU Prompt: Friends with Benefits

Summary: How will Billy Russo react when his FWB finds another lover? Bearing in mind that he’s a complete hypocrite.

Warnings: Swearing, jealousy, fluff with mentions of sex.

A/N: Loosely based on S1 Billy, it’s non-canon & set in my imaginary Punisher universe.

(My GIF)

»»———————————————　⚜　———————-————————-««

Your phone was jumping like a jack-in-the-box on your bedside table, the blue light of the screen illuminating the wall behind it every few seconds.

You rolled over with a groan, taking a moment before picking it up and looking at it. Of course it was Billy Russo, who else would it be at 1 AM on a Saturday morning?

The guy next to you in the bed also rolled over, covering his mouth as he yawned, eyes half-open.

“Everything OK, Y/N?” he asked.

“Yeah, Raf, just a needy friend.... gonna call them back, so do you mind staying hush-hush for the next few minutes?”

He yawned massively again, speaking through it, “Ahhhhrrrrr...yeah... no problem...”

You hit the ‘Favourites’ star next to Billy’s name in your contacts, hearing it start ringing.

It went to voicemail so you hung up, slid the phone onto the table and threw your head back down onto your pillow. Fucking Russo. Blows up your phone with missed calls & “Pick up!!” texts then doesn’t answer when you call back.

It rang two seconds later, just as Raf had turned towards you, opening his mouth to no doubt ask you about your ‘needy friend’. You rolled your eyes and grabbed it, but the screen went dark just as you did so.

You hit redial, it rang out, went to voicemail. “Fuck!” you ground out between your teeth.

Your head had touched your pillow again for about 5 minutes, when there was a staccato series of knocks on your apartment door.

You shot up in bed, quivering - ah hell, it couldn’t be, could it? Really?

Raf had dozed back off in the meantime & didn’t even stir when the knocks rang out sharply in the quiet apartment. Not much of a guard dog, you thought, quickly throwing on your discarded PJs.

You padded barefoot over to the front door, confirming via the peephole that Billy Russo was indeed outside in the hallway, leaning on your doorframe so he could place one eye right to it. You spotted an eyebrow wiggle as you made eye contact. Oh holy hell!

You straightened your shoulders, took the chain off and unlocked the door, swinging it open.

“Billy!” you said quietly, with a small smile, “What brings you here?” You hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him for about three weeks. Not that that was anything new.

He moved gracefully past you like the panther he was, even though you’d been trying to subtly block him from coming in. He was dressed in one of his sharp suits, so you guessed he’d been at one of the never-ending stream of events he attended.

Your mouth drew into a line. Whoever he’d gone there with must have bucked the trend and bailed on him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have turned up at your place when, in his mind, the night was still young.

He turned towards you, placing both hands on your hips as he did so, pulling you up against his muscled chest.

“Now, Y/N, why do you think I’m here, holding my best girl in my arms?” the New York accented voice purred in your ear.

He leant in and kissed you hungrily, deepening the kiss immediately to a passionate one.

You pulled away, escaping his grasp. His eyes widened in surprise, a small frown making its way onto his brow. A few locks of his dark hair had fallen forward onto his brow and he swept them back up with his fingers, a reflexive gesture for him.

“I tried to call you back,” you mumbled, “I’ve... uh... got a friend staying with me at the moment.”

He shot his trademark smirk at you. “Hey, that’s OK. We can be quiet for once, yeah?” Grinning now.

In true romcom fashion, Raf picked that moment to come wandering into the lounge, clad only in his boxers, both hands ruffling through his short hair.

Billy’s mouth dropped open. He made a quick recovery, though. Gestured with a thumb.

“So... this your ‘friend’?”

He looked Raf up and down. He was a 6 feet 3 firefighter with the FDNY, and to put it mildly, he was ripped.

He topped Billy by a couple of inches, and by a few pounds. Billy scowled at him.

Raf eyed up Billy too, turning to you and asking, “This your ‘needy friend’ you were talkin’ ‘bout, Y/N?”

Oh crap.

Billy’s scowl turned to a furious glare, aimed right at you. “Needy?!! Ah, fuck this, Y/N! I think we all know who’s needy around here.”

Your mouth rounded into an offended O, but before you could reply, Billy was out the door and it slammed loudly behind him.

Great - now all your neighbours were gonna be mad at you too.

»»———————————————-　⚜　-———-———————————-««

You had then spent an uncomfortable half hour over a coffee with Raf, explaining the dynamics of your non-relationship with Billy.

“Now,” he’d said, brow furrowed, “let me get this straight. He’s part of your friend group, you see him every so often at a bar or at one of their places - but never his. He sees tons of other women but turns up here for booty calls whenever his busy schedule allows?”

He shook his head. “He’s using you, Y/N. What a selfish prick.”

You bristled, “Look, we go back quite a ways. Since he was in the Marines. I knew Frank first as we were neighbours when we were kids, and I eventually met Billy through him. He’s Frankie’s best friend, they’re Marine brothers.”

“And how long have you been ‘friends with benefits’?”

You muttered your response. “Sorry, what was that you said?” he asked.

“Three years,” you repeated reluctantly.

“Damn.” he said. “And what am I, exactly? Filler for whenever fuckboy isn’t calling?”

“No! Raf, you’re a really nice guy, and I love spending time with you.”

He stood up, heading to the bedroom. “Look, I’m gonna go. I need a few days to try and get my head round your fucked-up relationship with the suit-wearing Marine.”

He’d left shortly afterwards, saying he’d call. You weren’t sure that he would.

You met up with Karen for lunch later that day. You’d been co-workers first off, then had become good friends. She was currently dating Frank, your childhood friend.

You were so glad that he was back out socialising, in a small way, after losing his wife and kids in a brutal gang clash just over a year before. They and several others had been what the papers described, rather callously, as “collateral damage” while minding their own business in the public park the gun fight took place in.

Frank had understandably closed himself off to a large extent as he grieved and after a decent interval, you’d tried your best to draw him back out in a gentle way. You’d decided to indulge in a bit of Matchmaking Lite, and had invited Karen along to a night out with the rest of your friends. You knew Frank would be there and as you’d hoped, they hit it off right away.

You spilled what had happened the night before to her, grateful for a shoulder to cry on. She looked and sounded sympathetic, but you knew she wasn’t a big fan of your arrangement with Billy. She again voiced her astonishment that you still had it going on with him.

“Karen, without making you vomit by sharing too many details, Billy is just the absolute best in bed. He’s got the stamina of an ox. Several oxes, in fact.” You just knew your eyes had a faraway look in them.

Her mouth pursed in a ‘moux’ of distaste. “But still, Y/N, he’s just so damn selfish about it! It’s all on his terms.”

“You know he’s got commitment issues.”

She choked on her espresso martini. “Ya don’t say!!”

“It’s complicated.”

“Look, honey, I’m gonna be straight with you. It is anything but complicated. He spends 90% of his time at Anvil, 9.9% with other gals, and guess who gets the remaining measly 0.1%, the crumbs from his table?” She pointed her finger straight at you. “Coconut for the lady over there!”

You sat in silence for several minutes, turning over in your mind what Raf, and now Karen, had said to you. Eventually you nodded slowly. “You know what, Kar, you’re totally right. I just let the great sex blind me to all the rest of his fucking bullshit.”

Time to cut Billy loose.

Not that you ever had him tied down in the first place. If you were being brutally honest.

And you weren’t sure whether he’d even bother showing up at your place ever again.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

The next day being Sunday meant that some serious ‘Me Time’ was in order.

Sitting on the sofa, you stared off into space, thinking about the two men in your life. You huffed to yourself; you hadn’t heard from either of them so far, and that was probably for the best. You could do without being stuck in the middle of some kind of testosterone-fuelled conflict between the two of them.

Then you laughed out loud at yourself. Who were you kidding? You’d probably never see either of them again! You stood up, stretching out your shoulder and neck muscles. Time for a bit of self-pampering.

You had a long relaxing bath, gave yourself a leisurely mani-pedi, ordered in some pizza, and began to go through some layouts for work the next day.

You were a digital content editor at the newspaper both you & Karen worked for. It was okay as jobs went, but it didn’t set your world on fire. However, what did excite you was that the newspaper’s parent publishing house was about to launch a travel magazine, and you’d applied for a transfer.

What really made butterflies pop up into your stomach, though, was the fact that the magazine’s content editors would also be contributing instead of just collating. You’d already had an interview with the Editor in Chief, and should be hearing back within the next few days.

If someone else got that position you’d applied for, you’d just have to shove them out of your third floor office window at the very first opportunity.

While you were thinking of potentially becoming a murderer, there was a familiar pattern of raps at your door. Your heart sank straight through your boots.

You knew it was Billy before you opened the door. It sounded ridiculous but he had a certain way of knocking. Peremptory, demanding, with military precision.

He stood outside your door, tensed up and rigid, with a carefully blank look on his face.

“You alone?” he barked, by way of greeting.

You crossed your arms over your chest, glaring at him. “Why, hello Billy. How are you? I’m fine, Y/N, how are you? Yeah, I’m great.”

He glared right back. “I asked if you were alone.”

“That’s highly unlikely, Billy, seeing as how I’m so needy!”

He huffed and marched inside straight to the sofa, sitting down and leaning his arms on his spread-apart thighs. He clasped his hands together, letting them dangle loosely between his knees.

“You said I was needy first.” Sulky face.

“Hey, are we back in school or something?”

He looked up at you, dark eyes staring into yours intensely. “Why d’you get with another guy, Y/N?”

Straight to the point, then. OK, you were going to return the favour.

“What, I’m not allowed to have a life? D’you think I’m going to just sit around, waiting to gratefully receive 5 minutes of your attention every few weeks? Like some kind of fucktoy, to be picked up and dropped at will? Seriously?”

He clenched his fingers until the joints went white. “I thought you were happy with the way things are between us!!?... our... our arrangement. You’re important to me. And you know I care about you!” Not meeting your eyes at this last comment.

“Huh!!!” You leant against your kitchen island, you weren’t going to get into Billy’s orbit. Too risky.

“So important that you spend all your time at work, while bedding half of Manhattan? Leaving me with the crumbs from your table, as someone put it recently.”

He shot up from the sofa, fury in his eyes. “Who fuckin’ said that?!”

You shrugged, “It’s not important. What is important is that our arrangement, as you call it, is over. Since you put it in such business-like terms, think of it as a contract which has been terminated.”

Billy stalked across the room until he was an inch away from you, eyes boring into yours. “No.”

You laughed in disbelief, eyebrows arching. “You think that just cos you say ‘No’ it’s not gonna happen? Because no-one ever says no to Billy Russo, is that it?”

He grabbed you, lips finding yours in a ferocious kiss. One hand crept up the nape of your neck, his fingers running through your hair, while the other hand pulled your hips to his. He had an impressive erection. You gasped as you felt the pressure of it against you, but pushed him away, escaping to the other side of the kitchen island.

“Just go, Billy. Please.”

He stared at you, wide-eyed, those dark pools of his looking suspiciously glossy. Was he...? No way.

Billy turned on his heel and slammed out of your apartment. Again.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

Billy knocked his beer bottle off the table with his elbow, as he leant forward to drunkenly wave a finger in his friend’s face. Luckily, it fell onto the grassy verge below, rather than the decked patio they were sitting on in Frank’s back garden.

Frank grabbed his finger. “Russo!!! Chill out, man.”

“She tol’ me... t’go, Frankie, I was kissin’ her an’ she jus’ said Go!” slurred Billy. Frank squeezed his eyes shut at the whiny tone then looked back at him.

“Bill! We all warned you she wouldn’t put up with your bullshit forever. You should’ve known this was comin’ bud.”

“Bu’ I... I... love her,” he blurted, then stared at Frank, eyes wide, part horrified, part terrified.

“Got a strange way of showin’ it, Bill. Picking other women over her, until you decide it’s time to hook up. Surprised she’s stood for it so long!”

Billy swayed slightly in his garden chair, just staring back at him, nodding repetitively like a bobble head every so often.

“I gotta get her back, Frankie.”

“Whooo,” Frank huffed out a big breath, “well, ya always did like to choose the impossible missions, Russo.”

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

You were beginning to understand what having a stalker was like.

When you left work the following day, the first person you spotted on the sidewalk outside your office building was Billy Russo.

You hesitated, shocked, then nodded and said quietly, “Hi Billy,” before continuing your short walk to the subway.

He fell into step alongside you. “M’gonna show you just how much I care about you,” you heard, then he was gone. Just gone, into the crowd of commuters around you.

That was just the beginning. Every morning, one single rose of the palest pearly pink would be delivered to your office, laying in a swirl of black chiffon within a silver gift box.

Texts would drop into your phone at unexpected hours. “Please forgive me. Let me back into your life. I love you, Y/N.”

The first time you saw those words, you nearly dropped your phone. What the....?

Gourmet meals and bottles of rosé prosecco would be delivered to your door, precisely 30 minutes after you’d get home. Was he watching you or something? A little shiver ran up your spine. He was still a sniper, after all.

You would catch glimpses of Billy when you left the office, and outside your apartment. Without a shadow of a doubt, he meant you to see him, he would never be so visible on a real surveillance job. But he didn’t ever approach you.

Then you got your dream job. You, Karen and a bunch of your colleagues went to your regular bar after work for a quick celebration. There was a toast proposed to your new job at one point, and one of your male colleagues grabbed you in a friendly bear hug after they’d all shouted “Cheers!”

You were looking past his arm as he hugged you, and found yourself staring into Billy Russo’s dark eyes. Casually dressed, he was leaning on a high table near the door, a beer in front of him.

Billy lazily pushed back from his table, strode over to you, swiped you out of the guy’s arms, wrapped his own arms round you and planted a kiss on your temple, with a nonchalant, “Hi, sweetheart.”

Karen, who had heard all about your last encounter with Billy, looked thunderstruck. You’d be getting interrogated later, that was for sure.

He, meanwhile, landed another kiss right next to your lips and said, “See you later at home,” giving you a quick squeeze before walking off.

Your female colleagues meanwhile were swooning over Billy, one of them commenting that she wasn’t surprised you’d kept so damn quiet about your hot boyfriend. You gave Karen a meaningful look and just smiled back at them all, neither confirming nor denying anything.

However the feeling of Billy’s body against yours, the delicious smell of him, his lips on your skin, had set your heart racing at a dangerous speed. You really did try to push those thoughts aside.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

Flopping down onto your sofa when you got home, you laid your head back on it and thought about that evening. As expected, Karen had questioned you ruthlessly as you left the bar together, like the perceptive investigative reporter she was.

Talking as you walked to the subway, you’d given her every detail of all the deliveries, glimpses of him and texts you’d received in the last few days. Karen had stopped walking, looking at you in surprise. “Y/N, why didn’t you tell me about all of this before now? Hell, Frank told me he had some crazy plan to win you back, but I never really thought...” her voice trailed off.

“Is it working?” she asked next. “Mmmm, yes and no, to be honest,” you said. “Don’t let it!” she said firmly, “This is what he should have been doing all along, instead of treating you like a total afterthought.”

You nodded, “Can’t argue with ya on that,” you agreed. “Is he going to turn up at your place, d’you think?” she asked. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” you laughed, “I think that was Billy giving me a heads-up.”

So as you’d been 90% expecting, the familiar knock at the door came about 15 minutes after you’d got back. You got up and after checking the peephole, sighed and opened it. “Hi, Billy.”

This was like déjà vu. Billy brushed past you and sat himself down on the sofa, in the same pose as the last time. Head down, hair falling forward and hiding his eyes from you. This time, you bit the bullet and sat at the opposite end, leaning against the armrest so you were facing him.

“Well, Billy.... leaving aside the stalkerish overtones, I guess I should thank you for the roses, gourmet meals and prosecco.”

He swung his head towards you, eyes wide. “They were just to get your attention. Frankie told me it’s what I shoulda been doin’ anyway, all along.”

You nodded, “Yeah, he’s not wrong.”

Billy heaved out a big sigh, head dropping. “I know I’ve been a complete shit to you, Y/N. Took you for granted.” He met your eyes again, ��Truth is, I was fallin’ in love with you, and I really didn’t know how to handle it. I thought it was... just sex to you, so I... I was a coward and tried to ignore it, and acted like I didn’t give a shit about you. I just couldn’t have you kick me to the curb if I told you how I felt.”

You were genuinely shocked - Billy had never talked about his feelings before. You’d accepted this in the past, telling yourself it was due to his upbringing in the system.

“So you meant what you said in your daily texts, then?”

He nodded, still looking straight at you, “Yeah...I meant it, I do love you, Y/N.” Then he quickly looked down again.

Before you could stop yourself, you’d leant along the sofa and your fingers were pushing that silky hair off his forehead. He looked up at you, taking hold of your wrist and kissing your pulse point softly. You stood up, saying “C’mere, you,” and took hold of his hand, pulling him up along with you.

He put his arms round you, burying his face into your hair and just holding you. “I’ve missed you,” he mumbled. You laughed, “What?! Even though you hadn’t seen me for weeks before the night you landed on my doorstep?!”

“I know, I know, you don’t need to remind me I’ve been a complete prick. I’ll be honest, I think it took me seein’ you with that guy, and him actin’ like you were his, to give me that kick up the ass I needed.” The dark eyes looked down at you, and he sniffed, “He still around?” You shook your head.

“Nah. I think he thought I was completely insane for still being with you.”

Billy laughed, “Maybe he’s right....” he looked at you, serious again. “You willin’ to give me another chance, Y/N? I promise you I’ll do it right this time. The whole dating thing, asking you to be my girlfriend after three dates, all that stuff... everything.”

“Everything? Like, what if I say no sex to start with? And no running off to other women to scratch that itch? You’ll swear to all that? Really?!”

“I swear to you, on my Ka-Bar.”

“Wow,” you said, knowing that the knife was never out of Billy’s possession. It was an integral part of him. Maybe he was serious after all.

»»————————————-———-　⚜　———————————-————-««

A small kiss on your cheek woke you the next morning. Those eyes, those dark liquid pools, stared into yours, while a thumb ran over your cheek. “Mornin’, sweetheart,” smiling down at you. Reaching up, you ran your fingers into his hair, moving it off his forehead. “Morning, sweetheart,” you echoed, smiling back.

You and Billy had shared a bed but nothing else, except hugs and hand-holding. You were in your PJ’s - well, camisole top with matching shorts - and all Billy had on were his boxer briefs. You couldn’t deny you’d had thoughts of just leaping on him during the night... let’s face it, he was one hot dude. And he knew how to ‘look after’ a woman in bed, as he himself put it.

But no, you were determined he was gonna have to work for it, just like he promised he would. So you’d had to show some self-discipline, well, a lot of it, actually. He’d passed the first test - he’d actually stayed all night. Usually he was gone before the morning light stole through the curtains.

Now, he kissed your bare shoulder and leapt out of bed, like he was back in the Marines. He stood still for a moment, sideways next to the bed, having a leisurely full body stretch. Billy knew full well you’d be totally enjoying the view. A little tease from him to remind you what you were missing.

The sunlight, which stole through a small gap between your curtains in the otherwise dim room, picked out the sculpted muscles on his back & torso. Then he turned slightly more, ensuring you wouldn’t miss seeing the hard-on he was currently sporting. You shook your head, with a slight smile on your lips. The cocky big bastard.

“Where you off to, Billy?” you asked, thinking to yourself, if he’s headed to Anvil, he can fucking shove his second cha......

“I’m gonna make my beautiful almost-girlfriend a cup of good Italian coffee.”

You smiled at his departing back as he disappeared out of the bedroom. “Oh, Billy?”

His voice drifted back through from the kitchen, “Yeah, darlin’?”

“Can I please get some toast with that, too?”

“Sure, sweetheart.”

You stretched luxuriously, nestling your head into your pillows.

Looked like you were going to find out what having a panther on a leash was like.

#ben barnes #billy russo #billy russo fanfic #billy russo imagine #billy russo x reader #billy russo fanfiction #that swept back hair

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welllpthisishappening · 3 years

Text

The Couples That We Know

Technically speaking, they’re not supposed to be dating. Each other, at least.

For Killian Jones, there are plenty of reasons to like working at Pendragon Publishing. Good pay, vaguely acceptable benefits, not-that-bad coffee in the break room. But there are also some things he kind of, sort of...hates. Namely the way dating his co-worker is possibly against the rules, and how that means they can’t go to the annual holiday party. Together, at least.

So, enlisting the help of their best friends only makes sense. Pretend to date other people, avoid any hint of suspicion, and drink all the wine Pendragon’s party-planning committee can offer them. Perfect plan, really.

----

Rating: Still teen, still with some kissing Word Count: 6.1K AN: As promised, the onslaught of Christmas fic continues. This one somehow has secret dating and fake dating because I know no trope limits. Also it almost sort of follows the prompt @the-girl-in-the-band-tshirt sent in, which was "we’ve been celebrating our wedding anniversary on the wrong day for the past nine years." Attempts to follow the prompt were almost made.

Also on Ao3 if that’s your Christmas jam.

----

“You know, for this to work, you’ve got to actually stop staring at her. At least without quite so much palpable longing.” Opening his mouth, Killian has every intention of announcing how little he’s staring, but that would be a rather awful lie and it’s probably wrong to lie at Christmas. Or at least two and a half weeks before. Plus, Mary Margaret’s face makes even the thought of saying whatever he hadn’t entirely come up with impossible.

“You going to give me detention?” “I’m seriously considering it.” He sighs. Dramatically. Nearly lets his chin slump towards his chest, which would add more than a fair share of melo to that aforementioned drama, and—“You think this is a dumb idea?” Mary Margaret’s eyes widen.

Her lips practically disappear when she pushes them together that way, and Killian has to bite the side of his tongue so he doesn’t make some sort of teacher-based quip again. He really cannot afford to get sent to detention. Metaphorical, or otherwise.

“There’s no possible way for me to tell you, again, how dumb this idea is,” Mary Margaret says, and that might be the most scathing string of words he’s ever heard out of her. Telling Emma suddenly becomes something of a necessity, and that’s a problem.

The crux of their problem, really.

Eyes flitting up, Killian ignores the wholly out-of-character sound Mary Margaret lets out when his gaze darts across the room and lingers on hair that’s looking shinier than usual, as if it’s trying to distract him and overwhelm him, and both things happening simultaneously is almost too much for his brain to deal with. When he’s had two glasses of wine, already.

It’s not the best wine, actually. Killian’s not surprised. Pendragon Publishing is not especially well known for its money-spending efforts, and the annual holiday party is no different. Funded by some half-hearted party committee, that is very likely controlled by just one person, that same person does not appear to have an eye for decorating. If the copious amount of mistletoe hanging everywhere is any indication.

And the whole thing exists to drive Killian insane. Both the mistletoe, and the party. Or so he will argue. When Mary Margaret inevitably points out what a dumb idea this is, again.

She’s totally going to say it again.

“It’s going to work,” Killian mutters, but it sounds inherently unenthusiastic, and Mary Margaret’s eyes cannot widen anymore. They’ll fall out. Which will cause a scene, he imagines.

And they’re trying to avoid that.

Or, well—avoid breaking the rules, technically. They don’t want to do that. Because Pendragon might host shitty holiday parties, but it’s one of the most well-known agencies in the Tri-State area, and both Killian and Emma like their jobs. They like each other too.

Deciding to date wasn’t really part of the plan. But she makes him smile, and he considers the ability to make her consistently laugh one of his better talents, and they’re really good at kissing each other. Which is something they’ve been doing for far longer than anyone realizes. Months, actually. With post-work dinners, and weekends spent together, and Killian has started to find it harder and harder to leave her apartment in the morning, because he keeps staying at her apartment all night, and not proclaiming several rather life-altering strings of words is becoming more and more difficult.

Which brings them right back to the crux of the problem. Pendragon’s holiday party, and its presumably boxed wine, and dating other employees isn’t explicitly mentioned in the employee handbook, but it’s very likely frowned upon and showing up here together wasn’t a feasible option. No matter how much he wanted it to be.

Showing with other people, though. That made sense.

It made—sense adjacent.

“Did I tell you that you look nice?” Tilting her head, Mary Margaret’s gaze turns appraising and she wasn’t particularly pleased about having to take her ring off. It hangs on a chain that’s only occasionally fallen over the front of her dress, and David thought the whole thing was hysterical.

He sent “Mary Margaret 101” facts to Killian all week.

“You don’t have to actually woo me,” Mary Margaret counters, but there’s a bit of color on her cheeks that doesn’t have anything to do with the heat in this rented loft. It’s very warm.

“No woo’ing, just facts. Should that dress look familiar, though?” “Depends on how often you’re rummaging around the back corner of Emma’s closet.” “Not that often, but—” Mary Margaret nods before he can get the rest of the question out, smiling over the top of her glass. Filled nearly to the brim with wine that may actually be capable of eroding paint. It’s so bad. That’s probably not a metaphor for anything.

“You’ve really got to stop staring, it makes you look like a crazy person,” she adds, and to prove how capable he is of following direction Killian’s does the exact opposite. Back towards his girlfriend, and there wasn’t really a ton of planning before they dove into the deep end of this totally legitimate, absolutely will not blow up in their face plan.

Will’s arm is slung over Emma’s shoulders. “Can’t clench your jaw like that, either,” Mary Margaret mutters. Keeping the laugh out of her voice is seemingly impossible.

And rolling his whole head is juvenile, but Killian’s starting to feel a little drunk. Without any of the fun benefits. His head hurts. “Should have come up with a list.” “I could if you want.” “I do not, no.” Mary Margaret’s smile is a hint more honest, that time. It really is a nice dress. “That’s what I figured,” she says, tugging on his tie familiarly. “But you look like you’re going to challenge your own best friend to a duel.” “Swords are a requirement for that, aren’t they?” “Alexander Hamilton.” “Excuse me?” “Dueled with pistols, so—” “—Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays?” Snickering, Mary Margaret bumps her hip with his and there are at least ten unopened texts from David on Killian’s phone. Demanding update for what he was regularly referring to The Great Idiot Romance of 2020 . Although, he never mentioned that in front of Emma.

Who very likely would have won that duel, should it have occurred.

“Alright,” Mary Margaret sighs, like she hasn’t already agreed to a whole night of this, “we should probably mingle, if we’re going to make this look legit.” “Say legit again, please.” She sticks her tongue out.

“Not a very good argument, Ms. Blanchard,” he chuckles, shifting his hand to the small of her back and he supposes he should eat something. To sop up all the wine. Her expression doesn’t change. Might get more scowl-like, if anything.

And there’s likely no reason for Emma’s neck to twist the way it does, except something else vaguely melodramatic that Killian cannot think about for the next four hours, but she does and he stands up a little straighter. Presumably, at least. Mary Margaret’s reproachful tongue click is very loud.

But then Emma’s eyes are widening as well, and her lips are slightly twisted and Killian does a God awful job of winking at her.

He swears he can hear laugh — across the whole loft. Four hours at this stupid thing, max. Then he’s going to make out with his girlfriend. For possibly four hours straight. Which he imagines is a record of some sort.

“Food,” Mary Margaret declares, fingers back on his tie and she makes him eat four bacon-covered somethings before they leave the table.

To mingle. As is required by polite society and Mary Margaret Blanchard soon-to-be Nolan, and Killian quickly loses track of the number of people they smile at and the few others they nod in the general direction of, and he really should have been better prepared soon-to-be to evolve into a problem. He’s not. And Aurora’s gasp catches him off guard.

“Oh,” she cries, hands flying to her cheeks in the middle of a group of editors congregated by the floor-to-ceiling windows, and at least that’s kind of picturesque. “I didn’t know you were engaged, Killian!”

Every one of his muscles tenses. Freezes, making Killian’s ability to stay upright all the more impressive, and it’s nothing except instinct when his gaze practically flies towards Emma.

Who immediately tugs her lips behind her teeth, Will’s eyes widening to a size that would be comical in any other situation.

Mary Margaret’s jaw works — trying to find an excuse, or an explanation, but there’s not any of those things and Killian finds himself nodding again. “Yeah, yeah,” he stammers, “that’s, uh—we are totally engaged.”

“Selling it,” Mary Margaret murmurs through clenched teeth, and he considers it an exceptionally large miracle that he doesn’t point that out. She’s not doing a good job of playing her role now, either.

Aurora doesn’t notice. Another miracle. ‘Tis the season, or whatever. “So,” she presses, “have you set a date or—” Strictly speaking, biology was never one of Killian’s better school subjects, but he’s starting to wonder just how much stress the muscles in his neck can continue to cope with, and he’s all too aware of how much he’s beginning to resemble a bobblehead.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re, uh—” Licking his lips doesn’t help their overall state, floundering under the expectant stare of half a dozen coworkers who are now heavily invested in a wholly fake relationship, and Mary Margaret’s hand threatens to crack several of his knuckles. When she laces her fingers through his.

“Thinking next winter,” she says, sounding more honest than anything else they’ve told these people. “City’s basically all decorated for us, already, you know?”

Aurora does know, it seems.

Her nod isn’t as erratic as Killian’s, is far more enthusiastic — complete with wide eyes that practically announce her interest, and the hammering of his heart against his ribcage makes it difficult to hear the footsteps that are moving towards them.

Will looks far too entertained.

Emma’s lips are still missing in action. “Couldn’t help but overhear,” Will drawls, and the duel is starting to sound very appealing, “sounds like congratulations are in order.” He’s going to kill him. Killian’s going to let go of Mary Margaret’s impressively tight grip, and he’s going to use both of his hands to strangle his best friend. Or at least ensure that he’s deprived of enough oxygen that he doesn’t continue talking.

He will enjoy it. Thoroughly.

Lifting her eyebrows when neither Mary Margaret nor Killian respond to this supposed stranger’s proclamation, Emma’s exhale is inappropriately loud. Rife with guilt, and an emotion Killian can’t quite name because being jealous of her best friend’s engagement to someone else is as absurd as anything they’ve done tonight, but it’s also kind of nice and— “Aurora, this is Will,” Emma introduces, and he’s actually got the gall to smirk in Killian’s direction. Before thrusting his hand forward, smiling a bit more good-naturedly at Aurora, who only looks slightly confused.

That’s fair.

All of this is flying off the rails, and Killian briefly considers how much of a scene it would cause if he barreled into the kitchen demanding better alcohol choices. It’s probably not worth it.

“Nice to meet you,” Aurora says, like an actual human. With normal, human thought processes and presumably fewer holiday-based lies to deal with. “We were just talking about Killian and Mary Margaret’s wedding.”

Blood floods his mouth, and Killian’s only slightly worried about running out of tongue to bite before the night is over. Mary Margaret’s fingers somehow tighten even more, threatening the blood flow to his entire right hand, and Emma is very interested in the state of her shoes.

“That’s absolutely what it sounded like,” Will grins, “when’s the happy day?” Glaring without making it obvious is actually difficult. Killian widens his eyes, but that only makes the width of Will’s mouth increase — like some literary cat, and Emma’s eyes keep closing for prolonged periods of time. Like at least several seconds.

“Next winter,” Killian bites out, “we’re getting married next winter.” “Decided on a location, yet? Gotta get that stuff in early from what I’ve heard.” “Have you just?”

Will nods, shoulders shifting ever so slightly. Like he’s trying very hard not to laugh. It’s not entirely working.

Maybe they should apologize to Aurora.

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Will says, “wedding industry’s cutthroat like that. Plan months in advance, and even then you might not get your first choice.” “That’s definitely true,” Aurora agrees, and maybe Killian will just topple over. Sit down on the floor and drink an entire box of wine, and he doesn’t think anyone else notices when Emma pinches the bridge of her nose. “When Phillip and I got married, we went through a couple different venues before we found one that worked with our date.” “Sounds hectic,” Killian mumbles. Talking was a mistake. His voice doesn’t even sound like his own, Emma’s gaze snapping up in unspoken warning, and he’s worried he’s using up his miracle supply. So as not to cry out at the overall force of Mary Margaret’s fingers.

All five of which were apparently blessed with mutant-type strength.

“Luckily we’ve got that covered,” she says, brightly and only a little disingenuous.

Emma blinks. “Yeah?” “Yup. Did you know you can get a permit for a Central Park wedding for like fifteen bucks?” “Wow, that’s—that sounds really nice, actually.” “Depends on whether or not it snows, but—” Mary Margaret shrugs, and none of them are lying anymore. Well, at least not quite as blatantly as five seconds before. Will’s smile almost looks legitimate.

“You’re thinking of an outdoor wedding?” Aurora asks. “In the winter?” Another shrug, hints of color rising on Mary Margaret’s cheeks. “Early December, and we probably won’t be outside for very long. Mostly just the ceremony, and some of the pictures. There’s a certain kind of romanticism to the city in December, isn’t there?” Aurora doesn’t look overly convinced. Killian barely notices — is admittedly very preoccupied with the look on Emma’s face, and how it almost feels a little wistful and maybe just as romantic and not kissing her is somehow a victory and loss all at the same time.

“You know,” Aurora says slowly, like she’s about to impart a crucial piece of information on them, “if we’re being honest, I am actually surprised this is happening.” One of Killian’s fingers flutters. Where it’s tangled with Mary Margaret’s, and Emma hasn’t blinked in years. Possibly longer. “Weddings? Or another wonderful event put on by Pendragon?”

“Bet they didn’t try and find this venue that far in advance,” Will mumbles. Emma closes her eyes. That’s like—half a blink, at least.

Aurora shakes her head, still looking far more serious than the situation requires. “No, no, no, well...you and Emma are always together at work, aren’t you?”

Breathing is a challenge.

Gritting his teeth less so, the overall tension in Killian’s jaw threatening to do permanent damage. Emma hasn’t opened her eyes yet.

“We’re friends,” he reasons, and if he were actually engaged to Mary Margaret he’d be almost offended by this whole conversation.

Lying likely robs him of any right to relationship-based offense, though.

“Oh no, no, I know,” Aurora says, without sounding entirely honest, “and I’m sure it’ll be a gorgeous wedding. Just—if we had to guess, I think most people at Pendragon would have thought it’d be the two of you.” If nothing else, this night has provided a massive insight into all the facial expressions Mary Margaret is capable of making. At least half a dozen that Killian was previously unaware of, including the current one — a mix of disgust and appropriate scandal, and Killian resists the urge to point out that he and Emma probably couldn’t date, even if they wanted to, which they are, but that’s...that’s beside the point.

Entirely. Like a different hemisphere from the point.

Aurora gives a tight-lipped smile.

“When did you and—” Will clicks his teeth, effectively redirecting the conversation. “—Phillip, was it?” Aurora hums. “Guessing you two didn’t get married in the winter, did you?” Whatever else she says gets lost in the buzz between Killian’s ears, the overall state of his heart continuing to threaten the structural integrity of his ribs, and Mary Margaret gives his hand several squeezes. To recapture his attention and whatever professionalism he’s barely clinging to, and she’d been right about romanticism.

Of which he’s clearly bordering on hopeless at this point.

Emma smiles.

And Aurora excuses herself eventually — Phillip appearing like an unknowing brunette knight in conversational-armor, all four of them nearly exhaling in tandem.

“So,” Will says, “scale of one to ten, how much did we suck at that?” “A forty-seven,” Mary Margaret replies, head lolling onto Killian’s shoulder while he finally lets out the scoff that’s been bubbling in the center of his throat.

“Next winter, huh? For real?” She makes a noise that’s presumably some sort of agreement, and Emma’s smile doesn’t waver. “Thinking about it. If Scarlet will double check with Belle about taking pictures in front of the library.” “Public property,” he replies, “don’t have to double check.” “But can we go inside at some point?” Killian asks.

“Wimping out about temperature already?” “Expressing concerns, like Aurora who is—” “—A wedding genius, apparently,” Emma mutters, and Mary Margaret’s shoulders shake. She still hasn’t touched her wine. Eventually that will prove important.

“Got a lot of opinions when it comes to other people’s plans, at least.”

“Eh,” Will argues, “did we give her much of a chance to delve into those opinions, or was Killian too busy making eyes at Emma?”

Continuing to open his mouth without actually saying any words is frustrating. For Killian. And the state of his heart, which cannot seem to find a rhythm anymore. Especially when Emma flushes, and threatens to stare a hole into the floor and of the two dresses she owns that are currently making the rounds at this party, the one she’s actually wearing is better.

Probably because she’s wearing it.

“I told you,” Mary Margaret grumbles, without any of her previous ability to chastise. She sounds almost amused.

“Although,” Will adds, “Emma’s not doing much better, so—” Huffing out a breath only serves to flutter the few strands of hair that frame either side of Emma’s face, and that’s only vaguely messing with Killian’s perception of...reality, maybe. “Ok, you do not get to point out my own,” she leans closer, like that will help the volume of her next few words, “fake relationship shortcomings.” “Why not? It’s making all of this endlessly entertaining.” “I’m a better fake date than you,” Mary Margaret says. “You had to use your own wedding plans because you can’t take your ring off.” “That is nice!” People likely don’t turn the way Killian’s brain has already convinced him they do, but every one of Emma’s teeth is visible when she grits them like that and both of their potentially-obvious fake dates look properly ashamed.

“Sorry,” Will grumbles, while Mary Margaret twists her heel and whispers, “no more wedding talk, I promise.” Emma laughs. That’s—surprising. And it’s not quite the laugh Killian’s also started claiming as his, but that feels almost possessive, and she’s definitely carrying less tension between her shoulders than he is. “I think that ship has sailed,” she says. “Should have thought about your outfit beforehand.” “Killian likes the dress,” Mary Margaret smiles.

“Yeah, well Killian likes me, so…” Tugging Emma against his side, Will lets out another noise that will only garner them more attention, and people are starting to dance. The party fund could not afford a band. Or a DJ. Or anything more than what sounds like slightly muffled speakers and someone’s Spotify premium account. Killian hopes it’s premium, at least.

Hearing ads in the middle of this instrumental Christmas music might be the last straw. For his sanity.

“Well,” Will says, “if Mary Margaret’s going to start planning weddings, then I guess I do have to step my game up. C’mon, Em—let’s show ‘em what we’ve got.”

“And what do we have, exactly?” “Impeccable rhythm, and the lingering knowledge of a Groupon dance class.” “Do people still use Groupon?” Emma challenges, and Killian loves her an absolutely ridiculous amount. For several thousand things, but at this very moment, it’s mostly how her voice causes Will’s eyes to bug again and his tongue to poke between his lips and maybe the whole night isn’t a total disaster. He should tell her he loves her.

Sooner rather than later.

“My girlfriend,” Will replies, “who will totally be able to sneak Mary Margaret and David into the New York Public Library to avoid frostbite and ensure very pretty pictures, presumably on that fancy staircase they’ve got.” “Nothing sets the tone for a winter wedding like some casual breaking and entering,” Killian says, barely containing his grunt when Mary Margaret’s foot shifts. On top of his.

Emma rolls her eyes.

They’re just playing the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas now.

“We’d appreciate whatever rules Belle could break for us,” Mary Margaret promises, “and will not mention that she’s the only person still using Groupon. Like, in the world.”

Will’s tongue is going to dry out. “Get on my fake date level, almost-Nolan.” “Shout that louder, please,” Emma groans. “And does the staircase not have a name? Fancy staircase cannot possibly be the acceptable vernacular.” “Probably not, because no one actual uses the word vernacular in actual conversation. Now you’re just trying to show off.” “Sound suspiciously like you’re impressed with my vast vocabulary, Scarlet.”

“Product of your profession.” “Grand, I think,” Killian says, fully prepared for Emma’s slightly parted lips. He will argue he’s prepared, at least. One of his knees does threaten to buckle though, and Will’s current eye-roll rate cannot possibly be healthy.

“The profession?”

“The staircase.”

“Oh. That’s pretty lame, actually. It doesn’t have like a—staircase sponsor?” “Not that I’m aware of, but the entrance hall is called Astor Hall.” “Similar to the place of the same name?” Will quips. “Or—” “—The guy from the Titanic?” Mary Margaret finishes. “Why do you know about this?”

Killian lifts one shoulder. The one not currently providing rest for Mary Margaret’s head. “I know everything, a good fake-girlfriend would know that.” “And a legitimate girlfriend would dispute that,” Emma says, “plus, the Astors own or have endowed like half of New York. This is not impressive knowledge, and don’t get Mary Margaret talking about Titanic, she’ll start waxing poetic about Leonardo DiCaprio.” “I do have a longstanding crush on Leonardo DiCaprio,” Mary Margaret admits. “If I start quoting things about a real party and point out that Kate Winslet was willing to dance, will that get you guys to move?” Will demands. “Because we’re starting to draw attention and that’s probably not going to help our quest.” “It’s a quest now?” Killian asks.

“Way more dramatic that way, so yeah.” “Please don’t start quoting Titanic at me,” Emma requests, pulling on the front of Will’s jacket and it’s a testament to their dedication to this ridiculous plan, or quest, that he wore a jacket. No matter how bad a plan it might be.

Or quest. Whatever, honestly.

“Alright,” she continues, “show off the lessons, or I’ll make fun of you for the foreseeable future.” Will winks. Not well, but possibly better than Killian is capable of, and he’s going to blame the wine. “Prepare to be absolutely wowed, m’dear.”

Rolling her eyes doesn’t do anything to shift the smile off Emma’s face, although she does look at Killian before she moves and the jealousy clouding his overall sense of being is as antiquated as the music and as absurd as anything else.

Impressive, considering their overall barometer for absurd.

“When do you think Aurora got married?” Killian asks, rolling his head towards a sympathetic-looking Mary Margaret. “Spring? June? That’s cliché, right?” “June,” she echoes. “Probably required her dozen bridesmaids to help her hand-make table favors, too. Just to really drive the point home. You want something else to drink?” “Yes, obviously.” Narrowing her eyes slightly when she nods, makes it more difficult to look at her — but that might also have something to do with the amount of alcohol Killian’s already consumed, and he really does appreciate how often Mary Margaret keeps making him eat. Even when it appears everything on this catering menu comes with bacon. “Don’t do that, ok?” he asks, at least two of their allotted four party-hours later.

She lifts her eyebrows. “Keep texting my fiancé?” “Maybe you are the worse fake date.” “Well, you’re speaking in tongues now, so—” Shrugging, Mary Margaret’s shoulder doesn’t collide with Killian’s, but he’s also starting to feel a little buzzed. And hating bacon. And possibly happiness. On principle.

Will and Emma keep dancing. Which also keeps them from having to interact with anyone else, but his buzzed-mind doesn’t care, and this whole thing was mostly his idea and that’s starting to really annoy him.

That might be his base setting at this point.

“Bacon,” Killian clarifies, “don’t allow the national obsession with bacon to affect your food decisions when you—” Footsteps move by them, curious eyes and he’s not a frog, so his blood cannot possibly run cold. Plus, it’s honestly way too warm in this room. “We,” he amends, somehow rushing over two letters, and Mary Margaret noticeably sags against his side. “What was that about this being a dumb idea?” “Ah, getting fired at Christmas-time sucks. How will you buy us all presents, then?” Laughing helps loosen the knot of emotion that’s been growing increasingly tight in Killian’s chest, and the ends of Mary Margaret’s lips quirk up when he kisses the top of her hair. “Bacon is vastly overrated, though,” she adds, “people are obsessed with it.” “It’s weird, right?” “Definitely. Should I apologize for getting you engaged against your will?” Kissing her hair again is easier than responding, because responding might force Killian to contend with a lot of life-type plans he’s only half concocted, and he really should tell Emma he loves her first. Like, more than he realized.

Until he had to pretend he didn’t.

“Nah, but you can explain it to David because I don’t want my story to get interrupted when he inevitably starts laughing.” “You wanna dance?” Smirking at her does not have the same effect it has on Emma. And that’s definitely a good thing, but Killian’s drifting towards melancholy and the music isn’t instrumental anymore. Michael Bublé is a Christmas requirement, though.

He flips his wrist.

“Sweep you off your feet, Miss Blanchard.” She’s closing in on Will for number of pointed, if not passably amused, eye rolls. Still, Mary Margaret’s hand lands in his, and Emma’s eyes definitely drift towards them — which is as bad as it is good, and Michael Bublé’s version Santa Baby might actually be the worst thing that’s happened to any of them. All night.

“Not exactly the pinnacle of music, is it?” Killian mumbles, and Mary Margaret hasn’t stepped on his foot. Or pointed out how close they linger to Will and Emma, both of whom look as unenthused by the music choices.

And maybe it’s because he keeps staring, or possibly because Will is not the asshole he likes to pretend to be, but Killian is not entirely prepared for his friend to spin his fake date closer, or mutter something about cutting in that makes Mary Margaret laugh and Emma’s jaw drop and she steps on his foot.

It’s the best thing that’s happened to him. All night.

“We are not good at this,” Emma says, but she doesn’t sound all that upset about it and the buzz between his ears lessens. Turns into something warm and hopeful, and she’s close enough that he can smell her shampoo.

“Something to be said for effort though, right?” “I’m not sure we’re making much of an effort.”

Nosing at her hair proves her point, but Killian’s—an idiot, and willing to blame romance, and the holiday season, and all the wine. So much. Even more bacon. God, he hates bacon. “Scarlet’s not subtle. And you look incredible.” “Do those sentiments go together?” “No,” Killian answers, “but true all the same.” “Flattery will get you everywhere.” Twirling her away, only to bring her back just as quickly, Killian doesn’t try very hard to avoid the smirk. So, he’s kind of a glutton too. For punishment, and poorly-timed emotions, and there’s a rather obvious glint in Emma’s eyes that leaves him breathless. Plus, she sort of slams back into his chest. “God,” she grumbles, “lacking some grace, huh?” “Eh, we’ll get there.” “Will we just?” He only realizes what he’s said when he notices the way her voice drops — rasped between lips that are redder than usual, and difficult to hear over goddamn Michael Bublé, and he’s totally staring at her lips. Obviously, he’s sure. “Yeah,” Killian nods. “Guaranteed.”

Part of him worries. Suddenly, Immediately. Overwhelming—ly. But Emma doesn’t move, and they’re more swaying than dancing now, and Mary Margaret’s footsteps are rushed. In a dramatic, everything is blowing up sort of way.

That sucks, admittedly.

“What are you—” Emma starts, but Mary Margaret just shakes her head. Yanking on Killian’s sleeve, she threatens to rip the fabric and he’s never heard her use any of those words.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she hisses.

Killian tilts his head. “Be more specific.”

“Lance Sinqua is here. Is he supposed to be here? Why didn't either of you tell me he was going to be here?”

“He works in acquisitions, I think.” “I thought you knew everything,” Emma teases, and he has to bite the other side of his tongue. To stop from kissing her.

Making out, more like. “I’ve had a lot of wine,” Killian reasons, “Should I be more concerned about why Sinqua being at his own holiday party is a problem?” Swatting at his side with both hands, Mary Margaret all but snarls. Emma looks appropriately surprised. “I know him,” Mary Margaret says, pausing between every word for emphasis. “And he has seen me.” What feels like the weight of several words and half a dozen ridiculous plans and/or quests fall into the pit of Killian’s stomach. Where they immediately crush a variety of internal organs. “Will’s distracting him now,” Mary Margaret explains, “but—he doesn’t know David personally, just that I’ve got a boyfriend—” “—Fiancé,” Emma corrects lightly, but the tone changes again and Killian’s never gone into shock before. He assumes it feels suspiciously like this.

“I do not care; at all. Just—Killian, you’ve got to come. Now. Like right now.”

Nodding hurts his neck again, but Killian’s legs move on their own and his hand finds Mary Margaret’s and thinking about the look on Emma’s face isn’t healthy. Makes him want to stand on a table, or something equally absurd. Shout several things from several different rooftops, and he wonders if she’ll have to wear a red dress for the wedding.

The real one, not whatever one he and Mary Margaret are going to lie about.

And to his credit, Will’s attempts to run distraction do look admirable. Moving hands and a nearly legitimate smile, while Lance nods in interest and continued conversation, and Killian squeezes Mary Margaret’s hand. In what he hopes is solidarity.

“Hey,” Will exhales, as soon as he sees them, “here he is.” Killian’s cheeks ache. “Present and accounted for. You must be Lance, Mary Margaret said you’re old friends.” “Ah, I don’t know about old,” Lance objects, “but certainly the rest of it. I didn’t know she’d be here, would have asked you guys for drinks before or something.”

There’s really no word for the sound Mary Margaret makes at that. Part squeak, and what sounds like an admission, but that says a lot more about Killian’s growing guilt and residual jealousy and—

“How long have you two been engaged?”

Racking his brain, Killian’s had too much to drink for this. He’s dimly aware of Mary Margaret swaying closer to him, Will’s grimace all but broadcasting how unprepared they are for that particular question, but it also seems like he’s trying to tell Killian something. He does not understand. Fuck boxed wine, quite frankly.

He opts for honesty.

Sort of.

It worked for Mary Margaret, after all.

Sort of.

“We’ve, uh—” Killian starts, “—been engaged only a couple of weeks, but...we’ve been dating since March.”

Will’s shoulders droop. His eyes turn imploring, but he can’t actually say anything and Lance is, so it absolutely does not matter. “March?” he echoes. “Your friend said it was kind of a whirlwind romance. Got together in the summer.” His mouth does more than open. His jaw drops, nearly to his ankles and shoes that he actually got polished because this party isn’t super important, but Killian wanted to look nice on his fake date and Mary Margaret’s hand is the only reason he doesn’t fall over.

“Ah,” Killian breathes, “right. That’s—yeah, that’s right.” Lance doesn’t look convinced, either. He should go talk to Aurora. Who keeps glancing at Emma, like she’s got like SONAR. Joke doesn’t even make sense. In Killian’s head.

“We’ve been celebrating a bunch of different anniversaries,” Mary Margaret cuts in, speaking so quickly it’s as if that lie jumps out of her mouth, does cartwheels and then gets a four from the Russian judge for lack of proper execution. “Y'know...romance, and everything. He’s uh—Killian must be thinking of when we met.” Lance quirks an eyebrow. He might hate Lance. He definitely hates Lance. “You’ve only known each other since March.” “Oh my God,” Will mumbles, scratching behind his ear. And really, that’s not what does it. But it’s certainly a tipping point, or a metaphorical straw, and Killian nods once before he lifts Mary Margaret’s hand to his mouth, mumbles thanks against her knuckles and marches directly towards his actual girlfriend.

Who is standing directly under the mistletoe.

It’d be more impressive if she wasn’t, honestly.

And the music doesn’t stop — although Killian can’t really hear it either, an arm finding Emma’s waist, and her hands landing flat against his chest and someone cheers. Will. It’s definitely Will. Heads turn towards them, surprise coloring more than a few of their co-workers faces, while others look...less so.

Killian doesn’t bother dwelling on that. He’s got more important things to do.

“I’m pretty ridiculously in love with you,” he says, Emma’s eyes getting brighter and her lips as distracting as ever. Several of the less-than-surprised faces aww. Audibly. Which doesn’t quite make sense, but he’s still not dwelling and—“Not admitting to dating you is driving me nuts.” “When is your lease up?” “What?” “Were those words confusing in that order?” Emma asks, infusing the question with false confidence that he can hear perfectly and she should have confidence in spades. At least when it comes to this.

Maybe if they get to keep their jobs.

“A little,” Killian concedes. “Are you—do you want me to move in with you?” “A ridiculous amount.”

“That’s admittedly not the best adjective I could have used.” “Eh, I won’t get particular with syntax.” “Stop showing off,” Will yells, “and kiss other directly on the mouth!”

There’s a general hum of agreement — even while Lance continues to look a little confused, and Aurora looks a little offended, both of which makes sense because they were fairly awful liars, and someone’s given Arthur a microphone. So the owner of Pendragon Publishing can tell them, “Literally everyone knew, you both suck at not making out in the break room.”

Heat wafts off Emma, climbs up Killian’s neck and takes root in both of his cheeks and Arthur is not done.

“It’s not encouraged. Intra-office relationships, usually way more trouble than they’re worth, but, well—all you really need to do is sign some paperwork with HR and maybe find some other corners that are less obvious.” Nodding slowly only makes it more obvious the kind of strain all of Killian’s muscles are under, but he can’t come up with a feasible response to that and Emma’s fingers curl. Into his shirt, and he imagines that makes it easier — when she yanks him forward, lips slanting over his and she doesn’t have to push up the way she normally does. Still, Killian’s fairly certain he hears one of her heels pop out of her shoes, and if this is how it feels when a heart beats its way out of a person’s chest, it’s actually fairly comfortable.

“I love you too,” Emma mumbles, against his mouth. So, the only reasonable response is to kiss her again. Several times over.

And they do fill out paperwork, eventually — the story of the fake date fiasco, as David comes to call it, perfect fodder for Emma’s maid of honor speech, and proof positive of the inherent romanticism of the city at Christmas.

#cs ff #captain swan #captain swan ff #cs fic #captain swan fic #i was not kidding about the amount of christmas fic #i've got three more prompts to write and also the blue line stuff i rewrote and a new time travel chapter tomorrow #guess who's stressed in a holiday sort of way???

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not-close-to-straight · 4 years

Text

100% Professional (Two)

MASTERLIST

*******************

Tuesday came faster than Peter was expecting.

Well to be fair, Tuesday came around at exactly the right speed, but Peter's week had been completely exhausting and the days managed to get away from him so before he knew it, it was Tuesday again.

The part time free lance at the Daily Bugle turned into a full time week long gig when the editor nearly blew a fuse worrying about who was going to photograph the visit from the President. Peter had spent the better part of the next six days following the presidential parade around town and while the paycheck was going to be great, Peter’s entire schedule had gone to shit.

He was late to every single one of his massage appointments, barely managed a full meal the entire week, and by the time Tuesday rolled around again and he got the reminder about Wade’s appointment, Peter was halfway past frazzled and running on fumes.

Here we go.

The doorman at Wade's building was apparently expecting Peter this time around and opened the door immediately, and even though the receptionist didn’t spare Peter a glance, she hit the button for the elevator without being prompted.

It was much less awkward this time around, and as Peter waited for the elevator to make its super smooth journey to the top floor, he fixed his perpetually messy hair in the mirrored walls and texted Wade:

From Peter: Hey Wade, I’m on my way up to your place. Dunno if your super fancy receptionist let you know or not.

From Wade: She did, but thanks for the heads up anyway. The door is unlocked, just come right in and get set up.

From Peter: I don’t make a habit of just walking into people’s apartments.

From Wade: And I don’t make a habit of letting it happen, but you’re fine. Just come in.

From Peter: Alright, I’ll see you in a minute.

Walking right into someone’s apartment certainly wasn’t the weirdest request Peter had come across as a massage therapist-- in fact, he’d dropped several clients because of much weirder requests, but he still hesitated, still knocked a couple times before opening the door and calling, “Wade? It’s Peter! I’m here for your massage appointment!”

“Well I sure hope it’s you.” Wade called from somewhere in the back. “Other wise something funky happened in the thirty seconds since someone else named Peter texted me in the elevator.”

Peter smiled to himself and closed the door, kicking off his shoes and trying to figure out the best place to set up his table. The couch looked like it cost more than Peter’s rent so he definitely wasn’t touching that and the coffee table probably weighed a thousand pounds and since Peter didn’t break a hundred and seventy five pounds on a good day, there was no way he could move it.

“Just set up right there in the middle, no need to move anything.” Wade spoke from the hallway and Peter looked up with a ready smile that stretched even bigger when he saw Wade was shirtless, clad only in a pair of loose shorts. “How’s it going, Pete?”

“Hey.” Peter thumped his bag to the floor and shoved his hands in his pockets, working to keep his eyes off of Wade’s sort of ridiculously ripped body and on Wade’s face instead. “You must be feeling better about all this, huh? I sorta expected you to be wearing a full body suit and gloves, not showing off your nip-nops right away.”

Wade raised practically non existent eyebrows and Peter closed his eyes briefly, muffling a curse. “I didn’t mean for that to be rude. Also didn’t mean to call your nipples nip-nops. I only meant-- holy shit, I was trying to-- fuck me, I am so bad at this.”

“It’s fine.” Wade cracked a smile at Peter’s embarrassment. “You making fun of me makes me feel normal.”

“I am definitely not making fun of you.” Peter was horrified by his blunder. “Definitely not doing that. Christ, don’t think I’m laughing at you or anything.”

“Pete.” Wade took a few seconds to look Peter over, lingering over the thick hair and down to slim hands and further still to maybe just check out a little bit of an ass that was begging to be tore the hell up.

"Seriously, I'm sorry." Peter said again when Wade didn't say anything for a minute. "Wade?"

“Really, it’s fine." Wade dragged his eyes back up to Peter's face and tried for a smile more reassuring than lecherous. "And I’m not actually feeling better about getting a massage, but I am very very drunk and highly susceptible to suggestion, so this is as relaxed as I’m going to get. Maybe let’s get this over with before all the tequila catches up to me and I pass out face down on your table.”

Peter laughed quietly, relieved Wade hadn't taken his teasing too seriously. “Oh my god. Alright yeah, come on. I’ll set up right here. How was your week? Do anything fun?”

“I don’t get out a lot.” Wade set a couple water bottles down on the couch and once Peter had his table up and secure, stretched out on top of the sheet. “What about you?”

“Actually, I got dragged into photographing the President’s visit.” Peter hurried around the room looking for switches to turn the lights down. “I work free lance for the Bugle and Jameson is a grade A asshole, but he pays good. I’ve never been so close to the Secret Service though, those guys are dicks. They wanted to go through all my pictures and make sure nothing was compromising, whatever the hell that means. It’s just a bunch of people shaking hands and vaguely patriotic shots of flags waving and sunshine. Nothing compromising about it.”

Peter flipped through the music on his phone until he found a playlist he thought Wade would like. “I ended up working like sixty hours which is almost what I do in an entire month. It’s great cos I’m thinking about moving and this will help with the security deposit. My landlord will be mad I’m moving but I mean, I’ve complained about my neighbors making drugs in their apartment at least a dozen times and he hasn’t done anything. I’ve thought about calling the cops but snitches get stitches and honestly, I like my face. So I’m just going to move and let him deal with it.”

He’d brought along an extra bottle of the avocado based lotion he’d left with Wade last week, and Peter pumped some into his hands and to warm between his palms. “My friends Harry and MJ are moving to the suburbs since they’ve started a family. They offered to let me move in with them and take the spare bedroom or whatever but you know, who wants to live in the suburbs? That sounds--”

“You talk when you’re nervous, Pete?” Wade interrupted, and Peter’s mouth clicked shut. “You are saying a lot of words right now.”

“I um--” Peter coughed. “I mean, yeah I talk when I’m nervous but I don’t want you to think I’m nervous about touching you. Cos I’m not. Not nervous, I mean. I can’t really say I’m looking forward to getting my hands on you without sounding like a creeper but--”

“Pete.”

“Sorry.” Peter ran his hands through his hair and then mentally kicked himself because he’d forgotten his hands were caked in lotion, which was now caked in his hair. “I’ll shut up.”

“No, it’s fine.” Wade resettled on the table and tried to relax and Peter-- Peter tried not to stare at the shift and flex of Wade’s shoulders and back. “I don’t mind the talking, I just didn’t want you to be nervous about touching me. It looks worse than it is, but it isn’t… I mean it’s not terrible.”

“What’s not terrible?”

Wade propped up on one elbow and sent Peter a disbelieving look. “The scars, Pete. They look worse than they really are. Don’t feel half as bad, I promise.”

“Oh.” Peter reached out with one hand and let it coast gently gently from Wade’s shoulder down to the small of his back, trying not to read too far into how Wade shivered and seemed to press closer into his palm. “I’m more concerned with how it feels. Not to be rude, but I don’t care how everything looks, I just want to make sure you enjoy this.”

Wade’s hazel eyes went very wide and Peter groaned. “Sorry, that came out awkward. I swear I’m not usually this terrible. Tell you what, for the rest of this appointment I’m only going to ask you massage related things and definitely not blurt out any nonsense or run my mouth. How does that sound?”

“Boring.” Wade grunted and lay back down. “I think you’re more concerned with being professional than I am.”

“Yeah but when massage therapists stray from professional we get involved in sketchy things and then the cops start showing up to interrupt the fun appointments.” Peter retorted and then almost immediately, “See what I did there? Opened my mouth and it got weird. I’m just going to shut up and start.”

“...don’t stop talking.” the words were almost muffled in the table, and Wade hesitated before adding, “I like it. Makes this feel less like necessary therapy and more like something I’m doing because I enjoy it.”

“You never had a massage before this?” Peter asked curiously. “Not even once?”

“Real men don’t pay pretty boys to slather them up in lotion unless it ends in various happy moments.” Wade retorted and Peter huffed a surprised laugh. “See? I can be unprofessional too. Now we’re even.”

“Now we’re even.” Peter re-lotioned his hands and took a deep breath. “Alright, I’m gonna start on your shoulders and then work down your arms to your hands. Usually I do arms and hands last, but I want to make sure I’m getting the pressure just right and that you’re comfortable before I move anywhere that could trigger pain, okay?”

“Okay.” Wade had to tamp down a sliver of fear the tequila hadn't quite managed to mask. He didn't want to say he was terrified to be touched but... but yeah, Wade was pretty fucking terrified to be touched. But he didn't say that. Instead he insisted, “I’m ready.”

“Use your words and tell me the minute you hate something.” Peter said firmly. “I’ve worked with several people with injuries or sensitivities but everyone is different and since this is my first time with you, I need you to talk to me and let me know what’s going on. Once I know your body better--”

“--you’re swaying unprofessional, Pete.” Wade sassed, sort of loving that even when Peter was being professional, he still managed to tease.

Normal. This is what normal people do.

“--oh my god.” Peter sighed overly loud. “--once I know your body better, this will be easier but for right now, lots of communication, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Wade clutched at the sheet and closed his eyes tight. "Lots of communication."

“Okay.” Another deep breath and Wade wondered for a minute if Peter was as nervous as he was. “Here we go.”

****************

Trapezius. Peter thought to himself as he worked his fingers along the right side of Wade’s neck and down over the collarbone and to the shoulder. The scars weren’t as thick here as they were further down on Wade’s back but it was still hard to look at the branching lines and feel the raised edges. The injury could have killed Wade just as easily as it had left him alive and seeing the sheer scope of the damage up close made Peter’s mouth dry and his heart clench.

Levataor scapulae, rhomboid minor, rhomboid major-- Wade jerked and Peter instantly let go. “Whoops, sorry about that. You alright?”

“Nope, that one hurts.” Wade hissed through clenched teeth."Jesus, maybe we just avoid it."

Peter leaned over to make a note on one of his diagrams and went back to the same muscle, lightening the pressure and changing the direction of his fingers. “How’s this? Better, worse, tell me the truth.”

“Better." Wade admitted after a few seconds. "But it still hurts like a bitch.”

“Like...a.. Bitch…” Peter wrote down and Wade chuckled a little bit. “Kay, we’ll move on from there.”

Deltoids. Wade’s shoulder was rock hard and Peter knew it was just as much scar tissue as it was muscle but he still felt gingerly along trying to feel where man met injury, where the slight give of solid muscles met unyielding damage.

“This will soften after a while.” he told Wade confidently. “Consistent massage does wonders, and it doesn't even have to be professional. If you work at it by yourself the scar tissue will soften and help lessen the appearance of the actual scars, too.”

“I know better than to hope for that.” Wade made an effort to sound joking, but he knew when Peter clicked his tongue in sympathy that the joke had fallen flat. “But thanks anyway.”

Triceps, brachialis, biceps. Peter could just barely close both hands around Wade’s arm and he knew if the former soldier flexed, his fingers wouldn’t touch. Good Christ. Peter was too professional to be imagining how easily Wade could pick him up with arms that size but… but…

Well anyway.

Brachioradalis, radialis longus, radialis brevis. Peter could feel the rod and screws that had been used to piece Wade’s left forearm together and even the lightest touch made Wade tense and try to pull away so Peter settled for long, soothing strokes with very easy pressure to try and loosen the stiff muscles.

"Both sides?" he asked and Wade muttered, "Just the one. Everything's worse on the left hand side."

"Okay." Peter made another note on his chart and moved onto Wade’s hand.

Extensor digilorum was the long muscle that led to fingers and Peter kept the same light pressure before moving on to the wrist, bending and flexing it until Wade relaxed and let it hang boneless. “Not to be weird, but I’m gonna hold your hand now.” he said out loud and caught just the hint of a smile. “Don’t worry sir, this is one hundred percent professional.”

“Yeah, I’m sure--” Wade jumped when Peter wove their fingers together, his heart suddenly in his throat. “Shit, shit-- sorry.”

“Is this too uncomfortable?” Peter paused mid squeeze. “It helps give your fingers a wider range of motion but I can stop if you don’t like it.”

“It’s fine.” Wade turned his head the other way because he felt like he was blushing and fuck that was stupid. “Been a long time since someone held my hand.”

“Um--”

“Longer since I had to pay someone to do it.” Wade wasn't entirely sure why he dropped that completely embarrassing factoid, but he followed it up with, "You know how weird it is to offer people money to hold hands? Like hey man, can I borrow your digits, here's a fiver."

“Oh my god.” Peter tried to muffle a laugh. “I feel like most people don't admit to hiring hand holding hookers. You really are drunk, huh?”

“Absolutely sloshed.” Wade agreed and this time Peter didn’t bother hiding the laugh. “Hate to admit that it takes a fifth of tequila to get brave enough to be shirtless but these days it definitely does.”

“It shouldn’t.” Peter kept his hand resting between Wade’s shoulder blades as he crossed to the other side of the table. “You’re gorgeous, Wade.”

There went his heart jumping to his throat again and Wade had to wait a few seconds before he could talk again. “I don’t pay extra for lies and compliments, kiddo.”

Peter got more lotion and felt gingerly along Wade’s left trapezius. “I am both shocked and appalled that you think I’m lying. What sort of massage therapist do you take me for?”

Wade breathed out shakily but didn’t answer, and Peter gave him a soft reminder of “Let me know if this hurts.” before he began again.

**************

“So.” Peter dried his hands on the kitchen towel and went to start gathering his supplies up. “How’d I do? I know we only got to shoulders and arms today, but I feel like I'm pretty comfortable with pressure and all that sort of thing. You want to do this every Tuesday? If you think a full body would be too much, we could do shorter sessions twice a week and sort of ease into something full body as we go?"

“Uh about that.” Wade handed Peter his usual payment, then added another fifty even though Peter protested. “No, keep that. Part of it for a tip and part of it to cover the commute time. Keep it.”

“Thanks.” Peter pocketed the money. “So. Appointment?”

“I don’t know.” Wade was dressed again, but he felt more uncomfortable now than he had when he was half naked and on the table. “I feel like maybe that’s not a good idea. Not um-- not that you weren’t great, I mean I feel--” he rotated his shoulders carefully. “This is the best I’ve felt in a while. But all the same maybe we shouldn’t do this again.”

“...I don’t understand.” Peter tried and failed to hide the hurt in his voice, and then the surprise when he realized he really was hurt. “Did I make you uncomfortable?”

What was that all about, two appointments and his feelings were hurt that Wade wanted to cancel?

“It’s not you.” Wade ran a hand over his bare scalp, then grimaced because even though it had been a while since he'd had hair, he still missed it. “It’s uh-- It’s me. This is weird for me.”

Peter just looked at him and Wade clenched his jaw and admitted, “I like you, Pete. And I don’t like a lot of people. And you being nice to me and then touching me-- it’s been a long time since either of those things happened and I don’t want it to get weird between us if I uh-- you know. If I end up-- you know.”

“I know lots of places to push that are basically instant boner killers.” Peter said offhandedly, smiling when he saw the relief and surprise flicker across Wade’s face. “And even if I didn’t, who cares? There’s lotion and hands touching, boners happen. It doesn’t mean anything and it’s definitely not going to make this weird. I’m way too professional for that.”

“Pete--”

“I like you too.” Peter interrupted. “If it wasn’t particularly obvious from our first meeting where I basically drooled over you and then made an attempt at truly awful flirting, I like you too. And usually I’d say no to working on a client than I also want to ask out to dinner, but in your case---” he shrugged. “--I don’t really want anyone else doing this for you.”

“...yeah?” Wade was almost too afraid to even hope. "You think?"

“Yes.” Peter nodded emphatically. “So what if we make another appointment, we can spend the entire time talking while I work on you and then it’s like a win win for everyone right? Super hot super secret reclusive former soldier gets company and struggling to make rent recent college grad--”

He pointed to himself. “--can pay his electric bill. It will help you with your physical therapy and give us a chance to know each other.”

Wade must have looked like he was going to say no again, because Peter added, “Me liking you won’t affect anything about this, Wade.” he motioned between their bodies. “Despite my severe lack of brain/mouth filter, I am a professional. Trained, licensed, all of that. I know regular massages will help you so I want to keep working with you. Whatever this flirty bullshit is-- that’s just a bonus alright? Unnecessary and unimportant and not going to have any affect on your hour long massage therapy.”

"Seems like a hell of a bonus." Wade was hard pressed to think of the last time he'd wanted to flirt with anyone, and it was driving him crazy that the anyone was also his massage therapist. No way this is professional. No way Peter would really be willing to-- "You think it will work?"

“Absolutely.” Peter promised. “But if you’re not super sure, then stop booking appointments and let me just take you out for a date. Or tell me I have no chance for a date and to stop flirting, and I’ll just be your massage therapist. But I think…” he raised his eyebrows hopefully. “...we could settle on a happy medium where we see each other in a professional setting but also get to be friends who maybe flirt too?”

“I could handle friends who maybe flirt too.” Wade said after a long moment, scarcely believing the conversation was even happening. "I think I'd fucking love that."

“I don’t mind the scars, Wade.” Peter’s voice softened. “Not as a massage therapist and not as me either. I promise.”

“Damn, Murdock knew what the hell he was doing when he recommended you, huh?” Wade coughed to clear what felt suspiciously like tears from his throat. “Alright then. So long as you don’t feel uncomfortable, I’d-- I’d like if you came back.”

“Tuesday.” Peter said confidently, hoisting his table up and over his shoulder. “Drink lots of water after a massage and remember to stretch. Text me what time works for you, okay?”

“Okay.” Wade managed a smile. “Thanks, Pete.”

“Text me a time for next week.” Peter said again. “And if you want? Maybe text me just to talk.”

“Alright.” Another smile, but this was one a little more certain. “I’ll… do that.”

“Talk to you later.” Peter finger gunned-- seriously, why couldn’t he just wave goodbye?-- and headed out the door, reaching for his phone when it buzzed in his pocket before he even reached the elevator.

From Wade: Not to be sappy and disgusting, but your terrible flirting has been better therapy than a whole year of rehab.

From Peter: That was absolutely sappy and disgusting and you should be embarrassed.

From Peter: And what the hell, my flirting isn't terrible.

From Wade: It absolutely is terrible and WHOA what happened to being professionally polite?

From Peter: Via text all bets are off. Besides, you’re awfully chatty over text too AND you already admitted to liking me so the 100% professional guarantee is face to face only.

From Wade: Alright then, tell me something 100% non professional

From Peter: You flexed earlier and I almost had a heart attack. Like what the fuck, muscles?

Wade was halfway through a bottle of water when the text from Peter came through and he choked on a hard swallow, spitting water out across the floor and wheezing as he tried to catch his breath.

From Wade: Thanks for that

From Pete: I was being serious!

From Wade:... yeah, me too.

***************

SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE CHAPTER!

***************

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#ncts fics #spideypool

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svtntntn · 4 years

Text

breaking news

superhero!au x co-workers!au

inspo: superman and lois lane, the flash, supergirl, superheroes:)

a/n: this is the epitome of ‘why can’t I write shorter fics’ and ‘I take so long to write’

——

"Another day saved by Helios, the golden man with a plan! The city can rest easy knowing that Helios has put away yet another villainous creature threatening the safety of our blooming metropolis. And now, we bring you today's weather forecast!"

You glare at the wide-set monitor in the center of the office, the banner at the bottom proudly presenting the name 'HELIOS' in bold letters, the newscaster's smile beaming through the pixelated screen. "Soonyoung, can you change the channel? It's literally running the same news everyday."

"It might be the same news, but it's a different story everyday, (y/n). It's Helios! The golden man with a plan, the golden savior of our city, the man with the golden smile! Fighting crime every week, thwarting their plan and keeping the city safe as always."

"Tell me something I don't know Soonyoung," you roll your eyes at his blockbuster summary of the week by week.

"You're just like this because you're one of the few people who don't think Helios is handsome, don't you?" Soonyoung pouts. "And you of all people! You're the one always assigned the Helios stories, you get paid to stare at him and write about him." Soonyoung gumbles as you walk with him over to the conference room, "Maybe I'll take the lead on one today."

"Go ahead, be my guest." You supportively nod to him, thanking him for opening the door for you. The writer's room begins to fill with all of your office mates either standing or taking a seat around the oval table centered in the room, the chair at the very top of the table remaining open for your editor in chief.

Soonyoung nudges your arm as he sits next to you, grinning at Seokmin sitting across from you, "Hey Seokmin, you want the Helio story? (y/n) said it's up for grabs."

You peek up at him from your notepad, noticing the way he greets everyone incoming with his charming eye smile, his head bobbing to all the staff walking in before he tuning into you and Soonyoung. Just him sitting there in a simple button-up with his staff lanyard makes your heart flutter and swoon over your long-time crush.

"You don't want Helios?" He raises his eyebrows in concern as you immediately shake your head. "You're tired of him already? Helios' isn't your speed anymore?"

"I never said that," you defend yourself, "you know I don't assign the stories here."

"Well good thing I do." Your editor-in-chief strides in and the room falls into a hush as she seats herself at the high end of the table, commanding all the attention with a single look. "Morning everyone," Lee Sunmi's smile reaches all corners of the room as she opens her agenda and runs by department by department.

"So for this week's headlines… Seokmin and Soonyoung, you two are covering the downtown dance festival this weekend. Seulgi, the children's center's re-opening on Wednesday. Seungkwan, any major idol or entertainment news. (y/n), you're on Helios this week, and... Joohyun, look at any political changes or campaigns on the rise, election season is coming up and I heard there's new blood in the race." Sunmi directs her attention to other writers in the room as Soonyoung pouts at you. You merely shrug and write out the superhero's name on the top of your pad and underline it with a sigh.

Another week with the golden man with a plan.

You look up from your notepad and catch Seokmin's gaze, who immediately shifts his eyes to his paper when he realizes you caught him. You stifle a giggle and doodle his name on the margins with your pen, circling his name over and over again.

"Helios this, Helios that. I'm about to go insane thinking about him." Your head is in your hands as you're buried under the paperwork of your research, your eyes bleary from staring at word after word after word.

"Thinking about who?" Seungkwan asks with a cunning smirk, popping up by the wall of your office, "Is he who I think it is?"

"Who else do you think?" You deadpan to him, gesturing to your screen and showing the numerous open tabs about the city's one and only golden hero along with the papers on your desk. "I'm at loss of what else I'm supposed to write about. I'm assigned to him every week and I feel like I've covered every inch of Helios."

"Not every inch," Seungkwan winks at you.

You gasp and chuck your pen at him, "We are not a gossip column, Boo Seungkwan!"

"Hey, you're the only one I can get flustered about Helios, might as well have fun with it." He pulls up a desk chair next to you and looks over your notes. "What are you stuck on?"

You explain how looking back on all the Helios nonsense, you don't want to repeat yourself and mimic past articles and tabloids about the famed hero, so you've been combing through all the pieces you've ever written for something original to pen this week.

Seungkwan doesn't tear his eyes away from your work as he calls out loudly in the office, "Seokmin! Lee Seokmin!" The lack of actual office walls separating your desks call for a lack of privacy on the floor, meaning that everyone can definitely hear Seungkwan's voice reverberate throughout the halls.

"Seungkwan, what are you doing?" You try to hush him as fast as you can, everyone's eyes now on you and him.

"What is it Seungkwan?" Seokmin hustles over without breaking a sweat, surprised to see you with him. "Oh, hi (y/n)."

Your co-worker slowly rises from the chair and keeps intently studying your papers, "Mind helping (y/n) for a minute, I think she's stuck on Helios… I would help her but I wouldn't even know where to start. Wait, see… look at this article right there," Seungkwan pushes Seokmin into the desk chair and smiles at the scene before him, "Good luck you two."

"Well, that wasn't subtle at all." You note out loud, ignoring the way your heart speeds up in Seokmin's presence. "So, want to help me?"

"Of course," he starts perusing through the same articles from before, reading over them and switching between your past works.

"Why not write about his armor or the extent of his strength?" Seokmin writes on your notepad, "Helios’ armor is composed of an otherworldly material that not only retains the same strength and opacity as regular metal sheets used in bulletproof vests, but is blended with breathable material and alloy to make it tailored to him specifically and his abilities. They're able to withstand the heat and cold as well as the earthly materials around us, and the everyday wear and tear." Seokmin rattles off, fondly smiling as you stare at him in awe.

"How do you know all that?"

Seokmin's pen falls out of his hand and as he bends down to pick it up, his head hits the underside of your desk, "F-from reports online! People make tons of theories and reports about Helios and I think someone who was rescued by him actually asked him and found out."

"I'll have to look into it, thanks Seokmin." You grin, starting a fresh document to begin your research.

"So, (y/n)..."

You can hear the wondering tone in his voice, but you don't look over from the computer screen. "Yes, Seokmin?" you say expectantly.

"Do you have any plans for tomorrow night?"

You're too busy proofreading your work to notice Seokmin nervously wringing his hands over and over, too focused to see him look up at Soonyoung and Seungkwan flashing him a thumbs up from across the pen. "Tomorrow night? Just planning to stay home, proofread and edit, eat leftover takeout, nothing special."

"Oh, well… would you want to get dinner with me? I'm sure I probably don't beat out the idea of leftover takeout, but I can try." He innocently beams at you.

"Okay, I wanna see you try." You muse with a flirtatious smile. Glancing at your watch, you note the time remaining till you're able to clock out of the office. "How about I meet you at 8?"

"Meet me at the diner on Fourth and West?"

The light atmosphere of the diner off Fourth and West brings a smile to your face, the casual restaurant known for its famed burgers and fries and milkshake combo making your mouth water.

Add in Lee Seokmin sitting across from you and it's a complete dream come true. "It's a date."

text message from seokmin

I'm about 10 mins away! See you soon!

Breaking News: Fire breaks out at Kim Technologies Headquarters in Downtown, please proceed with caution and evacuate Fourth Street

text message from sunmi (must answer at all times!!)

(y/n), find out what's going on!

Helios could be there!

text message from seokmin

Hey (y/n), sorry! I can't make it to dinner, Soonyoung needs me to get his car, it's stranded downtown and it's an emergency

Could we reschedule?

I'm sorry:(

The hands on the clock read half past ten as you wave goodnight to Joohyun and Seulgi, their figures disappearing out of the office as you lazily drop your head down in your hands. Your computer screen was opened to a draft of your newest story and yet it only had the main headline and your name at the top.

You blindly reach for your coffee mug and find it empty, your mind slowly throbbing from the lack of motivation and caffeine. You poke your head above your pen and see the entire office empty as well, stretching your limbs and groaning in pain loudly before yawning. You take your coffee cup and weave your way through the offices to the break room, stopping by a particular desk that's been empty the entire day and just so happened to belong to someone who may or may not have stood you up.

A tired sigh falls from your lips and you enter the break room in a huff, aggressively brewing a fresh pot of coffee. You're too into your thoughts as you pour yourself a fresh cup, when a loud knock erupting on the door and in surprise, you miss your mug and the brew spills over your hand and skirt, "Oh shi—"

"(y/n)! Oh, your hand!" Seokmin rushes over to you and takes the coffee pot from your hands, replacing it back into the brewer and taking a handful of paper towels for you. "Did I scare you? I didn't mean to, I just meant to surprise you, I thought you knew someone was here? What are you even doing here so late—wait, is your hand okay? Are you okay?"

The flurry of questions directed at you makes you chuckle when you notice his frantic smile trying to help you, "yes I'm okay. What are you doing here? Seungkwan told me you were sick."

"Oh, did he?" He coughs and clears his throat. "Yeah, my throat's been kinda sore… but Soonyoung had car issues again and he said he left his laptop here so I'm here to work on our piece from the dance festival." His hand rests over yours comfortingly as the heat and the pain subsides from your burned hand. "I'm sorry about our date. I didn't mean to cancel last minute, Soonyoung needed me to help him and—"

"It's fine…" You mumble quietly, trying to hide your disappointment. "I had to chase after Helios and the fire downtown, so it's okay… really."

There's a chill that travels from your fingertips and up your arm but it's gone the minute Seokmin removes his hand from yours, "Is your hand feeling any better?"

You cradle your hand and nod, "I can't say much for my clothes, though." The coffee is already seeping into your clothes as it stains the gray and white skirt and button-up you're wearing.

"I have some extra clothes at my desk if you want to borrow them? Unless you're planning to go home?"

The mind drifts to the unfinished draft on your computer, "Could I borrow? I'll wash them and return them to you tomorrow." You ramble, "I need to stay here to finish my draft for Sunmi, Helios' heroics just don't stop once I'm off the clock."

You notice a guilty look in Seokmin's eyes, but it's gone in a flash.

"Mind if I joined you? Writing, I mean. Sunmi's expecting a rough cut of it tomorrow too." Seokmin starts leaving the break room and you follow after him to his pen, where he pulls out a pair of gray sweats and an extra white button-up. "What? I'd give you my extra pants, but you'd have no belt for it."

"No it's perfect, thank you. I'll be right back." As you lock the restroom door, you take a moment and stare at your reflection in the mirror, looking at your flushed appearance and feeling the goosebumps along your arms.

Why did Seokmin have extra clothes at the office? It's not like he needed new clothes everyday to write.

But it was handy to have around, you thought to yourself as you buttoned his shirt together. The white button-up held the scent of fresh laundry and yet there was a hint of men's cologne lingering on, Seokmin's natural musk clinging on and making you blush at the idea of wearing his clothes.

You head back to your desk and find Seokmin already typing away at his laptop, staring up at the ceiling and attempting to find the right words to say. You circle around him and shove your ruined clothes into your purse, bringing yourself closer to your computer monitor, "Thank you again."

"No problem." He beams at you, "you look good in my clothes." There's a pause and you can't help but smile bashfully. "I-I mean.... uh, you just look good in everything, in general."

"Another late night, (y/n)?" Seungkwan asks as you cross your legs in your desk chair.

"Yeah, I need to write about Helios' newest adventure in not only single handedly halting the production of the city's new bullet train but causing its collapse as well." You sigh, remembering the amount of destruction and commotion at the press announcement of a sprinter train weaved around the existing city buildings designed to be faster than any functioning taxi or bus.

The reason behind Helios' good natured destruction was pure considering the existence of a series of bombs hidden in the tracks by a rogue ex-employee and yet where was Helios helping in the aftermath?

Sure, he managed to evacuate the area and save the city mayor and his family and the flock of reporters and news media covering the event, including yourself.

But in the concrete and debris and construction material askew everywhere in his wake, where was he?

"Helios' probably fighting off other bad guys or something. You know, dealing with them and the police or government or whoever." Soonyoung answers for you, standing behind Seungkwan with a shrug. "He has his own life as well."

Goddamn it, thinking out loud.

"It wouldn't hurt to help out the people he protects every once in a while, you know. Manual labor doesn't seem so difficult for a man of his strength." You scoff at his lack of consideration for others as Soonyoung and Seungkwan shake their heads. "We give him all this press and spotlight in the news and yet he doesn't want to get his hands dirty helping the public? Okay, sure yeah he saves the day, but c'mon."

"If you were a superhero, wouldn't saving the day take a lot out of you?" Soonyoung volleys back, his smile turning into a smirk when he notices a familiar face in the office, "Seokmin! Come over here! If you were Helios, wouldn't saving the day tire you out? You'd have to recharge your energy or battery or whatever you are—if you were Helios?"

Seokmin humors his best friends with a dubious chuckle, "Sure yeah, if I was Helios, I'd be too tired to do anything if I was busy saving the day." He notices your sour face at your response and looks at his best friends, "... but not too tired to be helping innocent people with my reckless actions? Right?"

"If you saw the destruction that Helios left in his wake, you'd understand." You mutter under your breath, knowing very well you and Joohyun were the only journalists from your paper to witness the catastrophe firsthand. "Being a hero doesn't just end with saving the day and locking up the villain. It’s dealing with the aftermath of it all—the good, the bad, the ugly."

"Right… well, hopefully you can tell Helios that, (y/n)." Soonyoung jokingly claps a hand on Seokmin's shoulder as he grins. "Good night, you two!"

You wave a good night to Seungkwan and Soonyoung as Seokmin rubs the back of his neck. "You're staying in another night?"

You hum a 'yes' as once again present the massive amount of papers and reports you have to transcribe for your article as he frowns at you. "I'll join you again, let me get my computer."

Seokmin sits by you once again as you both crank out drafts of your assignments, occasionally asking each other how your sentences sound and for words to use rather than the everyday, common tenses and verbiage. You hear your stomach growl and call for a lunch break between you two, the clocks almost hitting midnight as you take out your lunch bag.

He copies your actions with his own bag, taking out an array of containers within his small lunchbox. "What are you eating?" He hums in curiosity, leaning closer to you for a look at your food as your face immediately blushes at how close he gets.

You pull your container closer to your chest as you raise an eyebrow, "My food? Why do you wanna know?"

"In case I want to trade with you." He quips with a boyish smile.

You can't help but laugh at his innocence, "Are we in grade school? You wanna trade snacks with me?"

"Oh come on, (y/n). Live a little," he reaches over for a piece of your chicken but you hold your container out of reach from him, making him stretch over your body to fight over it. A surprised shriek escapes your lips as you shut one eye and hold your container as high as you can without it tipping out of the tray, actively trying to hold off Seokmin with your elbow.

You grin at your tactics as Seokmin's head comes close to your own, the smell of his hair filling your senses with fresh mint and the faint smell of concrete and debris. You falter for a moment as you stretch above, your mind traveling back to the scene of the ruined construction site from earlier that day but Seokmin simply reaches up and skewers a piece off your container and into his mouth, "mhmm, delicious!"

You come to your senses and shake out the coincidence as he mocks you, "Hey! If you take one of mine, then I have a right to yours," you quickly steal a bite of his food and consume it with a wink, playing up how good it is to him. "Mhmm, so good."

"You wanna switch?" Seokmin offers, holding up his plate to you. You reach for it but he pulls it further away from you with a smirk. "I'm kidding, here."

He switches your containers and takes a couple bites from your food as you do the same, both in content silence. The office is quiet save for the sounds outside the skyscraper, the honks of taxis and cars ringing from the ground and the changing of stop lights softly painting the office walls in different hues.

You're too caught up in daydreaming out the window when you realize Seokmin's been calling your name, "(y/n)?"

"Huh, yes?"

Your eyes lock on him and he lets out an apprehensive smile, "I want to take you out, like on a real date outside of the office. Properly, I mean."

"We were going to do that." You point out to him, taking a bite of his meal—technically, your plate—with a purse of your lips. Seokmin sulks in agreement and you decide to let up, "You actually promise to show up this time?"

"Hey, you told me too it was fine since you were chasing after Helios."

"Technically, you cancelled on me first." You wave off playfully, nudging your shoulder with his with a coy smile. "So yes or no on a redo date?"

"Hey I asked you first!" He cries out begrudgingly, "and you already know my answer."

text message from joohyun

good luck on your date today!

Breaking News: Bank Robbery commencing Downtown, please avoid First and West Avenue.

text message from sunmi (must answer at all times!!)

(y/n), get down to First and West

see what's happening

Breaking News: HELIOS intervening at Downtown Bank Robbery! Avoid First and West Ave for your safety!

text message from seungkwan

DID YOU HEAR THE NEWS?

I'm down by the barricade by First, come down here!

Breaking News: HELIOS rescues endangered hostages, safely apprehends the robbers, takes them into police custody

Breaking News: HELIOS promising to help restore Seoul City Bank, Seoul City's Train Transit and more! More news and information tonight at 9PM

"Isn't that the type of news you like to hear? Helios promising to help restore what's ruined in the city?" Joohyun notes, the broadcast of the golden hero streaming over and over again on the overhead monitors. The flash of the cameras ricochet off his shimmering armor and the mask that protects his identity, making him shine even more as the humble golden boy of the city.

"I'm surprised to see him taking such initiative, but it doesn't impress me. It's what he should have been doing in the first place." You snort, a sharp edge cutting through your voice as Joohyun studies you carefully.

She knew you were stressed following your private meeting with Sunmi and when you were stressed about work, it showed in your quiet demeanor—a clear 'don't talk to me' sign etched on your forehead after an evil glare.

But keeping your head down in busy work you could be passing to the interns?

Definitely not about work.

"So how did your date go?" You hesitate before carefully switching tasks and keeping your head lowered over your paper.

"It never happened, again." You mumble, marking your draft with your red pen.

"What? What do you mean it never happened?" Joohyun nearly spits out her tea and coughs when some of it catches in her throat.

"Seokmin never showed up," you uneasily shrug, picking up your papers and walking to the intern's conference room, passing your papers off to one of the many bored interns sitting about.

Joohyun eagerly trails after you with her eyebrows furrowed together, "What? What do you mean? Never showed up? How long were you waiting for?" You shake your head as you pass by Seulgi's pen and she turns around at the sight of you and Joohyun.

Seulgi pipes in, "Waiting for what?"

"(y/n) had a lunch date with Seokmin again yesterday, but he stood her up again." Joohyun sullenly quips to her as you speed walk faster away from prying ears and eyes. "(y/n)!"

"It doesn't matter how long I was waiting for." Joohyun gives you a pointed look that lasts for the longest minute till you cave in. "Fine… an hour… or two?" you pick at your nails nervously as Joohyun gasps in shock. "It's okay, I got a good meal out of it."

"Alone! You ate at a nice restaurant by yourself! Did he even send you a text he wasn't going to make it or anything?" You shake your head again as she sets her mug on your desk before scanning the floor, "I'm going to go talk to him, why would he stand you up? And for a second time? Who does he think he is?"

"It's fine, Joohyun!" You pull her arm to get her to back down, checking if Seokmin or Soonyoung or Seungkwan heard any of your conversation. "I can handle it, I'll talk to him. I'll talk to him and make it clear I won't continue to go through any of this."

You stand your ground and she accepts your statement, stalking off to her desk with a proud smile as you sigh and relax your solid form the moment you're out of her view. To say confrontation was your strong suit was an understatement, and the fact you were meant to confront Seokmin of all people made you want to avoid the situation as much as possible.

Speak of the devil, you groan as you notice him walk in from the elevators, his chivalrous demeanor making your heart swoon and his golden smile making you melt in despair, nearly overlooking that fact he was late to work. You quickly duck behind the walls of your cubicle before he can notice you but you can already hear footsteps approaching your desk.

"Um, hey (y/n)." He gently knocks on the wall of your office, meekly clearing his throat, "do you have a moment? I wanted to talk to you about—"

"I actually have to help the interns with something right now, but let's talk later, yeah? See you!" The lie is believable had you not just gone to the intern's office moments ago, but you excuse yourself anyways, not wanting to break your heart and Seokmin's at the same time.

"Sunmi, I'm at the building right now and there is no one here. The tip's probably some kind of teenager looking for a quick buck, a claim to fame for his social media." You roam the empty building and you can't help the chills that crawl up your arms. The wind howls through the unfinished architecture, the unfamiliar sounds making you look over your shoulder every other second.

The deserted hub for the halted bullet train was the perfect place to stage something—a drug hand-off, shady business deals, gang shoot-outs, rival matches—anything and everything goes here and that thought wouldn't leave your mind.

Especially considering the catastrophe that just happened that shut down construction there indefinitely? It was bound to be crawling with bad seeds lurking in the shadows.

She insists, "No (y/n), I know who gave us the tip, it's reliable. Trust me."

Trusting Sunmi was easy, but trusting the person who tipped off Sunmi? Never.

"Who told you?" You ask, "Wouldn't they tell the police about this if it involves drug trafficking? Or the local police if this was gang violence? Or wait—does this have to do with Helios?" You hear hesitation on the phone. "Sunmi, why didn't you tell me?"

"(y/n), it doesn't concern you. You know any and all tips are anonymous."

"Yes it does if it's about Helios!" You yell into the mouth of your phone, getting frustrated about being kept in the dark. "Sunmi, you could at least give me a hint, please. They could help me with—hello?"

Your pleading goes on deaf ears as Sunmi hangs up on you and you squint through the darkness with the careful use of your phone light. Voices whisper and shout just around the empty shells of the bullet trains, the cars stationed at Gate 1 of the supposed transit.

You position yourself behind a stack of abandoned construction equipment as you hear someone run out of the train's car, this footsteps heavy against the rocky earth as they shout into a radio. When the coast is clear, you rise from your hiding spot and quickly make your way to the inside of the car, finding a large machine beeping in the center of the car.

The timer on the machine counts down as you realize what exactly the machine is, dialing the number for the police on your phone, "Hello? I'm at the Seoul City Train Station—yes the abandoned one! There's a bomb counting down in one of the train cars, what should I—oh, um—there's ten minutes counting on this."

"Y-you're right, I will leave the premises as fast as I can." You calmly hang up the phone and back out of the train car, briskly running to where you entered but finding it completely blocked. "What the…?"

You begin shouting as loud as you can, sprinting all over the building for some way to get out of the station, but the only open section you can see are the unfinished train tracks leading outside of the hub and into the city—or into part of the city.

You start running down the tracks but it gets more and more narrow as you go along, your feet nearly slipping on the raised platform built high in the air. The metal rods end and you frantically look behind you, waiting for the building to erupt into flames, into something—when you lose your footing.

You can feel the wind rush past you and your heart drops, your eyes closing on instinct and bracing for whatever's to come till you hear a voice,"(y/n)!"

You brace for the impact of meeting the solid ground, but there's nothing.

No hard surface against your back, no painful slam into the concrete. You open your eyes slowly and find you're hovering in mid-air, your body flying above the ground and in the hold of a man in golden armor.

His eyes are covered by a matching golden mask and he breathes a sigh of relief, "Oh thank God, you're—"

Chills run up your neck and you cut him off as fear sets into your system, the feeling of floating mid-air making you extremely scared. You start scrambling to hold on to any part of the superhero for purchase, "Oh my god! Put me down! P-put me down!" You wrap your arms around his neck and shut your eyes again, the feeling of descending down to the ground fluttering about you.

You're pushing yourself off of the hero and onto the solid ground the moment he lands on the rooftop of the building, your hands pressing into solid, firm muscle as well. "O-ow! You're safe, you're safe, I promise!"

All the blood rushes to your face as you realize who the very person who saved you is, "Y-you're Helios." You stare at him in shock as he winces from your punches.

"Yes, that's me." He stands up straighter than before and clears his throat, his voice becoming deeper, "I'm Helios."

"What—how did you?" Your mind is spinning as you point back to the train station's main hub, "You knew I was there?"

"Of course, I always have a feeling when someone is in danger." Helios bravely nods, "especially beautiful women like yourself." You snort once you hear the compliment, a laugh bubbling up from your stomach before you suppress your laughter, "What's your name?"

"I'm (y/n)," you can't explain it, but you feel shy when he asks for your name, goosebumps arising when he repeats your name for the first time.

"Wait, aren't you that reporter from the Chronicles? You write about me, don't you?" He tilts his head and the moonlight reflects off his eye mask, specs of gold and white twinkling alongside his dark eyes.

"I-I do, actually yes. You know who I am?"

He shrugs, "It's only right to remember the name of the person writing about me in the paper—good or bad, I remember every name."

"Oh, well. Is it good or bad? Or both?"

Helios smiles, "Good, of course. You're a skilled writer, and you should believe that." He notices a leaf in your windblown hair and picks it out for you, "So what were you doing down at the Train Station? I can't imagine you're the one blowing it up."

"I was following a lead on something, but I think I found it—or him."

"You shouldn't be risking your life just to see me, that's pretty reckless of you."

You almost laugh in his face, "Oh don't kid yourself, I was at the original press conference of the train station that you evacuated and subsequently ruined and my boss heard something might have been going on there, so I went and investigated it myself. Finding you was just a bonus."

A little white lie didn't hurt in the presence of the almighty hero of the city, even if his strong sense of justice was equal to his handsomeness.

"This might be too much to ask, but can I see you again?"

He turns his back on you, levitating off the rooftop. "I don't do interviews, sorry."

Your eyes narrow at his back, running to the end of the rooftop, "But you're willing to get in front of the press to declare you're fixing the city? Restoring what's broken in the wake of your destruction?" He continues higher and higher till you shout at him, "Why? Why go through all that trouble of restoring everything when you could just do nothing!"

Helios stops and appears in front of you in the blink of an eye, his face obscenely close to yours, "Someone told me that being a hero doesn't stop with just defeating the bad guy, it's about dealing with the aftermath—the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. And if it includes getting on the good side of beautiful reporters like yourself, it's not so bad after all."

He winks at you and off he goes into the night, his armor shimmering in the dense, yellow moonlight as you stare at him going farther and farther.

"Who are you exactly?"

"Of all people! I thought meeting an actual superhero in person would change your perspective about them." Seokmin notes to you as he helps carry archived prints onto the dusty desk at the end of the hall. "I mean, Helios actually saved you—and you still think he's the bad guy?"

"Okay, fine. He's not a bad guy, but a chance encounter with him doesn't change anything," you mutter as you filter through the archived prints in the building's basement with a groan. You'd be doing this task with anyone but Seokmin but given your obvious avoidance of him and Joohyun making sure Seulgi, Soonyoung and Seungkwan did not volunteer to help you downstairs in the archives, here you were.

Stuck with him, aka your crush—or your not-crush considering he did stand you up multiple times despite showing clear interest in you.

If he really was your not-crush, then why was your heart beating so fast around him still?

"But ever since the whole 'getting saved by Helios' happened, there's one thing that I can't stop thinking about."

"What? Is it the fact that you met him in person? That he likes your articles? That he's as handsome as everyone says?" Seokmin chuckles, fast forwarding through the news station's footage of Helios' past fights.

You look up from the prints and smack Seokmin's shoulder, "Stop right there! That frame right there." The video pauses and once again Helios' face is covered, the camera's focus blurred by his arm rising to protect himself from a villain's punch. "Nevermind—and no."

"So he is handsome?"

"Yes—no wait, can we put that aside for a moment? Right before Helios saved me, right when the station blew up, I heard someone shout my name before Helios saved me." You start carefully. "No one else was in the building or around but me… I mean, I was on the phone with Sunmi but she hung up on me before Helios even was there."

"Maybe it was Helios who said your name." Seokmin hypothesizes, his shoulders rising in curiosity.

"But if it was him, how did he know my name? I only told him my name after he saved me, not before." You breathe out, the cacophony of the news broadcasts drowning out your thinking. "I mean, I don't think I know who he is… but talking to him… it felt like I knew him, like I've talked to him before."

"As crazy as that sounds," you shake your head, hearing yourself already sounding crazy.

"It's not." Seokmin turns to you, a twinkle in his eyes as his eyes lock on yours. You swear in the moment his eyes dart down to your lips and back up but he clears his throat, "I-I mean, having covered him for so long, maybe it feels like he's an old friend."

You nod and continue looking through the prints, trying to find the original articles of when Helios first came about.

"You know, I can't help but think why does Sunmi want me to cover the Helios stories all the time?" You wonder, "I don't even like covering him, even if it gets me a front page column."

"Because," Seokmin starts off with certainty, "she knows you're the best writer here and she wants someone doing Helios justice on the press."

"I am not the best writer here," you deny earnestly, running a hand through your hair tiredly. You sit on the desk next to him and rewind the footage to play back the scene of Helios' fight, watching the way he moves with ease around the villain.

"Yeah you are," he volleys back, taking the controller out of your hand and pausing it. "You write honestly, you write the facts without being too dry, you write with emotion without over exaggerating it all." Seokmin hesitates, "you know the gravity of your words and you're not careless about it."

You wordlessly nod, unsure how to respond to such a compliment as you throw your hands up, "If I'm so great, then why can't my brain work right now?"

"You just need a break from staring at the screen." He sets the remote aside and takes your hand in his, "Come with me."

Seokmin leads you through the rows of the archived material, entering a hallway leading to the personal archives organized by every journalist ever employed under the Chronicles. He stops in front of his personal cabinet, tugging it open and meticulously threading through his past works till he pulls a stack of papers from the very back, all brought together with a heavy duty clip.

"Do you remember the entertainment scandal that broke last year but was swept under the rugs by the heads of those companies? Involving women and those nightclubs?"

"Of course, I remember. Sunmi assigned that whole expose to me."

"Well, I wanted to work on it as well, but she told me no." He holds out the stack to you, "So instead I wrote this whole piece on it anyways."

"You wrote this?"

"Oh yeah," Seokmin nods as you peruse the unpublished first draft, "I was going to submit it to Sunmi but since she assigned the expose piece to you, there wasn't much I could do." You remember the headline articles you penned that week, the week where you literally went four days with no sleep to finish the damn thing. "But I didn't let that stop me from writing, I didn't let that get to my head that she chose you over me, so I saved it all and rewrote this whole thing at the start of this year and I'm happy with my progress."

He pulls out another set of papers, thicker than the previous one and cleaner with only several red marks marring the pages. "Looking back, I think I would have butchered that piece if Sunmi gave me the opportunity to write it instead of you. Everything happens for a reason, and it's brought us here." He gestures all around you, "I mean, not to the dark basements of the archives, but to where you shine doing what you love, what you're good at."

"You shouldn't doubt what you write because it's going to be good regardless of what you think. You're amazing, (y/n). Don't doubt that."

Your eyes travel all over the papers and back to him, his eyes locked on yours as you stand speechless before him, "Seokmin, I—"

You decide to take the plunge and cross the empty space to stand directly in front of Seokmin, tugging him by the collar and pressing your lips to his. Disbelief sets into him, his eyes going wide but slowly closing and melting into you as his hands wrap around you.

You're the first to pull away from the kiss, your eyes still closed and heart racing a thousand beats per minute as you realize what you just did. "I-I—uh, I don't know what came over me."

"(y/n)..."

He's about to pull you in for another kiss, and you can't help but feel a familiar chill in his arms as your hands rest on his chest, his heartbeat racing in under your palms till the ringer of someone's phone goes off—interrupting the bubble between you too.

Seokmin's hands immediately go to his phone and he grits his teeth, "I'm sorry (y/n), but I need to go."

The dire tone in his voice makes you worry, "What? What's wrong? Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, uh. It's… something." He taps out a quick text before rushing out of the room, leaving you in a flustered mess. "I have it under control, I just have to leave right now. I'm sorry."

Without another word, Seokmin's gone in the blink of an eye and your hand balls into a fist at the situation in front of you. The ringer of your phone goes off this time and it's another text from Sunmi.

text message from sunmi (must answer at all times!!)

(y/n), there's a villain loose from the Seoul City Jail and witnesses say he's looking for Helios

Keep your distance and get the story

He's by the Seoul City River

You glare at your phone, "Why are you literally ruining everything?"

"Sunmi, can I talk to you for a moment?" You knock on the panel of her door and she naturally waves you into her office, placing down the newspaper and shifting her complete attention to you.

"Yes?"

You take in a deep breath before asking your question, "Why am I always assigned Helios?" Your voice is rushed and hurried which makes Sunmi make you repeat it again before she raises an eyebrow.

"That's what… you came to talk about?" She deadpans sternly.

"I know there's plenty of people who can write about Helios and yet, every week you assign him to me. As much I thank you for the opportunity to cover him, I don't believe I'm the best person for the job. At all." You nervously twist the papers in your hands behind your back. "If Seokmin is all-knowing of Helios and his every move—why doesn't he cover Helios?"

"Because you’re the better writer," Sunmi answers for you, her gaze shifting to her glowing tablet. "Seokmin’s good, but you’re better."

"That’s complete BS," you argue back, slapping down printed papers with Seokmin's name at the bottom. "I’ve read Seokmin’s work, it’s frontpage quality! I read his reworked piece on last year's entertainment scandal, the big one involving those idols and those nightclubs? He didn't want to submit it to you but it's good! His writing shouldn’t be page two or three or five—he deserves the front page, he deserves the Helios stories."

"It doesn't concern you, (y/n)."

"Yes it does, considering I'm the one who's following Helios every month, every week, every day!" You yell back, contempt in your voice.

Your boss stands up and purses her lips, "I’ve already offered it to him—countless times," Sunmi reveals off-handedly, "and everytime I try to give him the story, he declines and passes it to you."

You're completely caught off-guard as you try to process what she just said, "H-he what?"

"And when I tried to assign him Helios for the—I don't know—millionth time, he threatened to stop the tips about Helios and to quit and work for the Metro. I can't have one of my top ranking writers work for the Metro." She shakes her head as she stalks over to you, leaning against the corner of her desk.

You try to piece the story together slowly, "What, why would he do that? Why pass it to me of all people?"

"He never told me." She muddles her tea in her hands before setting it back down. "I thought he was doing it to get into your good graces, because word around the office is that you and him are…?" Sunmi singles out her two index fingers and puts them side by side, hinting as to if you and Seokmin are a couple.

"O-oh no no no!" You shake your head, "Him and I—nope, we're not a thing, I mean… He asked me out a couple of times, but he's stood me up those times—but we stay late at the offices from time to time and eat together and—"

"(y/n), I adore you, but you need to take a major hint." Sunmi chuckles, rolling her eyes at the young love in front of her. "You two aren't the only ones to stay behind working hours."

Your mouth is gaping at the situation in front of you, your hands getting unnecessarily clammy and sweaty. "Fraternization in terms of workplace relationships in the office is not frowned upon if you two do decide to pursue that, just please keep it professional during business hours." She sits back at her desk and gives you a small smile. "If you don't have any other questions, you're free to go."

You enter the main floor and walk over to your desk, throwing Seokmin's article on the counter and releasing a tired sigh up into the air. Your hands go to your hips as you watch the widescreen television monitor run the story of Helios saving the day, spotlighting his built figure in the sky.

You glare at him, "Why are you always making everything so confusing?"

Your morning could not be going any better. Nearly everything and everything was going wrong or malfunctioning on you and with the entire office stressed about the Metro opening up their new headquarters across the plaza, everyone was running around like headless chickens.

And to make things even worse, the one person you wanted to talk to was out of the office the entire day, citing emergency after emergency to Sunmi and clearly avoiding your texts and calls.

If anything, you're more confused now than ever and the only person who seems to be making any sense is the one person you're writing about twenty-four/seven: Helios.

His plan to transform the city for the better had you following him around all day, watching him help the youth and the elderly as well as aid the construction workers in rebuilding the train station and other buildings he damaged during his past fights. Women, men and children alike were all enamored by kindness and were incredibly flustered over his perfectly white smile and charming manners.

You sit at your desk watching the footage from Helios' foray into the city's park, helping grow patches of trees and flowers by flying through the air and spreading them through the park.

"How long have you been watching that footage?" Joohyun chimes in from above you, her head perched on her hands on the top of the office walls. "Watch out Seokmin, I think Helios has taken your heart now."

"Oh shut up." You groan, pausing the clip. "He has not taken my heart, just… seeing him actually keep his word to make the city better has made me see him in a whole new light. That's it."

"A man of his word," she wistfully remarks, "I wonder where they come from."

"Not from here." You mutter under breath as you notice Seokmin walking your way. You minimize Helios' video and pull up your draft for this week, pretending to type a sentence or two till you hear a certain someone clear his throat.

"Hi Joohyun, (y/n)." He greets you both with a smile before turning to you, "Would you have a moment, (y/n)? To talk?"

You silently nod and march over to the break room in front of Seokmin, asking the interns tiredly sitting about to give you two the room as you chew on your bottom lip. You take in Seokmin's entire demeanor, noticing the way he looks unusually fatigued, like he had been up all day and night with no sleep, how he yawns as if it was past midnight and not eight in the morning.

"(y/n), I—"

The minute the door shuts, you run your hands through your hair frustratedly, "So now you want to talk?"

"Seokmin, what is there to talk about? I don't understand you, you're helping me with my research and flirting with me and acting all interested in me one day and then you're standing me up on our dates with flimsy excuses, and I'm tired of it! If you just want to be friends, then I understand. You don't have to keep leading me on and playing with my feelings like this."

"And another thing… why?"

He genuinely looks confused and you elaborate on your initial question. "Why pass Helios to me? All the opportunities to write about him—you said it yourself that your writing has grown since you first came to the Chronicles and yet you tell Sunmi to give Helios to me every time."

Seokmin bites his lips nervously, "Don't pretend, I know it's you who tips off Sunmi about Helios in the first place, too. I know she's tried giving you this assignment week after week and you keep saying no."

You can't help the tears that start to well up in your eyes as he stands there in tense silence, "On top of that, you know way more about Helios than I do, so why skip out on this big opportunity? You could even find out who he is or whatnot!"

"And you better not give me some excuse that I write better than you because that's not true."

The air is heated and quiet between you too as you stare at him, trying to figure out what Seokmin's playing at, but he doesn't attempt to open his mouth at all. His eyes are cast down, obviously avoiding your gaze.

Seokmin looks guilty but you can't quite figure out why, "I-I can't tell you, (y/n). You have to trust me when I say that it's better if you don't know."

You remark sadly, "How can I even trust you if you don't even keep your word?"

Seokmin opens his mouth as if to say something but nothing comes out, prompting you to start walking out of the break room, "(y/n), please. You have to believe me."

"I don't know what to believe anymore with you."

Days pass since your confrontation with Seokmin and since then, it's been quieter to say the least. You notice that he doesn't sit across from you during morning meetings, preferring to come in last and stand in the back next to Seungkwan. He keeps his eyes cast down around you, only briefly making eye contact with you before directing his attention elsewhere or excusing himself from the situation.

You've tried to not let it affect you but knowing you're somewhat the cause of the entire situation starts a pang of guilt in your chest.

"(y/n)! Are you leaving the office anytime soon?" Seungkwan knocks on the wall of your pen, rocking on the balls of his feet as he waits for your answer.

"No, I'm staying behind again." You focus on your laptop screen again, wiping the tired fog out of your eyes. "Should Helios' good deeds go unnoticed by the Chronicles, I don't think I'll hear the end of it from Sunmi, so I'm staying behind to categorize them for the article… are you done for the night?"

"Mhmm, Seokmin and I finished our piece on the Kim Technologies' charity gala earlier today so I'm heading out early." Seungkwan yawns tiredly as you nod in acknowledgement, a lost look in your eyes that he instantly recognizes. "But what about Seokmin you ask?" Your co-worker smirks but blinks any trace of deviance away. "He might still be around tonight, but why? You're finally going to talk to him after nearly a week of avoiding him?"

"He's the one avoiding me." You angrily mutter, your face feeling hot at the true accusation. "He can talk to me when he wants to reveal his dirty little secret."

You notice Soonyoung's eyes go wide and he gulps timidly, coming closer to your desk, "(y/n)... do you know… about Seokmin?"

"Do I know what about Seokmin?" You carefully repeat, watching his features contort in awareness of what you just repeated. "He's hiding something, isn't he?"

"No no no! Nothing, it's nothing! I thought you knew that Seokmin… uh, that his… birthday is coming up! And we're planning a party for him!"

"Wasn't his birthday in February? It's almost September." You reason, looking at the paper calendar on your desk and flipping through to months before.

"Oh would you look at the time!" Seungkwan glances at the imaginary clock on his wrist and starts rushing towards the elevator doors. "Good night, (y/n)!"

You shake your head in dismay as you watch him exit the building, turning back to your reports throughout the week of Helios' grandiose gestures to restore the city. The clips posted by innocent bystanders all over the city becomes a blackhole of you watching nothing but videos of the handsome hero soaring through the air and helping those in need. The next video that plays is new to you, the title reading 'WHO IS HELIOS? AN IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS!' in bold, black writing and a cutout photo of Helios grinning as the preview clip.

The video launches into a full scale investigation of who or what Helios' real identity could be, seeing as he physically appeared human—flesh and all—but retained superhuman powers and abilities. Sketchy videos with the quality of a cell phone were interlaced into the short film's evidence, zooming in on the superhero's face during battles and measuring his height and build in comparison to the people and buildings around him.

A deeper analysis appeared in the form of your posted articles from the Chronicle and from other tabloids that reported Helios-centric 'discoveries' and 'theories,' the creator mentioning how Helios' true identity must have been employed within media or the press as they've never explicitly covered who he could be under the mask as well as keeping a tight lid on information on the inside.

You found yourself glued to the analysis, playing along into the madness and thinking of who the culprit could be.

It had to be someone with access to people and places all over the city and working for the press, or under a major newspaper corporation, did just that. Not only did that help with getting around, but the media was always guaranteed a spot at major public events that common villains did target.

And there were few men who did fit Helios' proposed height and build in the industry, but did they fit his moral compass of good over evil? Did they have his boyish charm and strong sense of justice as much as Helios did? Did they change their point of view and own up to their mistakes in light of noticing their own faults? Did they match his bright smile and heavenly voice? Did they give you chills everytime he held you in his arms? Did they live selflessly and humbly in the spotlight despite the number of critics and bashers—as you were before—examining his every move and choice?

There was only one person to come to mind that fit your description perfectly: Lee Seok—

You're woken from your daydreaming as your phone rings loudly, a slew of incoming texts from the one and only Lee Sunmi.

text from sunmi (must answer at all times!!)

(y/n), this is an emergency

I need you to go to the rooftop of our building ASAP

No questions asked

You quickly rise from your desk and shove on your jacket, rushing through the empty offices to the elevator doors, nearly jamming the button to the rooftop stuck as time shifts forward a minute.

The stairs to the roof are slippery from the lack of use, save for the occasional times you know Sunmi goes to be picked up from her personal helicopter, which is rare in itself. There's a brisk wind that surrounds you, your breath evident in the cold temperatures as you reach for your phone to text Sunmi.

text to sunmi (must answer at all times!!)

I'm on the rooftop, what is it?

text from sunmi (must answer at all times!!)

No questions asked, remember?

Stay there and do not leave

You shove your phone back into your pocket and start walking around the rooftop, goosebumps creeping on your skin through your jacket as you notice a faint figure standing by the ledge of the rooftop.

The closer you get, the more the figure looks more familiar to you, your lips pursing together when you realize who it is, you turn on your heel to walk away but you remember Sunmi's instructions.

"Seokmin? What are you doing here on the roof? I thought you left hours ago."

You can see he's somewhat nervous as he sits on the edge of the building, pulling out a bouquet of flowers for you when you step close to him, "(y/n)—I-I, uh, there's something important I need to tell you, and I don't know exactly how to tell you. But you shouldn't hear it from me."

"What are you talking about?" You look at him confusedly. "What's going on now?"

"I'll be right back." Seokmin stands up and casually falls off the edge of the building and you scream, immediately rushing to the ledge and peering down below but the darkness doesn't give you much to see. A gust of wind shoots by in front of you and you pull your eyes away, shielding your vision with your hands till the wind settles. Again, there's nothing on the side of the building as you look left and right until you hear a cough behind you.

And there he is.

Lee Seokmin casually defying gravity before your very eyes as he lands on the tarmac with a soft step. "Surprise?"

"What the—Lee Seokmin! I hate you!" You smack his arm repeatedly in shock with the flowers he gave you minutes before, the flowers' petals falling to the floor in waves. "You're not allowed to scare me like that!"

"Sorry! I didn't think it through!"

You groan again and shake your head, "So that was you telling me you’re Helios? By falling off the roof of a skyscraper and giving me a heart attack?"

Seokmin winces from how bad it sounds when said aloud and instantly agrees, "Ok ok, it could have been explained better."

"Oh you think?" You hit him again with the bouquet and now when you look at it, the flowers are in shambles, desolate-looking with half-full petals. You sit down on the inner ledge of the rooftop as you pout at him.

He looks incredibly remorseful, "(y/n), I'm sorry. I-I should have explained it to you better and I know you're in shock from finding out—"

"In shock from finding out?" You shout in disbelief. "I already figured out you were Helios!" Seokmin sputters out incoherent babble as you grin madly, "all the clues were right in front of me: working with the press and always having the inside scoop, having extra clothes in the office, your knowledge and tips to Sunmi about Helios, your hair smelling like the aftermath of construction site, leaving when Helios is needed—even if it's all in bad timing. It's always been you."

"You're not shocked? Or mad?"

"I mean, I won't lie… I was mad at you before, but now I understand why you do what you choose to do. I can't be mad at someone choosing to save hundreds of people over spending dinner with me. I get it, I'm a bit of handful," you chuckle humorously to lighten the mood. You bite your lip, "I'm sorry for what I said before—about Helios, to Helios, to you. I can't imagine the chaotic double life you must live in order to keep your job as a boring city journalist and a superhero protecting all that is good."

"Hey," Seokmin nudges your arm as he plops down next to you, pollen and flower stains streaking his white shirt. "Being a city journalist isn't boring. It's the highlight of my day."

You scoff at the sentiment, "What? Typing and editing reports and interviews verbatim really do it for you?"

"No, but seeing you does." He winks, but he becomes flustered when he realizes the tail end of your sentence, "I mean—you make my day! Seeing you is the highlight of my day! God, this was way easier behind my mask."

"Don't worry, Helios. You still got it." You stand up with the bewildered bouquet of flowers in your arms, offering Seokmin your hand, "But you could make it up to me with dinner? I have a bountiful amount of food packed in my lunch bag."

His warm hand in yours sends a jolt of lightning up your arm, his smile making you melt on the inside, "I would love to—"

Suddenly, a phone chimes and rings with one text after the other, Seokmin's phone constantly vibrating with messages.

text message from soonyoung, seungkwan (group chat)

SEOKMIN! there's a break-in at the seoul city museum! cameras and wires were tripped 2 minutes ago [soonyoung]

the robbers look to be professional, carrying all sorts of gear and disabling the systems [soonyoung]

are you done making up with (y/n)?? I know you asked sunmi to help you talk to her, but she still seemed pretty mad at you when I left the office [seungkwan]

did you get her flowers like I told you so LOL [soonyoung]

yes he got her flowers, he chose the first bouquet HA [seungkwan]

I liked the second one better:(( [soonyoung]

HELLO SEOKMIN?? THE BREAK-IN [soonyoung]

Seokmin shakes his head and shoves his phone back into his pocket, his lips pulling into a regretful frown, "Uh, duty calls?"

"Fine, go." You nod in understanding, basically shooing him off the tarmac, "Be safe."

"Always." He kisses the back of your hand before running off the roof and diving into the night, shooting up from the shallows in his gold armor and threading his way around the city like a shooting star.

You hug yourself for warmth as you inhale the brisk city air, not a single shred of doubt in your system that he would return safely, knowing that full well that Seokmin was a man of his word, forever and always.

#Seventeen #seventeen scenarios #seventeen imagines #seventeen au #seokmin scenarios #lee seokmin scenarios #lee seokmin imagines #seokmin au #seokmin fluff #dk scenarios #my work

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yoonjinkooked · 5 years

Text

lockdown | (m) - Chapter 1

moodboard by @flajka

pairing; jungkook/female OC genre; college au, strangers to lovers, smut and tiny bit of fluff too, humor ofc rating; explicit words; 4.900

— synopsis; Eunhee is in trouble and facing a deadline - in comes curly haired jungkook to save her life, make her laugh and maybe, just maybe, fuck her brains out. When the two end up locked in a building overnight, who knows what will happen?

warnings (for this chapter): cursing, OC really wants to murder Tae, banter, cute Kook, slightly cocky Kook, hints of sexual tension. Just an introduction chapter, really.

A/N: I hope you enjoy the first part guys. I am now starting to work on Chapter 2 and will let you know when I plan on posting it. Let me know what you think - I’m still a tumblr newbie and basically, I’m crappin my pants.

With that being said, let’s start chapter 1 :)

In the life of a journalism major, there are a few life-changing, stress-inducing moments that essentially serve as a preview of what’s to come if you do decide stay on your chosen career path.

For me, a handful of these moments made me question anything and everything I have ever known about the career I’ve chosen to pursue back when I was 18 and frankly, a little bit stupid. One of these moments was back when I was doing an obligatory internship at a small, local newspaper, only to realize that the editors and big shots there expected me to do nothing more than to make them coffee and copy papers in their stead.

Another moment was when I attended my first murder trial, which probably would end up being a part of my future job, only to spend the entire afternoon wondering if this really is something I want to do for the rest of my life.

And the final moment, at least the final one that I can think of right now, is currently occurring, with me losing my shit as we are trying to get the final edition of this year’s university magazine ready for printing. And I, as one of two co-editors, will be the one to blame if anything goes wrong.

Half of my grade depends on this. My future job prospects depend on this. Whether or not the professor is happy can influence the direction of my masters’ next year. This is ride or die for me and I am losing it.

“Namjoon, where the hell is he?” I ask my co-editor, best friend and partner in crime. Who also happens to be the only person on this planet who is well equipped to deal with me losing my shit.

“I know as much as you do,” he reminds me, moving the phone away from his ear. “I am trying to reach him now. You panicking will not do us any good and it definitely won’t make Taehyung answer me sooner. So don’t panic and focus on the things we already have here and work with that. The photos aren’t the only thing we need to look over before it’s ready for print.”

I nod my head franticly, knowing deep down that he has a point but also knowing that won’t help me at all. It never does because whenever I am chasing a deadline, I follow the same line of action. Work, panic, panic some more, work, panic like the world is ending, forcefully calm down and then, finally, get shit done. I am not sure if I am on the ‘panic some more’ or ‘panic like the world is ending’ phase yet but as I run fingers through my hair, letting my nerves get the best of me, I am positive said hair is gray.

I hear Namjoon cursing under his breath but for the sake of getting things done, I ignore him for now and simply focus on the task at hand �� proofreading. As long as I preoccupy myself with tasks that need to be done, I cannot focus on the fact that Taehyung is late, like he always is, despite it being the one time he truly needed to be on time.

So for the next few minutes, I go over several articles in the speed of light, once, twice, three times. No matter how much they’re using spell-check, our reporters still make mistakes and honestly, when I see my name below one title, I know I am not allowed to judge because I obviously do it too.

Campus activity, student achievements, published works and former alumni ‘look, they’re famous now’ column – all covered and grammatically perfect. And Namjoon is still trying to reach the one man we need the most right now. Slowly but surely, the other students are becoming less frantic and more calm and casual, because their tasks are all but finished. Namjoon, Hoseok and I? Not so much.

“Okay, what the hell?” Hoseok throws his pen rather violently on his desk. “He does this every time. Every damn time. I’m the designer – I need to go over everything and make sure the photos are put where they belong. How can I do that if I don’t have said photos?”

“Hoseok, I know I’m not the textbook definition of calm but we need to try to be,” I tell him, turning my chair to face him over our connected desks. “Try to design it somehow, leaving the space for the photos. Vertical or horizontal, I will find good photos to fit. And if I have to change something, I will.”

“Are you sure you can do that?” he looks doubtful, which is extremely insulting, since we have known each other for three years and have been working together for more than two.

“Basic editing? Yeah, I can do that,” I roll my eyes. “If you doubt my editing skills, you can stick around till midnight to check on me.”

“No way,” he shakes his head. “It’s Jimin’s birthday party tonight and you know I need to be there.”

“Are you serious?” I ask, not even sure why, since it’s absolutely obvious that he is dead serious. “This is the most important edition we’re going to release. We’ve been doing this for years and this is our grand exit, which we need to execute perfectly, and you’re telling me you want to go to a party?”

“I’ll be going too,” Namjoon covers the speaker of his phone to tell me. “Sure, this edition is a big deal and we want it done well but most is already done and this isn’t our entire life.”

“Oh please,” I reach for something, anything, and end up hitting him on the chest with a block of post-its. “You’re just going because you hope to hook up with Hyejin, even though we all know you will just end up drunk, alone and watching her from a distance.”

“How dare you?” Namjoon is flabbergasted.

“She isn’t wrong,” Hoseok chuckles, ignoring the glare Namjoon throws his way. “But he’s right about this not being our entire life. You will burn out, Eunhee. It’s been two weeks and you haven’t stopped thinking about this once,” he tells me, as if I needed to be reminded. “This is the final edition with you being the editor. You should celebrate, not stay here after hours and pulling the hair of your head.”

“With the two of you playing beer pong and complaining about girls ignoring you, someone has to be the responsible one,” I point out. “All of this is riding on the three of us and you’re just… gonna dump me?” the betrayal is evident in my voice and yet, neither one of them is bothered enough to look guilty. Before they’re co-editor and designer, they’re just stupid, horny students.

“It’s already done Eunhee,” Namjoon rolls his eyes. “The one doing the dumping here is Taehyung and you just told Hoseok you can handle the editing. If you’re not sure, you can send him your final version and he can fix it if it needs to be fixed.”

“I am not leaving that party to fix Taehyung’s mess,” Hoseok cuts in.

“Our mess,” I remind him. “We have until 4AM to send it. So long as you’re not wasted out of your mind, it’s doable. If you even need to fix anything. Taehyung is always late but he also always brings more than enough material for us to work with. He’s a jackass but a talented jackass.”

“And a jackass who can’t answer his phone,” Namjoon adds, throwing his phone on the desk, before sighing as he slumps down onto his chair. “I’m going to regret that,” he glares at his phone.

“I can’t force you to stay here and help me,” I mumble, watching as the student reporters casually leave our office space, not even bothering to say goodbye because it’s the final week – who cares, life goes on, we’re going to see each other eventually and our portion of work is done. “I can, however, remind you of this in the years to come, guilt tripping you into doing favors. Many, many favors.”

“You make it sound like you’re not already doing that half the time,” Hoseok points out.

“Not my problem you somehow always end up owing me one. Or two. Or five,” I shrug as I turn towards my laptop, planning on searching for some stock photos we might be able to use, if Taehyung doesn’t show up. I know that he always does, last minute or not, but I can’t leave anything to chance. While stock photos would be a cop-out of sorts, we need to have a plan B.

The next two hours pass in almost complete silence. An occasionally sigh would leave Hoseok and every now and then, Namjoon would curse under his breath as he tries to reach Taehyung for what has to be the hundredth time – so far, to no avail. The panic I felt earlier had already left my system so I was able to focus on other things, all the while ignoring what seems to be our pending doom.

The sun had set and the lights are now on and that son of a bitch is still not answering his phone.

“You know, at this point I’m starting to wonder if we have better chances of finding him at Jimin’s party,” Hoseok breaks the silence. “I’m done with all the pages, I left enough space for all kinds of photos and there’s literally nothing more that we need to do.”

“Speak for yourself,” I mumble as I open the email he just sent me, showing the draft for the final version of the magazine. It looks as amazing as possible, seeing as 98% of photos are missing – instead, white blocks serve as breaks between long rows of text. “You know what? You two go. Go and have fun and if you find him, kick his ass. There’s no way he’d ever miss Jimin’s party. I’ll stay here and finish this up and when you send him to me, I’ll kick his ass too,” I tell them.

“Eunhee, are you sure?” Namjoon walks over to my desks and leans on it, giving me what I can only describe as a look of pure and utter pity. “I don’t want to leave you hanging; you’re not the only one with the responsibility here.”

Seeing as I am the only one that will sit Jimin’s birthday party out, I kind of am, but I do not say it. “It’s okay Joon,” I reassure him. “Go. Have fun. Try to get some with Hyejin. I’ll take care of this, it’s not like it’ll be the first time I pull an all-nighter. Just find that bastard and get those photos to me.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Hoseok stands up and throws a bag over his shoulder. “We will find him and I will do my best to stay sufficiently sober if you need my help. Which, if you do, don’t hesitate to call me, okay?” I nod, knowing I would rather fix it myself than have drunk Hoseok ruin it. He’s majestic with the editing software but when drunk, he can’t even walk straight, much less edit.

“Just make sure to get his USB to me, even if you have to kill him to make it happen,” I remind them. Namjoon is still worried but I roll my eyes at him, which apparently is the sign he needed to get his things and leave. I wave them out, surprisingly relieved to have the office for myself.

I am a decent team player but the last couple of years have shown me that I do my best work when I do it alone. Not to say that I take all the credit – hell no. Joon is the editor as much as I am and half the work is done by him but at times like these, I just want him out and away, busy with Hyejin. This way, if it’s a mess – it’s my mess. If it’s a work of art – it’s my work of art.

With a coffee in one hand and glasses of my head, I go over last year’s photo folder – that’s a better plan B than some basic stock photos. Some of the photos look like a decent backup – our campus hasn’t changed much over the last couple of months, after all. As long as I avoid last year’s seniors, I might be able to pull off plan B without anyone except a handful of us knowing the truth.

Even the swimming team – they have won gold last year, they have won gold this year too. The members are all the same, no new freshmen, no seniors last year. If my memory serves me well, all of them kept their natural hair colors and I can totally use said photo in this month’s edition. Sure, Jimin and the rest of the team will probably know what’s up but that’s nothing a round of beer can’t fix.

Look at me – such a professional. Bribing my way to get the work done. Yay.

In the midst of scrolling, I pause to glance at the clock – it’s almost ten and still no sign of Taehyung. Stifling down the pending panic, I take a deep breath and decide to play some music, hoping to distract myself more. While 80s rock has its charms, I still fidget as I scroll through folders upon folders, grabbing hold of my favorite koala mug again and downing the rest of the coffee in one go. Needing something to distract me further, I open the top drawer of my desk, grabbing the emergency M&Ms I’ve kept there for a few weeks now, knowing I was bound to pull an all-nighter sooner or later.

Just as I down a handful of candy, someone knocks on the office door and I nearly choke. I cough, make sure a lone M&M is not going to kill me, take a deep breath and shout a ‘come in’.

The little hope I have deflates as I realize it’s not Taehyung, the bastard himself – instead, it’s a guy I know, but not really. Tall, wavy brown hair, wide brown eyes and a slightly dumbfounded look, hidden under the hood of his black sweatshirt as he barely steps inside the office, still with one foot out as if he is ready to run.

I am positive I know him. I’m sure we have class together, or had the year before. Or perhaps we just have classes in the same building – I know I’ve seen him before, in the background, on the side, but for the life of me, I can’t put a face to the name.

“Can I help you?” I ask, once he doesn’t speak up for a few moments.

“Yeah,” he snaps out of his daze, tilting his head before reaching for his pocket – I keep my eye on his hands, half expecting him to draw a gun and shoot me in place. “Taehyung sent me to give you this,” he says as he pulls out a USB stick out of his pocket.

Finally, I can breathe. Finally, I know I will manage to get this done tonight. “Thank fuck,” I sigh, closing my eyes for a second before opening them up again and realizing I have just confused the shit out of him. “I was positive the jackass would leave me hanging. I would have murdered him in cold blood.”

“He’d never do that,” the guy smiles at me, a smile that evaporates as quickly as it appeared; making me wonder if I even imagined it. “If he had told me sooner, you wouldn’t have to wait. He texted me like 10 minutes ago, telling me that I need to bring this to the office.”

“He left the stick with you and didn’t tell you what it’s for?”

“No, he asked me to edit the photos,” he tells me. “Oh. You don’t… I’m the G.C.F guy. I’m the other photographer,” he explains and suddenly, the little boxes in my head fall into their designated place.

Taehyung had a photography partner. I’d say a solid half of the photos we’d print were Taehyung’s, and the others belong to the guy always signed as JJK, G.C. F; I have never met him, never asked for his name and before tonight, he had never showed up in the office.

And now I can remember the guy more clearly – he always had a camera, either hanging around his neck or covering his face as he would relentlessly take photos.

“Ah, now I get it,” I smile. “I’m Eunhee, the editor.”

“I know,” he tells me. “Jeongguk.”

Yep, I know the name. It’s all clicking now.

“Well don’t just stand there Jeongguk,” I tell him as I stand up; I walk around my desk and start Hoseok’s PC, knowing that he has a better editing software ready to go. “I’m going to need your help for this. Everyone else is getting shitfaced at Jimin’s so if you’re up for it, you’re going to be the one to help me get this edition ready by 4AM. You up for it?”

Honestly, I’m not particularly surprised when he doesn’t answer me straight away – it’s not like I’m offering him free food, drinks and a night he’ll remember – quite the opposite, I’m offering him a night full of work. Simply put, I’m begging him to help me, without actually openly begging.

“Sure,” I hear him shuffle around as he puts his backpack down on the ground. “Where do you need me?”

"Just get yourself a chair," I wave my hand around the room, staring at nothing as I try to figure out where should we start from. I suppose that from the beginning is the only real answer to that one. "Hobi had set it all up for me to finish but I think I need to see what you've brought me, see what i have to work with," I decide, turning to Jeongguk, just in time to see him drag Namjoon's desk chair from the corner of the office.

"All of them are edited and ready for use," he reassures me with a tight smile as he joins me behind the desk, a good foot between our chairs. Noticing that he still has his hood up and covering half of his face, I bite my tongue and decide not to wonder why - he has his reasons, I suppose.

"Then we just need to decide what goes where and that is where you come to my rescue."

"What makes you think that should be my call?" he asks, not bothering to hide his surprise.

"Well, you're a photographer," I announce, as if the guy is not aware of his profession. "Doesn't that officially make you a better judge when it comes to esthetic mumbo jumbo?" I ask, because I truly don’t know. I am not familiar with the job requirements a photographer needs to fulfill, other than to have a camera, of course. I simply imagine they have some sense of beautiful. Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about something and that is why I ask – there’s no shame in not knowing.

After a beat of silence Jeongguk looks at me, keeping direct eye contact for one whole second, which is time enough for me to conclude that he is cute, ridiculously so. Cute in a way that no man in his early 20s is allowed to be. Yet not cute enough to make me focus on him instead of the task before us.

"I guess so," he tilts his head as i force my jaw shut - now is not an appropriate moment for ogling. "Aren't you the boss lady though?"

"Boss lady," I test the nickname and roll my eyes. "Difficult to work with, perhaps. Bossy? Don’t think so. But I’m taking it because I obviously need your help tonight - I am good with words, not at making them look good on paper."

“What you need to do here is not that hard,” he waves at the monitor and I turn to look at him. “Deciding on which photo should go where depends on… the overall page. The colors, the neighboring photos and countless other things. There are no rules – just feeling. Photography is feeling,” he waves his hands about as he talks, completely immersed in his explanation and making me wonder if he’s talking about this particular problem or just photography and its misconceptions in general.

“No rules?” I ask through a chuckle. “That’s not what people told me when I took a selfie from a downward angle.”

To my shock and frankly, shame, he stares at me in silence, blinking once, twice, three times. I gulp. “That was supposed to be a joke,” I elaborate in a low voice, as I hope that the ground will split in two and just swallow me into a never-ending dark hole. Or that Hobi’s PC will finally be usable.

“Oh. Okay.”

Well, this settles it then – absolutely no possibility of mild, harmless flirtation. That flat-lined reaction will end up being a source of trauma for me in the years to come – I just know I will end up awake at 3AM in like five years, thinking of how awkward this particular moment was.

“Finally,” I feel relieved now that I can actually work with Hobi’s PC – I slide the flash in, on the first go. I nearly celebrate the seemingly impossible victory but I decide to hold myself back. If Jeongguk can’t take a joke, he will probably think I am insane if I behave like I normally would. “Now let’s see what we have here,” I mumble, opening the pop up. One folder named 1 – I open it. I click on the first photo, of a group of students sitting on grass and talking (looks absolutely staged but based on what I know about Taehyung and his G.C.F partner, they don’t roll that way). I smile when I see a photo of our swimming team huddled up together, gold medals hanging around their necks – I won’t have to use last year’s photos after all. “These are really good. Perfectly edited too. Thank you.”

“No need to thank me, it’s my job,” Jeongguk mumbles as he eyes the photos I scroll through. I can no longer tell if he’s serious or joking and I simply give it up altogether – who cares?

“This will fit perfectly,” I mumble as I finish going through the bunch of photos and end up on the first one – the one with a bunch of people that looks absolutely staged. I exit and go back to the folder, then back to the original one. It’s as if I could feel, actually physically feel, my heart slowly sliding down inside of my body. I go back and open the folder again, looking as the fear slowly grows in me. “Jeongguk, where are the other photos?” I somehow manage to utter.

“They’re all there,” he tells me, his eyes going wide when he notices the look of pure and utter horror on my face. “Taehyung told me you need 20 photos, no more, no less. There are 24, I added 4 more just in case, if you didn’t like some of them… Eunhee, what is going on?”

My chest goes up and down frantically as I try to calm the whole tornado of emotions that starts within me. Panic, worry, sadness and more than anything else, anger. Pure anger. “I will murder him.”

“What? Who will you… Taehyung?”

“I said,” I slowly speak, pausing for deep breaths. “200 photos. 200 photos, no more, no less. 200 from which we would end up using more than 100. I said 200, not 20.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah, oh shit.”

“What… where are you going?” Jeongguk asks as I jump off my chair and nearly fly over the desk to grab my handbag. I throw my phone inside of it and turn to look at him, only to find him flinching away from me. Apparently, I look as angry as I feel.

“I am going to Jimin’s birthday party,” I announce. “Where I will grab Kim Taehyung by the neck, drag him outside, throw him onto the ground and murder him in front of the entire student body. I’m thinking strangulation is the way to go. You should come too, take a few photos of it for the delayed magazine edition.”

“No!” Jeongguk snaps but I am already heading towards the door. His hand wraps around my wrist and he drags me back towards the desk.

“What?”

I don’t know what else to say because why the hell did he pull me like that?! I wasn’t actually going to murder Taehyung, no matter how much I might want to do so.

Jeongguk rolls his eyes at me and I feel even more stupid than he made me feel minutes ago. The nerve. “If you go there and yell at Taehyung, or even kill him in cold blood, you’re just going to end up wasting valuable time,” he tells me. Okay, true, I can’t argue with him on that one. “Not to mention that you won’t get the photos. He doesn’t have them on him at all times and even if he did, they aren’t edited.”

“So what you’re trying to tell me is that I am fucked? Like, missionary, sideways, in the ass fucked?”

“I wouldn’t choose that particular wording, but yes,” he sighs. “If you stay here, you’re not fucked. Just… follow me. It’ll make sense soon,” he seems impatient as he grabs hold of my wrist again and this time, he drags me out the door. I actually stumble to keep up with him, too confused to even ask him what the flying fuck he is doing and where the hell we’re going. He walks fast and with him dragging me behind him, I have no choice but to break into a light jog to keep my arm attached to my body.

Down the hallway and to the left, Jeongguk drags me towards the last door, in front of which he finally stops. He starts fidgeting and feeling himself up and down. It takes me a moment to realize that he is looking for the keys. “What are we doing here, what is this place?”

“This,” he unlocks the door and smiles at me mischievously. “Is my office.”

As soon as he turns on the light, it all makes perfect sense – it’s a darkroom. A darkroom which I had no idea existed, even though I have spent a bigger part of my college education just down the hallway. “Don’t just stand there, come on in,” Jeongguk urges me but I do not move. The hood that still covers half of his face, paired with the room’s red light, is making him look pretty ominous.

“No thanks, these places are as creepy as they seem in movies.”

Jeongguk laughs and shakes his head. “They’re not creepy. Suit yourself.”

“What the hell are we doing here?” I ask, feeling my earlier agitation return. Fix the mess then kill Taehyung. Stopping by a darkroom was not on my to-do list. “How the hell can this help?”

“As I said, this is my office,” he tells me and I see him rummaging through the top drawer in one of the desks that are lined up against a wall. “I keep my work here. Some, not all. Useless work mostly. Random campus photos I take just because I think the moment is worth capturing.”

“While that is very poetic and deep, how the heck can that help us now?”

“Haven’t I just said I take random campus photos?” he asks in annoyance. “I have at least one flash drive with random photos like the ones you might need. I’m a good photographer and,” he waves his hand and I notice something black in it – he walks over to me, takes my hand and puts the flash into it. “I’m the one who will make your words look good on paper.”

It’s not what he said – it’s the way he said it. For the first time tonight, his hood did not block my view of his entire face. The way his eyebrows lifted, followed by a smug smile and head tilt, my heart went into overdrive. His expression and the fact that he is a solid foot taller than I am makes it so easy for me to feel tiny, irrelevant, overpowered.

Despite being the talkative one of the duo, I am speechless for a moment because good lord, does he look hot right now. Like… please slam me against the wall and leave hickeys down my neck hot.

“Come on boss lady,” he laughs down at me. “Work awaits.”

What the fuck happened to the shy guy who couldn’t keep eye contact for longer than a second?! He is giving me whiplash! I again have to run to catch up with him but I do it without complaining, realizing that for tonight, he is my lifeline. This random dude who’s good at photography is my only hope.

Tonight’s going to be a very long night.

#jungkook smut #jungkook series #jungkook fanfiction #bts smut #bts jungkook #bts #bangtan #bangtan smut #jungkook scenarios #jungkook fanfics #jjk #jeongguk #jeongguk smut #jeon jeongguk #jeon jungkook

216 notes · View notes

lnarizakis · 4 years

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— sam’s match-ups masterlist

hi! if you sent in a match-up ask, you can find ‘em all here! if you sent off anon, i have just tagged you and added the link to the post. if you sent as anon/anon with identifying emoji, i included your description along with the link. this post will be constantly updated as i continue to post my match-ups! thank you and i hope you all enjoy your match-ups!!

— @hqprotectionsquad . . .

— anon . . . ❝ could i get a matchup🥺 with 2 boys~ i'm 4'9, i'm really tiny and i've been told i have really nice hair hehe personality wise i've been told i'm really gentle and calming, i had a teacher that said my voice is "serene" and "soothing" >__< i'm the mom friend of the group🥰 i'm quite the introvert, i enjoy just staying home with some takeout, studying quietly or playing acnh underneath all my blankets.. i'm quite fond of hugs and cuddling and forehead kisses too though😚😚💞💞💞 ❞

— anon . . . ❝ could i request for a matchup?🥺 i'm about 5'3, my friends always say i'm the perfect height to hug 🤗 i have long hair till my waist that i dyed a rose-gold colour, i like wearing green or grey contacts because i like the way they make my eyes look. i have a resting b!tch face though...i'm not very approachable because of it😭 i've been playing netball for about 6 years now and i'm quiet irl i guess, but off the court and when i'm comfy, i'm quite the goodball🤙🏻🤙🏻 ❞

— anon . . . ❝ grats for 500! I'd like to request a matchup w 3 ppl pls! Im female, 5'2, i LOVE volleyball! i play wing spiker but i used to play setter, i loved setting for my besties in hs after training. I like to work out, read books & study. i clean my room every morning cos i like neat things, my closet's organized. i have dark brown eyes and thick thighs, proud of em! i also dance, im flexible, and im taking journalism. i wanna play pro vb in the future but tbh 158.5cm's too short, but im not giving up! ❞

— ⭐️ 🌸 anon . . . ❝ Hey hey! If ur still doing the matchup event i would love one!! Im a short gal with wavy dark hair and green eyes. I wear makeup p often esp red eyeshadow and black winged eyeliner (bc im an egirl until i DIE). Speaking of egirl i dress in black and with a chain most of the time but i also randomly flip into floral soft girl hours?? As for personality im really energetic once im comfortable and i love people who can match that energy, esp bc i get anxious rlly easily so i need someone . . . who will help keep me calm and happy when my drive for success gets a lil out if hand lmao. I’m also v combative towards ppl who i think are disrespectful! I love classic novels and watching foreign movies, but I also LOVE sports and get rlly hype abt them. I also LOVE music esp metal but i can and WILL vibe to literally anything esp if its during a workout (bc i live at the gym and someone spotting my squats is so romantic 2 me 🥺). A match w/ 2 boys would be sick, tysm in advance! ❞

— anon . . . ❝ Im medium height with long brown hair and sharp features. I like drawing, reading, cooking. I’m rather chill and level-headed, i’m usually the one to fix objects and solve problems, I avoid drama. I’m compassionate and caring but sometimes indifferent. I like mountains, art galleries, concerts, cello and graphic design. I’m adaptable and open to learning new things but I don’t like changing my routine too much. + 1 male character. ty for this and congrats on 500 followers!!! you deserve it ❞

—anon . . . ❝ hihi!!!! congrats on 500!! i lov ur content sm.. akfjag im asking for a two chara match up!!! im 5'3 and i have pink hair,, i switch between so many hobbies LOL i play volleyball and softball,, and i love singing and painting!! i have a really cottagecore aesthetic and i love baking things for people!!!!! im really energetic and v bratty over text but i get flustered so easily in person,, i hope youre having a good day//night !!!!!! ty for ur fics ❞

— 🐧 anon . . . ❝ match up please!!🥺 2 characters n no gender preference!! im a tall (around 184cm) kinda chubby girl w/ shoulder length brown hair, hazel eyes, pale skin w/ a lot of moles n i wear glasses! im p shy n it takes me a while to open up. but when i do i am a completely dif person,, making friends is hard but the ones i do have i love more than anything! when im w/ them im cheerful, talk a lot n goof around. otherwise i look p intimidating n serious cause i have a rbf n barely talk,, . . . im the mom friend, an optimist, a dreamer n a procrastinator. im p hard to piss off but when im angry i can get scary 😳 im sensitive n cry a lot, currently im working on being more confident! i love animals n flowers!! cause im not the best with words i use lil gifts n touches to express my love! my hobby is drawing! ive been doing it my whole life n im rlly proud of it!! congrats on 500 followers love❤ ❞

— @raevaioli . . .

— 🦆 anon . . . ❝ Happy 500 bubs! You def deserve it :)! I was wondering if I could get a #1 male matchup? Looks: 5’1 petite fem w/ small chest/tiny waist. Thick/medium brown hair and eyes. I’m a cancer with ENTP type! I’m a very affectionate person to my loved ones. I’m very stubborn, sensitive (but I try to hide it), ambitious, witty and very talkative! I like to tease my friends, watch Netflix and try new baking things! Although I show my love through actions, I’m fine with getting love back in any way . . . Also I like baths! (It’s random but why not 😌) I wish you a good day! ❞

— anon . . . ❝ Hey! Can I get a matchup? (#1)I’m a Leo and a ISFJ chick! I have medium brown hair and big eyes w/ glasses. I have a petite body with a small waist and chest. I’m really nice to people but very awkward (I’ll laugh at the floor) and when annoyed. I’m much more open to others like my best friend,I feel at home with her :,) .My hobbies include watching greys anatomy, shopping for clothes, and calling my friends. I would want my partner to be a lil more extroverted than me. Happy 500 😊 ❞

— anon . . . ❝ hi! Can I get a matchup? I’m 5’2 straight girl w/ long brown wavy hair and big brown eyes. I’m thick in all the right places🥴 plus I have a curvy body. My star sign is Pisces and I’m a ISFP. I’m more introverted than extroverted. I dress like Hobo type of way, but i always wear AF1s and I NEVER crease them. In my spare time I draw,listen to raps (mostly by Tupac) and oldies, learn raps, and hang out wit friends. I also have a bunch of piercings on my ears and one on my nose. ty CONGRATS ON 500+ ❞

— anon . . . ❝ CONGRATULATIONS ON 500 WHOOP WHOOP❣️🥺, can i please have a matchup doe! so happy to celebrate this with you❤️ i’m a female, straight, 5’4 and a half, dark skin with medium black curly hair, chubby cheeks and always smiling, i love being outside just experiencing life or trying new drinks at restaurants!! i also enjoy staying home to watch tons of anime & movies or dates to the museum or theme park, spring is my favorite season and orange is my favorite color, i’m so hyper and loving, thank you! ❞

— 🐾 anon . . . ❝ Twice the charm I suppose :) I’m a 5’1 girl with long wavy brown hair. I have a lot of piercings and I tend to wear a lot of jewelry. I wear two knee braces due to a connective tissue disorder. I’m bisexual, so either way works for me owo. I’m an INFJ and a type 4. I’m told that I’m pretty easygoing but I get angry real quick when someone I love is threatened. I’m very empathetic and I’m the mom friend of the group 🐾 . . . Fun fact, don’t leave me alone in public for more than two seconds or else random strangers come up to me asking for advice. This has happened way too many times now don’t ask me why lmaooo. I’ve been playing soccer for eleven years now. I was the captain of a coed college-age division team for two years. I play left defense and goalkeeper. 🐾 . . . I go hiking a lot, I love cliff diving, and I’m an archer. I am also a painter and a writer. My dream job is to become a book editor, but I want to eventually live off my books. I tend to be pretty clingy when it comes to people. I randomly need a lot of attention and force my friends to cuddle. They like rejecting me 😔. Sorry that this was so long aha. Ily and have a good day 💕🐾 ❞

thanks for sending in an ask ! didn’t see yours? please let me know !

#sam’s 500 party

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literaryspinster · 6 years

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Fovever Yours, Iris West

The first chapter of the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before AU I promised. These won’t be very long at the beginning, but another chapter should be posted very soon.

Chapter one: Scott, The Boy From Picture News

Scott and Linda are here again. I can remember a time not too long ago when Linda was just Linda and Scott was just Scott. Now they’re a pair, never one without the other. And since the three of us have been bffs since elementary school, Scott and Linda becoming Scott and Linda has since turned three best friends into the couple and the third wheel, i.e. me.

The day they announced their boyfriend and girlfriend status, we were all sitting together in Jitters, the two of them shoulder to shoulder on a cushy padded bench. I sat in the single metal chair across from them because the bench only had room enough for two. I should have taken that as a sign. We’d been working on a big expose for the school newspaper together, and needed some time to unwind after nearly a full Saturday of grinding toward our deadline. I was prattling on at a mile a minute about the project between sips of my nitro brew, and I guess I hadn’t noticed how quiet they’d been the whole time, because Linda cutting in with “Iris, we need to tell you something,” startled me out of my excited rambling. They’d never been a we before, not without me, and still I wasn’t prepared for the words that followed.

“Linda and I are dating,” Scott said, because Linda couldn’t seem to get it out herself.

I just sat there, my eyes darting between the two of them, my hands clasped tightly around my mug like it was the only friend I had left, because that was what it felt like, like they were disappearing in front of me and nothing would ever be the same again, and the longer Scott talked, the stronger that feeling became.

It wasn’t Linda’s fault, she had no idea how I felt about Scott Evans, beautiful, brilliant Scott Evans, who was going to change the world one day with his words. I never told her how something in my chest went all screwy every time he smiled at me. I never told her how I liked to read his articles while wearing nothing but my cutest underwear. I never told her any of it.

If I would have admitted how I felt about Scott Evans, it would have changed things between the three of us, no matter which one I was admitting it to, it would have shifted something out of place and turned our perfect, comfortable union into something strange and foreign. So I kept it inside. But I never expected that hiding my feelings about Scott would allow Linda to explore her own.

They told me that they wouldn’t let it change things, and I guess that’s why they’re here right now watching Last Week Tonight with me even though I’m sure they’d rather be someplace alone, making out. They’ve been together for over a year, and yet I still feel like every moment they spend with me carries an apology in it.

Linda snorts and guffaws at a joke that John Oliver just made. Scott smiles and nearly lets out a chuckle. As serious as he is all of the time, that almost-chuckle must mean that the bit was perfectly hilarious, and I can’t believe I missed it because my eyes were stuck on their fingers laced together.

“You’re laughing awfully hard. Is this why you’re moving to England babe?” Scott says. Linda is a year older than us, and bound for Oxford in three weeks while Scott and I will be returning to school for senior year. Scott tries not to let it bother him, getting emotional about things that aren’t world hunger or human trafficking isn’t his style, but I know he’s sad about it because I know him more than anyone, maybe even Linda.

“John Oliver doesn’t even live in England anymore Scott,” she says, and my brow knits in mild confusion. Whenever Scott calls her babe, she always calls him babe right back. If I noticed it’s only because I’m an investigative journalist, not because I’m still in love with Scott or anything.

“I know,” Scott says. “But every guy there is going to have that accent.”

“Don’t be jealous,” she says, kissing him on the cheek. She then stands up, putting his hand down. “I’m going to get a water, you two want anything?”

“Dr. Pepper” we answer at the same time.

“That stuff will rot your teeth you know,” she says.

“My 16 plus years of perfect dental checkups would argue otherwise,” I say.

“Just a matter of time,” she says, slipping into the kitchen. It’s my house, but Linda is practically a sister to me, which practically makes her another daughter to my dad, which practically makes it her house.

I turn to Scott and speak under my breath. “You know you can talk to me about it right?”

“Nothing to talk about,” Scott says. “We’re going to be just fine, she’ll spend a year at Oxford, I’ll spend a year absolutely killing it as Editor in Chief of Picture News—

“Co-editor in chief,” I remind him with a nudge. Our adviser Mr. Bridge couldn’t pick between us, while Scott’s stories are always airtight with data and compelling statistics, my stories have all of the color and humanity. It’s why he chose us both to succeed Linda, together we’re the perfect team. Sigh.

“Okay, Co-editor in chief,” he says begrudgingly. “And with my perfect grades and almost perfect test scores, I should be able to write my own ticket to Cambridge.”

“You’re going to Cambridge?” I ask, how did I not know this? How did I not realize that both of my friends were planning on ditching me? My grades are good, great even, but they aren’t Oxford or Cambridge good, too many Bs in science and math courses over the years. Besides, I’ve had my heart set on Howard university since I was a little girl, they both know that. Part of me even hoped that maybe Scott would choose Howard too, especially after that profile on HBCUs he put his whole foot in last year.

“I think it’s the right thing. Cambridge has a rich history, stellar academic programs and its student body is more diverse than you’d think.”

“85 percent white is diverse?” I argue.

“How do you know so much about Cambridge?”

“John Oliver went there,” I say with a shrug.

“Damn,” Scott says, shaking his head.

“Look, plenty of colleges in the US have rich histories and stellar academic programs, tell the truth Scott.”

He lets out a breath. “I don’t want this to end,” he admits. “I know, I know that isn’t like me, I don’t do impractical things but…”

“But you love her.”

He starts a slow nod, “But I love her, I mean. Why not try the expat life together and see where it takes us? It’ll be like Hemingway, only seasoned.”

“Don’t Hemingway novels usually end badly?” I argue, but before he can shoot back we hear a voice behind us.

“You’re going to England?”

We turn our heads swiftly to see Linda standing there, a bottled water and two Dr. Peppers balanced between her hands. Scott stands up and goes around the couch to meet her there. I can’t figure out her face, but she doesn’t seem excited by what she’s just overheard. How could she not be? If I were dating a guy like Scott, I’d be absolutely floored to know that he was following me to England.

“I was going to tell you,” Scott says.

“But what, you just forgot?” Linda says, her voice going higher, not with anger, it seems more like nerves, but judging by her expression it could turn into anger at any moment. This is going to turn into a fight, and I don’t want to be here for it.

“I thought you’d be happy, I mean…” there’s a pause, and he looks at me quickly, then back at her. “I mean why aren’t you happy?”

I get up quietly. “Iris, you don’t have to leave,” Scott says.

“Actually,” Linda says. “I think maybe we should go. There are things I need to say to you Scott. Only you.”

He scrubs a hand over his perfect waves, and nods. He takes her hand then, almost like a plea, and she holds it back, pulling him behind her and out the door.

“I look toward the kitchen while my dad steps out, drying a glass. “What was that all about?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I don’t think it was good.”

****

I haven’t gotten a text from Scott or Linda. It’s been hours since they walked out and I wish I knew what was going to happen. Linda looked so upset, Scott so confused. And I don’t think I’m happy about it. Yes, I may love Scott, but I love Linda too, and I don’t want to see either of them unhappy. I always thought of my crush on Scott as something just for me, something to tend to silently, and inwardly, like a succulent I keep in my closet with a UV lamp, only opening it every once in a while to give it water. This is why the day I found out that he was seeing her, I made a secret vow to never, ever tell him how I really felt. But I needed a place to put all of those feelings, to finally end the cold war I constantly fought with myself over him. So I wrote him a letter.

Every time I love a boy so much that I can’t take it, I write down everything that I’m feeling. Each one is sealed with an envelope, and addressed to the object of my unrequited affection. There are five in total, written over a period of 6 years. I would never think of sending them, but it comforts me to know that they exist. My emotions can’t crush me if I keep them in a box.

I start to get a little restless when the clock on my phone hits ten with still no text. So I stand up and walk to my closet, I pull the chain to switch the light on and take down the box on the top shelf. It belonged to my mother. When she married my father she wore a beautiful long veil with beaded embroidery around the edges. It was sold to her in this box, white with dusty rose stripes. I swallow hard and open it, looking down at the letters. Scott’s is on the very top, and while I’ve sealed the rest, I haven’t been able to bring myself to do that with his just yet. So I slip it out of the envelope and read.

Dear Scott.

I remember the first time I ever saw you. You were protesting the use of genetically modified vegetables in the cafeteria. We were seven, and I was smitten. Now we’re the best of friends, and you love someone else.

I’ve decided I’m not going to stand in your way. When you really care for a person, you want them to be happy, and that’s all that I’ve ever wanted for you. But you have to understand Scott, even though I wish you all the best in the world, this is silently killing me. Every time I see your face, something inside of me flips, like I’m being switched on and everything works all of a sudden. I don’t want that feeling to go away but I know that it has to now.

Whenever we’re talking, just the two of us, whether it’s about the plight of Syrian refugees or how ridiculous Barry Allen looks in his track costume, I feel like I’ve known you before. I feel like I’ve known you in every life that I’ve ever lived. Do you feel that way about Linda? Do your eyes follow her when she leaves a room the way my eyes follow you? If you really feel as happy and at ease and challenged at the same time when you’re with Linda as I do when I’m with you, then maybe she deserves you more than I do. Just know that if you would have loved me first, I would have given you everything. I was simply too late.

Forever yours,

Iris West.

Next chapter: Barry Allen, the boy at the party

#westallen #iris west #scott evans #linda park #westallen fanfiction

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giasonesdream · 6 years

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Dubious Documents~Part 1: The Anonymous Message

→Summary: “You're not new to getting anonymous emails. Being a journalist trying to uncover truths usually sparks anger in some people. Sometimes the truth is hard to bare, and sometimes things aren't so black and white. If you go searching for answers, the broadcast of the unknown can be terrifying.

So you open the email, expecting empty threats or someone that just so strongly disagrees with what you feel that they need to type words and let you know (it's fucking hilarious). But after going through the few words in the body of the email, your curiosity thickens.”

→Word Count: 1,009

Being in a cafe on a Saturday afternoon was not your ideal place to get work done, but it served its purpose. Normally, the cacophony of laughter, the chime of clinking ceramic and silverware, and the hush of steam would all be too powerful for your senses. You enjoyed being able to drown in the symphony, but rarely could you ever get any actual work done.

The dying urge to get out of the apartment, however, cloaked any pre-existing qualms against trying to focus in the bustling city.

After getting your White Mocha, you settle into a booth near the back, your safe haven for the time being. You create a noise canceling bubble around you, tuning out as much as possible while your laptop boots up. This shouldn't take as long...then again, your laptop shouldn't be ten years old.

(Thank you, Schmapple, for making your products so fucking expensive. They're lovely as shit.)

There was a story you started at the beginning of the week, and you spent countless nights in your house going over the interviews, playing them over and over. You wouldn't dare say you lost your direction, but maybe you just needed to listen to everything in a fresh space.

You're definitely not procrastinating, but you have to check your emails. What if your editor wanted to discuss something with you? What if your Nigerian uncle wanted to announce you the Princess and gift you crates of gold?

In all honestly, you had been neglecting your mailbox for a couple days. If anyone was really pressed to get ahold of you, they would either text or call (oh, what a time for technology).

As you suspected, there wasn't much to look at: spam emails, companies trying to get you to buy shit you don't need, the usual.

Your phone feels heavy in your hand, filled with interviews you've tossed and turned over since Wednesday. The first one had been the most straightforward. If you could make an article on it alone, that would be golden. But the curiosity inside you would never allow that, never let you try to pass one thing off as the general fact.

You notice it in your peripheral, your inbox getting a new message. With a sigh, you look at your screen, try to read what the bold subject says. The message is from an anonymous source.

Interesting.

You're not new to getting anonymous emails. Being a journalist trying to uncover truths usually sparks anger in some people. Sometimes the truth is hard to bare, and sometimes things aren't so black and white. If you go searching for answers, the broadcast of the unknown can be terrifying.

Kim Namjoon is a name spoken hardly ever for fear he will pop out from the shadows- much like Voldemort, but not as pompous and he has a nose (hopefully...you hope he has a nose). He runs one of the biggest crime rings in the city, and is notorious for offing whomever he sees fit. You have had the pleasure of meeting some people that spend their days keeping tabs on the thriving Business Executive, and there have been talks of him wanting to expand his trade south, west, over oceans. But they're all just whispers as of right now.

Kim Namjoon, gang leader and all, is not one to plaster his face all over the city. What he does is also hidden until the last minute. Criminal Analysts jerk off to the thought of picking his brain (you've met a few and you're pretty sure they would be criminals if they didn't think so highly of themselves). He's...an enigma, aloof, other words that mean the same thing.

So, you're intrigued, to say the least, when the email reads that Kim Mother Fucking Namjoon wants to meet you, of all people.

There isn't much to it, just that the Boss would like to meet up with you, if you are willing. You only reread the words a few times before deciding to respond; thus begins the overuse of the backspace button:

Um, what the fuck?

You delete the words, sure that professionalism is probably the best way to go.

Good Afternoon,

I would like to start off with just a simple question: What the fuck?

The line gets erased quickly, and you notice the tightness of your shoulders. What are you even supposed to say? How does Kim Namjoon even know you? Sure, you're pretty well-known but you can't be popular enough for some high and mighty Mafia Boss to know you exist.

(Imagine getting that into the “humble brag” subreddit. Hoo boy.)

As questions spiral, you start to wonder if this is even true. Maybe it's just someone playing a joke on you. What if it's one of your colleagues? Hasn't Minseok had it out for you since your Corrupt Health Department Scandal? Or what about Sammy- oh man. He had been so pissed when you got to cover the Fertility Clinic story (ironic how he whined like a baby himself).

Should you just ignore it? If it is just one of your co-workers trying to get a laugh in, you don't really want to be embarrassed. But...if it is someone from Kim's circle...what would he want with you in the first place?

“Journalists never get anywhere by playing it safe,” you utter to yourself, thinking aloud.

The caret blinks at you almost impatiently, waiting for you to compose your thoughts. It's almost taunting, but you finally decide on a course of action.

You exit out of your email and go back to your phone, opening up the voice records you got this week. As insatiable as your wonders are, some things are left untouched.

At least, for now.

#bts fanfction #kim namjoon #namjoon fanfic #namjoon x reader #bangtan #bts scenarios #namjoon imagine

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misterbitches · 3 years

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i try not to be too personal-personal here cos tumblr is this thing that is the most chill for me. twitter is so hard. also tehre’s this whole fucked up panoramic thing.

but

1. i have a now defunct blog about black filmmaking. or not defunct just. unused

2. i am a filmmaker and artist; writer-director and editor specifically. do digital drawing

3. i love art. and i was a big fashion fan. that has influenced my life HEAVILY and continues to do so. it is never apolitical and is a hotbed of thought. i also love music but i dont want to do it cos i wouldnt be good and also i dont want to hate music.

3.5 i am a bigger fan of films than tv. i love film and art like i said but my rship to visual mediums has changed drastically since i decided to pursue it. because of that you will find my intense analyzation too. it becomes more abaout output and less about enjoyment because it means SO FUCKING MUCH. so when i get to observe wha ti cant do or havent created it’s a reprieve. for music i know so much less aobut it than the rest that i just stay consistently in awe

3.75 im still in awe at those better than me. but we compare ourselves to no one.

4. i had a fashion / regular blog before this. it was mcqueens. i was not internet famous but had a decent following (people are stupid.) a popular post of mine is a pic of lena dunham and taylor swift and i said grand wizards at a meeting. if you know you know

5. i don’t have an ID for leftist terms because i don’t really care. i am not a tankie but i support communism’s dream. best bet woudl be libertarian socialist.

6. i believe we’re reaching towards a world we want. so im gonna help fight for it.

7. there’s a lot of good texts out there. i only read articles and fanfic but my best friend bought ‘we do this til we free us’ by mariame kaba and im getting through it. i recommend that

8. im a wobbly

9. i type super off the cuff. stream of consciousness. i try to edit it but i wanna hvae fun. this is unfiltered me. sometimes long, sometimes short. i coudl spend hours editing and analyzing it but it’s just me here. i just wanna say what i am thinking no pressure. i can only be the woman i am. sometimes there’s a hard line of communication (people not understanding me) but i refuse to believe i am unintelligible and i have to stop internalizing that

10. going off 6, my thoughts and humor can be terrible and idk some ppl dont like it. even leftists. that’s life but my god im sorry i said money was bad why did u block me? why do u like cops?????? smdh

11. idk how i got a lot of followers on here but think of me as a mirage. a revolutionary mirage :)

12. in case it wasn’t clear, i’m black and it means a lot to me. also a fat cis woman. also means a lot to me. so when i engage, knowing my background, bitch imma lean in if i got sth to say.

13. i always say i dont know everything. i do nnot. i knwo some things about some stuff. i know what i like and what i can do. i am open to learning. i don’t have to be suuuper nice if i dont feel like it though. i dont tolerate bullshit.

14. life is awful and incredibly serious. the conundrum is genuinely not killing yourself. sisyphus! it’s heavy and fucked. but i NEED you to remember this if anything.... for me life is about dignity and doing what you want, okay? so if you get anything out of these posts just fucking laugh and have fun and nod when i say money bad. or just read it if you want. i’ve gotten so many ideas from other ppl like even storywise going through tags and have had such great food for thought. people are insane in the greatest of ways. i may seem pesimistic and melancholy but honestly im an idealist trying to live in the now. i realize that it sucks but there’s beauty in that and that’s why it’s super important to have a place for me to engage but also feel like it’s my space. its been tanquil here actually and i appreciate it even if fsr almost 400 ppl followed me. i really dont know why bc from jump i’ve just been terrible. i dont want praise unless it’s genuine so that’s not it. i have to just trust in myself more because i know my strengths but i dont trust em. i will conquer her !

15. piggybacking off hte middle of 14, I LOVE TO LAUHG. I LVOE COMEDY. i have a specific type of humor i guess. grew up on dave chappelle. arrested development, home movies. home movies isnt sociopolitical but recently i got into king of the hill and i am so impressed with it. great story telling, satire, funny, heartwarming. i love bob’s burgers too. i dont rly watch tv out of that

16. yes i love art and film yes talk to me about it if u want i can give u some recs if u want too and also we can talk and stuff abt that. maybe. and no filmmakers dont watch as many movies as u think. u probably have seen more than i have.

#i'd rather talk about moi #no i woudlnt

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easyhairstylesbest · 3 years

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77 Valentine's Day Gifts You Can Get on Amazon Prime

If going to the mall during the holidays drove you nuts before 2020, then Amazon Prime will save your soul now more than ever. Where else can you buy a wool Mackage coat, a sculpted bust of a greek god, a cardboard turntable for cats, and toilet paper? From the comfort of your couch. Naked.

Because there are millions of choices on Amazon and going through the results for even a single inquiry can be exhausting, we went through tens of thousands of items and put together a definitive list of the best gifts you can shop this year with Prime. Our non-negotiable criteria? Items had to be unique, high-quality, practical or chic, because nobody has time for anything else these days. Below, our top picks on Amazon Prime to add to your cart now.

Ocean Mist & Sea Salt Candle

NEST Fragrances amazon.com

$42.00

With notes of sea salt, white tea and coconut, this ocean mist-scented candle is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. (Something that can’t be said for most candles out there.)

Gabbi Vegan Leather Handbag

If you follow any fashion accounts, you’ve probably seen JW Pei all over your Instagram feed. What’s less known about the affordable brand is that their bags are made from 50 percent recycled materials and 10 percent of all profits are donated to animal sanctuaries around the world.

Polaroid Pop Instant 3×4 Photo Printer & Digital Camera

Being able to hold photos of special moments hits different. Polaroid’s wireless Pop Instant camera is a game-changer for making it possible to take, preview, edit and print 3.5 x 4.25 photos. The easily transportable device also offers WiFi connectivity, so users can upload their pictures straight to the ‘gram if they please.

Acrylic Sheep-Shaped Containers

Agirlvct amazon.com

$12.99

Whether you’re shopping for the aunt that does her own thing or your friend with the ironic instagram aesthetic, these sheep-shaped cotton swab containers will just hit different.

SLIP Silk Pillowcase

Anti-aging and crease minimizing benefits aside, a silk pillowcase simply just looks and feels luxurious. Because falling asleep these days isn’t easy, this queen size pillowcase makes for a thoughtful gift.

14k Gold Three Diamond Amigos Curve Post Earrings

Adina Reyter amazon.com

$675.00

If these diamond curve post earrings look familiar, it’s because Meghan Markle wears them on repeat. To give you a sense of just how versatile these beauties are, the Duchess wore these to Commonwealth Day 2018, throughout her and Harry’s Royal Tour of Australia, and numerous royal engagements in London.

The Archisutra: The handbook’s Final Chapter

Createspace Independent Publishing Platform amazon.com

$9.99

This creative Kama Sutra from London-based architect Miguel Bolivar is a good gift for cultured significant others. Each sex position is inspired by a famous building or furniture design with detailed data and annotated scale drawings.

Handmade Love Bracelets for Men & Women

Ubuntu Life amazon.com

$19.00

Ubuntu Life, which was included in Oprah’s Favorite Things 2020, provides employment to artisans in Kenya, in addition to running programs that support social inclusion for Kenyan children with educational and physical needs. A handful of colors are still in stock at the time of publication.

Premium Bamboo Bathtub Tray Caddy

For a fancy-feeling gift that’s actually affordable, look to this bathtub tray caddy. It has a stand that can be propped to read a book or display a tablet, plus a wine glass holder.

Fair Trade-Certified Chocolate Gift Set

Chuao Chocolatier amazon.com

$16.95

This dark and milk chocolate gift set from Whole Foods-carried brand Chuao Chocolatier contains innovative flavors the chocolate lover in your life won’t be expecting. Think: potato chip, honeycomb, salted chocolate crunch and more.

Open Back Lace Teddy Bodysuit Lingerie

Spice things up with this surprisingly affordable lingerie find. Its delicate lace details and open back lend a glamorous touch.

Nonslip Hair Claw Clips (Pack of 4)

Claw clips were already having a moment in fashion before the pandemic. Now that we’re working from home and wearing our hair up every day, they’re all the more useful. These reviewer-obsessed clips boast 3k reviews and counting with an average rating of 4.8k stars.

Flex Wireless Earphones

I obtained a pair of the latest Beats (the brand’s most affordable headphones to date) for testing a few months back and haven’t stopped using them since. Delivering crystal clear sound, 12 hours of battery life, and a rapid fast charge, these bluetooth wireless headphones are overall better than headphones I’ve spent at least 4x more on over the years.

7/8 Jogger Travel Pants

Editor’s note: I own these joggers and am in love with them. What first sold me on these was that reviewers mentioned how similar these are to Lululemon’s On The Fly jogger, which cost about three times more. Fast forward to me owning 4 pairs and recently FaceTiming with my grandma who was rocking her own pair as well. A great gift for any woman who likes comfortable, flattering pants.

Reversible Zebra Bathmat in Grey

Jonathan Adler amazon.com

$63.34

Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side… Not when you’re getting out of the tub though. That’s dangerous in an ER-kind of way. Anyway, here’s a cute, dryer-friendly bathmat.

Le Specs. Air Heart Sunglasses

Le Specs. amazon.com

$67.90

If these glamorous and slightly oversized sunnies look familiar it’s because Meghan Markle sported this exact pair during her 2019 baby shower. Shoppers, note that these fan-favorite shades have a track record for selling out fast.

OPRAH’S FAVORITE THINGS 2020

‘Tis The Season Huggie Set

Stella & Haas amazon.com

$29.97

This trio of hypoallergenic freshwater pearl huggies is another covetable find from Oprah’s Favorite Things List this year. Considering how versatile these earrings are, I don’t blame you if you opt to keep a pair for yourself.

UGG Fluffita Slipper

Have a shoe lover on your shopping list? Change their life with UGG’s Fluffita slippers. These fuzzy-feeling platform slippers will elevate all of their favorite loungewear ‘fits.

Mayberry Sheepskin Slipper

EMU Australia amazon.com

$59.95

Cozy gifts remain a failsafe move in 2021, so here’s another pair of chic sheepskin slippers certain to delight.

Emmanuelle Initial Necklace

Jennifer Zeuner Jewelry amazon.com

$154.00

A personalized touch goes a long way in making it look like you didn’t wait until the last minute to pick something out and panic while doing so. Here, a gothic initial pendant from Jennifer Zeuner that subtly channels Regina George’s ‘R’ necklace. More letters are available as well.

Dachsie Ring Holder

This dachshund ring holder takes cute jewelry organization to another level. Perfect for the dog lover who’s constantly rotating her stack.

Layla Bamboo Bed Sheets

Layla Sleep amazon.com

$175.00

$125.00 (29% off)

A sheet upgrade is the gift that keeps on giving. Suitable for sensitive skin types and hot sleepers, Layla Sleep’s 300-thread count Bamboo sheets are soft to the touch and eco-friendly. (Bamboo uses 200x less water than cotton and doesn’t require harsh chemicals in the production process.) The set includes a fitted sheet, top sheet and 2 pillowcases.

PhoneSoap Pro UV Smartphone Sanitizer & Universal Charger

PhoneSoap amazon.com

$119.95

File PhoneSoap’s Pro UV smartphone sanitizer under universally practical gift ideas. In just five minutes, this device is able to kill up to 99.99% of germs thanks to its powerful UV-C light.

Plush Slipper Socks Women

Toes Home amazon.com

$14.99

Amazon reviewers are obsessed with this set of fuzzy socks, which happens to be a steal at this price. (Think 2.4k ratings and counting, with an average of 4.6/5 stars.) A handful of designs are available, but the heart motifs here are especially kitschy-chic.

Alix Mini Top Handle Satchel

3.1 Phillip Lim amazon.com

$695.00

They say the best gifts are the ones you’d want for yourself. Phillip Lim’s versatile Alix Mini top handle bag is proof.

Supreme Glamour

Thames & Hudson amazon.com

Anyone who loves The Supremes or retro glamour will swoon over this new coffee table book, which chronicles the fashion history of the beloved 1960s Motown group. Founding member Mary Wilson tells her friend and co-author, Mark Begu, the whole story of the band.

Gisele Long PJ Set

Eberjey amazon.com

$120.00

Eberjey is practically synonymous with great pajamas. Made from modal and spandex jersey (no polyester!), these PJs are breathable, ridiculously soft and hot sleeper-friendly. Unlike cheaper options out there, you can be sure these will last for years to come.

EDITOR’S FAVORITE

Power Workout Leggings in Black

Sweaty Betty amazon.com

$100.00

To give you a sense of how beloved British brand Sweaty Betty’s power leggings are, one pair has sold every 90 seconds this year. (Editor’s note: I own these and don’t stop talking about how I think they’re the most comfortable and flattering leggings of all time.) New to Amazon Prime, these are still in stock in every size at the time of publication.

Women’s Asili Stacking Rings

Women-founded and sustainably sourced, SOKO makes some of the coolest, vintage-feeling costume jewelry around. Their pieces are handcrafted by artisans Kenya who use recycled brass, upcycled horns and traditional techniques.

Leather Touchscreen Texting and Driving Gloves

If you’re bougie on a budget, check out these Italian cashmere-lined leather gloves which boast over 1.7k ratings. As one reviewer put it: “They are great, and actually fit very well. Beautifully packaged. Could be a gift but I am keeping them!”

Women’s Duality Reversible Sherpa Jacket

Alo Yoga amazon.com

$179.89

Not only is Alo Yoga’s best-selling Duality jacket fun and practical in equal measure, it’s reversible and one side is sherpa. Five other colorways are available too.

Drinking Animals Coloring and Cocktail Recipe Book

Each page in this delightful coloring book opens up to a different animal and new cocktail recipe.

Tombow Dual Brush Pen Art Markers

Editor’s note: I’m a lifelong doodler and Tomboy’s dual tip brush pens are unrivaled when it comes to ease of use and vibrancy. Several color palettes are available in case you’re after something louder too. PS: A bunch are on sale right now, which is rare for the brand.

Apple AirPods with Wireless Charging Case

Few tech gadgets, if any, look as suave as AirPods. Of all the headphones carried on Amazon, these remain the #1 best-selling pair (no exaggeration), and for a limited time only, they’re currently on sale.

No Bounds Wireless Outdoor Speaker

House of Marley amazon.com

$58.78

These aux input speakers from House of Marley (which, fun fact, was founded by Bob Marley’s son, Rohan) boast an impressive ten hours of battery life. Even better? Because they’re dust-proof and waterproof, you and your partner will be able to enjoy these on outdoor adventures and road trips.

Retro Bluetooth Speaker

This ultra-compact speaker is sure to be a crowdpleaser. The indoor/outdoor speaker not only connects with bluetooth, but can be used as an FM radio with AUX connectivity as well, all while delivering impressive sound and 10 hours of battery life. A carrying strap and dust bag are also included, which makes for a sleek presentation.

Bose SoundLink Revolve Wireless Bluetooth Speaker

This sleek indoor/outdoor speaker delivers crystal clear sound quality and long battery life (16 hours!) certain to enhance any user’s listening experience. From true crime podcasts to Netflix to electronic music experiences, these will be a game-changer.

Boy Smells Beeswax & Coconut Wax Kush Candle

Boy Smells amazon.com

$36.00

This Boy Smells best seller doesn’t actually contain any psychoactive hemp-derived extracts, but it’s still lit. Paying homage to the cannabis flower, the scent is warm, fresh and floral.

EDITOR’S FAVORITE

Hand and Skincare Amenity Kit

Grown Alchemist amazon.com

$25.00

Editor’s note: I’m never more than a few feet away from my Grown Alchemist hand creams in the winter. Containing a vanilla and orange peel hand cream, vanilla and geranium day cream and watermelon lip balm, I’d argue this is the most affordable fancy-feeling beauty gift on Amazon. Fun fact, clean Gwyneth Paltrow is a huge fan of this lipgloss.

EltaMD Mineral-Based UV Clear Facial Sunscreen (1.7 oz)

Sunscreen as a gift? Only if it’s from EltaMD’s product line. If you or a loved one who spends a lot of time in the sun hasn’t tried this dermatologist-loved sunscreen line before, ELLE.com highly recommends. (Read Beauty Director Chloe Hall’s full review here.)

Sparkling Water Machine

sodastream amazon.com

$159.95

Kiss wasteful plastic bottles of seltzer from the grocery store goodbye. Set in a sleek monochromatic design, this SodaStream kit includes everything you need to make seltzer at home, including a carbonator.

14k Yellow Gold Hoop Earrings

Tilo Jewelry amazon.com

$69.99

Gold hoops go with everything and somehow always feel cool wearing. Here, a 14k gold pair made in the US that won’t slim down your holiday shopping budget.

Sherpa Trucker Jacket

Levi’s sherpa jackets have been worn by every fashion girl from Gigi Hadid to Zendaya. The denim staple is not only a godsend for complicated transitional temps, but a cozy piece to throw on at home.

Visual Feast: Contemporary Food Photography and Styling

Earning its moniker, Visual Feast is a coffee table fixture that explores food presentation in a myriad of Art forms. From witty jello dishes to painted lobsters, the foodie in your life will find the book’s photography drool-worthy.

Classic Greek Michelangelo David Bust Statue

Beonueni amazon.com

$29.00

Nothing subtly says ‘I’m an Intellectual’ louder than having a decorative bust of a Greek god on display in one’s home. Your loved one won’t see this gift coming, but they’ll love it all the same. (Editor’s note: This is the only item on our list where you have to pay for shipping, but it’s only $2.99.)

Women’s Natural Lace Trim Vest

Iris & Lilly amazon.com

$16.30

White tank tops have defined Tik Tok-era fashion more than any other article of clothing. Gift a set for the culture.

Mentone Half-Zip Sweater

Varley amazon.com

$148.00

This half zip from British athleisure brand Varley is practically dripping in cozy appeal.

Women’s Nori-K Coat

Mackage amazon.com

$790.00

Kindly sidestep the puddle of drool that formed while I gazed at this wool coat. That leather waist belt! The removable bib (!!!). The feminine silhouette that doesn’t sacrifice warmth! She’ll love this because how could anybody not?

Squeaky Parody Plush Dog Toy

Haute Diggity Dog amazon.com

$15.99

A fabulous squeaky toy for a fabulous pup. (Editor’s note: hi, Freddy!!)

Juicy Couture DIY Bracelet Making Kit

Make It Real amazon.com

$19.99

*Puts on Maneater by Nelly Furtado for a quick journey to 2006.* This kitschy DIY bracelet kit will pull at the heart strings of anyone who owned a velour tracksuit in the early oughts. Technically speaking, this set was probably intended for pre-teens, which makes it a good gift youngins who weren’t around for Juicy’s heyday all the same.

14k Gold Linked Diamond Stud Earring

Zoe Chicco amazon.com

$480.00

This 0.13ct diamond stud earring (yes, it’s sold individually and I’m sorry) will be her new favorite earring if she has more than one piercing.

Kitty Espresso Coffee Maker

Stainless steel espresso coffee makers don’t get any chicer than the Bialetti Kitty.

Walkie Talkies

These retro-looking walkie talkies are technically for kids aged 4 through 14; however, these will make a useful gift for any family quarantining together in the suburbs in lieu of a fancy intercom system. These boast a 3 mile range for outside, camping and hiking, as well as a backlit LCD flashlight.

Modern Glass Globe Table Desk Lamp

This sculptural table lamp injects instant modernity and warmth. It includes an LED bulb too, so the design lover you gift this too will be able to set it up and enjoy right away.

Clear Acrylic Bookends (Set of 4)

CY craft amazon.com

$16.97

If you’re after a gift for a book lover that isn’t books, this top-rated set of acrylic bookends works for any decor style.

Enameled Cast Iron Signature Dutch Oven

Le Creuset amazon.com

$349.95

Le Creuset is the gold standard of cookware and their dutch ovens are the lightest on the market. Here, the legendary brand’s signature enameled cast iron Dutch Oven in a gradient motif that brings to mind sunsets and Prada’s fall-winter 2018 collection.

BoostIQ RoboVac 15C MAX

eufy by Anker amazon.com

$279.99

$175.99 (37% off)

It’s hard to come by a list of best robot vacuums online (written by experts who actually tested hundreds of models) where eufy’s RoboVac 15C MAX isn’t included as a budget-friendly mention. The RoboVac 15C MAX has wifi and Alexa voice connectivity, which makes it easy breezy to set up and use. Reviewers love how it delivers an impressive clean with strong suction and self-charges after a clean.

Table Tiles

Areaware amazon.com

$20.98

There’s no such thing as too many coasters, though there is such thing as really tacky coasters. Trust me, I went through over 200 before finding this cool geometric set. These have a cork-lined base which further helps to protect furniture.

Sherpa and Fleece Throw Blanket

Green Orange amazon.com

$20.99

Sherpa on one side and plush on the other, this reviewer-loved throw blanket measures 50×60 inches, which means it’s large enough for two to comfortably snuggle during Netflix nights.

EDITOR’S FAVORITE

Men’s Sherpa-Lined Puffer Jacket

Amazon Essentials amazon.com

$50.10

Editor’s note: I got my dad this jacket for his birthday a few weeks ago because I figured it looked warm and practical. Turns out, this $42 coat is the softest-feeling men’s jacket anyone in my family has ever come across. Besides looking way more expensive than its price tag, this coat is warm and has a sherpa-lined hood which feels cloud-like. (Amazon, if you’re reading this, please make this coat in women’s.)

Men’s Figaro Chain Necklace

Miansai amazon.com

$125.00

In case you’re still thinking about how hot Connell’s chain was in Normal People. Same.

Men’s Memory Foam Slippers

These comfy slippers are machine washable, which means if he’s prone to having sweaty feet… you can gift these without any worry you might later regret it.

Polo Ralph Lauren Outdoor Bear Scarf

Polo Ralph Lauren amazon.com

For a guy in your life who’s a nightmare to shop for, look no further than this ribbed knit scarf featuring Ralph Lauren’s iconic, well-dressed bear.

Essential Crewneck Sweater

State Cashmere amazon.com

$140.00

Editor-loved brand State Cashmere makes 100% pure hypoallergenic cashmere for a fraction of what I see a lot of other brands charging. Here, a failsafe crewneck he’ll have for years to come.

Starter Shaving Kit for Men

Intro him to his new favorite grooming brand with a set that includes everything from a shave brush to priming oil to a safety razor and more. This shaving kit boasts over 400 reviews, with several mentioning how Bevel’s products help prevent razor bumps.

Hidden Comfort No-Show Socks

Runners swear by the support and durability of Balega socks. Take it from the 7k reviews this no-show unisex pair has, these will be a hit.

Grand Court Sneaker

If you’re shopping for a boyfriend who’s an amazing person but just not the best dresser, start with his shoes. Prince Harry has been photographed in a similar pair (Sdidas’s Gazelle trainer) in a similar grey, suede color on countless occasions. This color looks sharp with everything.

DiamondClean Classic Rechargeable Electric Toothbrush

Philips Sonicare amazon.com

$199.99

$166.95 (17% off)

Rumored users of the prestigious DiamondClean toothbrush include Beyoncé and Kim K. Per Philips, this luxe toothbrush removes up to 7x more plaque than a manual toothbrush, whitens teeth after 1 week of use, and improves gum health in only 2 weeks.

Pet Cardboard Turntable & DJ Mixer

Suck UK amazon.com

$35.00

For the cat person who loves a good RAC remix. To quote an epic review on Amazon: “By 9pm, DJ Kitty was in beast mode as the rave kicked off in the living room. As the sun came up, DJ Kitty refused to part with the deck… Yes, a bit expensive for [sic]carboard, but we are considering selling tickets to the next show to make up the difference.”

OPRAH’S FAVORITE THINGS 2020

Footnanny Hemp Extract Spa Treatment Set

Footnanny amazon.com

$69.99

Footnanny has been on Oprah’s Favorite Things list for seven years and counting, though the foot-care brand is loved by many, many more. Here, a trio that will help with exfoliating, soothing and relieving targeted areas of the body that often get neglected.

Foam Roller

Trigger Point Performance amazon.com

To give you a sense of how beloved TriggerPoint’s GRID foam roller is, it has 11.4k global ratings and an average score of 4.7 stars. It comes with free online videos so users can learn the best ways to utilize it for stretching and relieving tension.

Fully Adjustable Desk Folding Exercise Bike

Exerpeutic amazon.com

$299.99

$255.86 (15% off)

If they’re a fitness lover who’s working from home right now, this foldable stationary bike desk will make staying active during the day an easier pursuit. Reviewers agree it’s easy to assemble and sturdy, with one reviewer even saying this has changed their life.

Essential Oil and Aromatherapy Diffuser

Victsing amazon.com

$25.59

Shopping for a dedicated yogi or someone who could use a little serenity right now? Meet VicTsing’s popular essential oil diffuser that boasts 11.3k ratings and counting. The diffuser offers 2 modes, 4 different timers and 7 different color lights, which makes for a personalized zen experience.

Jenga

Jenga is fun whether you’re 6-years-old or 42.

Posh Peanut Pajamas Set (Newborn to Toddler Sizes)

Posh Peanut amazon.com

$30.00

Made from soft viscose bamboo, these pajamas will be super soft for any baby, toddler or eager young mind on your shopping list. A variety of prints are available in sizes spanning 0-3 months to 6 years.

Grippy Non-Slip Socks for Kids

Resilience Gives amazon.com

$10.00

The story behind this cheerful sock brand will move you (and the recipient). Resilience Gives was founded by Jake Teitebaum, a Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor who was frustrated with poorly-made socks during his stem cell transplant, and is co-owned by Andee Wallace, whose father survived non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. For each pair of socks purchased, the brand donates a pair to a child with cancer who’s undergoing treatment in a hospital. (Women’s and men’s sizes are also available in case you also want to get yourself a pair.)

Justine Carreon Justine Carreon is the market editor at ELLE.com covering fashion, Dutch ovens, and fashion again.

Jaimie Potters Commerce Content Manager Jaimie Potters is the Commerce Content Manager at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, where she covers fashion, beauty, tech and more.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

77 Valentine's Day Gifts You Can Get on Amazon Prime

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monleaanglaisespagnol · 4 years

Text

I Had An Affair With My Straight, Married Neighbor. Then His Wife Emailed Me.

The email came from out of the blue a few months ago. It was from the wife of a man I had been secretly involved with. “How long did your affair with my husband last?” she demanded to know. “I’d like the date range of the years, please.”

I always wondered what she knew, if anything. Why was she confronting me now? I hadn’t communicated with her husband — I’ll call him Mike — in more than five years. We live on separate coasts now.

“The least you can do is respond truthfully, given what you’ve done,” she wrote. Was she accusing me of turning her husband gay? Of breaking up their marriage?

That fiery email may have been written in haste. Still, it was years in the making. I now know that deception has a long life span and often returns to claim its guilt.

I never told anyone about my affair with her husband. Too much at stake. Not so much for me ― I was unattached, and my sexual orientation wasn’t a secret. Mike, on the other hand, was a devoted family man with two kids who I know loved his wife.

He was my next-door neighbor, and I did not seduce him, even though I was 20 years older than he was. I’m certain I was the first man he’d been intimate with, while I had, as they say, been around. Our affair wasn’t a sudden, passion-filled trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It was more like a long train ride. It started slowly and lasted some five years.

Mike wasn’t the only married man I’d been involved with. But the others were one-nighters or friends with benefits ― eager conspirators.

Mike was another story.

We were opposites in many ways: I was a magazine editor. He was a master carpenter. I liked the arts. He liked sports. I splurged on nice clothes and twice-monthly haircuts. He dressed in whatever was handy, usually cut-offs, T-shirts, Birkenstocks and a tool belt.

One night when his wife and kids were away, we went to see a movie about a giant meteor heading for Earth. He told me that he was 16 before he ever saw a movie. He had seen it on the sly because his parents were evangelicals and movies, TV, and pop music were all considered tools of the devil.

What we shared was a passion for the past. One night Mike took me to a fire station that was about to be demolished. We broke in. He wanted me to see what was going to disappear: a cast-iron farmer’s sink, a pulley for hauling ice to the second-floor window. He explained to me the building’s ingenious post and beam construction.

I once showed him a wood inlaid jewelry box that depicted a family playing cards around a kitchen table. My great-grandmother brought it from Germany. “It’s beautiful,” he told me, gently running his fingers over the different woods. “Don’t ever give it away.”

My Victorian flat always needed repair. I had no idea how to install ceiling fans or fix doorbells. Mike did. He once spent a week patiently refinishing the beadboard in my kitchen. He made the century-old wood glisten like new using only sandpaper and baby oil.

We were friends for several years before becoming lovers.

With his wavy black hair, cobalt eyes and droopy eyelashes, Mike had no idea how sexy he was, or could be. Yet his lack of vanity only enhanced his allure. I once stuffed him into my tuxedo when his wife insisted he accompany her to her workplace’s black-tie event. Put a martini in his hand and he could have been James Bond.

Mike would drop by my place after his wife and kids were in bed. We would watch baseball games, make popcorn. Sometimes we’d share a joint, which deepened our enjoyment of “Antiques Roadshow.”

I agreed to let Mike set up his saws and tools in my attic after he told me he couldn’t afford to rent a workshop. That meant seeing him at all hours.

There were signs, some blatant, that he was struggling with his sexuality. Like the time he told me he had gone on a porn site to see how gay men “do it.” He confided to me that when he was in college, he had been attracted to another male student but didn’t act on it.

It usually took a few beers for him to start opening up.

A mutual hug in my attic one afternoon changed everything.

Even after our relationship became physical, it took months for Mike to feel comfortable kissing. I’ve known couples, gay and straight, who were in open relationships. Many made a pact that they could mess around with others as long as they didn’t kiss. Sex can be a purely tactile, pleasurable experience. But kissing is up close and personal.

My nights were as free as his. I was in my 50s and I had outgrown discos and late-night bars. There was no Grindr back then. Craigslist was in its infancy. I could no longer bear meeting faceless strangers from newspaper ads.

I didn’t know Mike’s wife well, despite our being neighbors. She wasn’t the social type. Books, cats and gardening were her pleasures.

“What if she finds out about us?” I asked Mike.

I’ve been cheated on in several relationships, so I know how it feels.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. She’s not a confrontational person,” he said. “The other night, she told me she was tired and suggested I go hang out with my butt buddy.”

“What did she mean by that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he replied.

I was, or so I thought. I figured that on some level, she was OK with this good-neighbor policy. That helped ease my conscience.

Besides, I wasn’t out to steal her husband, even though same-sex marriage did become legal in our state in 2004.

I wasn’t being completely honest when I said I never told anyone about Mike and me. My downstairs neighbor, who I had become close friends with over the years, figured it out. She could hear Mike’s footsteps coming and going on the stairwell, the squeak of bedsprings. “Mike’s a good person,” she told me. “You’re helping him become his true self. You should feel no guilt.”

I’ve never had children or wanted them. Mike’s, however, were a joy to be with. I worked from home, so it was easy for me to babysit them on school breaks and summer vacations. I’d take them to their swim lessons. We’d go bowling, miniature golfing. They introduced me to “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

Mike was always struggling to make ends meet. Yet not having money didn’t matter when it came to his boys. He gave them something dollars can’t buy: his time and attention. He once spent a day with them riding the subway lines. He got them memberships to a science museum. He taught them to Rollerblade and play hockey. I would go with them on weekend hikes. I would bring my dog and lunch. His wife never wanted to go along.

I lent Mike and his wife a down payment to buy a house. It felt good to do something positive for his family. His wife worked out a payment plan, which she stuck to. Mike converted the basement of his new digs to a workshop. Despite living in a different neighborhood, he still came by.

I can’t give a precise date when it all came crashing down. All I know is there were no more late-night visits, trips to Home Depot or those delicious foot rubs that he voluntarily gave. Mike simply disappeared without a goodbye. My phone calls went unanswered. He blocked me on Facebook. We never argued, so it wasn’t as if he stormed off in a huff.

Desperate for an answer, I bravely — and foolishly — called his wife. “What’s going on with Mike?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said. “He never mentions you.”

Our train ride had come to its final station.

I had to take an honest look at myself. What I needed was a real boyfriend, one who I could go to the theater with. Or to restaurants. One who wouldn’t leave me waiting for him to come by on a Saturday night, only not to show up. One who I could tell my friends and co-workers about.

One who was available.

Then one afternoon, four years later, I saw Mike. I was taking my dog for a walk, cutting through a baseball field that abuts a wooded area. He was lobbing softballs over home plate to his boys. Seeing me, he trotted over to where I was. He took off his Red Sox cap. “I’m getting a little gray,” he said. I said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking my hand. “Really sorry.”

“C’mon, dad,” his boys yelled, and with that, Mike jogged back to the pitcher’s mound.

I finally had my explanation. His boys were becoming young men, old enough to ask questions and figure things out.

I should have foreseen this scenario. During the 1990s I lived in the Deep South. The steam room and sauna at my local Y served as a kind of after-work social club for men who were gay ― and for those who had wives and kids.

I would sometimes ask these men why they got married. “I wanted a family. I wanted children” was the usual reply. I asked one devoted father why he stayed in the South when he could have moved to a blue state. “I couldn’t live more than a few miles from my mama and daddy,” he said.

I knew a gay impresario when I lived in San Francisco in the 1980s. One night he threw a dinner party for his gay circle of friends at Trader Vic’s. Over tropical cocktails, he announced that he had just gotten engaged to a divorcée with two girls. “I’m going to have a family now, “ he told the table. “I can no longer see any of you again.”

I didn’t respond to Mike’s wife’s angry email. I figured that was Mike’s job, since he’s the one who came out to her and told her about us. He knew the dates of our affair as well as I did.

But I did need to know what was up. So I nervously texted him. We hadn’t communicated since that day on the baseball field.

“We’re going through a nasty divorce,” Mike texted back. “I decided to finally be honest with myself. I needed to be who I am. I told her about us. She blames you for everything. She wanted to know how many men I’d been with. I said there was only you, and that’s the truth.”

“Every time I pass by your place, I think of you,” he wrote. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” I replied.

“Do your boys know?” I asked. They would be young men now.

“I told them. They were fine with it.”

“You were a great father to them,” I told him.

“Now you’ve got me all teared up,” he replied.

Mike volunteered that he was in therapy. He said he had joined a bisexual men’s support group. He met a man there, he said, whom he found attractive and who had asked him out.

I felt a twinge of sadness. I didn’t tell Mike that. Instead, I wished him all the best in his new life, and I meant it.

I had a new life too. I had sold my place and moved to the California desert, where I knew no one. A few weeks after buying a small condo, I went to a paint store to check out color samples. A younger salesman waited on me. He looked to be in his early 40s.

I could see there was a gold band on his ring finger.

He intercepted me in the parking lot as I was heading toward my car. He handed me a piece of yellow paper that he had hastily scribbled his cellphone number on. “If you ever need anything, just call,” he said. “And I mean anything.”

“You’re married,” I said. He shrugged his shoulders.

Nights can be lonely. His invitation was tempting.

I took the piece of paper out of my pocket, wadded it up and deposited it in the nearest trash bin.

John Stark is a veteran journalist and editor who has had staff positions on the San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle, People magazine, Cooking Light magazine, Martha Stewart’s Body + Soul, Cooks Illustrated and Walking magazine. His freelance stories have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Newsday, AARP magazine and The Boston Globe. He was a founding editor of PBS’ “Next Avenue” website for boomers, where for three years he wrote weekly blogs and features, and continues to write for the site. He holds a master’s in journalism from Boston University and is a licensed Realtor. He currently lives in Palm Springs, California, where he is retired but writes freelance stories. For more info, visit JohnRStark.net.

Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch!

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dailynewswebsite · 4 years

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COVID-19 reveals how obesity harms the body in real time, not just over a lifetime

A COVID-19 affected person is related to life-sustaining units at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital in Oceanside, New York on April 14, 2020. Jeffrey Basinger/Newsday through Getty Pictures

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust the weight problems epidemic as soon as once more into the highlight, revealing that weight problems is not a illness that harms simply in the long term however one that may have acutely devastating results. New research and knowledge affirm medical doctors’ suspicion that this virus takes benefit of a illness that our present U.S. well being care system is unable to get beneath management.

In most up-to-date information, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention experiences that 73% of nurses who’ve been hospitalized from COVID-19 had weight problems. As well as, a current examine discovered that weight problems may intrude with the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine.

I’m an weight problems specialist and medical doctor engaged on the entrance strains of weight problems in main care on the College of Virginia Well being System. Prior to now, I typically discovered myself warning my sufferers that weight problems may take years off their life. Now, greater than ever, this warning has turn out to be verifiable.

Extra injury than believed

Initially physicians believed that having weight problems elevated solely your danger of getting sicker from COVID-19, not your likelihood of being contaminated within the first place. Now, newer evaluation exhibits that not solely does weight problems improve your danger of being sicker and dying from COVID-19; weight problems will increase your danger of getting contaminated within the first place.

In March 2020, observational research famous hypertension, diabetes and coronary artery illness as the most typical different situations – or co-morbidities – in sufferers with extra extreme COVID-19 illness. Nevertheless it was the editors of Weight problems journal who first raised the alarm on April 1, 2020 that weight problems would doubtless show to be an impartial danger issue for extra extreme results of COVID-19 an infection.

Moreover, two research together with practically 10,000 sufferers have proven that sufferers who’ve each COVID-19 and weight problems have the next danger of demise at days 21 and 45 in comparison with sufferers with a standard physique mass index, or BMI.

And a examine revealed in September, 2020 reported increased charges of weight problems in COVID-19 sufferers who’re critically sick and require intubation.

It’s turning into overwhelmingly evident from these research and others that these with weight problems are dealing with a transparent and current hazard.

Stigma and lack of awareness

Weight problems is an fascinating illness. It’s one which many physicians discuss, typically in frustration that their sufferers can not stop or reverse it with the oversimplified therapy plan that now we have been taught in our preliminary coaching; “Eat much less and train extra.”

It is usually a illness that causes issues bodily, corresponding to sleep apnea and joint ache. It additionally impacts one’s thoughts and spirit as a result of societal and medical professionals’ bias towards these with weight problems. It will possibly even adversely have an effect on the dimensions of your paycheck. Are you able to think about the outcry if the headline learn “Sufferers with hypertension earn much less”?

We medical doctors and researchers have understood for fairly a while the long-term penalties of extra weight and weight problems. We at present acknowledge that weight problems is related to at the very least 236 medical diagnoses, together with 13 sorts of most cancers. Weight problems can lower one’s lifespan by as much as eight years.

Regardless of understanding this, U.S. physicians aren’t ready to stop and reverse weight problems. In a lately revealed survey, solely 10% of medical faculty deans and curriculum specialists really feel that their college students have been “very ready” with regard to weight problems administration. Half of the medical colleges responded that increasing weight problems schooling was a low precedence or not a precedence. A mean of 10 hours whole was reported as devoted to weight problems schooling throughout their total coaching in medical faculty.

And medical doctors generally don’t understand how or when to prescribe drugs for sufferers with weight problems. For instance, eight FDA-approved weight reduction drugs are in the marketplace, however solely 2% of eligible sufferers obtain prescriptions for them from their physicians.

A girl measures her blood sugar degree throughout lockdown in Paris in March 2020. Photograph by Franck Fife/AFP through Getty Pictures

What goes on within the physique

So, right here we’re, with a collision of the weight problems epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. And a query I discover sufferers asking me an increasing number of: How does weight problems create extra extreme illness and complication from COVID-19 an infection?

There are various solutions; lets begin with construction.

Extra adipose tissue, which shops fats, creates a mechanical compression in sufferers with weight problems. This limits their capacity to soak up and utterly launch a full breath of air.

Respiration takes extra work in a affected person with weight problems. It creates restrictive lung illness, and within the extra severe circumstances, result in hypoventilation syndrome, which might trigger an individual to have too little oxygen of their blood.

After which there’s perform. Weight problems ends in an extra of adipose tissue, or what we colloquially name “fats.” Over time, scientists have discovered that adipose tissue is dangerous in and of itself. One could say that adipose tissue acts as an endocrine organ all its personal. It releases a number of hormones and molecules that result in a continual state of irritation in sufferers with weight problems.

When the physique is in a relentless state of low-grade irritation, it releases cytokines, proteins that combat irritation. They maintain the physique on guard, simmering and able to combat illness. That’s all effectively and good when they’re saved in examine by different programs and cells. When they’re chronically launched, nevertheless, an imbalance can happen that causes harm to the physique. Consider it like a small however contained wildfire. It’s harmful, but it surely’s not burning all the forest.

COVID-19 causes the physique to create one other cytokine wildfire. When an individual who’s overweight has COVID-19, two small cytokine wildfires come collectively, resulting in the raging fireplace of irritation that damages the lungs much more so than sufferers with regular BMI.

Moreover, this continual state of irritation can result in one thing referred to as endothelial dysfunction. On this situation, as an alternative of opening up, blood vessels shut down and constrict, additional lowering oxygen to the tissues.

As well as, elevated adipose tissue could have extra ACE-2, the enzyme that permits the coronavirus to invade cells and start to wreck them. A current examine has proven an affiliation of elevated ACE-2 in adipose tissue reasonably than lung tissue. This discovering additional strengthens the speculation that weight problems performs a serious function in additional severe COVID-19 infections. So in principle, in case you have extra adipose tissue, the virus can bind to and invade extra cells, inflicting increased viral masses that keep round longer, which might make the an infection extra extreme and extend restoration.

ACE-2 may be useful in counteracting irritation, but when it in any other case sure to COVID-19, it can not help with this.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

The novel SARS COVID-19 virus has pressured the medical career to face the truth that many U.S. physicians inherently know. Relating to prevention of continual illnesses corresponding to weight problems, the U.S. well being care system is just not performing effectively. Many insurers reward physicians by assembly metrics of treating the consequences of weight problems reasonably than stopping it or treating the illness itself. Physicians are reimbursed, for instance, for serving to sufferers with Sort 2 diabetes to achieve a sure A1C degree, or a set blood strain purpose.

I imagine is time to teach physicians and supply them with sources to fight weight problems. Physicians can not deny that weight problems, one of many strongest predictors for COVID-19 and at the very least 236 different medical situations, should turn out to be public enemy primary.

Cate Varney doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/covid-19-reveals-how-obesity-harms-the-body-in-real-time-not-just-over-a-lifetime/ via https://growthnews.in

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suzanneshannon · 4 years

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How to Think Like a Front-End Developer

This is an extended version of my essay “When front-end means full-stack” which was published in the wonderful Increment magazine put out by Stripe. It’s also something of an evolution of a couple other of my essays, “The Great Divide” and “Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.”

The moment I fell in love with front-end development was when I discovered the style.css file in WordPress themes. That’s where all the magic was (is!) to me. I could (can!) change a handful of lines in there and totally change the look and feel of a website. It’s an incredible game to play.

Back when I was cowboy-coding over FTP. Although I definitely wasn’t using CSS grid!

By fiddling with HTML and CSS, I can change the way you feel about a bit of writing. I can make you feel more comfortable about buying tickets to an event. I can increase the chances you share something with your friends.

That was well before anybody paid me money to be a front-end developer, but even then I felt the intoxicating mix of stimuli that the job offers. Front-end development is this expressive art form, but often constrained by things like the need to directly communicate messaging and accomplish business goals.

Front-end development is at the intersection of art and logic. A cross of business and expression. Both left and right brain. A cocktail of design and nerdery.

I love it.

Looking back at the courses I chose from middle school through college, I bounced back and forth between computer-focused classes and art-focused classes, so I suppose it’s no surprise I found a way to do both as a career.

The term “Front-End Developer” is fairly well-defined and understood. For one, it’s a job title. I’ll bet some of you literally have business cards that say it on there, or some variation like: “Front-End Designer,” “UX Developer,” or “UI Engineer.” The debate around what those mean isn’t particularly interesting to me. I find that the roles are so varied from job-to-job and company-to-company that job titles will never be enough to describe things. Getting this job is more about demonstrating you know what you’re doing more than anything else¹.

Chris Coyier Front-End Developer

The title variations are just nuance. The bigger picture is that as long as the job is building websites, front-enders are focused on the browser. Quite literally:

front-end = browsers

back-end = servers

Even as the job has changed over the decades, that distinction still largely holds.

As “browser people,” there are certain truths that come along for the ride. One is that there is a whole landscape of different browsers and, despite the best efforts of standards bodies, they still behave somewhat differently. Just today, as I write, I dealt with a bug where a date string I had from an API was in a format such that Firefox threw an error when I tried to use the .toISOString() JavaScript API on it, but was fine in Chrome. That’s just life as a front-end developer. That’s the job.

Even across that landscape of browsers, just on desktop computers, there is variance in how users use that browser. How big do they have the window open? Do they have dark mode activated on their operating system? How’s the color gamut on that monitor? What is the pixel density? How’s the bandwidth situation? Do they use a keyboard and mouse? One or the other? Neither? All those same questions apply to mobile devices too, where there is an equally if not more complicated browser landscape. And just wait until you take a hard look at HTML emails.

That’s a lot of unknowns, and the answers to developing for that unknown landscape is firmly in the hands of front-end developers.

Into the unknoooooowwwn. – Elsa

The most important aspect of the job? The people that use these browsers. That’s why we’re building things at all. These are the people I’m trying to impress with my mad CSS skills. These are the people I’m trying to get to buy my widget. Who all my business charts hinge upon. Who’s reaction can sway my emotions like yarn in the breeze. These users, who we put on a pedestal for good reason, have a much wider landscape than the browsers do. They speak different languages. They want different things. They are trying to solve different problems. They have different physical abilities. They have different levels of urgency. Again, helping them is firmly in the hands of front-end developers. There is very little in between the characters we type into our text editors and the users for whom we wish to serve.

Being a front-end developer puts us on the front lines between the thing we’re building and the people we’re building it for, and that’s a place some of us really enjoy being.

That’s some weighty stuff, isn’t it? I haven’t even mentioned React yet.

The “we care about the users” thing might feel a little precious. I’d think in a high functioning company, everyone would care about the users, from the CEO on down. It’s different, though. When we code a <button>, we’re quite literally putting a button into a browser window that users directly interact with. When we adjust a color, we’re adjusting exactly what our sighted users see when they see our work.

That’s not far off from a ceramic artist pulling a handle out of clay for a coffee cup. It’s applying craftsmanship to a digital experience. While a back-end developer might care deeply about the users of a site, they are, as Monica Dinculescu once told me in a conversation about this, “outsourcing that responsibility.”

We established that front-end developers are browser people. The job is making things work well in browsers. So we need to understand the languages browsers speak, namely: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript². And that’s not just me being some old school fundamentalist; it’s through a few decades of everyday front-end development work that knowing those base languages is vital to us doing a good job. Even when we don’t work directly with them (HTML might come from a template in another language, CSS might be produced from a preprocessor, JavaScript might be mostly written in the parlance of a framework), what goes the browser is ultimately HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so that’s where debugging largely takes place and the ability of the browser is put to work.

CSS will always be my favorite and HTML feels like it needs the most love — but JavaScript is the one we really need to examine The last decade has seen JavaScript blossom from a language used for a handful of interactive effects to the predominant language used across the entire stack of web design and development. It’s possible to work on websites and writing nothing but JavaScript. A real sea change.

JavaScript is all-powerful in the browser. In a sense, it supersedes HTML and CSS, as there is nothing either of those languages can do that JavaScript cannot. HTML is parsed by the browser and turned into the DOM, which JavaScript can also entirely create and manipulate. CSS has its own model, the CSSOM, that applies styles to elements in the DOM, which JavaScript can also create and manipulate.

This isn’t quite fair though. HTML is the very first file that browsers parse before they do the rest of the work needed to build the site. That firstness is unique to HTML and a vital part of making websites fast.

In fact, if the HTML was the only file to come across the network, that should be enough to deliver the basic information and functionality of a site.

That philosophy is called Progressive Enhancement. I’m a fan, myself, but I don’t always adhere to it perfectly. For example, a <form> can be entirely functional in HTML, when it’s action attribute points to a URL where the form can be processed. Progressive Enhancement would have us build it that way. Then, when JavaScript executes, it takes over the submission and has the form submit via Ajax instead, which might be a nicer experience as the page won’t have to refresh. I like that. Taken further, any <button> outside a form is entirely useless without JavaScript, so in the spirit of Progressive Enhancement, I should wait until JavaScript executes to even put that button on the page at all (or at least reveal it). That’s the kind of thing where even those of us with the best intentions might not always toe the line perfectly. Just put the button in, Sam. Nobody is gonna die.

JavaScript’s all-powerfulness makes it an appealing target for those of us doing work on the web — particularly as JavaScript as a language has evolved to become even more powerful and ergonomic, and the frameworks that are built in JavaScript become even more-so. Back in 2015, it was already so clear that JavaScript was experiencing incredible growth in usage, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, gave the developer world homework: “Learn JavaScript Deeply”³. He couldn’t have been more right. Half a decade later, JavaScript has done a good job of taking over front-end development. Particularly if you look at front-end development jobs.

While the web almanac might show us that only 5% of the top-zillion sites use React compared to 85% including jQuery, those numbers are nearly flipped when looking around at front-end development job requirements.

I’m sure there are fancy economic reasons for all that, but jobs are as important and personal as it gets for people, so it very much matters.

So we’re browser people in a sea of JavaScript building things for people. If we take a look at the job at a practical day-to-day tasks level, it’s a bit like this:

Translate designs into code

Think in terms of responsive design, allowing us to design and build across the landscape of devices

Build systemically. Construct components and patterns, not one-offs.

Apply semantics to content

Consider accessibility

Worry about the performance of the site. Optimize everything. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Just that first bullet point feels like a college degree to me. Taken together, all of those points certainly do.

This whole list is a bit abstract though, so let’s apply it to something we can look at. What if this website was our current project?

Our brains and fingers go wild!

Let’s build the layout with CSS grid.

What fonts are those? Do we need to load them in their entirety or can we subset them? What happens as they load in? This layout feels like it will really suffer from font-shifting jank.

There are some repeated patterns here. We should probably make a card design pattern. Every website needs a good card pattern.

That’s a gorgeous color scheme. Are the colors mathematically related? Should we make variables to represent them individually or can we just alter a single hue as needed? Are we going to use custom properties in our CSS? Colors are just colors though, we might not need the cascading power of them just for this. Should we just use Sass variables? Are we going to use a CSS preprocessor at all?

The source order is tricky here. We need to order things so that they make sense for a screen reader user. We should have a meeting about what the expected order of content should be, even if we’re visually moving things around a bit with CSS grid.

The photographs here are beautifully shot. But some of them match the background color of the site… can we get away with alpha-transparent PNGs here? Those are always so big. Can any next-gen formats help us? Or should we try to match the background of a JPG with the background of the site seamlessly. Who’s writing the alt text for these?

There are some icons in use here. Inline SVG, right? Certainly SVG of some kind, not icon fonts, right? Should we build a whole icon system? I guess it depends on how we’re gonna be building this thing more broadly. Do we have a build system at all?

What’s the whole front-end plan here? Can I code this thing in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? Well, I know I can, but what are the team expectations? Client expectations? Does it need to be a React thing because it’s part of some ecosystem of stuff that is already React? Or Vue or Svelte or whatever? Is there a CMS involved?

I’m glad the designer thought of not just the “desktop” and “mobile” sizes but also tackled an in-between size. Those are always awkward. There is no interactivity information here though. What should we do when that search field is focused? What gets revealed when that hamburger is tapped? Are we doing page-level transitions here?

I could go on and on. That’s how front-end developers think, at least in my experience and in talking with my peers.

A lot of those things have been our jobs forever though. We’ve been asking and answering these questions on every website we’ve built for as long as we’ve been doing it. There are different challenges on each site, which is great and keeps this job fun, but there is a lot of repetition too.

Allow me to get around to the title of this article.

While we’ve been doing a lot of this stuff for ages, there is a whole pile of new stuff we’re starting to be expected to do, particularly if we’re talking about building the site with a modern JavaScript framework. All the modern frameworks, as much as they like to disagree about things, agree about one big thing: everything is a component. You nest and piece together components as needed. Even native JavaScript moves toward its own model of Web Components.

I like it, this idea of components. It allows you and your team to build the abstractions that make the most sense to you and what you are building.

Your Card component does all the stuff your card needs to do. Your Form component does forms how your website needs to do forms. But it’s a new concept to old developers like me. Components in JavaScript have taken hold in a way that components on the server-side never did. I’ve worked on many a WordPress website where the best I did was break templates into somewhat arbitrary include() statements. I’ve worked on Ruby on Rails sites with partials that take a handful of local variables. Those are useful for building re-usable parts, but they are a far cry from the robust component models that JavaScript frameworks offer us today.

All this custom component creation makes me a site-level architect in a way that I didn’t use to be. Here’s an example. Of course I have a Button component. Of course I have an Icon component. I’ll use them in my Card component. My Card component lives in a Grid component that lays them out and paginates them. The whole page is actually built from components. The Header component has a SearchBar component and a UserMenu component. The Sidebar component has a Navigation component and an Ad component. The whole page is just a special combination of components, which is probably based on the URL, assuming I’m all-in on building our front-end with JavaScript. So now I’m dealing with URLs myself, and I’m essentially the architect of the entire site. [Sweats profusely]

Like I told ya, a whole pile of new responsibility.

Components that are in charge of displaying content are almost certainly not hard-coded with data in them. They are built to be templates. They are built to accept data and construct themselves based on that data. In the olden days, when we were doing this kind of templating, the data has probably already arrived on the page we’re working on. In a JavaScript-powered app, it’s more likely that that data is fetched by JavaScript. Perhaps I’ll fetch it when the component renders. In a stack I’m working with right now, the front end is in React, the API is in GraphQL and we use Apollo Client to work with data. We use a special “hook” in the React components to run the queries to fetch the data we need, and another special hook when we need to change that data. Guess who does that work? Is it some other kind of developer that specializes in this data layer work? No, it’s become the domain of the front-end developer.

Speaking of data, there is all this other data that a website often has to deal with that doesn’t come from a database or API. It’s data that is really only relevant to the website at this moment in time.

Which tab is active right now?

Is this modal dialog open or closed?

Which bar of this accordion is expanded?

Is this message bar in an error state or warning state?

How many pages are you paginated in?

How far is the user scrolled down the page?

Front-end developers have been dealing with that kind of state for a long time, but it’s exactly this kind of state that has gotten us into trouble before. A modal dialog can be open with a simple modifier class like <div class="modal is-open"> and toggling that class is easy enough with .classList.toggle(".is-open"); But that’s a purely visual treatment. How does anything else on the page know if that modal is open or not? Does it ask the DOM? In a lot of jQuery-style apps of yore, yes, it would. In a sense, the DOM became the “source of truth” for our websites. There were all sorts of problems that stemmed from this architecture, ranging from a simple naming change destroying functionality in weirdly insidious ways, to hard-to-reason-about application logic making bug fixing a difficult proposition.

Front-end developers collectively thought: what if we dealt with state in a more considered way? State management, as a concept, became a thing. JavaScript frameworks themselves built the concept right in, and third-party libraries have paved and continue to pave the way. This is another example of expanding responsibility. Who architects state management? Who enforces it and implements it? It’s not some other role, it’s front-end developers.

There is expanding responsibility in the checklist of things to do, but there is also work to be done in piecing it all together. How much of this state can be handled at the individual component level and how much needs to be higher level? How much of this data can be gotten at the individual component level and how much should be percolated from above? Design itself comes into play. How much of the styling of this component should be scoped to itself, and how much should come from more global styles?

It’s no wonder that design systems have taken off in recent years. We’re building components anyway, so thinking of them systemically is a natural fit.

Let’s look at our design again:

A bunch of new thoughts can begin!

Assuming we’re using a JavaScript framework, which one? Why?

Can we statically render this site, even if we’re building with a JavaScript framework? Or server-side render it?

Where are those recipes coming from? Can we get a GraphQL API going so we can ask for whatever we need, whenever we need it?

Maybe we should pick a CMS that has an API that will facilitate the kind of front-end building we want to do. Perhaps a headless CMS?

What are we doing for routing? Is the framework we chose opinionated or unopinionated about stuff like this?

What are the components we need? A Card, Icon, SearchForm, SiteMenu, Img… can we scaffold these out? Should we start with some kind of design framework on top of the base framework?

What’s the client state we might need? Current search term, current tab, hamburger open or not, at least.

Is there a login system for this site or not? Are logged in users shown anything different?

Is there are third-party componentry we can leverage here?

Maybe we can find one of those fancy image components that does blur-up loading and lazy loading and all that.

Those are all things that are in the domain of front-end developers these days, on top of everything that we already need to do. Executing the design, semantics, accessibility, performance… that’s all still there. You still need to be proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and how the browser works. Being a front-end developer requires a haystack of skills that grows and grows. It’s the natural outcome of the web getting bigger. More people use the web and internet access grows. The economy around the web grows. The capability of browsers grows. The expectations of what is possible on the web grows. There isn’t a lot shrinking going on around here.

We’ve already reached the point where most front-end developers don’t know the whole haystack of responsibilities. There are lots of developers still doing well for themselves being rather design-focused and excelling at creative and well-implemented HTML and CSS, even as job posts looking for that dwindle.

There are systems-focused developers and even entire agencies that specialize in helping other companies build and implement design systems. There are data-focused developers that feel most at home making the data flow throughout a website and getting hot and heavy with business logic. While all of those people might have “front-end developer” on their business card, their responsibilities and even expectations of their work might be quite different. It’s all good, we’ll find ways to talk about all this in time.

In fact, how we talk about building websites has changed a lot in the last decade. Some of my early introduction to web development was through WordPress. WordPress needs a web server to run, is written in PHP, and stores it’s data in a MySQL database. As much as WordPress has evolved, all that is still exactly the same. We talk about that “stack” with an acronym: LAMP, or Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Note that literally everything in the entire stack consists of back-end technologies. As a front-end developer, nothing about LAMP is relevant to me.

But other stacks have come along since then. A popular stack was MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular and Node). Notice how we’re starting to inch our way toward more front-end technologies? Angular is a JavaScript framework, so as this stack gained popularity, so too did talking about the front-end as an important part of the stack. Node and Express are both JavaScript as well, albeit the server-side variant.

The existence of Node is a huge part of this story. Node isn’t JavaScript-like, it’s quite literally JavaScript. It makes a front-end developer already skilled in JavaScript able to do server-side work without too much of a stretch.

“Serverless” is a much more modern tech buzzword, and what it’s largely talking about is running small bits of code on cloud servers. Most often, those small bits of code are in Node, and written by JavaScript developers. These days, a JavaScript-focused front-end developer might be writing their own serverless functions and essentially being their own back-end developer. They’ll think of themselves as full-stack developers, and they’ll be right.

Shawn Wang coined a term for a new stack this year: STAR or Design System, TypeScript, Apollo, and React. This is incredible to me, not just because I kind of like that stack, but because it’s a way of talking about the stack powering a website that is entirely front-end technologies. Quite a shift.

I apologize if I’ve made you feel a little anxious reading this. If you feel like you’re behind in understanding all this stuff, you aren’t alone.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to a single developer who told me they felt entirely comfortable with the entire world of building websites. Everybody has weak spots or entire areas where they just don’t know the first dang thing. You not only can specialize, but specializing is a pretty good idea, and I think you will end up specializing to some degree whether you plan to or not. If you have the good fortune to plan, pick things that you like. You’ll do just fine.

The only constant in life is change.

– Heraclitus – Motivational Poster – Chris Coyier

¹ I’m a white dude, so that helps a bunch, too. ↩️ ² Browsers speak a bunch more languages. HTTP, SVG, PNG… The more you know the more you can put to work! ↩️ ³ It’s an interesting bit of irony that WordPress websites generally aren’t built with client-side JavaScript components. ↩️

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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On the Day We Reopened Our Restaurant, We Had to Close It Again

A booth at Guerrilla Tacos | Colin Wolf

We spent a month preparing to safely reopen our restaurant. Five hours after opening our doors, the state made us close again.

This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark. If you want to write an Eater Voices essay, please send us a couple paragraphs explaining what you want to write about and why you are the person to write it to [email protected].

It is July 1, 2020, a little after 8:30 a.m. In just a few hours, we are finally going to reopen our dining room for the first time since lockdown orders went into effect in Los Angeles on March 16. Since Day One of the lockdown, we have innovated and adapted to keep the lights on in our taco restaurant, with a small takeout and delivery operation that employed 10 percent of our original staff. Now, I’m excited and nervous; these are uncertain times and we never know what’s coming next.

At 8:36 a.m., I receive an email from the Independent Hospitality Coalition, a group of California hospitality industry workers that I belong to. “Hearing from our people that the governor is going to announce that restaurants in some counties (including LA) will be closing indoor dining rooms at his noon press conference today,” it says.

I immediately grab my chefs and managers and tell them the news. There is silence for a while, during which I think about everything we did to get to this day to reopen. My stomach drops and I begin to rant. They never should have let us open, I say. We all knew this was going to happen.

I text my good friend and mentor, Melissa, the director of operations at République. She tells me that she is hearing the same thing. République opened not long after restaurants were first told they could reopen on May 29, and even as one of the best-run restaurant operations in LA, it has been hard for them. People are not ready to eat out, and too many of those who are are not taking the masks and social distancing seriously.

So I ask myself: Now what do we do?

In the two weeks leading up to this morning, we did 32 full hours of training on new COVID-19 protocols and safety measures and the importance of taking the pandemic seriously. We updated our menu, purchased the PPE required for reopening safely, invested in training, redesigned the restaurant’s layout, and did construction to create more space and incorporate plexiglass dividers. I could see, even through their masks and face shields, that my staff was excited and comfortable about reopening, and to have jobs again. We were doing everything by the book and taking the time needed to do it right. We had hope!

And now, this morning, we still have a restaurant to open. But all I can do is wait for the governor’s press conference, which is still 90 minutes away.

At 10:45 a.m., our GM, Gretel, does the line-up as if nothing is wrong. Spirits are so high among our staff, and we don’t want to bring them down. But I can’t stop thinking about what’s going to come next.

At 11 a.m., I go hide in my office. My partner, Dan, arrives at the restaurant to console me. The staff was so excited, and now I’m going to have to furlough them all again. I can’t take it, and I start crying. For the last four months, I’ve been on the verge of a mental breakdown, and now I think Dan is concerned that this will push me over the edge.

When LA County told us that restaurants could reopen on May 29, I also heard the news from my friends in the Independent Hospitality Coalition. I didn’t believe them: There was no way we could reopen without any warning. Well, I was dead wrong — we were given the green light to reopen on the “honor system,” meaning that if we followed all of the county’s guidelines and safety rules, we could open that same night.

Less than an hour after the announcement, I got a message from my landlord’s broker. “Congratulations on being able to reopen,” he said. My heart sank as my mind translated his message into: “Send the check when you can!”

Shortly after, I was on a call with the Independent Hospitality Coalition. No one I spoke with was feeling ready to reopen. Our dining rooms had turned into dry storage, our staff was furloughed. But our members were already driving past restaurants that had reopened, hastily “complying” with the guidelines. How could anyone have done it safely in 24 hours? We knew this was a problem: With no lead-in time to prepare, restaurant operators were being rewarded for rushing to open, and their prize was making as much money as quickly as possible.

I wanted to stay closed. However, as other restaurants began to open their dining rooms and people grew more eager to leave the house, our takeout business started to fall steeply. With our PPP funds drying up, I had to make the call to reopen as safely as humanly possible. As we began preparing, the team spent so much time thinking about our customers and our staff: How do we keep them safe? How do we behave as responsible members of our community?

With no lead-in time to prepare, restaurant operators were being rewarded for rushing to open, and their prize was making as much money as quickly as possible.

But even as we were holding ourselves to this standard, we had empathy for the operators who had just rolled the dice and said “fuck it” and decided to open. It is desperate times for restaurants, and many of us feel as though we have no choice: As operators, we work 12- to 14-hour days and typically haven’t been able to pool enough of our time or financial resources to be in the back pocket of the politicians making decisions.

Now, as I wait for the governor’s announcement, I ask myself what’s changed since May 29. Back then, our county didn’t meet any of the state’s requirements for reopening. And we still don’t. I feel completely abandoned by our leaders, and like we’ve lost for trying to comply and be as safe and careful as possible.

Recently, there was a bill in the California State Senate that really could have made a restaurant industry comeback possible during COVID-19: SB 939. It basically required landlords to enter rent renegotiations with tenants, and it would have given tenants and small businesses leverage to walk away without consequence if they couldn’t make it work. Members of the IHC, myself included, reached out to state senators, and many spoke with us. But when the bill reached the appropriations committee in late June, it was killed by real estate groups with money. Before the committee voted on the bill, we could not even get a Zoom meeting with state Sen. Anthony J. Portantino, its LA-based chair. We — the small businesses that employ almost half of California’s citizens and are on the ground trying to work with our landlords — mattered too little to him. When IHC contacted him after the bill died, he said he had no clue that landlords were not negotiating with tenants. We’ve since met with many politicians who have echoed the same sentiment: They truly believe that most landlords are working with tenants. In my experience, this is not the case.

Our elected officials’ total lack of consideration for a whole industry is unforgivable; anyone who loves going to restaurants or grabbing a drink after work should be pissed. If I was feeling petty, I would suggest every restaurant refuse service to politicians. Instead, I’m focusing on the Restaurants Act, a new bill being proposed in the Senate in Washington D.C. that could save us; it would establish a $120 billion relief fund that would be used to provide grants to independent restaurants. My true hope is that we can mobilize the restaurant industry to get it passed. Enjoying good food is a bipartisan issue.

As a woman of color, it feels wrong to be upset about this, given the systemic racist bullshit that is being protested around the country, and the basic equality and liberty that some of us are denied as its citizens. I am pulled back and forth between being upset as an operator and being upset as a non-Black person of color.

At 12 p.m., I listen to the governor confirm the earlier rumors: Restaurants are closed again.

Again, I ask myself, what do I do now? I am just out here trying to survive, trying to build generational wealth, trying to employ a great team of people. I am angry. As a woman, I am angry. As a small business owner, I am angry. As a non-Black person of color, I am angry. There is no winning for the little guys. We are under the boot of big business, politicians with price tags, and a system that has set us up to fail. Before the pandemic, it was easy to ignore these long-standing truths; I was busy and hustling. But now, it is impossible. And it’s one reason that Dina Samson, the co-owner of Rossoblu, and I, have been working on a project we tried to start before the pandemic: a guide to help educate our local leaders on how difficult it is to operate a restaurant in the city and how they can help. The pandemic has forced us to make time to do it.

At 4 p.m., we close our dining room. After a month of planning, it was open for five hours. We’re back to where we were before May 29, but now with less funds, too much inventory, and the dashed hopes of 45 people.

At 4:34 p.m., the chefs, managers, and I are sitting around a table. We’ve been here twice before: when the lockdown orders were announced in March, and when the dine-in orders were announced in May. We’ll adapt again. We always do.

At 6:13 p.m., the managers call our employees to furlough them again.

Brittney Valles is the longtime managing partner of Guerrilla Tacos, a restaurant in Los Angeles.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3jAZKpk https://ift.tt/30w5Cat

A booth at Guerrilla Tacos | Colin Wolf

We spent a month preparing to safely reopen our restaurant. Five hours after opening our doors, the state made us close again.

So I ask myself: Now what do we do?

And now, this morning, we still have a restaurant to open. But all I can do is wait for the governor’s press conference, which is still 90 minutes away.

With no lead-in time to prepare, restaurant operators were being rewarded for rushing to open, and their prize was making as much money as quickly as possible.

At 12 p.m., I listen to the governor confirm the earlier rumors: Restaurants are closed again.

At 6:13 p.m., the managers call our employees to furlough them again.

Brittney Valles is the longtime managing partner of Guerrilla Tacos, a restaurant in Los Angeles.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3jAZKpk via Blogger https://ift.tt/3juvagP

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