#key takeaway points | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sc0tters · 8 months

Text

Game Night | Quinn Hughes

summary: when you and Quinn have the lake house to yourself he comes up with the perfect way to turn pool into an interesting game.

request: yes/no

warnings: mature themes, p in v, unprotected sex, swearing, oral (fem receiving!), semi-proof read.

word count: 3.48k

authors note: from the moment I got this request I knew I had to write it cause I had been thinking about it the all day… low-key edited your request but that’s only because once I thought about strip pool it was the only thing I could think of. I know I got the whole two shot rule wrong but let’s be real here, you aren’t reading this to learn about pool.

This was meant to be the weekend before the storm hit.

Quinn had convinced you to join him at the lake house days before the rest of the boys joined you two.

The lake house wasn’t uncharted territory for you. Quinn met you the day he moved to Vancouver, the interaction was short at first but when you ended it reminding him that he was always welcome over so you could show him your favourite takeaway places in the city.

It didn’t take long for you two to become friends but once it happened you were quickly sent into a spiral that catapulted the friendship to the best friend category. Ellen met you during one of her many trips to the Canadian city when she was checking up on her son, it made her smile how you were the only thing that Quinn would talk about.

When she encouraged him to bring you back to the lake house it made Quinn feel at ease how you seemed to slip right into the family dynamics, by the third day of you being the Jim even let you be his second chef at the barbecue, something he didn’t even let his own wife do.

Somehow throughout all of the years of friendship you two never crossed the line that went over to the romantic side of things. Sure people swore you did, the way his hand always found its way around your lap or how your favourite seat seemed to be his lap. But you two swore that it was always friendly, now that didn’t mean that the thought of Quinn’s head between your legs didn’t cross your mind during those lonely night when you had nothing more than the help of your vibrator. Yet you managed to keep Quinn unaware of the fact that he was your new favourite thought to get off to “you good?” He snapped his fingers in front of your face as you zoned out.

You were quick to shake your head as a crimson coat spread across your cheeks “I-I’m great.” You stuttered as you nodded quickly getting up to get yourself another drink.

Unaware of the arousal that formed between your thighs, Quinn followed you “I was thinking we should play some pool to end the night?” He proposed as he leaned against the frame of the door flexing his biceps as he crossed his arms.

You took a gulp of your seltzer letting the fruity liquid hit the back of your throat “you seriously want to play? You furrowed your eyebrows knowing that when the boys arrived pool and table tennis would be two of the only activities you’d do as a group inside.

It made him chuckle “thought we could play with a twist.” Quinn shrugged with a devilish smirk that spread across his face.

Something told you to hear him out as curiosity got the best of you “I’m listening,” you batted your eyelashes as you looked up at him “remember strip poker?”

That was a time of your life when you brought Quinn along to the last college party you went to as the frat boys thought it was a smart idea to play strip poker “I’m going to stop you right there.” You cut him off drawing a groan from his lips.

The Canucks player as he thought it was a good way to spice the evening up “you think you’re gonna lose?” Quinn teased knowing that he was pressing your competitive buttons.

A scoff left your lips “you’re on Hughesy.” You pointed your finger at him before you pushed past him making sure that you were in the pool room first.

Whilst Quinn had lost his hat and shoes you had lost your socks and both your bracelet and necklace to the game. Meaning that each of you were going to have to start removing actual clothes for the next balls “what are you thinking of going with?” Quinn smirked as he looked up to you once he potted in his fifth ball into the hole that was in front of you.

You rolled your eyes as you let your pool stick rest against the wall “don’t act like this isn’t what you wanted me to take off first.” You mumbled to yourself as you pulled your shirt over your head revealing the sky blue bra that you were wearing.

He didn’t mean to stare, truly that wasn’t his plan. But it felt wrong to Quinn to let you show off such a stunning bra that made your boobs look like they were the only things in this world to not have them be appreciated.

Your hair was tucked behind your ears letting him truly get the perfect view of them when you reached forward for your stick “I’ll be nice and let you pick which one I should pot next.” You proposed as you placed your other hand on your hip “orange,” he pointed to the easiest ball for you to get in as it was right in front of the hole.

It made you laugh “something tells me that you want me to see you all shirtless,” you raised your eyebrows as he nodded.

The grin he sent you was toothy “been told that my chest is my best feature,” your face scrunched at the thought of the time you had seen him after an adventurous night with a girl. His chest looked like it had stripes for a week “better get stripping then.” You smirked as you got the ball in with ease.

This was how the game continued on with the clearly flirtatious banter until you were each left in nothing more than your underwear or at least that was until Quinn got the last of his regular balls in “no wolf whistles,” you joked as you reached behind your back to unclimbed your bra.

Quinn swore he forgot how to breathe as he watched the blue straps fall from your arms letting him get the perfect view of your perky breasts. What truly surprised him though was the titanium bar you had pierced through one of your nipples “could have counted that as a piece of jewellery.” He pointed out as he motioned to it attempting to ignore the way his mouth watered at the thought of tasting it.

You smiled as you placed your hand on your chest by your collar bones “where would the fun be in that?” You asked as your tongue darted over your lips watching him get the first double turn of the game as it seemed to be a stupid rule that the Hughes family played with.

He had to admit that it was hard trying to focus on the ball whilst you were stood there running your fingers over the side of your waist in nothing more than some little white thong that looked like it shouldn’t have even been described as underwear there was so little fabric.

In that moment he swore that the universe was on his side as he had hit the wrong side of the ball but the black ball still dropped into a pot with the white ball hanging dangerously close to the edge with it stopped. You took your loss like a champ hooking your fingers into the sides of your panties “I wanna get my prize myself.” The beer in Quinn gave him that boost of confidence “come and get it then,” you smirked crossing your arms just below your breasts as you pushed them up.

It didn’t take him long as his strides were large “you better not be fucking with me,” he warned when his hands replaced yours in the waistband of your thong.

The air between you two was heavy as even a knife wouldn’t have been able to cut this “it’s all for your taking Quinny.” The mumble of your voiced sounded like heaven to him as Quinn helped you out of the white undergarment groaning when his eyes landed on the wet patch that had formed where your core sat “you seeing how much I enjoyed that?” You asked as he looked back up at you.

Your thong was quickly thrown onto the ground so that his hands could go to your waist “cause it looks like you felt the same.” Your hand moved between the two of you so that you could cup his balls as you began to palm his bones through his boxers.

Quinn’s head landed on your shoulder as he thought his legs were going to give out “fuck don’t stop,” he begged as you clicked your tongue “gonna need to get that final ball in to remove those boxers.” You teased with a grin evident on your face.

On the other hand it made Quinn annoyed “happy?” He asked as he dropped your blue ball into the pot next to him “ecstatic,” you leaned forward to kiss him.

His beer mixed with the taste of your berry seltzer as you moaned when Quinn pushed you against pool table letting your ass met the cool wood.

He loved how you tasted, sure you had never crossed this line but that didn’t mean that the thought never crossed his mind “fuck you’re so hot,” Quinn confessed as he pulled away feeling your fingers crawl under the waist band on his boxers.

A giggle left your lips “thinking you enjoyed this more than me.” You teased pointed down to what now looked like a painfully hard boner “could see you like this all the time.” Quinn announced as his lips moved down to your neck so he could nip that the parts of your body continuing to show that part of your chest love until he got to your pierced nipple “saw how much you liked this.” Your voice was soft as you felt vulnerable watching him stare at the piece of jewellery.

When his lips wrapped around it you seriously thought you were going to fall onto the table behind you “dear god,” your nails went to the nape of his neck when Quinn brought his hand to your other nipple so it wouldn’t feel left out.

The round texture of the balls that were attached to the bar made Quinn groan as each whimper than left your lips every time he hit it went straight to his cock “I need more Quinny, please.” It was now your turn to beg as you didn’t think that you were about to last much longer.

It made him smirk as he removed his lips from your nipple with a pop “so fucking pretty for me baby,” Quinn mumbled as he cupped your face with his hands when he pulled you into a kiss.

Now your back hit the fabric of the table as your arms wrapped around his neck bringing him down with you “my needy little baby,” he groaned as you began to grind your clit against his boxers.

A smile formed on your face as you felt his hands hook under your knees “I gotta taste you,” Quinn confessed as you nodded letting out little pleads as he moved his lips down your body “looking so fucking good from down here.” His voice made your body shake with anticipation as you felt his hands run down your legs.

The hockey player leaned down so that he was eye level with your core “you been waiting for this haven’t you?” Quinn smirked as he placed sloppy kisses against your thigh moving closer to your pussy.

But rather than stopping where you wanted him to he instead moved to your other thigh repeating his previous actions “please Quinn,” your voice came out shaky as you watched him come to a standstill with your pussy in front of him “seen the way you look at me.” Quinn clicked his tongue as he used two fingers to rub your clit nicely wetting it with your juices.

Your hands cupped your nipples teasing them both “needed you for so long,” you gasped as you felt those two fingers thrust inside of you.

He smiled hearing your confession “all you had to do was tell me you wanted this baby.” The Canucks player mumbled as he placed a kiss against your clit “could have all been yours years ago.” There was a sparkle in his eyes as he wrapped his lips around your clit letting his tongue run over the nub whilst his fingers didn’t let up their thrusts.

It was a good thing that nobody was in the house as you swore the neighbours could hear you “god don’t stop.” Your fingers locked into his growing hair making you grateful that he hadn’t cut it yet.

Quinn watched on in awe as your eyes were screwed shut and your face went scrunched as you clenched around him “god ain’t here with us baby.” His voice made you groan as he spoke with his mouth still against your clit.

Your chest began to rise and fall at a quicker rate “just like that Quinn,” you mumbled as you dug your head further into the table trying to push your hips closer to him.

Throughout the rest of the house your moans bounced off of the walls “what do you want baby?” Quinn asked as he used his thumb to rub your clit “tell me and I promise I’ll give it to you.” He added letting his mouth go back to what it was doing.

Brain fog seemed to hit you hard as your eyes stirred, remaining silent until you felt his hand pinch at your waist “please let me come.” You begged letting your lips form a pout “need it. Need it so bad.” Your whines went straight to his boxers making him realise that he was going to have to pull his boxers off the second he was done with you.

Quinn smiled “not gonna make you beg baby, want to make you come.” He cooed increasing the pace of his fingers as you gasped.

That was all you needed to hear from him as it pushed you over the edge “s-shit shit.” Your body shuddered as the boy made sure to help you through your orgasm as he didn’t let up on his actions “Quinny,” you whined as you tried to pull away from him but remained unsuccessful.

When you tugged at his hair Quinn got the hint as he moved back up to your face “feeling good baby?” Quinn asked as he kissed your lips letting you taste your release on his tongue.

With the little energy that you had left you pushed yourself forward “so good,” your hips clenched at the feeling of the pool table wall against your bum.

It made you feel bad when you saw how painful his boner looked “wanna fuck you,” you confessed as you palmed his cock over his boxers.

Quinn didn’t waste any time letting out a groan as the feeling of your fingers made him weak in the knees. The hockey player didn’t stop you when you got off of the table and hooked your fingers in his waist band so that could do a slut drop when you pulled his boxers down “don’t even think about it.” Quinn warned seeing you lick your lips as you were met with his cock.

A pout formed on your lips as that clearly wasn’t what you wanted to hear “I’m not gonna last long and I need to come inside of you.” He explained hooking his fingers under your jaw helping you back up.

It made you giggle “fuck me like you know you can Quinn,” you mumbled as you pecked his lips.

His hands gave your ass a squeeze “wanted this for years.” Just because you two acted like friends didn’t mean that all of the thoughts that ran through your heads were all platonic.

You let your hand run over his cock “want to feel every inch of you.” Your confession combined with the kiss you placed on his earlobe made his eyes almost roll back “what are you waiting for them?” He asked spinning you around as your hands handed in the table.

Unintentionally your core clenched around nothing as the anticipation for the best of you “my cock hungry little girl,” Quinn mumbled into your ear as he kissed your temple before he grabbed his cock letting it run over your clit twice before he slowly pushed himself inside of your pussy.

Your head fell back onto his shoulder “fuck Quinn!” You slapped your hand over your mouth as you adjusted to his size.

It made him laugh as his fingers dug into your hips sure to leave bruises tomorrow “enjoying it princess?” He asked as he kissed your shoulder letting his teeth sink in just hard enough to leave a bruise tomorrow.

All you could do was nod as you felt him hit your g-spot making you grateful that you weren’t on the table “don’t stop,” you blurted out enjoying how good it felt as he continued to fuck you.

The sound of skin slapping was blissful as you both only had one thing in mind, to come. Quinn felt like he was the weaker person in this battle as your pussy squeezed him in all the right ways “this pussy was made for me,” the boy announced as his hand reached in front of you to rub your clit.

When you didn’t respond it made the boy smile as your eyes began to roll back “just for you,” you cooed unaware of the grunt the boy released “all for you baby.” You added using all of your energy to face him as he brought his lips down to yours, the salty taste of your real ease still clear on his tongue.

Each time he thrusted forward your hips went back to meet his resulting in moans and whimpers coming from both of you “you want me to last much longer then you gotta stop doing that.” Quinn warned as he watched you bring your hand up when you wrapped it behind his neck making sure that he stayed close to you.

That statement acted like encouragement for you to do it again as you smiled “don’t tease me baby.” The boy grumbled as he brought his hand to your ass giving it a slap.

Instead of giving you a moment to respond his fingers that hadn’t left your clit now began to rub faster “please Quinn.” You begged feeling your toes wanting to scrunch up as you were teetering ever so closer to your high.

The hockey player wasn’t far behind you “take it baby.” Quinn groaned as his fingers dug harder into your hips “that it all.” He added as held increased his thrusts too.

It wasn’t any surprise that your second orgasm of the night quickly came over you “holy fuck!” Almost all of your body went limp besides for your pussy that clenched around Quinn’s cock spurring on his own orgasm “so good baby.” He cooed letting his cock flop out of you when he let out a gasp.

Your release trickled down your legs “that’s never happened before.” You announced growing red with embarrassment.

The boy didn’t let you feel that way for long “that was the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.” He confessed as Quinn tilted your head up to his so that he could kiss you.

A smile formed on your lips “want to join me in the bath?” You asked letting your fingers trace up his arm “lead the way princess.” Quinn nodded letting his hands leave your sides when you eventually were able to make your way to the staircase.

four days later

The boys were having a blast being back together under the same roof. They loved getting to do all of the things that the lake house let them, from the boat rides to the long games of pool and table tennis.

Quinn had to admit that he was enjoying where things were with you. It was easy with the lack of expectations but the Canucks player definitely planned on taking you on a boat ride just the two of you do that he could ask you out.

But for now he was going to have to wait as a game of pool called his name “this table looks off,” Jack announced as he furrowed his eyebrows.

Both yours and Quinn’s eyes went wide “what do you mean?” You asked as you stood next to the younger boy.

The devils player motioned to the marks on the carpet that showed that it had definitively been knocked “see,” Jack pointed out as he pushed the table back to its original position totally unaware of the looks of relief that ran over your and Quinn’s faces.

This was going to stay your little secret for now.

#quinn hughes imagine #quinn hughes x reader #quinn hughes smut #hockey imagine #hockey imagines #nhl imagine #nhl oneshot #imagines #oneshots #hockey smut #nhl smut #amber writes fics

1K notes · View notes

multifandomgirl08 · 3 months

Text

Tu me promets (Daniel's POV) - D.R. #3

Sugar Daddy!Daniel Ricciardo x Fem!Reader

Summary: He was sorry, for not calling, for sleeping with you, and then running as if you meant nothing to him.

Warning(s): Implied sexual content

A/N: As per pole results this will get published first. The Reader's POV will be up next week. The title translates to you promise me. Points to anyone who can spot the Gossip Girl reference from season 6.

Words: 3.3k

Previous Part ← Reader POV The Arrangement Masterlist

Daniel knew he was being a coward, not texting you back after you had gotten home, not calling you for two months. It was a lot for him to process all while being back in Formula 1 driving for AlphaTauri. It wasn’t Red Bull but Christian and Helmut through it would be a good stepping stone for him after last year.

Yet here he was showing up at your apartment building to try to talk to you. He was pretty sure that you would slam the door in his face before he was even able to get a word out. He waved at the security guard before going up the elevator to your floor.

He knocked once he was at your door. He didn’t have to, he did have a key to your apartment but he wouldn’t do that. He may have bought the apartment but it was your space and he wasn’t just going to let himself in after not talking to you.

It took a few moments for the door to open. There was something punishing in that silence of waiting. It wasn’t long before you stood in front of him in his pink Enchanté jumper, black shorts, and thigh-high socks. The bouquet of white Japanese Camellia flowers that were in his hands suddenly felt heavy, like it was weighing down his arm.

“Can I come in?” He asked.

You eventually let him through the door not saying anything. Daniel couldn’t help but take in the apartment after not having been here for a while. It was very well lived in, you had candles, books, and photos set up all around. This had become home for you. He saw a throw from Hermés over the back of the armchair he helped you pick out. He knew he was the only one to sit on it.

There was a container of takeaway on the glass and silver coffee table, and you were watching Gossip Girl on the TV.

“I’m sorry.” He blurted. He was sorry, for not calling, for sleeping with you, and then running as if you meant nothing to him. It was wrong and you deserved better, not just from him but in general.

He tried to hand you the flowers but you wouldn’t take them from him. His eyes fell on an empty vase by one of the windows that looked like a handbag. He walked over in small steps and placed the flowers in there, just happy for them to be out of his hands.

He walked closer to you but kept the distance between you, leaning against the back of the cream couch, his legs folded on top of one another.

“Look,” He started to say. He could feel your eyes on him, running up and down what he was wearing probably tuning out his words just to not seem rude or something. “I know I shouldn’t have left the morning after. I just…”

Come on mate, out with it. She won’t hear you out all damn day. He thought to himself.

“It was a lot for me, to know how I felt and then do that. Be with you.” It was the only thing he felt he could say. It was his truth. He never expected that he would get a chance to be with you or that you would even want him like that.

“So, what does that mean?” It was fair of you to ask him that. What did that mean?

“I don’t know.” He answered honestly. “I pay you… to spend time with me, in gifts, and clothes, and all this other stuff.”

He hated bringing up the money. Money bought him things, it wasn’t meant to be used on people.

“I won’t pay you to sleep with me. It’s not right.” He blurted out. Daniel had always tried to be a nice guy, and he just couldn’t use you like that.

“Who says that you’d be paying me to sleep with you?” You asked as if there was nothing wrong with that. He can’t do that to you. He can’t treat you like you mean nothing to him. “Maybe I just want to.”

Daniel can’t help but shut his eyes at those words. “But you shouldn’t.”

“What I mean is… I can’t keep doing this because of the money.” It was never about the money when it came to you. Yes, he liked buying you things and spending money on you. But there was more in it for him. “I care too much for you now, for it to be about the money.”

“Can you think about our relationship for a second… without the money.” You asked him.

Think about their “relationship” without the money. Their whole arrangement started because of money.

“What are you talking about?” He asked.

"What would we do while you were in town? And I don't mean the shopping." Your question puzzled him a little.

Without the money? He thought. That wasn’t shopping?

"Dinner, and we'd go out to hang out with my friends, maybe watch a movie or something." He finally managed to get out.

Come to think of it he had never met your friends, he never tried to insert himself into your life thinking that there was no way that he would fit. Always busy with his career, media obligations, and his friends. It was easier for him to try to find a way to pull you into his world, without inserting himself into yours.

"What am I to you Daniel? What do you call me in all your notes?" You asked. It was like there was an odd shift in the room. Everything felt slower, almost hazy with how dark it felt in the apartment.

"You... you're my girl." He struggled to get the words out. He had only said those words out loud once, before that, it was always either writing them down on paper or in a text message. Saying it now felt strange on his tongue.

"Why do you call me that?" You drew out of him.

As you walked closer Daniel couldn’t help but swallow down his breath. His hands felt hot like he had just gotten out of the car after an intense session on the track.

"Because you’re mine." He whispered, "I like spoiling what's mine." He still didn’t know what that meant for the two of them. Calling you his was one thing, but he knew that he had no ownership of you whatsoever.

Feeling the press of your body against his chest made him nervous. All he wanted was to get out of the hoodie that he was wearing. It would make him less hot, and make it easier for him to breathe. He felt you moving his hands to your hips, just laying them over the soft fabric of your shorts.

"It's okay, Daniel." You whispered brushing their noses together. "You can have me." The invitation felt too good to be true.

It was too easy to pull you to the couch and let himself get lost in the feeling of your lips. Two months without it. You were a drug in the best way, the best high he could ever get. How had he let himself believe that he could live without the feeling of you in his arms and the taste of your lips on his?

Coherent thoughts and feelings didn’t matter while he held you to his chest.

“You’re perfect for me,” He praised you letting his lips trail over your neck. You were trouble and he knew that he was done for.

At some point in the evening, both of you had moved to the bedroom. He was leaning back against the headboard, letting his eyes wander around the room taking in the contrast of soft creams and dark black accent pieces. A phone charger and a few jewelry pieces cluttered the nightstand to his left.

His fingers fiddled with the silver Tiffany bracelet that you were wearing, letting himself get lost in the feeling of your skin against his, seeing your hair a mess, and light bruises start to show on your neck.

"Can you promise me something?" You asked him.

He gave you a slight nod. He wasn’t sure what he could promise you. A wonderful life, a diamond ring one day? Okay, maybe he was getting ahead of himself by thinking about a diamond ring.

"If we keep doing this," You said, pointing at the two of you. "Promise me that you know it's not about the money."

So it hadn’t been about the money for her? He couldn’t help but question. He still paid for things for you, food, clothes, even if he was the one who was picking things out to give to you. Money was the thing that held them together.

"But isn't that why this all started for you," He asked. "Because of the money."

"Yes, when I was in school." You said. School. Right. You had been in college when you met. How could he forget? "But I'm out of college now, I can find a job.”

Find a job? He didn’t like the sound of that. That would mean that if they kept this, even if it was in some small way he would have to work around not just his schedule but yours as well. There was no way.

“Maybe even take over paying the rent on this place." You continued.

Pay rent. He didn’t pay rent on this place. He had bought it. He always saw it as an investment, he put down the 5 million on it, and if this hadn’t worked out he could always rent it out to someone. It wasn’t like he needed the extra income.

"I don't pay rent on it." He admitted, scratching at the back of his neck. "I bought it."

He looked over at you to see that you were a little shocked at his confession. Maybe he should have told you that when he had gotten you the place.

"What about you?" You asked changing the subject. "What started all this for you?"

That was a hard question to answer without going into too much detail. Everything in his career felt like it was falling apart and in some ways his life as well.

"I needed a change, something to make me feel like I was worth something. A priority if you will." That felt like the easy way to explain it. He hadn’t felt like he made himself a priority in a long time. Being with you made him feel like he was worth something. It was always time and energy well spent. You made him feel like he was worth everything after just a few hours together.

He felt you move closer to him in the sheets, sitting on his lap as your bare thighs brushed against each other. Your hair pooled around your face a bit as he tried to stop himself from pulling you closer. You may have just been wearing only his hoodie in bed but he could only control himself so much.

"You are worth so much." You said to him. He felt you lean closer to him. Touching your foreheads together. "All the money in the world can't compare."

God, that was cheesy. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing even if he tried.

Daniel let himself enjoy the feeling of you against him. The supple feel of your hands on his skin, the way your hair was just slightly brushing over his arm. Small things he hadn’t let himself enjoy before.

"I think that if we keep doing this," He started to say. He was slow to pull back from you. A the same time he wanted to cherish feeling you against him. "You need to know that it'll be more for me than it was."

He was making this choice for you. He couldn’t do this if you wanted to keep it casual. He needed it to be all or nothing. Full relationship. He couldn’t live with just having pieces and moments with you anymore.

"I understand." You said as he felt your fingers running over the skin close to his collarbone.

"No, like, I have feelings for you. Real feelings. And I can't do this if you don't feel anything for me in return." He stopped your hand where it was.

He wasn’t willing to say the words I love you. He didn’t want you to shut him down if you heard them, he couldn’t handle it.

"I do have feelings for you, but I never thought that you would let me get close enough to see if there was more than attraction." Wait? What? He thought… it wasn’t just him then. He didn’t have to treat this like it was only based on what he felt for you.

“When did it become more for you? Italy? Meeting Scotty and my friends?” He couldn’t help but wonder. Why had you fallen for him if it wasn’t to do with the money?

When you brought up the story of him insisting on walking closer to the curb on the street he couldn’t help but feel a light blush make his cheeks warm. He was just being a gentleman. Doing what he thought he should since it was late at night and they were in New York. He didn’t want you walking close to the sidewalk in case something happened. Who knew what could happen if you did?

“That’s when I knew it was more, I knew that I couldn’t make you give me more, so I let you give me what you could, until Monaco.” He appreciated that for a while she had been understanding of the fact that he didn’t want to just jump into something. “By then I was sick of waiting. I needed more… So I took it.”

Hearing that being in Monaco made you want more had made him see that it was more gradual for you than it was for him. He had been apprehensive to share his feelings for you, but now that he knew that you felt something for him, he wanted to be with you more than ever.

"I guess that means that we're both in this." You half asked.

"This means," He said, quickly flipping you onto your back. He made sure to rest his arms against the mattress to keep most of his weight off you. You let out a loud laugh. "That since you’re mine, I get to keep taking care of you."

You were quick to lock your legs around his back while he lightly trailed his lips over your neck.

"Know what that means?" He whispered, nudging your neck with his nose before moving up your neck. You felt perfect underneath him.

"There is... no way... I'm letting you... get a job." He admitted between moving to the other side of your neck lightly digging his teeth into the skin. Nope, not happening ever. You were his and he didn’t want you working if he could help it. Damn the fact that you paid for your schooling.

Daniel had let his eyes pear over to the window to see that it had grown dark at some point. Between the talking, the couch, and ending you in your bed. You had turned the lights off and Daniel had settled in against one of the pillows that you had on your bed. He had felt you move closer to him in bed, he turned over onto his side instead of his normal sleeping position on his stomach.

“Don’t worry, babe.” He put his arm around your waist, muttering into your hair before kissing your forehead. “I’m not going anywhere.”

It was a promise that he intended to keep. He let the sound of your breathing settle him to sleep. It had been the first time since Monaco that he had been able to fall asleep without the sound of a podcast or music filling his ears.

The feeling of the sun in Daniel’s face had woken him up. He was under a thick duvet, his pillow crushed in his arms, and a warm body settled against his side. Daniel was careful to roll over in bed. He knew that this wasn’t his bedroom on the farm in Perth, his bedroom in his Monaco apartment, or the house in LA. However, waking up here didn’t seem out of place.

He looked over to the other side of the bed, past messed-up white sheets, and saw strands of hair gracefully falling over a pillow. You were still asleep, turned towards him.

He didn’t want to leave the bed, but he thought maybe it would be nice if he at least made you a cup of coffee. He pulled himself out from under the warm sheets, letting the cold air of your apartment hit his chest.

As he moved through the apartment he couldn’t help but rub his eyes. He looked through some of the books that were on your shelves, pictures of you with your friends that he didn’t recognize at parties and out at dinner.

Eventually, he makes his way to the kitchen, looking through cabinets and opening drawers before finding the coffee mug you always use. His eyes fall on the built-in coffee maker and he can’t help but think that it looks complicated. Buttons and screen. Are there instructions lying around somewhere?

“How do you work this damn thing?” He asks no one. He’s on his last try using the machine before giving up and just using Uber Eats to order Starbucks or something. He’s washed the mug and it’s still dripping wet when he hears what can only be your feet against the light hardwood floors.

He looks up seeing you and can’t help but smile. You look gorgeous in the pink dress that you’re wearing. He places the cup down trying to avoid one of the bigger puddles of water by the sink that is facing the living room.

“How's my girl this morning?” He asks. As you get closer Daniel can’t help but reach for you. Now that he can touch you as much as he wants, he’s not sure if he’ll ever stop.

He leans down to press a light kiss on your cheek.

“Pretty good.” He can feel the smile in your words.

Everything after that feels easy, like the whole time he’s known you this is what the relationship has been like. He can’t help but stand there for a few moments, in awe of being here with you. He pulls his hand away from your cheeks, looking down at you as you peek up at him through your eyelashes.

“I know I bought the place, but can you please show me how to use this thing?” He says gesturing to the coffee maker.

You laugh pulling away from him just a bit before kissing his cheek. He can’t help the smile that creeps through. God, does this feel right. He watches as you roam around the kitchen making both of you coffee. The little sound of you humming to yourself, as he takes in the thought of being able to enjoy this all the time, not just when he lets himself indulge in his selfish whims.

As he’s watching you, he’s surprised to see you pull out oat milk from the fridge and put it into what he can only assume is his cup of coffee.

You quickly give it to him and all he can say is, “Thanks, babe,” Taking the cup from you.

He lets himself pull you to the couch needing to feel you close. It’s always been easy to talk to you, never having to miss a beat with anything that either of you brings up. Movies, music, anything. It just flows for both of you. He’s holding his coffee cup in one hand while the other is running over your skin, making little invisible patterns that he’s not paying attention to.

He can’t believe that some part of him thought it would be right to leave and run from this. It felt right, talking to you that night by the bar. From the moment he met you, he knew that he was done for.

SD!Danny Ric Series: @hc-dutch, @taylorslovesswifties13, @thatsusbitch, @laneyspaulding19, @basicallyric, @divya14, @zafetycar, @brekkers-whore, @cixrosie, @taytaylala12

#SD!Danny Ric Series #daniel ricciardo imagine #daniel ricciardo x reader #daniel ricciardo x you #dr3 x reader #dr3 imagine #f1 imagines #f1 imagine #f1 x reader

271 notes · View notes

patricia-taxxon · 7 months

Text

So, I watched that response stream that DeadwingDork made about my furry boinking video, here it is if you're curious.

youtube

By some accounts, this gentleman seems like he means well, with regards to pronouns he pulls the "when in doubt, they/them" gambit, which is partway there. If he finds this, I'll politely let him know I don't use they, just she & it. Thanks!

I have good reason to believe he began this journey in good faith, but over the course of the video he slowly gives up being charitable, and it's very frustrating to watch. There's a few key moments of miscommunication I noticed that I'd like to clear up.

DeadwingDork and I got off on the wrong foot very early on, and part of that's my fault. I start the video openly lusting after Garth Alphandomega, and this put him on edge. This might be an ideological difference we can't get past, he says that Garth is "Just a wolf" when I personally think he's quite different from a wolf. After that, I do the joke where I say "If the opportunity presented itself I would fuck my-" and cut to The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe, but he didn't have the context to understand what I'm saying by cutting to that album in particular, so he thought I was jokingly saying I would fuck my dog. He spends the rest of the stream with that initial impression of me lusting after what he perceives as literal animals, it's kinda the initial rock that starts the avalanche and closes him off from understanding basically anything that I'm saying, until the end, where he's convinced I've just spent 43 minutes coming out as a zoophile.

This might just be a difference in artistic philosophy, like he interprets Alpha & Omega to be about wolves whereas I interpret it as being about people through the aesthetic lens of wolves. Metaphor isn't just for abstract art movies, after all. Garth walks on 4 legs, but he has enough obvious persistent human-like traits both visually and behaviorally for me to understand him as a person delivered via wolf. For the same reason, he is disturbed by my lusting for Shoukichi Pompoko, because he interprets that movie as literally being about tanuki. I think this the main reason the concept of a character being "simultaneously human and inhuman" completely whiffed on him. He skimmed over my segment on how Leo can be both a wolf and hispanic & didn't understand the relevance, because I don't think that contradiction can be resolved in his head.

The most frustrating part of this stream is the way he clearly picks up on a lot of the overarching subtext that I'm putting down, but by that point in the video he doesn't have enough faith in me to interpret it as being put there intentionally. He treats the connection between my special-ed dog training and my current animal identity as an unintentional self-report, when it isn't. There's this *maddening* segment where I talk about Pom Poko for the first time, and he... honestly quite accurately picks apart the picture I'm illustrating about alienation, but he handwaves it away in favor of his horrible mangling of the exact literal sentence I am saying at that moment.

He says:

"There's clearly a story here, but it's being buried. There's a lot of stuff that's leading towards... 'oh, you watched this movie and this movie and your parents did this and your fuckin' teachers did this, and that's why this is happening.' That's like the fuckin' undertones of this video, [but] the main takeaway is supposed to be that this movie... I dunno, makes you f.. is supposed to feel like how fuckin' animal people feel like they're... whatever, I don't, I don't... whatever."

He grabs at the subtext, the story I'm obviously telling with the surface level anecdote of my experience seeing Pom Poko when I was young. I say obviously, because he and his chat both understood it. But then he discards that, assumes it was unintended, and importantly, he doesn't have a good answer for what I'm actually saying divorced from that. Because... what's even left after you remove the subtextual story I'm telling with this anecdote? The anecdote itself? Of course he's empty handed.

Other notes:

He can't decide whether I'm an over zealous recruiter trying to call everything furry, or that I'm a gatekeeper trying to force robust definitions of 'furry' into the general lexicon. This isn't very important, it's just kind of funny.

He is dismissive of me saying I won't report news if my only source is Kiwifarms, but he doesn't really give a good reason for it. I am having trouble summarizing his argument for why I should have referenced a website whose users doxxed me. He hilariously suggests that I should negotiate with them to have my address taken down, as long as I'm not a "lolcow" about it. I'll be charitable and say that I don't think he's thought this through very much.

He hates that I "compare autistic people to animals," when that really just doesn't mean anything on its own. A comparison is a comparison, a follower of mine pointed out to me they could say that trans people are like cockroaches & it could either mean they are doggedly resilient in the face of harsh circumstances or that they are pests that need to be exterminated. I meant something specific by using an animal metaphor to describe my autistic identity, and it transcends the literal reading of "calling autistic people animals."

He derisively calls Echo a "gay furry sex game" when it simply is not. I'll forgive him for this because he hasn't played it, but Echo isn't porn, it's a horror game. There's sex in it, and it has the framework of a dating game, but it is far from the main appeal. I'm not saying this to elevate Echo above the degrading label of "porn," because Adastra is definitely porn and it's almost as good, just not as easily recommendable to outsiders.

He thinks its commendable that Sean Booth bought my album, which is nice.

Overall, I don't think DeadwingDork is outwardly hateful, but he is quite gullible. He accepts hate speech at face value and buys into narratives useful for hate movements. There's echos of trans groomer panic, that old "you're the reason people are transphobic" chestnut, and of course, using Kiwifarms as a news source. He said he came into the video knowing nothing about me and had no reason to be approaching me in bad faith, but he clearly doesn't trust me enough to think the main rhetorical thrust of the video was intentional.

bad stream lol

#mini essay #long post #cilantromixture #Youtube

435 notes · View notes

fursasaida · 2 months

Text

Emma Saltzberg: Your book chronicles a longstanding struggle over public opinion in the American Jewish world. What are the top-level conclusions you draw from this history?

Geoffrey Levin: The first big takeaway is that this history of American Jewish concern for Palestinian rights isn’t something that started yesterday, or even in the ’60s or ’70s. It goes back to 1948. As long as there has been a Palestinian refugee issue, there has been American Jewish concern for Palestinians, especially coming from Jews who spent a lot of time in the region and were deeply exposed to Israel and to the Palestinians. The second is that this American Jewish engagement with Palestinian rights was frequently influenced by state actors. Sometimes it was the Arab League [an organization of Arab states formed in 1945 to advance their shared interests], sometimes it was the CIA—but most often it was the Israeli government. I uncover this long record of Israeli diplomats trying to manage American Jewish discourse. And the last key point is that American Jewish groups were having nuanced and complicated debates in this period, as early as the ’30s, about the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. A lot of the groups that are arguing today that there’s a strong overlap between those two things, like the AJC and the Reform movement, didn’t hold that position 70 years ago.

[...]

ES: You also write about some Jewish figures whose anti-nationalist position led them to maintain their opposition to Israel’s creation even after 1948.

GL: A more extreme version of the AJC’s position emerged through the American Council for Judaism, which was an anti-Zionist group originally formed by Reform Jewish thinkers. Before and after ’48, they were against the creation of a Jewish state, but they were not focused on the Palestinian question initially. They opposed Israel because of their anti-nationalism, thinking the state would be bad for Jews. These anti-Zionists were focused on keeping Zionism and Israeli and Hebrew culture from dominating American Jewish life. They were concerned that doing so diverted American Jewish loyalties. Yet ultimately, some within the American Council for Judaism, mostly leaders like Rabbi Elmer Berger who had a lot of exposure to Palestinians themselves, did become strong advocates of Palestinian rights. And then they got kind of nudged out of the organization.

ES: You tell the story of Breira, an anti-occupation Zionist group founded in 1973 that tried to advocate for Palestinian rights in this context of increased Jewish nationalism. What happened to them?

GL: Breira was the first national American Jewish group arguing for what we now call the two-state solution. The leaders had gone to Israel and heard from Israeli leftists and had become convinced that Palestinians couldn’t be ignored forever. They framed themselves as nice Jewish boys and girls—people who wanted what’s best for Israel and for Jewish politics. And every chance they could, they highlighted Israeli voices. But they still ended up getting eviscerated as “Jews for Fatah”—Fatah being the leading PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] faction—after just a couple of members met with a few moderate members of the PLO. It was an early example of how no matter how much American Jews who want to recognize Palestinian rights try to burnish their Jewish and even Israeli credentials, people will push against that and question their Jewish identity. And that hurt people a lot. A lot of those figures in Breira could have contributed a lot more to the future of the American Jewish community, but they felt really burned.

ES: As you note in the book, some analysts today describe American Jews’ increased criticism of Israel and Zionism as a product of distancing from Israel. But, as the Breira story shows, this stance is often a product of very close engagement with Israel.

GL: I think this is crucial. Millennial and Gen Z Jews who are involved in the Jewish community are far more likely to have gone to Israel than people of older generations, because of all these newer subsidized programs, like Birthright. They are far more likely to have met Israeli shlichim [young adult “emissaries” from Israel] through camp or through campus Hillel, and far more likely to watch Israeli stuff on YouTube and enjoy Israeli cuisine. Younger Jews are far more likely to know Palestinians as well. In contrast, many in earlier generations may have had more positive views toward Israel, but less deep engagement with the actual place and the people living there, both Israelis and Palestinians.

In my book, those from the earlier generations who engaged with Palestinian rights did spend a lot of time over there. They knew Hebrew. When they were advocating for Palestinian rights, whether that meant self-determination, or civil rights for minorities in Israel, or a different approach toward Palestinian refugees, they often came to those conclusions from going there and talking to Israelis and talking to Palestinians.

ES: Why is it important to know this history, as we contemplate different American Jewish responses to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza today?

GL: The characters in this story are people that a lot of experts haven’t heard of before. By unearthing these stories, I show how seriously people were thinking through some of these same questions 70 years ago. I think that one of the most important chapters is this one where I am able to use the archives to put a Palestinian voice at the forefront. Fayez Sayegh was struggling to find a way that was acceptable in American public discourse to talk about Palestinian issues and Arab issues. I think it’s important to write these people back into history, because they were so eager to change the discourse.

These people all kind of failed; they were pushed out. The critical American Jews were fired. I think a lot of American Jews thought the problems would just go away. And I can’t tell you that we would have had peace if the dissenting voices had succeeded. But I do think if they had been successful in getting a more open discourse within the Jewish community 70 years ago, that we would probably be in a healthier place right now, both in terms of the American Jewish community and American discourse more broadly.

#USA #israel #palestine #zionism #jewish antizionism

199 notes · View notes

lvpislvzuli · 1 year

Text

If you are an Avatar fan then you’ve probably been rather bewildered by the unaccountable animosity that has developed toward Spider. What’s obvious is that the brains of some moviegoers are rather blank slates.

Here’s the thing—Spider Socorro’s arc in the film requires some reflection and analytical thinking on the part of the audience. Automatically labeling him a traitor or a Terrible Person demonstrates a lack of effort to understand this complex character.

Of course, it is natural that we may find ourselves frustrated with Spider for seemingly going along with the RDA/Recoms and for saving Quaritch’s life. After all, those are the bad guys! But if you take the time to analyze some of the plot points and Spider’s own personality and history, you can better understand his motivations.

Here are a few key takeaways to help you empathize with Spider’s choices. I think most Avatar fans will have already picked up on these.

One: Early in the film, Spider is kidnapped and interrogated by the RDA. An interrogation that borders on physical and mental torture. This is a sixteen-year-old kid who has never been in that kind of terrifying situation, so of course he’s going to take the first opportunity he has to escape, even if it’s with the Recoms on their mission to hunt down the Sullys. Anything to not be handed back to the lab coats, right? But even then he is still being held hostage by Quaritch, who places a tracker inside his Exopack to keep tabs on him. Spider is smart—he knows he has no choice but to tag along with the Recoms.

Two: It’s important to recognize that despite having spent his whole life on Pandora growing up in the forest among the Omatikaya People—befriending the Sully kids, painting blue stripes on himself, and speaking their language—Spider knows he is still just a human. And even though he has a confident personality, it is reasonable to assume that there are times when he feels different or inadequate. Sort of an “I need them, but they don’t necessarily need me” kind of situation that many of us can relate to.

But now Spider finds himself surrounded by a group of foreigners from Earth, who it turns out appreciates that he is Pandoran. Appreciates that he operates with the knowledge and physical capability of the Na’vi. Here he can prove his worth and skill, and it’s obvious that Spider gets caught up in the feeling of being useful (and of being smarter than the Recoms, because let’s admit it, Spider can be a bit cocky 😆).

However, this is only the case until he witnesses the violent potential of Quaritch and the Recoms in those heartbreaking scenes where they destroy Metkayina villages and murder Ilus. Spider has a wake-up call at this point in the film, and it’s here that he actually stops “helping” the RDA.

Three: Saving Quaritch from drowning. Spider’s decision to rescue Quaritch at the end of the film boils down to two inconvenient but very realistic and credible reasons.

A – Quaritch is his father. We cannot try to claim that a son choosing to save his father from death is an evil or traitorous act, even if the father himself is evil. Especially a father who potentially just saved his son’s own life, because I don’t think Neytiri was bluffing during that standoff. So yes, he’s clearly not happy about it, but at that moment Spider accepts that Quaritch may have saved his life, so in return he saves him from drowning.

And B – the simple fact that Spider is a good person.

In addition, I think some people have overlooked that at the end of the film, Spider ditches Quaritch and returns to the Sullys without hesitation. That speaks for itself to the resolution of his arc in this film.

So there you have it. I wanted to contribute this to the discourse in the hope that it might sway a few minds. Spider is a fascinating character, particularly because of his intrinsic relationships with both the heroes and villains of this story. Saving Quaritch’s life has put him in a really tough spot, and I don’t think this character is finished being caught in the middle. I’m very excited to see where Spider’s story goes.

Amazing writing James Cameron and amazing acting Jack Champion!

💙

#spider socorro #miles socorro #avatar 2 #avatar the way of water #miles quaritch #pandora #james cameron

2K notes · View notes

balioc · 4 months

Text

Holiday Engineering: What Not to Do

We can learn a lot from Chanukah, because Chanukah is a garbage-tier holiday.

I mean this in a mostly-detached, mostly-analytic way. Like many people who were raised Jewish, I have some very fond and happy memories of Chanukah. Anything can accrue fond and happy memories, if you have a way of getting people to do it. But Chanukah is full of features that actively detract from its being resonant, impressive, memorable, or fun. It is an anti-advertisement for its community.

If you're a would-be designer-of-holidays, this is actually a really useful thing. Mimicking the good and successful holidays is quite hard; their quality tends to hinge on a lot of idiosyncratic hard-to-replicate factors, and "invent something as cool and punchy as the $WHATEVER" can be a tall order. But it's easy to look at a design failure and say, "I"m not going to do that."

With that, let's go into the details:

CHANUKAH: THE GOOD

Timing. It's a midwinter festival-of-lights. Solid start. Everyone loves those. Brightness and festival cheer, in the long cold winter nights, is practically a need for many. The holiday mostly skates by just on being the winter light festival for the Jews. A+. Or, really, we should knock that down to an A, because Chanukah usually comes too early to be ideal for this purpose, but -- still, quite good.

Traditional food (side dishes). Latkes are incredibly popular, and for excellent reason. If you're trying to settle on a food that everyone will love, "fried potatoes" is a damn good choice.

CHANUKAH: THE NEUTRAL

Symbols. There's really just one that matters: the chanukiyah (nine-branched menorah). Which is, on paper, a very cool and snappy symbol. Distinctive silhouette, ritual engagement, plus the allure of fire. But it loses a lot of points for the fact that you don't actually light the whole damn thing, and get the proper visual effect, until the very end of a long-ass holiday when everyone's enthusiasm and attention have ebbed. On the first night, in particular, you light just two candles in your chanukiyah, and it looks lopsided and sad.

Traditional food (sweets). Jelly donuts are fine, I guess, if uninspiring and uninspired. Chanukah gelt is pretty lame as candy goes...but from a holiday-design perspective, it's hard to go too far wrong with giving kids candy.

Music. "Maoz Tzur" is kinda pretty. "Oy Chanukah!" is kinda fun. That's pretty much it, barring some silly kids' music (and I guess that Adam Sandler thing). Nothing that will knock anyone's socks off. But, honestly, two decent songs is more than many good holidays have.

Gifts. Being the big annual gifting holiday is a double-edged sword. It's some super-powerful mojo, culturally speaking. People are obsessed with giving and receiving gifts, in a way that's very hard to excise or evade, no matter how often you trot out your utilitarian language about deadweight loss. Chanukah gets a lot of its traction out of the fact that it's the holiday where you get presents. But. (a) In the modern world, the gifting holiday is unavoidably a locus of stress and misery for many people, and Chanukah doesn't have nearly enough upside serving to support that burden. (b) Chanukah is bad at being a gifting holiday. The gifting is not well-integrated into the event, it's a tacked-on thing copied over from Christmas, and it shows. There's no real ritual surrounding it, no presents-under-the-Christmas-tree equivalent, certainly no Santa Claus. Worse yet, the eight-day-holiday thing means that either you need a set of gifts whose awesomeness is equally divisible by eight (mega-awkward), or else you have inconsistencies and disappointments.

CHANUKAH: THE BAD

Theme. What is the holiday about, when everything is said and done? What is our key takeaway message from all the shit we're doing. "God is great, God looks out for His people, God performs mighty miracles." Stop. Shut up. You fail. That's every holiday, if you're operating within a religious tradition. You need something more than that, something powerful and deep and important and special, to be even halfway-decent as a holiday. But for the vast majority of Jews (including Jews in the most orthodox and observant denominations), that's pretty much all you get. Because...

Mythology. The story of Chanukah, the holiday's narrative raison d'etre, is just unconscionably bad. In some extremely vague sense, it's a story about Jews overthrowing foreign oppressors and casting off foreign influences...which is already pretty bad from a modern liberal perspective, we don't like jingoistic ethnonationalism these days. But the actual events of the Chanukah story are less about Jews-against-foreigners than they are about Jews-against-other-Jews. It is a story about fanatics seizing power and murdering cosmopolitans. Virtually everyone hates that shit, up to and including the most tribal-minded Jews. The rabbis of the Talmud were pretty iffy about Chanukah for exactly this reason, and didn't talk about it much, with the result that the holiday doesn't have much in the way of supporting cultural infrastructure. And you really can't tell the Chanukah myth without that horrible stuff; it's so baked-in that it gets incorporated into even the most sanitized propagandistic Hebrew-school versions of the tale (with exactly the effects that you'd expect on Hebrew school students). The miracle of the oil feels like a tacked-on narrative coda, because it is, because without it the only possible moral of the story would be "kill your neighbor if he's not pious enough for you." But it's much too little, much too late. The miracle of the oil is super lame by miracle standards: no one is saved from danger, there are no memorable SFX, the whole thing is relevant only to the rituals of a long-vanished Temple.

[There are several lessons that can be learned from this particular problem, at multiple levels of abstraction.]

Structure. You can have a good eight-day holiday, but a festival of that length needs an arc. The days need to be distinct from each other. You need to be either building up to a climax, or -- more commonly, as with Passover and [the twelve days of] Christmas -- coming down from a main celebration at the beginning in a long pleasant haze of semi-special time. Chanukah is flat and internally undifferentiated, except for the addition of more candles to the chanukiyah. You can't sustain real holiday feeling that long, and there's no particular day on which you're supposed to do anything special, so it all just turns into a mush of "how much do we care right this moment?"

Activities. The traditional dreidel game is the worst, most boring, most unbalanced game in the history of games. Pushing it on children only makes those children hate Chanukah, and Judaism, and games, and you.

Traditional food (entrees). There's no classic Chanukah dish that can serve as a viable main course, unless you're one of those people who can happily eat fried potatoes as an entire meal. This is a glaring omission. It's particularly bad for Chanukah, because Chanukah has so little else going for it that it really needs to lean hard on the standard holiday "gather for a festive meal" thing.

Social role. As many people will eagerly tell you, Chanukah was a pretty minor holiday for most of Jewish history; it got big largely because of a marketing push in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly because people got scared about the prospect of the younger generations assimilating, and wanted to give them a holiday to compete with Christmas. Which is maybe the worst idea that anyone has ever had. For more reasons that I can easily list here, modern Western Christmas is an absolute SSS-tier holiday, one of the very best of all time. Setting yourself up as a direct competitor to Christmas -- inviting your own people to make that comparison -- is tantamount to telling them that your traditions and your community are worthless and weak, and that they should join the ranks of the gentiles. And that would be true even if your own offering were something halfway decent. Trying to do it with Chanukah...it's like Estonia declaring war on the US. It's the ultimate "we have food at home." It is, if you'll pardon my saying so, Christian rock.

#holiday analysis

159 notes · View notes

brostateexam · 5 months

Text

I watched all four hours of the video about plagiarism on YouTube and my key takeaway is that YT has helped aid millions of people in sealing themselves in some kind of idealized form of Plato's Cave, where they are either unable or unwilling to do things like read books, go to the library, or even browse Wikipedia. Truly fascinating.

I remember people saying that YT would usher in an era of citizen journalism that would shake institutions. Maybe it has done a bit of that, at some point, in some places, I don't want to say it hasn't. But I think it's indisputable that there are many people in the world, disproportionately young people but people of all ages, who are strapping themselves into a passive entertainment machine and then refusing to leave its comforts to learn anything.

156 notes · View notes

avidvampirehunter · 6 months

Text

Some key takeaways from this moment:

1. We have confirmed the existence of two brushes.

2. The first one is an "ancient" brush. But how ancient? And what was it used for that so greatly removed it of it's power that the Crafter felt he needed another one?

3. Amateresu acknowledges that the true Calamity was never Yato, but the Crafter. Yato is not a god of Calamity, he is a god that slays Calamity.

4. Even though "Hakki" was made in a fashion that would be abominable in the eyes of the heavens, Amateresu commends her actions as well as Yukine, a bonafide Hafuri vessel, which says alot about Amateresu's opinion of her.

4.5. She talks about "Yato-gami" like the concept of him is dead, but is the person of him dead, or just the nickname he went by?

5. Back to point 2—what was the ancient brush used for, and why would the Crafter hold onto it? Could it be that its power was used up doing something MAJOR, and to not hold onto it and risk destruction be risking breaking whatever curse it was sustaining? Was the Tsukiyomi theory right all along, and the Crafter used the brush in ancient times to "overwrite" his true name? Does that give greater meaning to these two scenes?

From this:

And this?

6. After the Crafter is destroyed and his false reality is broken, BOTH Koto-no-has began to fade away. Yato was only beginning to disappear while IN that false reality, so even if he really was Tsukiyomi all along, it makes sense that he would start to disappear in the world in the same way Hiyori became a shinki—temporarily and illegitimately.

7. AND if Yato is a facsimile of Tsukiyomi (Amateresu's brother) then it makes sense why she would seem so confused about his name "Yato" when he has an audience with her. After all, if she knows his true name, then why ask here? (She later goes on to prove to the Heavens that they are innocent with the trial in Chapters 70-71).

What are your thoughts? Amateresu knows a lot more than what she has said. Now that the ancient Koto no Ha is broken, what does that mean for Yato?

#noragami #noragami spoilers #yatori #noragami manga #tsukiyomi theory

160 notes · View notes

orshii · 6 days

Text

Will I ever see you again? CHAPTER 2: Slow Down

Author: orshii

Pairing: Kim Hongjoong x reader

Warning: cursing, violence, alcohol consumption, drug use

Word count: 5 k

Summary: You were left alone with your brother, Yunho, and his best friend Hongjoong, after your parents' death. Yunho had someone to grieve with, but you? You had no one as your brother and his best friend pushed you away, singing becoming your only savior. There was one rule that Yunho made inside his friend group: “Don’t touch my sister”. And for this reason, Hongjoong had always kept his distance. But one night, you find yourself in danger. And from then on, Hongjoong does not leave your side. He is suddenly overprotective of you, and your relationship shifts and becomes fraught with tension and unspoken feelings, with secrets lurking beneath the surface and a painful past haunting you. Will you find out the secrets your brother and best friend have been keeping away from you? Will you be able to finally free yourself from your cruel past?

Will you fall in love amidst the chaos around you?

A/N: Chapter 2 is here finally, sorry for updating so late, I just needed to figure out some things in the story. More secrets are coming to the surface and their connection gets a little...hotter. Poor Wooyoungie tho. Idk about you but I love this possessive Hj haha, and it'll get more interesting. Thank you for reading, byee!

Taglist: @bvidzsoo @vixensss @deltamoon666 @scarfac3 @chatsgotmytongue @xiang-zalea (taglist is open if interested)

The four men stared at me like they were the hunters and I was their prey.

"Now that fucker, Yunho, will give back the money he owns us, for sure." The tallest man said, stepping closer to me.

I slowly stood up; they were only inches apart from me. I inhaled deeply, trying to get myself together. There was no point in panicking. No one was here to save me, I needed to save myself. I looked around, two men were standing on my right side and the other two were on my left side. They were blocking my car, the takeaway food was splashed on the dirty ground, and my bag with my keys was meters away from me, getting to my car wasn't a choice now; I needed to run.

"What money?" I asked and slowly, very carefully stepped back, trying to appear confident.

"Your brother robbed us, and took all of our money, so he will pay now." Again, the tallest man stepped closer to me as I stepped back. I guessed he was their leader.

He grabbed my chin and lifted it aggressively, "We should play a little with this slut." His mouth was barely inches away from my face. I felt disgusted.

Fuck, this isn't good. I needed to think, very quickly. Suddenly, Hongjoong’s words were echoing in my brain.

If your timing is perfect, your enemy will be on the floor in seconds.

I remembered what Hongjoong taught me. Four against one isn't fair. I can't just knock them all out. A stupid plan started to form in my mind as I took in my surroundings carefully, analyzing where I could run, and I knew— It was now or never baby. The man was trying to say something when I suddenly shouted.

"Look, what is that?!" I said as the four men looked behind themselves. I quickly punched the man in front of me, right in his solar plexus, and he was on the floor in seconds. But I had no time to wander around. I started to run, run for my fucking life. I ran opposite my car, into the dark streets. I looked behind me and the three men were running after me, the fourth a little behind. I was breathing heavily, I wasn't used to running, it was ridiculous, this predicament was a joke. Adrenaline crawled through my body as I was still running, and looking behind my back, I saw the four men slowing down. I guess they weren’t used to running, fuckers. I knew this town just like the back of my hand, so I knew a place where I could hide, I just needed to get there.

I ran down short and narrow streets, turning left, then right. I don't fucking know what kept me going, but the adrenaline pumping through my body gave me some kind of superpower. I even climbed over fences; I was running like the Flash. I didn't recognize myself, it was as if someone kept me going, giving me the power to go, to not stop. Then I let myself look behind me again, and I saw no one.

However, I didn't stop running until I reached an old building where we always played with Yunho when we were little. The memories suddenly hit me at once: numerous times when we’d snuck out with Yunho to play here because somehow, we felt happy and safe here. That is why I came to this place, it always gave us security, making me believe that I would be safe this time too. When I finally went into the building and sat down, I held my breath for a short minute, just to make sure no one was following me, and that was when I finally started to panic. Suddenly, everything hit me like I was a punching bag. I took quick breaths, trying to understand what the hell happened mere minutes ago.

Did they try to kill me? Who knows what the hell they wanted to do to me…

What the fuck did Yunho get into? What money were they talking about?

My body was shaking from running and from the overwhelming emotions that flew through my system. I started sobbing, lifting my knees to my chest, grabbing my hair with my hands. Then I started to laugh, at this whole situation, at the fact that my stupid plan worked. I needed to cry because I did not know what all of this was, I was so confused about what just happened. My heart was beating fast, it felt like it might explode at some point. After ten minutes, somehow, I got myself together, and after breathing in and out a few times, I pulled my phone out to text Yunho.

ME: Someone fucking attacked me, and they talked about some money you owe them. What the fuck Yunho?

For a moment, quiet overtook the abandoned house, and then suddenly, my phone's screen lit up. Yunho was calling me.

"Where the fuck are you?" I heard Yunho's voice immediately as I picked up.

"At the old abandoned house." I told him.

"Are you okay?" He asked worriedly.

"Yes, I ran away." I said quietly.

"Stay there, don't go out until we arrive!" He said, his voice furious, and hung up quickly.

I waited in the dark, it swallowed me like I was one with it. I just stared at the white wall in front of me, which seemed almost black from the lack of lightning as it barely lit up the abandoned house due to the streetlights being faulty.

I didn’t even realize how much time had gone by when I finally heard a car quickly stopping with its tires screeching and two doors slamming shut. I stood up and looked out the window, and saw Yunho and Hongjoong. Of course, Hongjoong just couldn’t stay out of this. I stepped out of the building and was met with two pairs of worried eyes. Yunho quickly ran towards me and hugged me.

"Fuck, are you okay?" He grabbed my face to check if I was hurt.

"Yes, I'm okay." I pushed his hands away.

"What the fuck happened?" Hongjoong asked, stepping closer to me and checking my body, trying to find an injury.

"I was at Granny's ordering some food and when I went out to my car, suddenly four men appeared and they pushed me onto the ground—and they were talking about some fucking money and Yunho—I somehow ran away, I was lucky, I guess—I don't get it, what the hell—who are they?" I quickly told them what happened, stammering as I felt overwhelmed again.

"Fuck, this is because you couldn't shut your mouth, Yunho!" Hongjoong said, angrily looking at him.

"What the fuck, Hong?! It was necessary for our plan, what else could I do, do tell me, please!" Yunho shouted at Hongjoong.

"They fucking attacked Y/N! Who knows what the hell they are going to do next time." Hongjoong pointed at me. "Your plan is shit; we can't do this anymore." Hongjoong stepped closer to Yunho, staring at him with sharp eyes.

Again. Like I was not even fucking there.

"What plan? Oh, my God, tell me something for fuck's sake!" I shouted at them.

They looked at me like they were surprised I was there too.

"It's none of your business, we will take care of it, don't worry." Yunho said, trying to hold my hand.

I scoffed and pushed him away. "Yeah, of course. Take me to my car." I went to Hongjoong's venom-green Mustang Shelby and sat in the backseat.

I was so fucking angry, I felt sick. The fact that they never tell me anything at all, made me feel again like I was just a fucking object, never truly acknowledged and cared for. I hated them. Yunho and Hongjoong.

As I got angrier, so did the familiar melody I heard playing in my head again…

≫The furious dragon sped through the clouds

Just to bring the storm to the people who deserve it≪

When we reached my car, as soon as Hongjoong stopped, I got out of his car and went to collect my things that were still scattered around the dirty ground, and went right to my car, sitting in it. I locked the car so Yunho couldn't sit inside too, because I knew, that from now on, they were going to turn into my fucking babysitters. I turned the engine on and quickly drove away, not wishing to see them.

The next morning when I woke up, I felt like a zombie. I hadn't slept well because I had nightmares about dark figures trying to push me down to the ground, just until I drowned in the sudden water that appeared out of nowhere, hands that seemed like shadows pulling me deep down to the bottom of the ocean.

I went down to the kitchen so that I could eat something before I attended my classes as yesterday night I had no appetite to eat anything. When I was close to the kitchen’s door, I overheard Yunho and Hongjoong talking.

"We have to find them before they find us." I heard Yunho say, his voice still raspy as I assumed he got up just a few minutes ago.

"Yes, but we don't know where they are. They are not the foolish type to stay in plain sight, this whole thing seems to run way deeper than it initially seemed to." Hongjoong said in a low voice.

"I easily fooled them still." I said stepping inside the kitchen, and they looked at me surprised.

"You just had luck." Hongjoong said with fierce eyes, looking at me only for a second before he returned to the table.

"Are you kidding me?! If I would've panicked, I wouldn't be fucking here." I scoffed at him, going to the counter to grab a glass and pour some water for myself.

"I'm glad you were smart and tricked those motherfuckers, I'm proud of you." Yunho came to stand next to me, pecked my temple, and ruffled my hair.

I wanted to slap him, but he slipped away chuckling before I could, "You coming to Mist tonight? There's going to be a party." Yunho asked.

I shrugged, "I don't know, I'll speak to Yeosang to see if he’s going."

"Alright. I'll grab my stuff and then we can go, Hong." Yunho said leaving the kitchen.

I poured water into my glass and turned around, leaning against the counter.

I looked straight into Hongjoong's eyes, "Will you tell me who those men were? I want to help you; who knows, maybe I can recognize the ones that attacked me." I said, lifting the glass to my mouth to drink, but Hongjoong stood up and came right in front of me and grabbed my wrist, stopping me from drinking it.

"Don't try and bump your nose into things you shouldn’t, just be a good girl and stay low. You saw what happened, so just stay the fuck out of this." His eyes burned me like I was a match waiting to be lit up, burn me down until I was nothing.

"You make it sound like this is my fucking fault. Is it my fault that four men tried to fucking kill me? Were you there? No. So stop telling me to ‘stay low’, when none of this is my fault." I yelled at him furiously. I was sick of this shit already. His face remained impassive and cold, but I didn’t care anymore. I didn't want to see him, so I went back to my room to get ready for my classes having lost my appetite.

The furious melody did not want to leave my mind again, playing it over and over, until my mind found the right words to match with.

≫The world sees you as a fool

Like you are the fault in the stars≪

My classes went by quickly, thank God. I was with Yeosang the whole day and we decided we'd go to the party. We really needed some partying before our exams started. It was a good excuse to let go of everything. I needed to catch a break from my thoughts because if not, I might drown in them.

Yeosang helped me choose my outfit for the party, which consisted of a tight black skirt, paired with a white crop top, alongside black high boots reaching up to my knees. My hair fell onto my shoulders naturally, and I put on some make-up and accessories. Yeosang wore black ripped jeans and a green blouse with a low cut, his collarbones exposed. He put on a necklace with a padlock on it. I figured he wanted to find someone that would have the key to open it. Well, anyways, that’s what I told him, making him laugh, until he suddenly turned serious and said,

‘True’. I was sure he’d find someone tonight because, damn, he looked so beautiful I got nothing on him.

When we arrived at Mist it was already crowded. It took us longer to arrive because on our way, we decided to buy Whiskey and then we secretly drank it on the bus, on our way towards the club. We laughed loudly during the ride, conversing animatedly, drawing attention to us, pissing the people off around us. So, by the time we had arrived, we were already tipsy enough to start dancing, joining the crowd. We became one with the dancing bodies, becoming one of them. This was what I needed—To get away from my thoughts.

I felt the rhythm of the music slowly engulf my being, spreading from my head to my toes. The strangers’ bodies hugged around us as I held Yeosang's hand while we jumped up and down happily to the strong rhythm of the music. The music was loud, the colorful lights blinding us as we danced like there was no tomorrow. After a while, we decided to drink something as we had started sobering up, and that wasn't the plan at all. So, we went to the bar.

"Two gin tonics and tequila shots, please." I shouted to the bartender, trying to speak over the loud music. I knew him, he was from Yunho's friend circle, Jung Wooyoung.

"Isn't that too much for a pretty girl like you?" Wooyoung looked at me with his sharp foxy eyes. He had two piercings near his eyebrows, making him look even more intimidating. He wore a simple black T-shirt paired with ripped jeans. He had a few earrings and rings too. I couldn’t lie; he was handsome as hell.

"It's not, and I'm here too." Yeosang stepped in, next to me, staring at Wooyoung pointedly.

Wooyoung chuckled as he started preparing our drinks. I looked around, but I didn't see Yunho anywhere. Maybe he was making out with a girl, somewhere deep in the crowd, or was trying to piss Mingi off. Suddenly, my eyes landed on someone. Someone who was smiling, and that someone was Kim Hongjoong. I promise to God, it was a rare sight to see his smile, let alone hear his laugh. A girl was next to him and as he leaned against the wall, he whispered something in her ear while holding her waist. It was quite obvious what he was doing, shamelessly flirting with her. It was weird seeing Hongjoong like this, he never really did things like that. At least not when I was around.

He was wearing jeans that were two colored, these colors the opposite of his hair black and white hair. The top part of his body was hugged by a white T-shirt and a denim jacket, black boots his choice of footing for the night. He had a good sense of fashion, that was obvious.

The longer I kept staring at him, the more I realized I should do what he was doing. I should let go and just feel free for one night, if possible. I turned back to face Wooyoung as he had finished mixing our drinks. Yeosang and I downed the tequila shots right away, and then, he suddenly leaned closer to me.

"Can I leave you here for a little bit? I might have found the one holding the key to my padlock." Yeosang winked at me.

"Yes, of course, go." I smiled at him, pushing him away playfully. I watched as he disappeared between the dancing bodies when suddenly an idea came to my mind. I turned towards Wooyoung again.

"Do you have something—stronger? You know…" I looked at him while trailing off, hoping he knew what I meant.

He slightly frowned at me, a small smirk present on his lips, "You mean, pills?"

"Yeah." I said, trying to sound and look convincing.

"I do have some." He kept his sharp eyes on me while he wiped a wet glass dry, "Do you want some, pretty girl?"

"I do, actually." I looked at him, batting my eyelashes at him with a sweet smile on my lips.

I wasn’t really sure if he knew whose sister I was, and so, I wanted to take advantage of that.

He leaned over the counter, face close to mine, "If you dance with me, I'll give you some." He whispered so close to my lips that they almost touched mine.

I looked down at his lips, then up into his sharp eyes, “Don't you need to work?"

"My shift is over, pretty one." He said smiling charmingly, never taking his eyes off me.

"Okay." I agreed in the end, I could use some fun too.

He smirked and moved away from me to get the pill, and then walked around the counter. He stepped closer to me as he held something in his hand. Then he slowly poked his tongue out and placed the pill on it, his eyes never leaving mine. He raised one of his eyebrows as if he meant to say, 'Take it if you want it', while leaning towards me. My heart started racing. Fuck, he looked so hot like this, why wouldn't I take this one-time opportunity? I slowly leaned down, closer to his face, feeling his hot breathing puffing against my lips. But he didn’t wait until I was close enough to kiss him. Wooyoung eagerly closed the distance between our lips, crashing them together like there wasn't a pill slipping past our entangled tongues. I felt when the pill finally was passed onto my tongue, into my mouth, but we didn’t pull away straight away. His lips moved against mine, rushed, his tongue discovering my mouth as I moved mine along his. My arms slowly crawled around his neck as he pulled me closer to him by my waist. That is until I felt a strong hand grabbing my left shoulder, yanking me away from Wooyoung. He bit my bottom lip painfully due to the sudden motion. I could taste blood, mingled with Wooyoung’s saliva.

I turned to look stunned at the one who yanked me off, it being none other than Hongjoong. He looked so furious I was afraid he might kill someone. And I wasn't joking as he grabbed Wooyoung's shirt and pulled him close aggressively, his T-shirt threatening to tear apart at any second.

"What the fuck were you thinking, Wooyoung?" Hongjoong said in a low tone, he was shaking as he held Wooyoung.

"Dude, chill, what the fuck did I do?!" Wooyoung asked, looking confused.

"Did you give her pills? Are you insane?" Hongjoong pushed Wooyoung a bit, still not letting him go.

"Yes, because she asked. Now let go of me, you fucker." Wooyoung pushed Hongjoong's hands off himself. As Hongjoong released him, Wooyoung tried to straighten his T-shirt.

"She’s Yunho's sister; you should be grateful I was the one who found you two like this." Hongjoong said, looking at me for a second, making me feel little under his sharp gaze.

"So what? It should bother Yunho, not you. What?” Wooyoung asked, lifting his pierced eyebrow, “Are you fucking her behind his back?"

It truly was the worst idea to provoke Hongjoong, because as he heard the things Wooyoung uttered, he lost his morality. He didn’t care that the guy in front of him was one of his best friends. He punched Wooyoung with the force of a boxer, obviously, and it made Wooyoung fall to the ground immediately. Luckily, Hongjoong didn’t knock him out, I guess he still had that very little sanity in himself still. I gasped, however, hardly believing my eyes. Did Hongjoong just hit Wooyoung?!

"What the fuck, Hongjoong, are you out of your mind?!" I shouted at him, my body trembling from the sudden anger I felt.

He suddenly turned around, coming towards me. He grabbed my chin and lifted it up to look straight into my eyes. "Spit it out!" He commanded like I didn’t have a choice at all.

I poked out my tongue, just to show him that there wasn’t anything on it anymore, "Fuck off, you are not my brother Hongjoong! You are acting ridiculous." I said to him, pushing him away and turning my back to him. I wanted to go back and dance, lose myself to the music and the people around me.

But suddenly, Hongjoong pulled me back by my wrist. "I'm going to take you home, right now." He said with a face void of emotion, making me unable to read what he thought and felt, it was fucking annoying.

"I'm not going anywhere!" I shouted at him, trying to free my wrist from his hold.

He stepped even closer, holding my wrist harsher. I was sure his grasp was going to leave black and blue marks, "Yes, you are!"

But I couldn't really do anything as he dragged me out of the buzzing place, towards his venom-green Mustang, still squeezing my wrist painfully. He opened the passenger side door and pushed me inside. I didn’t recognize this Hongjoong, he was someone else, some kind of demon had taken over him, fighting for who would be in control. I was shaking as I felt terrified of the thought that he might hurt me; he could do anything to me if he wanted to. He probably saw me shake because he broke the silence as he started driving.

"I won't hurt you, Y/N. I would never." He said quietly, looking forward as his hands clenched around the steering wheel.

Still, I looked down at my wrists, where some faint red bruises started to appear. I just leaned my head against the window, to gaze out at our moving surroundings. Tears started appearing in my eyes as I suddenly felt so many emotions all at once that I couldn't handle. I started feeling dizzy, remembering the pill I took. It finally kicked in, making me feel numb, as if my soul left my body. This was the feeling I craved for, but not in this setting, I’d rather be anywhere but here. I cradled my wrist to my chest, 'Yes, you would never…'

The long-forgotten melody crept into my mind, trying to break through my thoughts, break my walls down, to save me from there. I let go as words broke through my walls.

≫The moon has two sides as well, a dark and a bright side

Who knows which one will light the dark at night≪

“Why did you kiss him?” Hongjoong suddenly broke the deafening silence.

I looked at him with a frown, “Because I wanted to?” Words barely came out of my mouth as everything felt blurry.

He suddenly stepped on the gas pedal, speeding down the way home, “And do you want him?” His voice got lower as he clenched the steering wheel, his knuckles white.

“What are you talking about?” I was looking at his side profile, watching as he got angrier than he was before. He floored the gas pedal and we were flying down the silent streets.

“Do. You. Want. Him?” He glanced my way, a dangerous glint in his eyes. I held onto the door as I was pushed back into my seat by the sudden force.

“For fuck’s sake Hongjoong, slow down! Are you crazy?!” I shouted frightened as he continued speeding.

“Answer my question!” His voice got even louder now, and he had to shout over the sound of the loud engine of his Mustang.

My heart was thumping like crazy, breathing heavily. I felt overwhelmed and overstimulated from the drug and the alcohol, and now the adrenaline too, the sudden speed making me feel like I was about to collapse any time.

“No!” I shouted, “I don’t want him! Just please slow down.” My voice cracked as I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore.

Then, as if his sanity finally returned, he slowed down, not daring to look at me. When he pulled up in front of our house, it was quiet. It was quiet, but at the same time, it was the loudest as my brain was full of loud noises. I looked at his side profile, I could only see the black side of his hair, his dark side as he looked like he was still battling with his inner torment, biting his lower lip. I didn't dare move; I was scared if I did, he’d do something brash again.

He then slowly looked at me, "Are you shaking?" He looked panicked.

I couldn't control my body, there was too much happening at once. The alcohol mixed with the pill, I couldn't even think—of course, I was shaking.

I just looked down at my hands, as the world spun around me.

"Fuck, Y/N!" He took my hand, my wrist now bruised.

I looked up, just to see him looking worried. He seemed like he couldn't even believe he was the one to harm me. Yet now, he held my hand in the most delicate way possible, holding it as if it were a treasure.

"I'm so sorry, Y/N, please forgive me." He looked into my eyes with his own teary ones. He was finally allowing me to see the real him, he lowered his walls.

He raised my hand towards his lips and left little kisses on the bruises, whispering little apologies against my skin, as if he could heal it like that.

I watched him, still struggling to process what was happening, "Please, just take me to my room, I don't feel good." I closed my eyes and it was a mistake because I felt like I was on a roller-coaster. He snatched his head up quickly and opened his door when he saw my face. He ran around the car to open the passenger door.

"I got you, sugar." He whispered, leaning down to slowly help me out of the car and hold me up bridal style, holding me close to his chest so that he wouldn't drop me. I hid my face in his neck, his scent hugging me around. It was dark, yet still sweet like honey.

I felt us going up the stairs after Hongjoong had managed to unlock the front door and walk inside the dark house, finally reaching my room. He slowly, and very carefully placed me down on my soft bed. I closed my eyes as he pulled my boots down.

"Do you need water or something else?" He leaned down, holding himself up by his right hand placed next to my head, his two-colored hair falling into his eyes. His other hand caressed my cheekbones. I couldn't speak, so I just shook my head no.

Suddenly, we were staring at each other as if we were like two magnets, not even blinking.

"Kiss me." I suddenly whispered, surprising myself too, having suddenly found my voice.

"I can't, and you know that." Hongjoong whispered, leaning down closer to me, even though he had stated just the opposite of his actions.

"It's just a fucking kiss, don't be a scared little cat, Joong." I whispered against his lips, brushing my thumb over his soft lips, trying to tease him. He would break eventually. And I liked playing games.

I don't know what came over me, but I just needed to kiss him desperately. Even though he treated me like shit, and shouted at me, I was still lost in his eyes, which stared into mine with a flaring desire. He continued looking at me as if he was fighting with himself, trying not to make a bad decision.

"Please." I whispered, looking up at him pleadingly.

"Fuck." Then he suddenly crashed his lips against mine. He tasted sweet, like strawberry cake. The kiss wasn't hurried, it was slow as our lips moved together passionately. I moved my hands slowly up, to bury them in his hair, pulling him even closer to myself. He kissed me even more animatedly, possessive almost as if he were an addict and I was his drug. But the moment didn’t last for long, emotion dissipating just as fast as it came, as we suddenly heard the front door slamming shut. Hongjoong immediately jumped away, standing up to his full height.

"Shit." He ran his fingers through his messy hair. "This never happened." He looked at me with eyes ablaze as I continued lying in my bed.

I pushed myself up onto my elbows to look at him better, "Yeah, I just knew you couldn't resist me." I grinned at him.

Hongjoong scoffed, "You’re crazy." And then he left me there, in the dark, as I still felt his lips on mine.

≫Two sins met each other

Just to collapse together like magnets≪

As they were just outside my room, I heard Hongjoong telling Yunho that he drove me home because I wasn't feeling well, and then Yunho thanked him footsteps fading.

Not knowing that Hongjoong had kissed his little sister merely a few minutes ago.

-Previous Part- Next Part>

61 notes · View notes

kaijutegu · 1 year

Text

Proper Snake Hook Use

One of my biggest problems with reptile handling on social media is the improper use of snake hooks. We see this a lot from big names in the reptile community, and far and away the worst is Jay Brewer of The Reptile Zoo/Prehistoric Pets. A while ago, I commented on his inappropriate use of a snake hook to agitate and improperly handle a large snake, and ever since I have been looking for images that show the proper handling of a dangerous snake.

Today I saw a really good example of appropriate snake hook use from The Kentucky Reptile Zoo. KRZ is... I think it’s fair to say the most important venom facility in the United States. They actually aren’t really a zoo- the vast majority of their animals are not on display or publicly viewable, and their primary mission isn’t education or conservation. It’s venom production.

They keep lots of venomous species and regularly milk them for pharmaceuticals and research. Venom from their facility is used to make antivenom, as well as life-saving heart and anti-cancer medications. In other words, this facility bothers its snakes for a reason, and it’s not for social media views. (I like their content and find it highly educational.)

So today, I thought I’d break down why I like this video and show off how it features the safe use of a snake hook to control a dangerous animal and keep a handling situation completely under control.

The video features a small bushmaster, a South American pit viper. At the start of the video, the animal is out and quite calm.

The handler makes an initial first pass with the hook, lift the snake’s head off its body and isolating it. Notice that the snake’s body language doesn’t change much; there’s a little tension but no noticeable distress.

The snake slips away from the hook.

The handler repositions and gently pins the snake’s head against the ground.

While the snake’s head is under control, the handler firmly grips the snake behind the head...

...supports the body with his hand (not the hook)...

...and prepares the snake for venom extraction. The hook is on the floor at this point, as it’s no longer needed for the safe handling of this snake.

Here are some key takeaways:

The hook was never used as the sole source of support for the snake’s body

The hook was never used to agitate the animal

The hook was used to control the head without applying too much pressure

The snake’s body language was observed and respected; when it initially pulled away from the hook’s pass, the handler repositioned and tried again

Even during venom extraction, the snake was not particularly agitated; part of this comes from the firm, secure, but not too strong grip that is used, and part of it comes from the snake being used to this behavior. The handler is doing everything he can to keep the snake calm and to support its body during handling.

Ultimately, I think this is a perfectly ethical piece of venomous/dangerous snake handling content. It shows an animal that is being treated well and handled appropriately. The handlers are trained professionals who are well-versed in venomous snake safety, and at no point is the animal provoked or aggravated for attention. While venom extraction doesn’t hurt the snake, it can still be stressful- and it’s up to the handler to do everything they can to ensure that the snake is safe.

#reptiblr #reptile #animal welfare #reptile handling #venomous snake

705 notes · View notes

bakedbakermom · 7 months

Text

Good Morning

Rated X // 2300 words // Read on A03

tagging @today-in-fic @ao3feed-msr

Summary:

He loves her first thing in the morning.

Notes:

A little smutbiscuit for Kinktober 2023. Prompts: morning sex, frottage, (light) somno. I was 3 or 4 days into writing this fic when the painfully talented @msrafterdark posted this piece and it was like fate and the universe had come together.

He loves her first thing in the morning.

Well, he loves her all the time—volleying theories back and forth across the office over burnt coffee and crappy photocopies, singing along off-key to whatever radio station comes through the static three hours into a road trip from one corner of nowhere to another, lounging on a tiny motel bed with sharp springs and a pile of reports spread out like snow across scratchy blankets. He loves her on his couch sharing a beer after a long day, in her kitchen as they dole out boxes of takeaway (broccoli beef extra spicy for him, kung pao tofu for her, and she always nabs the carrots from his shrimp fried rice), nestled against him with her tiny feet propped up on the coffee table and a bad movie on TV. He loves her when she presses her sweet lips to his and breathes hot into his mouth, when she wraps her smooth white legs around his waist and whimpers “more,” when she clenches around him in the dark as she shatters on a gasp of his name. Oh yes, he definitely loves her then.

But he especially loves her first thing in the morning.

It’s something about how soft she is. Agent Scully is all crisp lines and barbed tongue, the creases of her suits pressed sharp enough to kill a man as she slices through the hallways of the Hoover Building like a red-headed sword of justice, eyes flashing blue steel. Agent Scully can unman the most cantankerous and blustering small-town sheriff with the twitch of one razored brow, can force Death itself at scalpel-point to surrender the most intimate secrets of the grave.

Agent Scully flashes through her days like a machete, too sharp to touch and so blindingly bright it hurts him to look at her sometimes. But Morning Scully. Oh Morning Scully…

Her edges blur in the evening, melting under his words and his mouth and his hands, but it takes until morning for her to grow butter-soft and creamy between the rumpled sheets of their bed—her bed or his, both are theirs, though this particular morning they’re secure behind door 42, the honeyed sunlight of a rare empty Sunday drizzling through the blinds and illuminating the intricate dance of the little dust motes that hang in the air. She sleeps on her side with her back to the window, the light catching her crimson hair in a nimbus that he thinks would inspire a better man to painting or poetry, but reduces him to gibbering wonderment.

He watches her sleep with something like awe. Her lips slack and slightly parted, still plump and red from kissing. Freckles sprinkled like cinnamon across her sleep-pinked cheeks, hair in a delightfully tousled disarray that makes him think of sunset clouds and cotton candy. There’s a little crease between her eyebrows as if she’s dreaming of something unpleasant, and he smoothes it oh so gently with his thumb. He doesn’t want to wake her; he’s not done looking yet.

The sheets have shifted as they slept, revealing the hourglass curve of her side, the mole cradled just inside the firm crest of her hip. She had whimpered last night as he tongued it, a long detour on his slow journey to the oasis between her thighs. Her body is ripe with secrets to explore, his mental map of her slowly filling in as he traverses every hill and valley. He writes “here be monsters” beneath her ribs where she is too ticklish to touch, “here be angels” on the curve of her breast where the gentle scrape of his teeth makes her breath hitch. He finds heaven in the cradle of her hips, nirvana in the fragrant skin of her neck, paradise in the lush press of her lips.

Morning Scully may be soft, but Morning Mulder is getting decidedly less so by the minute.

She stirs slightly and rolls onto her back, the sheet slipping down the slope of her breast. One rosey nipple emerges into the cool morning air, pebbling quickly into a tantalizing peak, and he can’t resist anymore. He leans over her and circles it gently with his tongue, then pulls it into his mouth. He licks and sucks, feeling her flesh tighten even more, and when he scrapes his teeth against it, her chest jumps beneath him. She sucks in a breath, and her hands come up to card slowly through his hair. “Morning, Mulder,” she murmurs, her words still slurred with sleep.

“Good morning, Scully,” he answers as his mouth slides wetly to her other breast, on which he lavishes the same attention as the first, the slow and thorough consideration of his lips and teeth and tongue. Her breathing quickens, her pulse jumping visibly beneath the soft skin of her throat, and she moans low and long. He runs one hand up her leg, and her thighs part with a contented sigh; his fingers move higher until they brush against the curls of her sex, parting them to reach the hot, slick slit beneath. Morning Scully is always putty in his hands, her limbs loose and heavy, making love to him like something from a dream. “Sleep well?”

“Mmmhmm.” Her hips move in small circles as he plays between her legs, right on the line between soothing and arousing, and a blush blooms across her chest. “Wh-what time’s it?”

“Late.” He kisses his way up her neck, suckles on her earlobe until she whimpers softly. She still hasn’t opened her eyes. “I let you sleep in as long as I could stand it. Sorry.”

“S’okay.” His fingers skim her entrance and she twitches beneath him. “This is a nice way to wake up.”

“Do you want to go back to sleep?”

Her face scrunches adorably, and she makes a grumpy whining sound in her throat. “Maybe?”

He smiles into her skin, presses his fingers just barely inside her. “Do you want me to stop while you figure it out?”

Eyes still closed, lower lip between her teeth, she smiles and shakes her head.

Her body is sleep-warm and limp as he drags her thigh over his hip, opening her to him. His erection presses into the firm flesh of her ass as he strokes her, coaxing her arousal slowly to life. He slides his fingers through the slick folds of her sex, coating them in her wetness; some of it must be from last night, when he had pressed her into the cushions of the creaking leather couch and come inside her with a cry that made the upstairs neighbor bang on the ceiling—and then again, in this bed, as she rode him like a prize pony until they both came apart at the seams. She clenched around him like a vise as they came together, and the way he spasmed inside her only set her off again, until their orgasms seemed to feed off each other in an ouroboros of pleasure that felt endless and left them both gasping, shaking, too exhausted to even roll off the wet spot, let alone clean up properly.

She’s slick halfway down her thighs.

“Fuck, Scully, you’re so wet. You feel so good.” He slides his tongue into her ear and one finger into her slippery, aching heat, and her neck arches off the bed. “You felt good last night, too, especially the second time”—and now he scrapes his teeth along the shell of her ear, slides a second finger alongside the first—“when your pussy was already full of my cum, when I could feel it leaking out of you as I fucked you.”

“Jesus, Mulder,” she gasps, and spreads herself open even more, hooking her leg behind him and shifting a little onto her side. He holds her across her stomach and gathers her partly on top of him; her head falls back on his shoulder so he can tongue the soft column of her throat, nibble the sweet ridge along her collarbone. He ruts against her as his fingers pump slowly in and out, her clit hardening beneath his thumb. One arm is still trapped against the mattress, and he wriggles it free as best he can to fondle her breast, rolling her nipple between his fingers.

She moans, squirming against him and pushing her ass deliciously against his hard length, begging for more. A quick shift of her hips, an awkward moment of fumbling, and then his cock is no longer trapped between their bodies but gliding between her slickened labia, and she brings a hand down to press him more tightly against her. He thrusts languidly, trapped between her hot little fingers and her even hotter cunt; he skims across her entrance with each stroke, rubs the head of his cock against her clit, her hips rolling in counterpoint to his sweet, unhurried rhythm. She reaches backward to grab his hair, whimpering, and his newly unoccupied hand busies itself at her other breast, groping and tweaking them in tandem.

“I love making you feel good, Scully.” His voice is velvet and gravel, his cock almost painfully hard against her molten core, and he talks to keep from embarrassing himself by coming before he’s even gotten inside her. “I love making you wet, feeling your clit pulse under my fingers, my tongue.” He licks her from shoulder to ear, leaving a glistening line of saliva along her skin, then sucks on the sensitive little spot where her jaw meets her throat. Soft little oh s spill from her lips as she grinds harder against his cock, and stars crowd his vision. “I love making you come, over and over. The sounds that you make, the way you smell, the way you squeeze me with your tight, wet cunt. ”

“Oh God.” Her whole body shudders and he feels a warm trickle of arousal coat his cock. Her face turns into the pillow, muffling the increasing volume of her moans. Greedy for the sound of her, he cups her jaw to pull her into a long, sloppy kiss, swallowing each whimper as she writhes against him with growing desperation.

“Are you awake yet, Scully?”

“Yes,” she pants helplessly against his mouth, his cock gliding between her soaked folds with almost no resistance. Soft, wet sounds fill the room, broken only by her breathy moans, his desperate panting. “More,” she manages to gasp. “God, more.”

His arm tightens around her stomach, and in one smooth move he drags her fully on top of him and scoots until his back is against the headboard. Her thighs fall to either side of his and he spreads her wide, his thick cock still thrusting along her slickened sex. She drops her head back against his shoulder and he growls, “Touch yourself,” into her ear.

A moment of hesitation, a deepening blush in her cheeks, and then she obeys. He watches her hand moving in quick tight circles over her clit, brushing the head of his cock as he slides it up and down the length of her. He slips just barely inside and she cries out, chasing him with her body when he withdraws, teasing her again and again. She gasps his name between casual blasphemies, notes in a symphony of moans and whimpers. “I want you inside me,” she finally begs. Her hand is slick with her own arousal as she wraps it around his cock, pumping him slowly, holding him against her entrance. She arches back to kiss him, plunges her tongue into his mouth, unable to stop the embarrassingly high-pitched whines coming from her throat. “Fuck, Mulder, I need you inside me when I come.”

“I live to serve,” he purrs against her mouth, and thrusts firmly upward, impaling her in one smooth motion. A loud cry pours from her throat—the neighbors are definitely going to complain again—and then she’s riding him for all she’s worth, her hips rolling and the muscles in her thighs clenching as she gallops toward release.

“Yes, oh God, Mulder, yes,” she gasps again and again, breathless and wanton, her tits bouncing in his hands as he pinches her nipples and her fingers making ever-more-frantic circles over her clit. “Close, so close, harder—”

Her words melt into a loud moan as he begins to plunge into her from below, his feet braced against the bed for leverage and his cock bumping against her cervix with every stroke. “Yes, Scully,” he hisses into her ear. “I want to feel it. Fuck me until you come.”

She’s tight and clenching around him, hotter than hell and slicker than sin, and his hand leaves her breast to join her fingers, stroking her clit together. He bites her nape, hard, and with a startled “ Oh! ” she shatters, her inner walls squeezing his cock in strong, rhythmic flutters as she gushes around him.

“Christ, Scully, did you just–?! Oh my god–!” Before she has a chance to answer or even catch her breath, he squeezes her tightly against his body and thrusts hard and fast, unable to hold back any longer. His ass lifts off the bed as he pistons in and out of her, desperate for release, and when she tightens around him again he comes with a roar—someone next door bangs on the wall—spurting hot inside her until his eyes roll back in his head and his vision goes red at the edges.

He comes down to find himself spooned against her, her ass cradled in the bowl of his hips as he softens inside her. They’ve made quite a mess, but his legs are burning like he’s been running for miles, and she’s gone completely limp against him; the last thing he can imagine is getting out of bed.

Still, he tries to be a gentleman.

“Want me to make some coffee? Then maybe a shower?”

She shakes her head against the pillow and pulls his arm tighter around her body. “I think I might be falling back asleep.”

He smiles into her hair. “Want me to wake you up a little later?”

“Absolutely.”

Hope you enjoyed! As always, comments will be printed and pasted into my little self-esteem scrapbook <3

#my writing #my fanfic #msr #msr fanfic #x files fanfic #fox mulder #dana scully #the x files #txf #xf fanfic #kinktober 2023 #good morning

162 notes · View notes