#something so i drank them one after the other like a normal person

[loveonarooftop]

cranberry tea tastes like vomit straight up if anyone didnt know

#+ive just learned that uva ursi and cranberry shouldnt be taken together bc they cancel eachother out i thought it was bc you could die or #something so i drank them one after the other like a normal person

[cheapshrimpysheep]

Spring of Canathus (AKA: They're Babies)

SUMMARY: They drank water that ended up turning them into babies. You were in charge of taking care of them while the rest of the students go looking for the antidote. What will they be like as babies?

CHARACTERS: Overblot Students (Riddle, Leona, Azul, Jamil, Vil, Idia & Malleus)

TAGS: Bullet Points, GN Reader, Fluff, Cute

WORD COUNT: An average of 350 words per character. More or less. This is distributed in a different way than I usually do.

COMMENTS: Yes, a post about what it would be like if they were babies. But I have a good excuse for this: It is canon in the Hercules TV show and I even remember watching this episode when I was younger. Episode 50 of the first season: Hercules and the Spring of Canathus. The Spring of Canathus is a pool which reverses age. Pain and Panic use it on Hercules and other character in the episode, turning them into babies.

I hope you enjoy 🧸🍼

CONTEXT: Seven bottles of a supposedly new water were delivered to NRC Housewardens. A small sample. But when they drink it they turn into babies. Sam doesn't have the antidote, but he have the information of where the spring is that they need to get the babies back to normal. The other students you know from the dorm went to get the water and you were in charge of taking care of the babies. Grim went to look for the spring with the others because he didn't want to deal with babies.

You take care of them in Ramshackle Dorm.

Riddle drank the water because it would be bad manners to refuse it. Or because of some strange rule from the Queen of Hearts.

Tantrums, a lot of tantrums.

He is an "independent" baby. You will probably lose sight of him sometimes because he started walking/crawling around to explore the house.

He always wants to eat sweets. You'll find him from time to time sneaking into the kitchen looking for cookies or something like that.

He bites anyone who irritates him. Maybe even you. But in your case, if you pretend that he hurt you a lot, he will start crying with regret and hug you.

If he gets mad at someone and you show up, he'll point to the person who annoyed him as if he's complain to you. Kind of like the "I'm gonna tell mom" thing.

When you hold him up and give him affection, he will respond with a lot of affection too and laugh a lot. But after that he will always want to be with you and be jealous of the other babies.

When you scold him and tell him not to do something again he will start crying and hug you as an apology, but he will never disobey you.

Leona drank the water, because why not?

Half the time he is sleeping which makes him peaceful. But the other half when he's awake, he's a little terror.

Like a baby lion, he wants to play, which means play fighting with other babies, so you are always separating him from the others.

He will bite and scratch you, without leaving very deep marks, because he wants to play. And you decide that it's preferable for him to bite and scratch you than the other babies.

He won't leave your side because he is lazy and you are the one who entertains him the most and gives him food. And he will always want to sleep either on your lap or on your chest.

He'll complain with those baby lion roars that sound more like grumpy meows.

If you hug him or give him too much affection, he will push you away with his little hands. But if you're not too clingy he'll headbutt your cheeks lovingly.

When he's calmer, he'll lick any small wounds he may have inflicted on you while he was playing.

If you buy toys for him, buy toys for him to bite.

There is a high chance of him attacking your cushions, sofas, curtains, etc. He will probably break things like a cat throwing a glass off the table on the floor.

When you seriously scold him that's the only time he'll cry.

Azul drank the water because he thought that if it was good he could make a deal to sell it at Mostro Lounge.

Cry baby!

He will be crying constantly at first. Until you realize he wants to go into the water.

You fill a bathtub, take his clothes off and put him in it. He turns into a little octopus merbaby.

But he is still not satisfied. After analysing the water for a second he started crying again. You then assume that he wants sea water, so you go get a bunch of salt from the kitchen and pour it all in there. Now he laughs happily.

You go to Sam's to buy some toys for Azul to play in the bathtub.

Problem: He will cry whenever you are not with him.

When you are with him in the bathroom and with one arm in the bathtub, if you get ready to get up, he will grab your arm with his little tentacles so you don't leave.

Maybe you buy Sam an aquarium to put Azul in so he can be in the room with you and the other babies.

He will cry whenever he sees you cuddling another baby. He also wants your affection!

He absolutely loves it when you pick him up.

You will end up with a lot of suction cup marks on your arms.

He's the type of baby that puts everything in his mouth and you have to be careful.

Jamil was the one who drank the water because whenever Kalim receives food he has to make sure it isn't poisoned.

He is one of the least problematic babies. He's a very quiet baby, which worries you a little.

He doesn't throw tantrums, but he doesn't seem to laugh much either. He also seems undecided whether he stays near you or not.

At first this ends up making you forget about him a little while dealing with the others. But when you realize it, you'll immediately pay attention to him.

When you pick him up for the first time, he doesn't know how to react. But as soon as you start giving him affection, he will laugh and return the affection. The others will be jealous because you're paying so much attention to him.

He can't sleep unless you rock him. Do you know about that thing that babies feel safer when they are close to their mother's heart? He only feels rested enough if he is lying on your chest and listening to your heart beating.

Since he's the one who laughs the least, you might end up paying more attention to him to make him happy, which will make others jealous, but him very happy.

Vil drank the water because he thought it was the product of an advertisement that he and his manager talked about once.

He's a grumpy baby.

He's the type to throw things when he's upset.

His tantrums may be quieter than Riddle's, but they are just as intense.

He likes to do little things like stack cubes or doodle on paper and show it to you with pride. The more you congratulate him on these little things, the more things he will do just to show them to you.

Maybe you'll end the day with a sketchbook of his drawings. (Rook will be so jealous of you)

When you pick him up and give him affection, it's the moment when he smiles and laughs more. And of course he will return the affection.

He's also the type of baby who likes to walk or crawl around, so you might lose sight of him if you're distracted.

He is fascinated by beautiful things so every now and then you can see him staring at some cute object.

If you put a video on your cell phone, or PC if you have one, he will be hypnotized watching it. And if it's something, or someone he really likes, he'll clap and get your attention so you can look at it too. If he sees Neige, he'll throw a tantrum.

Idia drank the water a little with the same thought as Leona: Why not? Somehow, Ortho found no abnormalities when it scanned the bottle.

Cry baby #2

He will never ever EVER leave your side. He's the type to hold on to your leg and never let go.

He will hide behind you, or your legs.

He will cry for you to hold him. Especially if he feels threatened by Leona or Riddle for example.

Even when you hold him to your chest, you'll feel his little hands gripping your shirt, as if he's afraid to let go.

He will also cry whenever he doesn't see you around.

He loves stuffed animals and other plushies.

He will hide a lot, which can make you lose sight of him. But as soon as he sees you looking for him, he goes straight to you for you to pick him up.

He loves learning toys, but can get tired of them quickly.

He can only sleep if you are close to him.

Of all the babies, he is the one who most reciprocates the affection you give him. He is a very enthusiastic little boy.

He also likes to draw and in the middle of the doodles you will be able to see a drawing of him, eighteen years old, with you and hearts around.

Malleus thought it was some kind of gift. The biggest surprise was that it was strong enough to affect even Malleus Draconia.

Unlike the others, only Silver and Sebek went looking for the antidote. Lilia stayed to take care of Malleus, so they stayed in Diasomnia.

Until you receive a call from Lilia because Malleus really wants to see you. AKA: he won't stop crying and throwing tantrums because he wants to be with you and the lightning strikes are getting worse and worse.

Given the circumstances of you also taking care of the other babies, you decide that it is best for Lilia and Malleus to go to Ramshackle Dorm.

When you open the door and baby Malleus sees you his curious face turns into a huge smile and he stretches his arms out to you. Lilia looks slightly apprehensive, but hands you the baby to hold. He was worried that Malleus could hurt you with his strength.

But that doesn't happen. The first moment you show discomfort, he will stop hugging you and look worried and afraid that he has hurt you. You’ll need to reassure him so he doesn't start crying.

Lillia and he stay in a separate room to avoid the risk of Malleus losing control of his powers. But, almost every 5 minutes, Lilia will call you because Malleus misses you.

He loves your cuddles and give him affection! He's the happiest baby when you're with him.

Whenever you kiss his cheeks he will laugh very loudly and happily. And he will kiss your cheeks back.

When you take too long to show up, you'll start to hear lightning outside and a storm brewing.

He will inevitably burn you by accident. With a simple sneeze. And the burns won't be worse because Lilia will protect you.

Whenever he realizes he hurt you, he will start crying and a torrential rain will start outside. You will have to reassure him, saying that everything is fine and that you will not leave him because of that.

He is very curious. Anything you do he will look closely at you.

You and Lilia will end up taking turns. while one of you is with Malleus, the other was with the rest of the babies.

Whenever you return to the other babies after Lilia's shift, they will attack you with hugs as if they miss you terribly.

YOU WILL COOK! Baby Malleus, keep Lilia busy!

Leona will want to play fight with everyone, so you will always be keeping him away from others. He will annoy Riddle and Vil and make Azul and Idia cry. Jamil is the only one who might retaliate in kind, which is not a good thing. Idia will cling to you so you can protect him from Leona.

Riddle gets along well with everyone else, but can get irritated with Vil and vice versa. They both like things to be done their way and can throw tantrums to have a toy or do something a certain way.

Azul can be clingy. And the ones most likely for him to be very attached to and want to be close to them are Jamil and Idia. These three are the least aggressive so the three of them would get along very well.

Jamil prefers to be close to Idia because he is calm and not very clingy.

If you feel sorry for Malleus for not being able to be with the other babies, you ask Lilia if any of them could be with Malleus for a little while.

You both agree that the best candidate for this would be Idia. He is calm and Lilia knows that he and Malleus get along very well. Plus, Idia is the least likely to get scared if he sees a bit of green fire.

At first Idia will be a little afraid, but then he will recognize Malleus. Idia will show toys and how to play with them while Malleus looks on attentively.

They only returned to normal when they were in their respective dorms, so they hadn't seen you since they were still babies.

Riddle will come to Ramshackle Dorm with your favourite cake or pie made by Trey.

He tries to hide his embarrassment the whole time.

He wanted to thank you for what you did, apologize for any inconvenience and ask you to please not tell anyone any details of what happened.

If you tell him how cute he was, he'll blush a lot and ask you to stop saying those things.

Leona will enter Ramshackle Dorm without knocking or anything. He'll just open the door, walk in, close the door behind him and walk right up to you.

“Listen up, herbivore! No talking about what happened! Understood?”

If you comment about him being as grumpy now as he was as a baby he'll reply with "I told you: no talking about it!"

If he sees the scratch marks on your arms, his tone will drop a little. And you'll see his ears lowered back. “Those were mine, weren't they?” and he will look a little embarrassed.

He will curse under his breath and calm down completely. Sit next to you on the couch and take one of your arms "Sorry" and give light kisses to the scratches.

Someone knocks on the door of Ramshackle Dorm and when you open it you see Azul carrying a large gift and a wide charismatic smile on his face.

The gift was something big and expensive that he knew you really wanted.

Asking him what he wanted in return for that: “Your silence. I want you to never tell anyone, much less the twins, what happened, especially the parts that concern me.”

You can tell him that he could also pay for the toys, aquarium, salt and the rest of the things you paid for him. If he complains and asks why you bought all that, you tell him he wouldn't stop crying and he will immediately agree to pay you back for all that stuff.

If he sees the cupping marks on your arms he will blush with embarrassment. “I-I'm sorry. Did I hurt you?”

You say he didn't hurt you, but the tentacles were pretty strong. He will take your hands and lightly kiss the marks.

Jamil shows up at Ramshackle Dorm with your favourite dish, freshly made by him, in a Tupperware container.

He greets you, asks how you are and then asks if he can come in. It's only after you're both in the common room that you ask if that's for him to ask you not to tell anyone about what happened.

And he will answer yes, embarrassed. And above all, you can't tell Kalim, or Azul, anything. (they don't remember what happened)

If you say there weren't many things to tell even if you wanted to and that was what worried you, he won't even know how to respond to that.

And if you start telling him how you spent time with him and played with him just to make him smile, he'll be so flattered he'll pull his hood over his face. And you'll only make it worse if you say his laugh was so cute.

He will apologize to you and say that even though he doesn't remember exactly what happened, he remembers feeling really happy whenever he was with you.

Vil trusts you enough to know that you wouldn't tell anyone anything that could harm him or his career, so he just went to the Ramshackle Dorm to thank you.

In addition to a few kisses on your cheek, he also offers you something from his cosmetics line.

If you mention the drawings he made for you, he'll brag about being an artist since he was little.

But if you start talking about the tantrums, he'll be embarrassed, and he will defend himself between laughs that, apparently, he has always been a demanding person.

Idia doesn't want to see you face to face because he is extremely embarrassed. But he also needs to make sure that you don't tell anyone what happened.

His tablet shows up at Ramshackle Dorm door.

So, you know that cell phone game you love? What if he buys you those 1230 Gems? You wouldn't say anything too detailed about what happened to anyone, right?

If you start talking about how cute he was, he'll beg you to stop. You can't see him on the tablet, but the more you talk about it, the pinker his hair gets.

He'll bounce as soon as he is sure that you've made a deal and you'll not tell anyone about what happened.

Lilia told Malleus about having to take him to you because he was throwing a tantrum about not being close to you. He even mentioned (dramatically) that he was hurt that he was no longer enough to take care of Malleus.

And because of this, when Malleus appeared at the door of Ramshackle Dorm to thank you, he was also partially embarrassed.

He thanks you for being so brave to agree to help Lilia take care of him. And he asks if he caused many problems, and that, in advance, he's sorry for all of them.

You can try to say he didn't cause any major problems, but somehow he'll be able to see the little burn marks on your arms. The kind of burns he knows only his flames can cause.

He will politely interrupt you and ask you to show him your arms.

The burns aren't many, nor are they very serious, but either way he widens his eyes in worry and regret. “You lied to me. After all, I caused a serious problem. I hurt you.” He also seems a little sulky that you tried to hide it from him.

He asks if he can touch your arms. After you give him permission, he kneels in front of you, gently grabs your arms and kisses the burns, all of them.

If you would like to read more from me, you can find it in my pinned post: INDEX

#Twisted Wonderland #twst #twisted wonderland x reader #twst x reader #disney twisted wonderland #twst imagines #twst wonderland #twst fluff #Twisted Wonderland Fluff #Riddle Rosehearts #Riddle Rosehearts x Reader #Riddle x Reader #Leona Kingscholar #Leona Kingscholar x Reader #Leona x Reader #Azul Ashengrotto #Azul Ashengrotto x Reader #Azul x Reader #Jamil Viper #Jamil Viper x Reader #Jamil x Reader #Vil Schoenheit #Vil Schoenheit x Reader #Vil x Reader #Idia Shroud #Idia Shroud x Reader #Idia x Reader #Malleus Draconia #Malleus Draconia x Reader #Malleus x Reader

[writingoddess1125]

could you do Mihawk, Luffy, Zoro and Shanks being all protective over their drunk partner, like maybe someone had put something in their drink.

also who’s your favorite person in one piece to write for? :D

Ohh I love this idea!

As for favorite to write for It absolutely Buggy! IDK Ive always had a think for creepy clowns ;3 What can i say! I would ride some red noses! MWAHAHAHAHAH 🤡

Support me on Ko-Fi please 🙏

Or support my Gofundme

⚠️ Warnings ⚠️: Drugging, Alcohol

Drunk + Spiked Partner

Mihawk

• It had been a fun evening you and him going to a grand bar and drinking together. You two had been having a great time- but Mihawk had made a mistake however. Unaware of how much of a lightweight you were and (compared to normal pirates-) having been a giggly red mess after 'only' 6 strong drinks.

• "Y-You know I always found you super attractive~" You slur out far too drunk. He looked at you amused as you drank far too much.

• "I think you have had enough" He purred out, his hand keeping you closer to him in case you slipped away. However he noticed immediately how your seemed to be getting loopier

• "I don't thinkkk" You slurred as you tried to lift the glass to your lips once more.

• Mihawks hand shot out and snatched the cup from your hand much to your surprise. Watching how he closely stared at the contents of the drink.

• Smelling the contents before he growled at the discovery. Looking at you he stood up and dumped the drink on the floor, pulling you up to your feet. He scooped you up into his arms-

• "Which Bartender gave you that drink?" He ordered, watching you as you pointed to a rather panicked looking Bartender who was trying to slip into the back. His eyes narrowing in anger at this-

• "Let's get you to sleep-" He takes you out quickly back to your gets hotel room.

• Mihawk would definitely take care of you that night and if your symptoms are worse or getting worse will take you to the hospital.

• Will brutally murder the Bartender and any of those who dare go against his actions. Using using hid small cross blade to make it more intimate

Luffy {dark}

• Luffy wasn't a drinker since it makes him sleepy- So when he agreed to go with you to celebrate he was going got food and not much else.

• As he would be careful to escort him out, his gaze darkened at this and he glanced to across the room. His eyes meeting Zoro who had been across the room the whole time and nodded once. The green haired man nodding his head as he lifted himself from the wall and stalked towards the bathroom where the injured asshole had hid in. His hand already on the blade of his sword as he walked in-

• What was being celebrated however was unknown still but you were still all to happy to have him join you.

• Eating food together while you drank, the conversation being light and happy. Both of you oblivious to the cook who had been eyeing you the whole night or when he slipped behind the bar before the waitress brought your next round of drinks.

• It only took 3 drinks before the world began to spin-

• "W-Wow I feel funny-" You slurred and rubbed your face. Trying to rub away the odd feeling washing through your body. Luffy watching you closely and touching your forehead.

• "Are you okay?" He said calmly as he checked for fever.

• He would pull the glass from you and smell it calmly. Sticking his finger in a glass and tasting it lightly, His face cringing at the taste bit also by the chalkiness at the bottom of the glass.

• "We need to go (Y/N)" He said calmly as he pulled you up to your feet carefully.

• "Here lets get you back to the ship" He said cheerfully. Taking the time to nurse you back to health and watch over you fully.

Zoro

• Will absolutely cut them down in person- He is not going to hesitate in the slightest and murder the suspect right then and there in the bar. He doesn't care if it gets the attention of others-

• It was suppose to be a simple bar date. Drinking together and your crew out enjoying the festival, you and Zoro paired together best anyway since you kept him from getting lost.

• "This has been so fun!" You say cheerfully, holding Zoros hand as you two step into the busy far.

• "Can to buy me a drink?" A young women flirted with you. You smile politely and decline, walking away quickly as she glares at you and Zoro who take a seat.

• "That chick is giving me the creeps" You mumbled, noticing a women staring you down.

• "Probably just jealousy" He said calmly pouring you two another drink as you guys cheered and talked merrily together.

• Eventually you two finishing the first bottle so you offer to get up to grab another

• Going up to the Bartender he hands you a free shot- Saying someone bought it for you. You happily accept and down it before returning to your table with the new bottle.

• After a few more drinks Zoro noticed your drowsy ways, the way you slouched forward and could barely keep your eyes open.

• "(Y/N)?" He mumbled and reached forward to touch your face. Squinting his eyes as he knew immediately what this was and watched as the Bartender & Women from before approach.

• "You did this didn't you?-" Zoro hissed in anger as he watched the duo smirk.

• Bartender: "She looks really drunk and my friend here has noticed. Sir why don't we have the Lady take them?-" He suggested as the women's marked and nodded.

• "You did this.." Zoro said as he held you closer and anger bubbled in his chest.

• Doesnt know where the hospital is so goes the the Inn next door and takes care of you through the night.

Shanks

• Shanks eyes narrowed as he gently pulled you close, looking you over as he gently placed his hand on your cheek to look you in the eyes.

• You were always Shanks favorite waitresses. He had been coming to your bar for years and always did it just to visit you.

• Tonight was extra special since you weren't on shift so you decided to drink with Shanks and his crew.

• "I see a new Bartender tonight" Shanks commented, Seeing how he leered at you with every drink you had.

• You nodded taking another sip from your strong drink. "Yeah he just started- a nice guy.. if not a little too nice" You admit, however not wanting to ruin the moment you continue drinking.

• It didn't take long for you to start to grow loopy, confused by basic conversation and sleepy. Most would assume you simply had too much to drink- but you were no lightweight.

• "(Y/N).. did someone hand you a drink or look away from it?" He said calmly, You leaning into him heavily and nodded Unsure of what he was even saying. Shanks eyes narrowed as he looked around the bar angrily, his eyes landing on his suspect.

• Will take you immediately to the hospital and have his crew deal with the suspect who was clearly to avoid capture.

• Sits with you the whole night and will get updates from Ben Beckman on the status of the person who Drugged you- aka them being past tense

#x reader #one peice x reader #one piece #one peice live action #one piece mihawk #hawkeye mihawk #mihawk x reader

[h34rtbeat]

I BEG A ROUGH NONCON WITH SUNGHOON

BECAUSE IM IN LOVE W/YOU (cunt)

okay ik u said super duper non-con but like I’m gonna use this as an opportunity to show my stalker sunghoon.. pls don’t be mad at me queen. There will non-con if yall want a part 2

PART 2 HERE

JUST BEAR W ME YALL.. BEAR W ME..

warnings: panty stealing and drugging

some-what based off of she

7 weeks.

It’s been 7 weeks since you started to feel like someone is watching you. An inching feeling, crawling up your spine as you undressed. Was it here? The thing watching you? Maybe you were really going mad, all this drinking…

You were sure enough that drinking wasn’t good, but, having your best friend over, Sunghoon, did help and you both shared some drinks.

You definitely drank more than him, you were sure of it. It didn’t help that you felt fuzzy after your third drink, it wasn’t normal, but at least you were safe with your friend.

Sunghoon was the only person you told. He was quiet to keep your worries away from people finding out. He was quiet enough to know how much it meant to you, for no one to find out.

Yet you didn’t know this only made Sunghoons arousal increase tenfold.

“Ah.. I’m so sorry this is happening.” He reassured, rubbing your back as you sat on your table together, drinking.

“I’m sure it’ll go away soon, no one would wish to cause you pain.” Sunghoon sipped some more of his drink, and lifted yours to your lips. “Let’s relax. You deserve to anyway, with all this stress of yours.”

In his mind, you had only told him about this issue (which was him), and that meant you trusted him and only him.

“Maybe you should have another drink.. I’ll have another too, before I get on home.” His voice was always so quiet, so calm..

“Yeah, you’re right.” You chuckled, rubbing your head. “I do need to destress.”

God, you were so naïve, he couldn’t help it. He knew you had no boyfriend, no other man in your life but him. A few girls here and there, but not romantic. He was all you had, and that made him so egoistic.

You had to love him. You just had to. You trusted him, a man, to make your drink.

Slipping two little tablets into your drink, he made sure to add some sparkling water in both the drinks to make it seem like the fizziness was coming from the water. In reality, he gave you something far more strong.

“Here, drink this. It’ll make you feel better.” You laughed at his words.

“I’m sure it will, ‘hoon.” You took a sip, and your eyes widened. The drink was sweet, you could barely taste the liquor.

“Oh. Wow sunghoon, this is.. great actually.” You took more and more sips, he only took a few. You felt tingly all of a sudden, and kind of light-headed.

“Hey, I need to use the restroom real quick..” he mutters, tapping your shoulder. He felt how warm you suddenly became.

“Y-yeah.. s’down the hall, to your.. right.” You say, suddenly snapping back. What was this? Why did you feel so.. warm? And dizzy? You couldn’t even keep up with your eyes as you watched sunghoon leave the table and go down the hall.

Sunghoon checked behind his shoulder, seeing as you slumped over the table. He snuck into your room, looking your drawer. New panties?

Seemed you weren’t as worried as he thought. He wondered what you’d like look putting them on, how you’d look through the window, or maybe how you’d touch yourself.

While you were basically drugged out on the table, Sunghoon closed your bedroom door, quietly examining the panties. Who did you buy these for?

Surely it wasn’t for a man.. you’re way too pure. Just for yourself right? For you to feel sexy by yourself.

Gosh.. what an innocents girl you were, he couldn’t help but to take himself out of his pants, stroking himself with the underwear.

They were flimsy— lacy, light blue underwear. He’s never seen these while you got dressed. These are brand new! A breath leaving him, leaning only your drawer, holding onto it as he continues to rub it up and down his length.

He wondered what you’d look like, sucking his cock in this panties. Would you touch yourself?

Would you even wear these, no.. you’re too pure, too good. You’ve never even touched a dick before.

Heavy breaths coming out as he sprayed apures of white all over your panties, he tucked them in his pocket, before walking back. But before he fully walked back, he went into the kitchen.

opening your juice, he slipped around 5 tablets in, shaking it. If you happened to drink some later, while he was watching, you’d feel the same way.

He saw your body slumped over the table, and smirked to himself. He pressed a kiss against your lips.

“I’ll see you soon..” he muttered, and then exited.

#[🦭📞] anon!! #[🦭] enha! #tw: stalking #tw: drugging #enhypen hard hours #enha smut #enhypen hard headcanons #enha x reader #sunghoon enha #sunghoon hard thoughts #sunghoon hard hours #enha sunghoon #sunghoon x you #sunghoon enhypen #sunghoon x reader #sunghoon smut #tw: noncon #sunghoon #sunghoon drabbles #enha hard hours #enha scenarios #enha #enha imagines #enha hard thoughts #dark content

[weepingchronicles]

platonic yandere hunter headcanons

tw/cw: yandere behavior, stalking, creepy(?), drugging(tranquilizers), guns mentioned, hunting obviously, cussing, kidnapping

a/n: i guess this is my first yandere oc? I don't know if he'll ever have a name or background but I'll just call him hunter

He acts like a friendly neighbour at first and for right now that's all he is.

To be honest, there is something slightly off about him.

The way you've never seen him without a weapon of some kind draped across his back. Or the way he leers and asks you questions slightly too personal.

"Where are your parents?" "Oh, are you close with them?" "Aw, that's a shame."

Still he was nice, enough. He never crossed a line. If he saw you getting uncomfortable his teasing and questions immediately stopped. So, that must be a green flag?

During winter, you had stopped hiking and going out to the trail you normally would. I guess the time spent away from you made Hunter fall deeper into his obsession with you.

He'd follow you to the grocery store, dentist, whenever you'd leave your house. He'd justify thinking it's just to keep you safe but didn't clarify on what.

During this, he'd learn more about you. Your habits, schedule and personal life.

You didn't have a good home life as far as he can tell. Sometimes he'd hear shouting within your house right before you burst out and slam the door to walk off some steam.

He thought he could treat you better, give you the home he thought you deserve. He had begun to think he knew you better than anyone else did.

Once you're back in the forest again is when he'd slowly force himself into your life.

He'd somehow "bump" into you whenever you're hiking and escort you. Saying "It's too dangerous for a kid like you to be walkin alone out here." You were creeped out to be honest but he was somewhat right.

Although he was actually pleasant to be around, one time he took you to the river and helped you catch a fish. He offered to help you cook it back at his place but you declined.

Other times were more silent but eventful, you'd both sit and enjoy the nature breeze, the birds. Sometimes when you were lucky a deer would run by, blessing you with its innocent presence.

You asked why he hadn't shot it, considering his job is to hunt.

"Because I'm with you, kiddo."

The more time you spent with him, coincidental or not, you slowly began to open up. He somehow knew your likes and dislikes in which you couldn't help but ramble about when brought up, he found it entertaining.

All your baggage too began to untangle. You'd talk about your problems with your family and how you go out into nature to get away from it all. It becomes your only safe space.

Hunter understood easily, he was always attentive when you talked of your parents but you failed to notice the murderous look in his eyes whenever he heard something that ticked him off a little too much.

You began to see Hunter as a father figure. I mean, he'd comfort you when you were sad, took you out fishing. He was more of a father than your biological one.

One day after fishing, he asked you if you wanted to go back to his cabin and cook it. He'd always ask you but always declined, but this time you actually felt safe enough to accept.

Hunter was delighted and drove you to his cabin further into the woods.

It was a lot nicer than you expected, you think it would look like a cabin from a horror movie or something but it was newly furnished or just well kept.

Hunter told you sit down and get comfy while he prepared the fish.

You did so in the living room. He gave you some hot tea but you never actually drank it, being far more interested in his home.

Hunter never talked about himself or family, you thought maybe it was because he was divorced or just secretive about personal things.

But as you roamed around the living room you noticed there were no framed photos at all.

Well, there was one. It was a photo he has taped on his window above the sink with him and you. You had caught your first fish and he wanted to take a photo to celebrate which you begrudgingly complied.

You roamed around more, careful with your footsteps to not make any creaking. You didn't want him to think you're snooping, I mean you are, but not in a bad way!

You came across a room that was slightly ajar enough to peek in. It was his bedroom.

His bed was messily made and on the dresser were empty or half empty beer bottles. Leaning on the wall were a couple shotguns, you didn't know if they were loaded or not. The only innocence misportraying his room were these lilacs in a vase you had collected on a hike with him. They were slightly dying, hunched in posture while a couple petals fell.

You roamed around more, you found the bathroom down the hall and passed the kitchen without Hunter noticing as he was cooking.

You had looked in every room so far besides the basement.

It was sketchy you will admit, but maybe that was your guilty conscience punishing you for snooping around.

You had went down a couple of steps and there was a hall. Most of the rooms down the hall were normal, for extra storage, that kinda thing.

You made your way down to the final door. It had a slide bolt lock and was probably the only door where the paint was peeling.

You figure it was just another storage room or maybe a place to keep his guns..(why would he need that kind of lock anyway?)

You open the room and peek inside, you find a light switch and turn it on. The room is ghostly cold, making you scrunch up your shoulders in chills.

What... the fu-

Your mouth fell slightly agape. The room had posters of your favorite media and characters plastered on the walls. On one side was a dresser and on-top were some of your childhood plushies that mysteriously went missing awhile ago.

"What the fuck is this.."

The most scariest part to you was that in the center was an old mattress covered by a thick blanket and few pillows. Alongside was a long chain connecting to the wall, it was meant for someone.

Your heartbeat sped up, Hunter was not who you thought he was.

You quickly ran out and went upstairs again, standing in the hall where you could hear Hunter humming to himself while cooking.

You froze there for a couple seconds, debating on what to do. You could just make a run for it but you don't know the way back home and it would take forever to get back on foot. Plus, he has guns. The other option was to pretend everything was fine, all good. You didn't know how well you could that, putting a hand to your chest made you feel your frenzied heartbeat. What if he knew something was up and killed you? What if you pretend and stay but he kills you anyway?

Your thoughts began to blur as if you were a deer caught in headlights, you only snapped out of it once you heard Hunter calling your name.

"There you are! What's wrong?"

You felt your lip twitch, control yourself.

"I- I was looking for the bathroom." You felt your throat suddenly dry up, like you've just been in the sahara desert.

Hunter chuckled at this and gestured to the bathroom that was just further down the hall.

His smile faltered when he realized you wouldn't move yet when he reached out to your shoulder, you instinctively backed away.

"Kiddo?" He said, slightly confused and panicked. He looks down to the basement and saw the door was still open.

Realization hit him and he was trying to muster up an explanation, anything.

But you were already running, you didn't have enough time to put on shoes so you were running on only your socks.

You tried to remember the path you came from, you couldn't just run down the road he'd easily drive by and catch you. Everything in the woods looked different as the sun began to set and the sky was cast with an orange hue, it was almost more alive than in the daytime.

You didn't stop to look behind you, only running as fast as your wobbly knees could take you but you could hear your name being called in the distance which somehow urged you to sprint faster.

Fuck, maybe your parents were right in saying to do Track and Field. You were panting, your chest felt itchy and your cheeks burned yet felt cold all at the same time. You knew you couldn't yet stop though.

Finally, once you couldn't hear your name being called is when you stopped by a large stone.

You tried to contain your breaths but they came out in only puffs as you regained control of yourself.

How the fuck were you supposed to get home now!?

In a state of hopelessness you began to softly cry. You came into the woods because it was your safe space but all you want to do right now is be back home on your bed.

Before you went into a full breakdown, you heard the familiar call of your name again.

Hunter.

You gasp and hide behind the large stone, accidently falling in a small river and biting your lip at the freezing water.

You peek out the best you can without revealing your hiding spot.

You see the blurry image of Hunter walking, is he...

Is he holding a gun!?

"Kiddo!? Come here, I'm not going to hurt you. Let's just go back to the cabin and get you warmed up."

'Um, I think I rather freeze to death out here, thanks.'

You knew he was getting closer as the creaks in the twigs and leaves louden.

Feeling you have no choice but to make a run for it, you do. Either he finds you hiding, shoots you or you run and he tries to shoot you.

"(Y/N)! Come back here now!"

Is this guy really trying to get you to come back willingly? Why is he not shooting?

"Come back or I'll shoot!" Oh, there it is.

You don't stop running however, you run in a zig zag motion to make it hard for him to shoot but I guess he never told you how good of a shot he was.

A shot came to your left calf and another at your shoulder, making you crash into the dirt and solid ground in front of you. You thought it would hurt more, a bullet ripping into your flesh like a fucking parasite. But what you felt was stinging.

Yeah, it still fucking hurt but it wasn't a pain you expected from a bullet wound. In that last moment you have consciousness, you turn over peering down at your calf and seeing a dart poke right into it.

A dart?

Hunter rushes by your side, finally catching up to you.

Your instincts urge you to escape but a numbness spreads throughout your body, making your eyelids so very heavy.

He lifts your head in his hands, caressing your hair and brushing away dirt on your face.

"Shh, it's okay now. Just go to sleep, everything will be okay once you wake up."

You tried to move, run, protest, anything! But it felt like someone put a weighted blanket over you, or more like ten blankets.

You began to lose consciousness and your eyesight blackening. You could feel your wrists and ankles getting tied together. You were pulled over what felt like Hunter's shoulders, as if you were a freshly caught deer. Maybe that's how he saw you.

You didn't have much of a say either way as he trudged further into the woods again, carrying you.

a/n: woop yay!! my first original character! feel free to ask any questions bout him, if you have any. I might make a part 2 to this when I feel like it but I have a bunch of other requests to do at the moment. also let's not talk about how it's almost 6 am and I'm writing this

#platonic yandere #yandere #soft yandere #yandere headcanons #yandere oc #yandere original character #oc #original character

[he-goes-down]

Our Last Summer

- irl friend req

Masterlist

Pairing:

Duff Mckagan x reader x Slash

Warnings: threesome, sex in the pool, unprotected p in v, anal, smut with plot

Second Person POV:

It was the middle of the day, the guys had invited you over for a swim, a thing they do now regularly as it’s summer and they had a pool installed in the backyard. You rocked up to their place, wearing a light purple and blue bikini under a white crocheted shawl that you used as a skirt. Opening the already unlocked door, stepping inside with two plastic bags, one with extra clothes and the other with booze. You put the booze on the kitchen counter and tossed your clothes bag in Izzy’s room as you were normally in there, being best friends after all. You got to the threshold of the door to the backyard and Izzy spotted you. Laying on one of the lounge chairs, under an umbrella, he’s such a vampire sometimes. He got up from the chair and walked towards you, and you got closer as well. “You’re wearing the bikini I picked out!” He said in awe. His eyes under his sunglasses scanning you up and down. “Mhm..” You responded with a smile as you began to untie your shawl. “Ah! You’re here!” You heard Axl from the end of the pool, ready to jump in, he was already wet so it seemed like a canon-ball competition, one he always looses. The rest of the guys heard Axl’s call and turned to your direction to look at you. All them happy to see you and all of them eyeing you up and down as they could fully see your body in the bikini. You went to the edge of the pool and asked Izzy to put sunscreen on your back as you finished lathering the placing you could reach. His hands massaging your skin, which felt quite nice. Slash and Duff we’re watching this scene, their emotions unknown but definitely not in a positive light

You got into the pool and swam around with Steven, doing laps underwater and you won every time, except once when Axl took you by your leg and pulled you back. Izzy did get in the pool at a stage, he just wanted to finish a cig before he did so. You on the other hand didn’t know he was getting in the pool, you were laughing and splashing with Slash and Duff until you felt someone come from under you and hoister you on their shoulders. Izzy was the culprit of course. You continued to fight the two others, now fighting in teams of two. But in the end Slash and Duff both gave each other a knowing nod and pushed Izzy over taking you with him. These chicken fights happened a few times as Steven and Axl joined, switching around the teams each round and for obvious reasons anyone on Duff’s shoulders were sure to win.

Although when evening started to fall you went back inside for a meal and a few drinks. Still all in your costumes as you ate and drank. It was now night, the food had all digested and sank, although the alcohol still stayed up in your head. Axl and Slash went outside again for a night swim, they were drunk enough to do something stupid but not enough to drown and sink to the bottom of the pool. You heard some yelling but then a big splash after so thinking nothing of it. Until the rest of you were called. You were last to exit the house as you put away the dishes. Everyone was back in the pool, but something was different. You saw the scattered swimming trunks in the side of the pool. ‘Jesus christ’ you thought in a laugh. “Come in doll, the water’s really nice.” Izzy cooed, calling you over. You went to the edge of the pool about to step in, but you thought ‘fuck it.’, taking a step back, taking off your bikini pieces. All of them now fully sober and paying attention to you as you got in the pool.

Now fully submerged in the water, not trying to get too close to any of them. But Izzy came up behind you, holding your waist. You blushed hard, you didn’t know what to feel. You just giggled it off as the two of you began chatting, you trying your hardest not to look at him but him trying hard to show you that he wasn’t looking but his eyes were very focused on your body. Duff and Slash noticed Izzys wandering eyes on you body as you now stood in-front of him. Both Duff and Slash swam over, talking a bit before asking Izzy to go get more drinks. Now you in between Duff and Slash all of your laid with your arms crossed at the edge of the pool. Now you were really trying not to look down at them, you had never seen them in anyway naked. You had seen Izzys once when he was off his rocket drunk and you had to change him into other clothes. Your eyes did have a quick peak at both their bodies, and something more specific. You were thankful you were in a body of water so they couldn’t notice how wet you were.

“Hey where’s Axl?” Slash asked, scanning the dark pool, the only light was the far away blue pool light and the lights of the house. “And Steven.” You added. But soon enough you heard drunken giggles from inside the house. It was now just the three of you left and the three swimming costumes on the other edge if the pool. “And where’s Izzy with the drinks anyway?” You asked. Duff shrugged but gave a secret look to Slash which he reciprocated. Again hearing another voice from inside the house, not a voice, a noise. Snoring. Whenever Izzy is drunk he will sometimes collapse into a catnap but wake everyone else up with his loud snoring. All three of you laughed as you realised the noise

After more chatting, the tension from your naked bodies close to each-other sparked dirty conversations. About experience, would you rathers, casual flirts. The pools water was now getting replaced with a pool of lust.

“Have you ever…” Duff thought of a question. “Had sex in a pool?” He finished. You answered quickly, “Not a pool but in the ocean.” Both of them looked at you quizzically. “Never again, too much sand.” You added. “What have you ever Duffles?” You nicknamed. “Twice.” “Slash?” You asked after Duffs answer. “Yep, a few times, mostly in hot tubs though.” He told you. After a few more questions on details. “Would you ever?” Slash asked. “Ever what?” Your brow lifted. “Have pool sex.” He informed. “Wouldn’t mind.”

You knew exactly where this was going. If you weren’t holding yourself up by your arms, your legs would have been so weak that you would sink. Your mind was wondering, and so with that your eyes did too. Going from the tiles of the pool, to Duff’s newly golden tanned body, to under the water your gaze fixed a bit to long on one particular position. “My eye’s aren’t under the water are they now…?” Duff said, catching you off guard and making you blush hard, if it was any harder the water around you would start to boil. “There’s no shame in it honey.” He said, now moving closer to you, turning around so his back was on the wall of the pool. “I haven’t been paying attention either.” He told you. “None of us have…” Slash began, now also moving closer, but a bit away from the pools edge, nearly behind you. You looked at Slash, silent but your nervous breathes showed your lust. Adding on as your eyes immediately went to look below the waterline, but quickly scanning up, meeting Slash’s face as a shit eating grin began to plaster it. Duff moved to be in front of you now as your nervousness made you let go if the pools edge. Duff’s back laid in the pools edge, his hands under the water feeling your waist to your hips. You subconsciously wrapped your legs around his waist. Slash in the other hand moved to be behind you, his hands in your waist as his chest pressed against your bare back. You wanted them. More than anything, you wanted them. They wanted you too, finally getting that security of being able to love you, always in competition with Izzy, but now it was final that you were theirs. In short whispers you agreeing to this.

Slash kissed your neck as his dick pressed against your ass. Duff kissed your tits as his dick was against your folds. Both of the men sucking on your skin leaving hickeys. “Please…” You pleaded for them to enter you. Your head falling into Duff’s shoulder as Slash’s thick cock lined up to your ass. “Take him baby.” Duff told you, releasing his mouth from your breasts. Slash held your cheeks apart as his dick slowly started to enter your tighter hole. “Good girl… you can do it.” Slash mumbled as his hard thick cock began to stretch out the hole. “Fuck…” his head falling back at the tightness. Your body burned uncomfortably at the harsh gritting feeling, but it soon eased as he went slowly and gently into you and stopped to rest every inch that his cock had to offer. His head laid on your shoulder and neck as he sighed bottoming out. You moaned and whined still even whilst he wasn’t moving. But you were louder as Duff began to push into your cunt. His longer dick getting pushed and pressed to the back of your pussy as he tired to get his whole length into you. Your head flung back in ecstasy feeling the two men inside you and one of then had their fingers starting to please your clit. “Fuck baby… you’re so fucking hot. Taking us both like a good girl.” Duff told you as felt your hips repeatedly press into his as Slash slowly fucked his way in and out if your ass. “Mmm, fuck so tight. So fucking perfect.” Slash moaned under his heavy sighs. As both of the men fucked your holes your orgasm was much closer and fiercer than normal.

“Mmm… gonna cum… fuck!” You whined. “Oh god baby- me too-…” and with Slash’s heavy sighs and uneven thrusts he came inside your ass. You very quickly after came abruptly over Duffs dick, cursing out and whimpering as you came down from it. Duff was very soon to finish as well, as when you orgasmed your pussy clenched around his dick tighter than anything and squeezed out his cum for him, shooting inside your begging pussy. All three of you were sighing heavily. Hot sweat dripping down into the cool as your body’s were still attached to each other. Duff kissed you as you got off his dick and Slash did too once he pulled out your ass and picked you from the water, holding you in a bridal position.

“Shit, we have to drain this pool after that.”

A/n: sorry that the end was rushed its late and I want to get to other requests and make space for newer ones

And yes I know that you have to have a silicone lubricant for water sex but I was too lazy to try add it

#Spotify #guns n roses #izzy stradlin #slash #axl rose #duff mckagan #steven adler #duff gnr #slash gnr #izzy gnr #axl gnr #steven gnr #duff mckagan x reader #slash x reader #duff mckagan smut #slash smut

[wenigstenshabeichesversucht]

Drinks and kisses

Pairing: Anthony Lockwood x fem!Reader

Summary: Four times you drunkenly confessed your love to Lockwood and one time you did it sober.

Warnings: alcohol consumption (OC is not an alcoholic, she just can't tolerate alcohol), English is not my native language

Word Count: 2,6k

For the story I used some of the Drunken Love Confessions from @creativepromptsforwriting, please check out her blog

Living the life of an agent aka child solider was most of the time gruesome. After dusk as the adults hid behind silver fences and thick walls, you and the other kids dared to venture into the dark night to fight against ghosts. Every agent knew another who had died on a mission. Life was pretty depressing if you didn’t take it in your own hands to enjoy it. Therefore, at Lockwood and Co., you celebrated every so little milestone and achievement. While Lockwood, your boss, landlord and crush, and George sometimes drank beer, you only drank alcohol at you little celebrations. To say that you could handle your liquor, was an exaggerated lie.

The first time you told Lockwood, that you liked him more than a friend was at one of this so-called parties. Lockwood and Co. had just finished a big case. That was reason enough to get together and drink.

It was already late that night, the song on the radio floated through the room and Kipps was asleep on the couch. Lucy was nowhere to be seen and George and Holly were in one corner of the living room lively talking about cooking.

However, you only had eyes for Lockwood sitting in his favourite armchair. His hair was shining so nicely, and you really wanted to touch it. Would it feel under your fingers as soft as it looked? That thought should have been warning enough that you were drunk. But drunk-you wasn’t smart and neither discreet with your staring. Everybody who took one second to watch you with Lockwood, would realize that you liked him. Thank God Lockwood was an even bigger idiot than you.

“What are you thinking about, sweets?”, broke Lockwood the silence between you two and normally, caught in your staring, you would have looked away. But normal-you and drunk-you were two totally different persons. Drunk-you was loud and bold, while normal-you shied away.

“About you”, you declared honest, and sober you would have never said something like this. However, drunk you didn’t even blush.

“About me?”, echoed Lockwood confused and reminded you by doing so of a puppy. You loved puppies.

“You’re cute. And a bit blurry. But definitely always so cute.” The words just tumbled out of your mouth. Even if you wanted to, you wouldn't have been able to stop them. But drunk-you didn’t know something like regret. Before Lockwood could say anything, you took a page out of Kipps books and just felt asleep.

The next morning you had no memory about what you said. At breakfast Lockwood acted like always except his ears turned a little red when you asked him for the butter. But you were too hungover to pay attention.             

The second time happened at Lucy’s birthday party. The birthday girl and you were dancing in the middle of the living room, downing one shot after the other. You intentionally ignored Lockwood, who warned you to slow down. Maybe that was a mistake. Or the five tequila shots were a mistake. Or both were a mistake.

Anyway, one moment you were dancing with Lucy, having the best time of your life and in the next moment you felt awful. Pressing your hand over your mouth you made a beeline for the next bathroom. You barely made it to the toilet before you threw up.

Hurrying footsteps sounded behind you and then someone held your hair back. With a small whimper you puked again.

“Just let it out then you’ll feel better”, he whispered softly while he caressed your back. Sober-you would probably have sunk into the floor in shame. But hanging over the toilet bowl you were too drunk to care.

You didn’t know how long you puked your soul out of your body. Lockwood had taken a seat on the floor behind you and didn’t stop rubbing your back.

“Can you keep a secret?”, you slurred and rested your head against his shoulder. Out of the corner of your eye you saw him nodding.

“I have a crush on Lockwood, but you can’t tell him or anybody else.” He laughed, and you could feel the vibration of his chest.

“I would love to hear those words in any other place than this bathroom, holding your hair back.”

“But you can’t tell him or anybody else”, you repeated urgent. You couldn’t imagine that Lockwood liked you back, and you didn’t want to make the atmosphere in the house awkward. Therefore, Lockwood was never allowed to know how you felt about him.

“I swear, let’s get you cleaned up and in your bed, sweets.” Fishing a washcloth from the sink, he gently wiped your face. Then he scoped you up in his arms and started carrying to your room.

The third time: Bright giggles echoed across the attic.

“No-no-no it wasn’t like this”, Lucy laughed while taking another sip from the vodka.

You just returned from your case to a waiting Norrie. Norrie was Lucy’s girlfriend and was visiting her in London. As you had stumbled through the front door, Norrie had already handed you a bottle of vodka. Now sitting in the attic, you slowly nursed the alcohol.

“And how did it go in your opinion?”, asked Norrie, who was telling an embarrassing story about the time Lucy and her had still worked in the northern part of Great Britain.

“First it wasn’t so embarrassing how you make it sound.”

“Sure”, you butted in as you and Norrie shared a meaningful glance.

“Don’t join forces against me”, Lucy demanded, not blind to your actions.

“We would never!”, giving her an appeasing kiss, Norrie took the bottle from Lucy.

“Why does it feel like you’re lying to me?” maybe a little bit paranoid, maybe appropriately paranoid, Lucy raised one eyebrow. You meanwhile tried to look as innocent as possible. Of course, you would join forces with your best friend’s girlfriend against said best friend. Where else was the fun?

Seeing through your innocent act, Lucy pointed accusing her finger at you. “As punishment you have to get the snacks from downstairs.”

Rolling your eyes, you stole the bottle out of Norrie’s grip and took a big sip. Leave it to Lucy to find an excuse to not go down all the stairs. But it was OK, as long George and Lockwood were still not home from their case. If George caught you stealing the snacks, he would demand that Lockwood would revoke your biscuits rights. So, there was a big risk associated with getting the snacks. Was it a risk worth taking? Drunk-you said yes.

“I will be right back”, with a wink to the girls, you picked yourself up.

You noticed immediately that you were drunker, than you had thought. Your steps were a little wobbly and the world was turning more than usually. But you lived more than two years in this house. You knew which floorboard creaked and how many steps each of the stairs had. With your eyes closed, you would find your way from the attic down to the kitchen. So being drunk shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

You should be right for most of the way. You already reached the last stairs down to the kitchen without tripping over your own feet, when the front door flew open, and Lockwood and George came clattering in. Normally you weren’t easily startled. You were an agent for gods’ sake. But you were drunk and hadn't expected their loud arrival.

You weren’t sure who was more surprised. You, who lost your footing and tumbled down the stairs, or Lockwood, who was standing at the bottom of said stairs. At least he wasn’t drunk and therefore had quicker reflexes than you. Instead of stepping aside and leaving you to your fate, he caught you. For a moment nobody said something, there was only a shocked silence between you.

“I think I just fell in love with you”, you drunkenly joked.

“No, you fell down the stairs. You should really learn to hold your liquor, sweets”, Lockwood told you stern, without letting go of you. But you saw the creeping blush appear on his face.

“I get her a glass of water”, clearing awkwardly his throat, George rushed to the kitchen.

“You drive me out of my mind, sweets”, whispered Lockwood against your hair, but you were too busy getting lost in his scent. He smelled of lavender and bergamot. Your favourite smell in the whole world.

The fourth time you told Lockwood, that you loved him you were drunk, shocking you know.

You just came home from evening with your old friends from Rothwell and as always, you easily became too drunk.

Usually when someone of the team went out after dark, Lockwood waited for them to come home. This time was no different.

As you drunkenly stumbled out of the night cab, Lockwood was already opening the front door.

“Hi handsome”, you greeted him without shame.

“You’re drunk”, he blandly stated, but his eyes were sparkling like someone stole the stars from the sky and hide them there. He had beautiful eyes. You could spend hours gazing in his eyes.

“Yes”, you admitted before a wide grin took over your face, “and hopelessly in love with you!”

Pushing past him, you stumbled into the hallway. Behind you, you could hear Lockwood taking a surprise inhale. However, you were already busy with your next task, taking off your shoes without falling over.

“Say that again after two coffees at least and I will be yours”, he whispered barely for you to hear.

Then he rushed to you, “Sweets, let me help.”

Getting on his knees he carefully unclasped your shoes. Where his hands touched your bare skin, it felt like you were burning.

“We should get you some water.” That sounded like a really good idea. Allowing Lockwood to take your hand, you let him pull you into the kitchen.

“I hoped you had a great evening”, he carefully led you to your chair before he went to the sink and got you a glass of water.

“It was sooo great, only you were missing!”

“Maybe then I join next time”, Lockwood mused taking a seat in front of you.

“You should, my friends really want to meet the person, who stole me away from Rothwell.”

“And I would steal you again, sweets. A shame that you will not remember this talk tomorrow.”

The one time you told him what you felt while being sober:

It had been a nerve-wracking case. You felt like a wrack when you finally reached Portland Row. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong, and you were lucky that all four of you were still alive. Stressed you all went separated ways. While Lucy rushed to the attic, you scored the first shower to remove the remains of salt and sweat that stuck to you like a second skin.

When you return to the kitchen after the shower to get a glass of water, you expected to find it deserted. After a case like this the team usually retreated to each of their own room to lick their metaphorical wounds in peace. You were no exception. Therefore, you were even more surprised when you saw the light shining from under the closed kitchen door.

Not bothering to knock you entered the room, to see Lockwood sitting at the kitchen table, in front of him the open first aid kit. His dress shirt was unbuttoned, and you couldn’t help gaping. Slowly blood was seeping out of a large wound, you didn’t know about. Caught, he looked up when you entered.

“That’s not what it’s looked like.”

“So, you didn't hide from us that you were injured?”

Not waiting for his answer, you could lie to yourself, you pressed a compress on his wound to stop the bleeding. As reaction Lockwood just took a sharp inhale and a little part of you were glad, that it hurt.

“We are a team; we can’t help you if you don’t let us”, you started to lecture him. But as Lockwood looked down ashamed your anger vanished into thin air. You couldn’t stay mad at him for long.

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I will always worry about you”, you paused for a moment, not sure if you should really say what just popped up in your mind. But then you gathered all your courage and did it, “I will always worry about you because I love you.”

Your heart was beating like crazy, while you waited for a response. But now it was out and nothing you could do could undo it. That was somehow liberating.

“I know.”

On the list of the worst reactions after a declaration of love, “I know” was at the top. You didn't know whether to cry or to scream. However, in the end you couldn't do either. You could just stare at him while your mouth dropped open.

“You know?”, you echoed and could feel how something in your chest broke into two parts. He knew that you loved him and never said something. That could only mean one thing, he didn’t feel the same way you did. Shame slowly crept into your face.

“You already told me one, two, or maybe four times”, Lockwood explained to you and if it were up to you, he would have simply remained silent. He didn't have to try to reject you nicely, what he said was already enough for you. Standing up so quickly that your chair flew over, you tried to escape from the kitchen, but grasping your wrist, he stopped you.

“You already told me, that you love me, but there was never a good moment to reveal to you, that I love you too.” In total disbelief you gasped at him. He must be joking. Couldn’t he have told you this sooner instead of sending you on this rollercoaster of emotions?

“You love me too?”, you echoed and slowly started to feel like a parrot.

“Yes, I love you, sweets.”

“Why couldn't you say that right away?” Technically, you should be floating from happiness that he reciprocated your feelings. But you were just angry. Before Lockwood could answer you, you continued, “and when did I tell you that I love you before?” No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't remember it.

“You told me this four times when you were really drunk.”

“And you never thought to talk to me about it the next day?” Flabbergasted you shook your head. You just couldn’t believe it.

“I wasn’t sure if you really meant it and I didn’t want to embarrass you either.”

Up in the hallway, George discreetly listened to the loud voices.

“Didn’t she just tell him that she loves him?”, Lucy asked, also attracted by the noise.

“Yes.”

“But why are they yelling? Shouldn’t they be kissing or something like that?”, confused Lucy wrinkled her nose. Taking his eyes off the closed kitchen door, George looked at her.

“In response to her confession he said, “I know””

“What an idiot!”

“But an idiot in love, it seems.”

Back in the kitchen your chest rose and fell angrily. Still, you couldn’t believe that he had been aware that you liked him, and never acted on it while also being in love with you.

“You are an idiot, Anthony Lockwood.”

The biggest idiot you knew.

“But hopefully your idiot?”

Instead of answering, you wrapped your arms around his neck and kissed him, softly at first but with growing intensity. When you separated you felt dizzy.

“Yes, you are my idiot.”

#anthony lockwood #lockwood & co #lockwood & co fanfic #lockwood and co #anthony lockwood x reader #lockwood netflix #fanfic #lockwood x reader

[atinylittlepain]

joel miller x f!oc

story playlist

monsters are made of myths. in this story, two myths become one. two myths are in love. they are in wretched love.

warnings | 18+ this is a work of contemporary horror | literally cannibalism, and the trappings of it - love as consumption, non-graphic death, murder, grotesque depictions of food (normal food) and eating (normal eating), non-graphic references to unhealthy parental relationship (abuse and neglect), descriptions of dissociation, smut, strange neurotic processes in general

word count | 17K (yes, really)

a/n | this fic is partially inspired by the movie Bones and All, and it is my attempt to get Bones and All right (read: better) - i cannot stress enough that this is a work of horror, and as such, deals with unsettling imagery, subject matter, and emotions. read with care. special thanks must be given to @pr0ximamidnight and @wannab-urs who loved these two characters enough to keep me writing them, thank you, my darling friends, i hope i've done them justice. and thank you, dear reader, for coming along on something of an odyssey.

Monsters, she thinks, are hewn from guilt and shame. She is trying very hard not to feel either of those things about what she must do. But some slippery part of her still supposes that she has been a monster for a very long time, maybe even from the beginning. When did it change? When are monsters made? Like everyone else, she drank from her mother’s breast. Some time after that then.

What she does remember is not regretting it, any of it, until her mother taught her it was something to regret. Shame in the whites of her eyes, the dark ring of her open mouth, stricken in a scream. She has only ever met one other person like her in all her time skipping from town to town, a few years younger than her, but older in her confidence, her certainty in who she was. And like her, the first time, a babysitter, blood in the bathtub. She took her ear clean off, and the girl’s father found the scene when he got home from work, babysitter having fled, baby still in the tub, gumming on something pink and soft in her mouth. He had been afraid, she told her, that she could have drowned. Never mind the ear. Monsters are loved too, after all, a wretched thing of love. 

For her it had been a finger. At least that’s what her mother told her, easy to wrap her small mouth around. She believed her, vaguely remembering the flicker of red nail polish, bitter amidst the rest of sense and sate. What she does remember, the feeling of fullness. What she does remember, her mother making a myth out of her, conjuring up some way to explain this condition of hers. Condition, what she decided to call it. An affliction of appetites, something to be controlled, to be smothered under the thick swaths of what her mother taught her. How to be normal is really just another way of saying how to hide. And she hid for a very long time, weak and wan and wanting things she knew she shouldn’t be wanting. Until, eighteen, and their tenth packed car and dark house and her mother telling her that she was no longer interested in this myth, this unmaking of a monster. You are what you are and I have tried, I have tried, I have tried, but you are what you are. 

Not just guilt and shame, monsters are made in the breadth of a back turning, in eyes settling somewhere up and away. Monsters are made in a leaving. Everyone has already left. So what else is there to do but eat?

She likes the song that’s playing in the convenience store, the light haze of it, staticking from somewhere overhead. Hazy in the afternoon slump, everyone making minced conversation about setting the clocks back last weekend. Her watch still reads an hour ahead. 

I feel the earth move– she needs toothpaste.

I feel the sky tumbling down– and soap.

I feel my heart start to tremble– but there’s an empty promise left in her wallet.

Whenever you’re around– soon, she will have to stay.

I just got to have you– soon, she will have to pretend.

Baby– make-believing normal.

I just lose control– make a little more money.

I get hot and cold, all over, all over– before another leaving.

Tumbling down, tumbling down– before another fullness. 

“Excuse me.” A man, somewhere in her periphery, and the quick realization that she’s been standing in front of bars of soap, considering what it would feel like to slip one or two into the pocket of her coat, standing there for a bit too long. Shrug and shuffle to the side, a quiet sorry, keeping her eyes down, but in a quick flicker, she sees his face. Fang recognizes fang, always. 

He looks tired, like if not for whatever weight is pulling at his shoulders, he would be much bigger, much badder. Worn thin at the edges, wings darkening beneath his eyes, he spares her a single glance, disinterested, picking up two bars of soap, the kind that smells clean and young and kind. As he leans down, she sees the glint and flirt of gold dangling from his neck, a cross. But she knows, she thinks she knows. When you are rare like this, it isn’t difficult to know another myth when you see one. 

She watches the heels of his boots clip down the aisle toward the checkout, there and gone, and she does not follow. This is not something that should be followed. She knows, she knows. She tried once, with that girl. That girl who had different ideas about what their myth meant, their mouths, who decided that cruelty felt good, who decided to play the part of the monster with a terrible flair. No, this is something best done alone, and worst when it is shared. 

A single bar of soap sits heavy in her pocket while she pays for a tube of toothpaste, the man already gone, mercy. And the evening unfolds like it usually does during these times of motion. Still enough gas in her car that she can crawl a few miles down the interstate and find a quiet place to pull off for the night, somewhere green, somewhere with trees. Summer, the heat turning cool and sticky as it starts to darken, and a routine that is familiar to her by now. Windows cracked just enough to let a thin stream of fresh air in without threatening danger. And she folds the fact of her body in the backseat, tucking all her angles beneath a worn blanket that she keeps folded in the trunk during the day. Always memory before sleep, though her mind has made motheaten, misshapen murmuring out of the most of it. The fullness is always what remains. And that thick curl of shame. 

Here is how her mother made her. She broke skin and pulled out a rib of her own, made flesh of her flesh, tended to the wound until it was something else. There was no father, and there was certainly no god. At least that’s how her mother told it. You came from me, mine, this is mine, me and you and your mouth that must stay closed because I love you even though you are like this, awful, you are like this and I love you. But that love stretched thin, snapped, bleeding gums and broken teeth and never again. A goodbye that she is still saying, that she curls herself around in the backseat of her car in the summer when it’s warm enough for leaving. 

…

Maybe a foolish thing to spend what’s left of her money on. The waitress is very pretty though, a flush of red curls piled on her head, red lipstick too, crackling with her smile and bleeding into the lines around her mouth. Pours her a dark cup of coffee and leaves the steaming pot of it at her table. She pours three plastic thimbles of cream into it, two packets of sugar that she doesn’t stir in, lets it settle, biting down on the grit when she tips the last of her cup back into her mouth, and repeats. And the pretty waitress brings her two plates, so hot that they leave red welts on her forearms when she sets them down on her table, pinkened pain. Scrambled eggs, grease and sweat pooling beneath their lingering heat, bleeding over into two pieces of bacon, blistered crisp. A stack of pancakes, the sheen of butter seeping down, she pours enough syrup over them to pool thin and flooded on the plate. Collects a little of everything on her fork, the soft give of protein and matter, everything sagging in the sweet stick. Hand to mouth, but she stops, stuck, seeing him sitting alone at a booth across the diner. And he sees her too. A meal much like her own, enough to give someone a stomach ache. His eyes fall away from hers just as soon, and she watches him pass a knife through a piece of meat, flesh on his fork that he pockets into his cheek, jawing it down. She works her mouth around her own bite, teeth hurting with the snap down onto metal, the scrape of the fork. The food turns to sweet, soft mush, rolling around on her tongue, swallowed hard. 

He’s watching her again, working his jaw in a slow shift, and this time, his eyes don’t leave hers. She plucks a piece of bacon off her plate, pinched between thumb and forefinger, bites down again and sucks the salt from the dried flesh. He finishes a piece of toast in two bites, mouth screwing to the side, the dip and bob of his throat when he swallows, muscle moving muscle. Sweat is starting to prickle her scalp, the soft stretch of her stomach with her meal, warm and sick and sloshing. She doesn’t chew her eggs, swallows them, slipping down her throat with the rest of the salt and sate. His eyes fall to her hands, the smooth procession of fork and knife making mince out of her pancakes. She sucks the syrup out of each bite, works the sugar down first before swallowing the rest. His meal, almost completely gone, dragging a finger through a smear of ketchup he had been steeping his hashbrowns in, sucks the remnant red into his mouth. She can almost hear the hum that bobs in his throat, even through the murmurings of the diner. And he is very beautiful, beneath it all. The crooked strength of his nose, his brow, the drop of his lashes over the tops of his cheeks when he takes a pull of coffee. Unabashed, she stares, and he stares back, a darkened dare, watching the movements of each other’s mouths.

And just like that, she’s still chewing when he gets up to leave, not sparing another glance her way as he shoulders out the door. Her chin tilts, neck stretched to see him get into a blue pickup truck with a slam of the car door. He’s gone like a thin flame of lightning. She feels like she’s going to throw up. But she doesn’t, pays her check and stumbles out into the starkness of the morning. It’s a Saturday, and families are congregating for breakfast. She watches, slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, a sliver of a little girl and a little boy crossing her rearview mirror, holding onto hands attached to bodies that are cut off from view. She sighs, sits up straight and turns the key in the ignition. 

…

It’s a half-hour worth of driving later when she sees that blue pick-up truck again. Midwest, middle of nowhere, fields of ruin, and that truck, still and silent next to an abandoned barn made of rot. Middle of the day, the sun a flirting threat high in the middle of blue shock, but there are very few people out here, no one around to see her pull off the side of the road, get out of her car, and start swaying through the tall grass toward that truck and the barn. 

He is beautiful like this too. Slinking out from behind the barn, his eyes flickered low like he knew, he knew. His shirt is ruined, dark, damp. White t-shirt bled red, and the strange starkness of that gold cross glinting around his neck. He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and makes the mess worse, smears it up to the height of his cheeks, across his forearm. And his eyes, his eyes, swimming, darkness starting to drip down his face, starting to meld and mix with the rest. Beautiful, and so very sad. 

“There’s nothing for you here.” Low, the shivering thrum of it murmuring from somewhere between his ribs. Some kind of twang that sharps in her ears. She can’t find words of her own, still where she stands, beneath his hunkered gaze. When nothing comes, he sighs, shakes his head, walks right past her to his truck, keeping a wide breadth of distance between them as he does. 

“How did you know?” The question tries up her throat once, twice, before it finally jerks out into sound, stopping him before he opens the door to his truck, squinting at her over his shoulder. 

“It’s not hard to tell.” And in the space that follows, something is understood, confirmed. It’s starting to dry on his skin, in the scruff along his jaw, dark. The strangest hunger, the sharpest, an awful ache just looking at him. But he’s already leaving, not another word when he gets into his car, and the silence is a command in and of itself. I am and you are, and it will be a blessing if we never cross paths again. Again, gone, parting the sea of withering  grass with the slow trundling beast of his truck. 

She does not look, does not see for herself what lies behind the barn. She already knows. 

…

Like a child, her cheeks flamed with tears, scrubbing at the salt as soon as it falls. To put it simply, her car stopped, a few last wheezing rolls, and it will not start again. And there is no one to call, not out here, between states, between time itself. Eventually, the panic gives way to a dull surrender. She leans against the side of her car, tips her head back to let her face flush in the last slip of light, the sun fretting at the edge of the horizon. Memory is never far when she lets her eyes close. Something normal, driving down the street outside of house number five, her mother letting her, teaching her. She had laughed, giddy, running her palms along the wheel. Back then, flight had felt more like option, and less like routine. Those last few years, and the quick succession of escapes. 

She was out of control, her mother’s words, and she felt it too. Felt like a fine thread of hunger had been stitched through her spine and was pulling painful, the sharp tug toward destruction. And when the thread snapped, it was all she could do to find something to close her mouth around. Those last few years, they moved more than they ever had, every couple of months when she would inevitably mess up, making a mess of everything. Much easier now to always be leaving, because staying was never really an option. 

It’s heard before it’s seen, the crackling of gravel, of tires and brakes slowing down. She lets one eye slip open in a thin slit, squinting in the final slip of sun. That blue pick-up truck, sidling up behind her car along the shoulder of the road. He makes no move to get out, but he does roll his window down, and that’s enough for her to walk over to the side of his car, smalling beneath his steady eyes. He’s clean now, she thinks she can even smell the soap on him, that same soap that she stole a bar of and has been holding under her nose in the nights, something of comfort before she sleeps.

“You’re like me.” The words come from somewhere unnamed inside her, what might be called courage in someone else, and it seems to surprise him too, his brow jumping before furrowing back down. 

“I am.” 

“Where are you from?” A stupid question to ask someone like her. She doesn’t blame him for remaining silent, lips pressed in a thin line. So, she tries again.

“Where are you going?” 

“West.”

“Where west?”

“Just west.” Silence again, a single car hums by them. He clears his throat.

“Is your car broke down?” 

“I think it’s dead.”

“Is it worth fixing?”

“No, probably not. And I don’t have any money left.” 

“Do you want a ride?” Myths are made in the fine split of choice. She is walking into a new one. 

“Okay.” 

There is very little of herself to collect. A bag in the trunk of her car with a few spare clothes, her blanket, a bar of soap. The rest can be left behind. 

“I’m Joel.” All that he offers her when she slides into the passenger seat, a glance that falls on the curl of her hands in her lap. 

“I’m Maeve.” 

It has been a very long time since she has been a passenger in someone else’s car. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, leaving always looming, but she had been doing well for her mother. Well enough to get a date with a shy boy who sat behind her in seventh period math. He took her out in his car, fall and dark and dim and something light threatening in her chest, stealing glances at each other as he drove them out to that spot that everyone parked at. Lovers, lovers, lovers, young limbs tangling in the backseats of cars, damp windows and fog twirling up skirts in the wash of headlights. And they had parked, and shy boy had stuck his shy tongue in her mouth, and she had liked it, she had liked it. And of course, it went wrong, blood and body and blood and she ran home with salt stinging down her cheeks. She didn’t mean to hurt him. She never meant to hurt anyone. This isn’t a hurting thing, at least she didn’t want it to be. Her mother had slapped her, hard, sending her neck turning to one side before collecting her up in her arms and making it all better, making a leaving for both of them.

Now, with her temple pressed against the window of the passenger side door, silence save for the thin voices on the radio, she thinks of that boy, and how carefully he had cupped her cheek in his palm. She wanted to kiss him, she wanted to love him. But she didn’t know how to without biting down.

For as long as she can remember, alone has meant monstrous. Evidence of defect, deformity, the delineation between others, normal, the world, and her, somewhere on the periphery, always. But she wasn’t always alone, and for a while, that was enough to convince her that normal was possible, that, no, not a monster. She had her mother, not alone, not a monster. Clinging to not alone so hard, and in turn clinging to her  mother so hard, that often her fear, or love, or the product of the two, would get her hurt. 

She was hungry for touch as a child, and her mother was unwilling to give it to her in the amounts she wanted for. Her mother, her mother, locking her bedroom door from the inside so she couldn’t turn the handle and slip inside and ask for a palm on her back to calm her nightmares. She would curl up on the pilled carpet of whatever house they were in at the time, back pressed to the door like maybe she could feel her mother’s respiration through the wood, something to soothe down her spine, thumb tucked into her mouth. And in the mornings, bleary, jostled awake by the slow fall backward when her mother would inevitably open the door to her room. Lying on her back in the doorway, blinking up at her mother, grave and grim, who was always frowning, always sighing. Not again, not this again, not you, doing this again. Her mother would step right over her, the hem of her dressing robe brushing against her body as she did, and even that was a relief to her, touch of some kind.

And her mother did love her, in some way. Loved her the way one loves a monster. At arm’s length. That doesn’t mean much to monsters, though. They want, they hunger, just the same. She has wondered, from time to time, if it was the way her mother loved her that made her worse. To go hungry like that for so long, no great working of the imagination to consider how a body might solve that problem in another way. But no, she knows, this is something essential, something curled close inside her. This hunger has been there from the beginning. After all, the finger, the red nail polish, she was just a baby then. She likes to imagine how her mother loved her before that happened. There was a whole year of life before she became a monster. What is love like when people will actually look you in the eye, when every touch does not come tentative as if through the bars of a cage? Sometimes at night, she will wrap her arms around herself and trace her palm along the span of her back that she can reach. Something like that, she imagines, it would feel something like that. 

Something like what she is seeing now, sitting in the pew ahead of her. Husband and wife, and they are very old, the fine threads of age mottled on the back of husband’s hand, spread between his wife’s slight shoulder blades, her pale blue sweater, gold band glinting. His thumb moving back and forth, a smoothing thing, smoothing and steadying thing. The sermon, the prayers, the withering coughs of the staggered crowd all fall away. Small salvation in the steady rhythm of touch, it mesmerizes her. Things like these are always over before she’d like them to be, the husband’s hand falling away as he and his wife both rise from their seats, the sudden shuffle making her blink back into place and space. Plenty of people are getting up, sliding out of the pews to line up down the aisle. Joel, one of them, a gasp of cool air in the empty space he leaves beside her. 

She doesn't know what they are doing in a place like this. She doesn’t think, up until recently, that she had ever been in a place like this, if she’s being honest. Her mother wasn’t religious, and it always seemed to her like churches were somewhere good people went. So no, she had never been in a church before. Not until she started traveling with Joel. 

He tries to find one every Sunday if he can, in between towns and states and strips of road. Usually, he will manage to, he doesn’t seem to care what kind. Last week, Presbyterian, and the week before that, Baptist. This week, Catholic. They all seem the same to her. But then again, she doesn’t listen closely to the sermons, focuses instead on the movement, and making her own like theirs. Here is what she has learned, when you talk to God, look up, and look sad. What else she has learned, at the end, there is always an eating. Bread and wine placed on soft, trying tongues, and some kind of prayer draped over the entire thing. She watches Joel, every week, take communion until she doesn’t even have to watch. Keeps her eyes closed and pictures the drop of his jaw, the slow pull of his throat. She knows it, she knows it. What she doesn’t know is why. Not much room for a God like this one in their particular myth. Though Joel seems intent on it, and she is in no position to challenge this routine. A month traveling together, and still such strange silence between them. But on church days, he is always more likely to speak. 

There’s only a few other people who don’t get in line to receive communion, and all them, herself included, are met with the heavy sweep of eyes, soft shakes of heads that tells them no, should not be here, no, not for you. A childish thought that she keeps to herself, not for Joel either, no matter how he plays pretend at it, gold cross glinting like a rotten tooth rendered good at his neck. A thin flare of jealousy, maybe, that he can believe in good so easily. 

But maybe Joel is good, she thinks, in spite of what they both do. He certainly seems good walking down the aisle, polite words soft in his throat and a nod for her to follow on his heels and out to the parking lot. These people, church people, will never see them again, and that is a mercy. 

“Where are we?” 

“We’ll be in Kansas soon.” He always answers that question with the future rather than where they are in the present, always forward motion. All that he offers her, folding his worn map back up before he pulls the truck onto the road. 

Joel has some money saved from a past staying. And she told him that wherever he decided to stay next, she would stay too, paying him back for what he has already spent on her. He seemed neither moved nor impressed by her affirmation, eyes slipping down somewhere to the side, a sigh. At the very least, it’s a comfort to her, the promise of somewhere for her, for a little while.  

“Should we try to today?” 

“We don’t have to do it together. If you want to, today, that’s fine. I don’t mind.” The words feel stupid in her mouth, and the sharp look Joel gives her before his eyes return to the road tells her as much. 

“It’s safer if we do it together. Less of a mess.” It doesn’t feel that way to her. She knows what he means, but still. Not to her. Shameful to her, that someone else sees her like that. Shameful back when she had been traveling with that girl, that girl who would grin through it, teeth stained and tarred and making her sick up in her throat with shame, with cruel terror turned inside herself. But Joel isn’t like that. No, there is something different to how Joel tends to this. 

Now, alone means go, green light, good for taking. They watch for alone, parked in rest stops, gas station parking lots, all the in between places, places where the loneliest people tend to linger. They’ll spend whole afternoons in some various slump in or against his truck, squinting down in the sun at bodies moving around them, moving through. Today, they pull off at one of those long haul trucker stops, a gravel lot full of slumbering beasts of cars, cargo, men mincing around, stretching length back into their tired bodies. And they watch. And they wait. Teeth aching.

Joel distracts her, sometimes. Her watching him watching the world. It seems like he moves and something pressed beneath the thin crust of the ground moves too. Big man, silent as a fist man. But he is nice and gentle and kind. Small words for a big man. A kind of manners she has never seen before. She watches him now, the soft squint of his eyes under the sun’s cool heat, leaning against the side of his truck with his hands tucked into his pockets, ankles crossed. He looks so casual, but she knows that there’s a wire strung taut in his spine, quick flickers of want, of hunger. She feels it too. 

“Joel?”

“Hmm.”

“Can I ask you something?” He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no either, ducking his head down in a way that shows her he’s listening. 

“How many others have you met?” Like us, the implicit understanding of like us. Something strange passes across his face, quick pinch, smoothing itself out. 

“A few.” 

“How many is a few?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Well, how many do you think there are in the country?”

“I think that’s a useless question.” He doesn’t say it mean, more matter of fact than anything, though it still feels like a swift loss of breath in her lungs. She pinches her mouth shut, a flume of embarrassment warming beneath her skin. But Joel pays her no mind, his gaze has settled on someone. 

They’ve only done this together two other times, but it’s been enough to know there’s a particular way Joel goes about this. Always alone, always men, trying for the bad ones. And how they decide who is bad is, at best, a childish logic. Alone, for one thing, both of them understanding how that can translate into bad. The loud ones, the brassy, blundering ones, ones that bodies move like they know violence intimately. It is all a game of chance, though Joel seems so methodical. Regardless, it makes her feel messy, smeared and stupid for the way she used to go about this, which is to say, with little thought for anything save the ache in her gut. Yes, she had rules of her own. Never children. Rarely women. As alone as she could find them. It was in the mechanics of it that she always failed, and this failure curdled into something close to cruelty, something she had a hard time stomaching. 

But not Joel. Joel is painfully careful in how this is done. The first step is always the waiting, seeing if a body will stick around in this in-between place. And in that waiting their hunger grows teeth of its own, hunkering their shoulders, making them as small as the curl of their guts. And when a body stays in that in-between place, a trucker who seems to be resting for the night, wandering idly around the lot with a cigarette held loose like a prayer between his lips, that’s when Joel moves. This part is not difficult for Joel, because he is kind and gentle and nice. Quiet, he smalls himself, makes himself anyone that could be anyone else. 

And when he does it, he does it in the night, pale slants of the moon’s watchful gaze washing down on him. And when he does it, he does it with his hands. Not a word, not a whimper or whine, just a final puff of breath when he is done, something absent floating up in his eyes. In the close brush of trees a few yards away from the rest stop, there will be nothing left to find when they are done. Down to the ankles, and then some. 

She hates doing this with him, to have him see her in it, and in the after of it. The sate feels good, but the shame fans a perfect flame up her neck. And she cries, she always cries, and he refuses to look at her when she does. They stumble into the rest stop bathrooms and wipe away what they can from their skin. This is no clean thing. She will feel the stick of it on her for days afterward, she always does. But she will feel good too, full too, and it will only make the shame worse. 

“Why do you cry like that?” It startles her, stops another sniff from hiccuping up her throat. He doesn’t look at her, keeps his eyes focused out on the flare of their headlights eating away at the road, driving back into the night. It’s difficult to look at him, the pearling stains of it that he missed down the line of his throat, the darkening of the front of his shirt, pink-tinged skin, hard to scrub off. Not difficult in that she wants to look away, but difficult in knowing that she should want to look away, though she doesn’t. Beautiful, eyes blown into a sad melt from beneath his brow, his jaw working at some phantom feeling. No, she shouldn’t, but she does. 

“It feels like I should.”

“Well, you don’t have to.” A little sharp, still quiet, but enough to make her heart twist. The rest of their drive is silent, eventually, pulling into the vacant yawn of a motel parking lot. 

Joel goes into the motel office after hastily changing into a new shirt, her eyes slipping somewhere else, but not without a glimpse of bare skin. He’s better with people than she is, and she is still inconsolable, shaking in the passenger seat and trying not to look at her hands, the thin curl of red under her fingernails. She lets her gaze unfocus on the blinking neon sign, vacancy becoming less of a word and more of a throb in her skull. 

“Come on.” He opens her door for her, snapping her back into awareness, and he’s not mean about it, but he is exasperated, dragging his palm down his jaw, already rounding the car to pull their bags out of the bed of the truck. She wishes she could be like him about this, so matter of fact, so mundane. Where did he learn that from? Who taught him to be like that? Who loved him like that? He is far more free than she is, she thinks. She wishes he would show her how. 

This is part of the routine too. They stand, hip to hip, at the cracked sink in the bathroom of their room and they brush their teeth. Their work is meticulous, rounding every canine, making gums bleed with too much pressure. She flosses twice, then brushes again, spitting pink into the porcelain. Joel prefers mouthwash, swallows two stinging gulps of it, trying to kill something from the inside out. It makes her stomach hurt to watch the dip and bob of his throat. 

He lets her take a shower first, the faint sound of late night news filtering in through the cracked bathroom door. She scrapes at her skin with her fingernails, scrubbing down until it stings, until she’s certain that a layer has been sloughed off. She uses the soap that he uses. She smells like him. Clean and good when she looks in the bathroom mirror again. 

Cheaper to get one room with two beds, she never sleeps under the covers. If she thinks too hard about what other lives have breathed on this bed, what cellular remains cling to these sheets, she will make herself sick. So she curls close to one edge of the bed, letting the light from the television blur into meaningless shapes. Joel comes out of the bathroom clean as well, the soft ruff of his hair, the stretch of muscle in his back beneath the thinness of his t-shirt. She watches him sit down on the edge of his bed, elbows resting on his knees, the glinting dare of his cross hanging from his neck. 

“Can I ask you something else?” She regrets the words instantly with the sigh that slumps down through his shoulders. Not supposed to speak, not after. Though he still turns his face over his shoulder to look at her, eyebrows jumped in something like assent. 

“Why do you wear that?” Nod of her head that she hopes he understands, and he seems to, pinching the teardrop of gold between thumb and forefinger.

“Because I believe in it.”

“Why do you believe in it?” 

“I’d like to think there’s something that will forgive me when I say that I’m sorry.” And she can understand that, though she gave up on sorry a long time ago. Her mother used to be the one to receive her sorry. Her sorry, met with scorn, with a scoff, the whites of her mother’s eyes rolling with her sorry, the flat of her mother’s palm making contact with her sorry. Much easier, she thinks, to offer sorry to something that will never actually answer. You can believe anything you want that way. 

“I wish I wasn’t like this.” She’s never said that out loud, sighed out loud, her chin propped in her palm where she’s laying on her side. But it is the crux of all her wanting, and there is a sorry threaded through it. Wanting for something else, to be anything else other than this. 

“It’s not your fault, being like this.”

“I should be able to control it.”

“You can’t, Maeve, you can’t.” She knows that, nods her knowing to him before sitting up and curling her chest over her knees. There’s comfort, at least, in sharing this understanding, in finding control in other ways. 

“Why did you let me come with you?” 

“That’s another question.” His words curl with the smallest smile, a rare thing as he turns to fully look at her, something softening, something slipping. 

“Did you follow me, Joel?” She ruined it with that, she knows, his face falling into something darker, shadows dipping and bending around his eyes, something dark swimming in his lashes. But some part of her already knew. There are no coincidences in a myth like this, everything must be chosen. 

“I did, I’m sorry.” 

“Why did you follow me?”

“I was confused by you.” He speaks so quietly that she keeps her body perfectly still so she can collect what little sound there is, the low thrum of it, something cracking in his voice. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I knew you were like me, but I didn’t understand how that could be possible.” She knows that he doesn’t mean the possibility of others, he has met others before her. Her confusion must be evident on her face, because he offers her a weak smile, his hands in an anxious clasp in his lap, working a steady rhythm into his knuckles. 

“I didn’t think people like us could be good like you are.” These words, what finally shocks her, a surprised yelp of a laugh frightening up her throat, though he is serious, unwavering, and she finds herself becoming angry. How dare he tell her what she is. How dare he hope like that, amidst all this rot. The most they have spoken in their month together, and this is what he says? How dare he say good with so much certainty, and lay it at her feet like it is hers for the taking. A sick joke, more cruel than anything else. 

“I’m not good, Joel.” 

“You are, I see it.” She feels tears starting to ache behind her eyes again, and she is too tired for another flood. All she offers in response to him, a quiet I don’t think so, leaving no room for argument when she lays back down and turns out the lamp on her nightstand. With her eyes closed, she can hear his quiet sigh, the slow shuffle of his body laying down, the softening of his breath. 

She hates that she liked the way good sounded coming from his mouth. 

“Alright?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Are you getting that?”

“No, no.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s not practical.”

“You can get it, if you want.” She considers it, letting the fabric fall between her fingers, a brief wanting that she lets dissolve with a shake of her head, the small pang of it settling in her stomach. There’s no point in getting something nice like this dress, light blue with buttons down the front. It’ll just get ruined anyways. No, instead she sticks to the sensible stack of t-shirts and jeans, some sort of dollar deal at the Salvation store on denim today. Joel takes the bundle of clothes from her, his palm cupping her elbow for a moment, and she thinks he might ask her again if she wants the dress. She’s grateful that he doesn’t, that he takes his hand away, because if not, she might have said yes, might have given into that want, and that would be something she simply could not do. 

They move strangely around each other. Days bleeding weeks bleeding months. Very little progress made in the push west, following a coiled snake of a path, zagging from state to state. Pieces of each other, collected slowly, carefully. Joel is from Texas, and, like her, Joel tried at normal for a very long time. He got further in normal than she ever did. Had a daughter, had a family. Held on long enough to see her into adulthood. He writes letters to her now, though Maeve tries not to watch him working. The shake of his hand, his shoulders, not for her to see. Sometimes the letters get sent, if they are in the right place at the right time to make that happen. Sometimes the letters are left behind in their wake, a prayer to something much larger. 

She tells him a clean version of her own myth, leaving out what she can, leaving out the mother when she can. She is learning the power of deciding for herself where she comes from. She is learning the power of looking someone in the eye, and of them looking back. 

Joel pays for their new clothes, and she sulks, lingering amongst the racks like a despondent ghost. In part, his money comes from the wallets of the people they find in the in-between. It had upset her when she discovered this, and while he had been apologetic, always quick to soften when she prickles, he was still firm about it. She couldn’t exactly argue with his logic, doing far worse things, after all, but she still tends toward steel when money leaves or enters his hands. It makes her nervous, and it makes her sad. Because she knows with no uncertainty that Joel is good, she knows that now. A shame, that all his goodness must get confused in what they must do.

“How much longer do you think?”

“Maybe twenty minutes, we’re close now.” Something that she knows he is doing for her, and only for her, which makes it lovely, and dangerous, and a little dizzying. It had been an idle, errant thing on a morning a few weeks ago, looking at the creased map over the dash of the truck and trying to make sense of what should come next. Arizona had seemed like a tenable answer, and a memory had floated up, something she had seen on the television as a child, something she couldn’t quite believe on a hazy afternoon, turned upside down on a couch they’d be leaving behind soon. A chasm in the earth, somewhere split open, somewhere to look inside of and see whether all wounded things bleed the same way. Sheepish, she had mentioned it to Joel between the cracks of her fingers held over her mouth, hiding the want that was curling at the corners of her lips. And he had said okay, as if it were as easy as that, as if want could ever be as easy as that, asking and receiving. A silly thought, she wondered if he wouldn’t say the same thing if she had pointed up to the moon instead. She thinks that he would. 

The truth, she likes Joel, in a way that makes her nervous. Likes the quiet hum in his throat while he drives, likes his palm between her shoulder blades, an absent-minded touch that she tries hard not to lean into, likes the steadiness of his breath in the middle of the night. Above all, she likes him looking at her, and she likes giving that back to him, looking right back at him with only kindness, a foreign mercy.

“Have you been before?”

“No, never even been in Arizona before.”

“Thank you, Joel, for doing this. I know it’s silly.” His hands flex along the wheel, a light jump in the tendons of his fingers, a glance her way in the passenger seat before his eyes settle back on the road.

“It’s not silly. We needed somewhere to go.” Always needing somewhere to go, the in-between of the in-betweens. But here in the cab of his truck, it seems like time might forgive them, might let them slip by. She’s worked up something that kicks like courage over the months, enough that now, she will often reach across to him and take one of his hands in both of hers. And he will let her. Always that first tensing, touch still tentative, though the lines of his palms will smooth out eventually, pressed close and tight with hers. She likes to hold the pads of her fingers over the soft inside of his wrist, let the beat there lull her into line with the murmuring engine. And he lets her. 

It’s a perfectly normal scene when they get there. Tourists, teeming, tired parents and kids tugging at pants, at hands, at each other. And Joel, clearing his throat a few times, a shake in his hand that she knows well as they walk out to the edge. She hooks her arms over the railing, leans over until her stomach starts to lurch, eyes dizzy from the vast swaths of red and orange grit, crags and peaks and dry brush all around, down into the canyon. 

Because she is so good at leaving, she can do it without even having to move muscle. A little leaving, she watches herself from somewhere suspended, and in her leaving eyes, she watches the small mechanics of her body climb over the rail and leap out into the sinking blankness. But a hand on her shoulder draws her back. She finds Joel looking at her with a cloudy focus, a soft frown that she watches pinch and pull into a thin line. He clears his throat again. 

“Is it what you imagined?” 

“It’s in color.”

“What?”

“When I saw it on the TV it was in black and white. This is better.” Relief, she thinks, something that smooths his brow and the wings of his shoulders. Maybe even a smile. She offers him one of her own, slight slippage when her gaze wanders over his shoulder. Hand in hand, a halo of golden hair like corn silk, a daughter at her mother’s hip, both of them walking away from the edge. Probably back to their car, probably back to their home, to dinner, to bedtime, to mother brushing her daughters corn silk hair with hands that could not even imagine violence. Saying I love you with mouths that could not even imagine violence. 

And Joel turns around to see what she is staring at, and she sees in the planes of his back the same tensing she feels, the same tensing that comes with knowing that something has been lost, and that it can never be retrieved, returned to. When he turns back around to her, steel has resettled in his jaw, but something is swimming hazy in his eyes. 

“We should go.” 

“Okay.” She takes one more look at the open wound, one more imagining of slipping into it, letting it swallow her whole. And then, well, they do what they always do. They leave. Somewhere inside of her, she is telling her mother that she finally got to see the Grand Canyon. 

…

She thinks she might be hurting Joel. Not directly, not intentionally. She’s been trying to wait out her hunger, staving it off, and he in turn has been doing the same. Testing and trying the boundaries of how long she can hold onto normal, and it hurts, and she can see that it hurts Joel too. Waiting like this, going without like this, strings him by a livewire of his want, makes him jumpy, slow to soothe, to sleep. She can hear him shifting around in the night in the close quiet of their motel rooms, restless, wanting. Sometimes, he will sigh, get up, moving quiet in the dark, the thin slice of sound when he opens the door and steps outside. He goes and sits in the truck. She knows, she has stepped into the corner of the motel room window and seen him with his temple propped in his palm, made small in the cab of the truck. This waiting is tiring. This waiting has teeth and claws and growls. This waiting, this hunger, is enough to make an animal stupid, shivering like static. 

And he has done this nice thing for her, taken her to see the black and white wound in color, and so, she decides that the waiting is done, for now. So they do the thing that they do. They find a place that is in-between, and they begin a different kind of waiting. 

“I want to see this time.”

“No, Maeve, it’s not something you should be seeing.”

“It’s nothing new to me, Joel.” She needs to see, she thinks, needs an accounting of every part of him. In the past, it has always been an unspoken routine. She would catch glimpses of it, of him, of his hands closing around something fragile,  but he wanted her to have nothing to do with it. It’s not like she hasn’t done it herself. The whites of the eyes, and the collapse of the lungs one final time, wretched things she understands.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” His voice borders on the edge of pain, the tendons in his neck playing a hurt tune, and for a moment, she thinks about backing down, letting this go. But she can’t. To do what she wants to do, she must know every part of him, this too. 

“Please.” And he’s not going to say no, she knows that. He has turned her into a terrible king in some ways with how little he says no to her. She grows greedy with it. A child growing up with so much no will hoard whatever yes they can find. 

He doesn’t say anything else, returns to his waiting in the gas station parking lot, with perhaps an edge less patience, shifting in his boots and squinting into the dry shock of the afternoon. She presses her lips together to keep any more from coming out, turns back to the strange landscape surrounding them, the desert, the resilient death of it. And as always, if you wait long enough, someone else will come staggering into the in between. 

It begins like it always begins. They wait until the bruising pall of night washes the cracked earth purple, all the other nighttime creatures starting to yip and titter, working themselves up into their usual routine. But this time, she is there when Joel approaches the man, there to watch something else slide into the place where he is kind and gentle and nice, there to watch him, with the calm strength of a storm, take the man out into the quiet judgment of the desert. 

She stands and she watches a scared animal whimper and wriggle in a merciless trap. Joel’s hands are around the man’s neck, hunched over the strange slump of his body, a thin frown on his face and the slightest pinch between his brows. She can’t look away, her eyes stinging, unblinking, wide and receiving this part of him. And Joel is looking right back at her with the same intensity, eyes lit up in a slash of moonlight. And the man refuses to die. Still struggling, clutching at air and hoping for a savior. And the errant realization that she is someone people need saving from, a quick flash of lightning in her mind. Her stomach starts to churn. 

“Please, please.” It isn’t the man that’s saying it, she realizes. It’s Joel. Quiet and broken murmurings, pleas, prayers, for this to be over. This time is different. Joel, usually so clean and quick and quiet, is struggling. And it isn’t because the man is big or battering, actually quite slight, actually still slumped, but wheezing lost breaths, heart still beating blood and body. Broken cries like an animal caught in a trap. She covers her ears with her hands, but the sounds echo, and the sounds  will echo for a long time. But she can’t look away, not even when thin beads of silver start to fall down Joel’s face, crying, and still pleading for the man to die. And when nothing else works, Joel does turn violent, a quick shock of it in the way he makes simple work of the man’s neck in his hands. She lets out a shriek that she cannot hold back, hot shame following close on its heels. 

Joel is pale, face flushed wan and weary. He swallows hard a few times as he straightens his spine, letting the body curl limp on the ground. Hot salt starts to skate down her face, both of them crying now, shivering with it. 

“I can’t, not this one.” His face crumples at her words, something close to agony that makes her stomach swoop and curdle. She has seen every part of him now. There will be no returning from this.

“Maeve, please, I–” 

“I’m going to wait in the truck.” Already turning her back to him and stumbling toward the faint, fluorescent pulse of the gas station in the distance. He does not stop her, and she is grateful for it. 

The worst part, she is still very hungry. Her shame growing wings that batter against her ribs, because beneath the horror and the guilt, there is still that hunger, made worse now by how close she came to sating it. Like a petulant child, frustrated, and on the brink of going full-tilt. She sits in the passenger seat of the truck and presses her forehead against the window, cool glass providing the smallest comfort. 

And when Joel eventually returns to the truck, he is not covered in it. She knows he is still hungry like her. She does not want to know what was done with the curled body, and he does not tell her. 

They are silent, small, slow moves. She keeps her temple pressed to the passenger-side window, shoulders shaking with the smallest sobs. And she isn’t sure if it’s the hunger, or the shame that is making her cry, and not knowing only makes her cry harder. 

She doesn’t know how long they drive for, but eventually there is a motel, and eventually she is standing in the bathroom of a motel room, and he is standing next to her, and they are moving like they had not failed. She brushes her teeth twice, until it hurts, and like always, he lets her have the shower first. She wants it to burn, and so it burns, coming out from under the water with skin welted and washed thin. And when they pass each other in the doorway to the bathroom, their eyes still don’t quite meet, nothing is said. 

Something strange is settling inside her. She doesn’t lay down, runs her palm across the static fuzz of the television, over the pixel-pocked face of the person delivering the evening news. And when that isn’t enough, she presses her cheek to the low-humming screen, curls her arms around the back of the television, and holds herself there. And for a moment, it’s as easy and as simple as how good that warmth feels, the mumbling drone of sound in her ear. She pulls herself away from it when she hears the water shut off, and there is a moment of reckoning, recognizing, when he comes to stand in the doorway to the bathroom. Hair dark and dripping darker onto his t-shirt. He looks at her, and she looks back, her hands fisted in the fabric of her sweatshirt. He looks small, he looks sad, he looks like he’s about to ask her for something. She would give him anything he could ask for, she would try, the realization as clear and clean as the blade of a knife. 

“I’m sorry, Maeve.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I couldn’t. Not with you there like that.” 

“It’s okay.”

“I wanted to keep good for you.”

“You are good, Joel.”

“Please, don’t.” A monster, broken, a monster, bending, a monster, brought to the ground. A monster in tears. Something seems to split inside him, the fragile threads of his strength flailing and failing. And she surprises herself when she goes to him before the first shaking crack of a sob can rack his chest, curls arm around shoulders like she knows what to do. He’s saying something that sounds like sorry and she’s saying something that sounds like forgiveness, managing enough movement to get them to the edge of one of the beds, to sit down still holding him. 

That cross hangs from his neck like a wretched joke, the small shiver of it. He cries, big man, big strong man. And she holds him, lets him shake with sorry and promises him that he doesn’t have to, that he is okay, that he is good, and in turn, it feels good to give these things to him. 

Eventually, the shake starts to smooth, and when she takes his face in both her hands, he leans into it, eyes heavy and worn weary, but something bright still when he looks at her. 

The thing is, Maeve knows very little about what care looks like. Most of what she learned came from the same black and white fuzz of a television. Beautiful women and beautiful men and their beautiful lives. In the movies, care is a delicate hand at the cheek. In the movies, care is a complete embrace, arms in arms and faces tucked into necks. In the movies, care is having someone to come home to, someone to love. When her hunger was at its worst as a child, she would sit as close to the television as she could get, unblinking, should she miss the moment that the beautiful woman and the beautiful man would kiss. 

And when she got older, she learned a little more about what care is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. There were boys whose violence shocked her, and in turn were shocked by her own violence. There were men that made her feel foolish for expecting care, and there were others who were just plainly mean. One comes to mind, a man whom she got on her knees for. Strange, how women are made gods on their knees, fleeting, foolish gods. And she felt wanted, looking up at him and him looking down at her. And she was wanting too, the thick curl of it in her stomach that was different from any other want. But that had changed very quickly. She didn’t like the way his hand gripped the back of her skull and she didn’t like the crude words he dribbled over her and she didn’t like that it didn’t feel like care, knew that it wasn’t care, it was a cage, and it was too much, and it was all she could think to do because she was afraid, she was afraid, and wanting, and afraid of her wanting, and she was young. So she let a different kind of wanting, different kind of hunger take over. And instead of a god on her knees she became a monster all over again.  

She has not tried for care since then, not for a very long time. But she thinks that she would like to now, with Joel. And so she does, tentative at first, the soft presence of her mouth at his temple, the round of his cheek, the drop of his lashes brushing against her skin, something shy about it. She lays another at the corner of his mouth, and it is an asking, it is a choice, it is a new myth made possible, one in which they can both be good, one that is constructed out of care. An answer in the tilt of his head, in the aligning of mouths, in his palm spanning her jaw, holding her now, holding her still in a kiss that teaches her a new kind of hunger. 

They move like they have both been wanting for a very long time, and they have, after all. The act of give and take, and she wants to take so much, give so much, perfect, pooling pangs of want when she lets his tongue into her mouth, a sharp sigh in her nose. Both turn pliant for the other, his hands at her hips, coaxing and curling her into his lap, and her hands in his hair, tilting his head back how she would like it so she can taste the sharp of his jaw and the soft hollow of his neck. For a moment she pauses, mouth pressed to the jump of his pulse, and she breathes because he smells like him, like that soap he buys wherever they go, like something else human and pleasant and real. And he lets her, runs his palms up the track of her spine, a soothing, steadying thing, only stilling when she lifts her face from the crook of his neck. Breath and beat stop briefly when she looks at him, the dark awe rounding his eyes, cheeks flushed down devastating and lips parted. She has never been looked at like this before. She likes being looked at like this. 

“I think that you’re beautiful, Joel.” It makes him shy, and awful, it makes her smile. She keeps him from dropping his gaze in denial with her hand at his jaw, holding him there and pressing a small thing of a kiss to his lips. And what unfolds afterward happens slowly, something on the verge of timid in how they move, like at any moment, flight, fleeting and fled and gone. But that does not happen, but they both stay, and they both grow more confident every time touch is answered with more touch until they are both bare, and they are curled around each other on the bed, the closest to holy she thinks she could ever get in the sense and sate of skin pressed to skin, a warmth that is so new it stings salt behind her eyes in overwhelm.  His brow pinches at the sight of her first tears, showing her how gentle he can be for her with the fragile presence of his thumb gathering the salt before it can fall. 

“I’ve never met someone good like you.” Awful, she believes him when he tells her this, hope unfurling in her chest and flushing up under her skin, a terrible heat that flickers and flumes when he begins to shift down her body, moving muscle how he would like it to move until she is splayed for him, her knees falling to the sides to allow the breadth of his shoulders to settle between them. He rests his open mouth over the soft inside of her thigh, his eyes flaring up to hers beneath the dark fan of his lashes. And this is care, she thinks, soft jaw and soft teeth where they could turn so violent. Soft only for her. He holds her in the soft bleed of his mouth, dragging heat to her cunt. He takes from her, eats at her pleasure, pulling muscle and bone into a taut line of want, her whole body strung in a snarl as he takes and takes and takes, his mouth, and his fingers, and yes, she thinks, anything else she could ask him for. He would give it to her. Gives and gives and gives until it’s his name in the back of her throat, something that borders on pain with the way he continues to mouth at her through it. She tugs at his hair, begging mercy that he finally allows, up and up and up until she’s tasting herself on his mouth and the solid weight of him is smoothing the kick of her pulse, her chest. 

The roll film starts to melt and pop at that point. Not like the movies, some myth of their own, making myth out of their want. She opens for him, a high, animal keening in her chest when his hips settle against hers. And it is not grace, it is not beautiful or merciful. It’s want distilled, and it makes them move ugly, animal, accepting and open to each other, a little bit frantic, frenetic and fizzing. Skin slicks with salt, turning everything hazy, everything close and cloistering and she likes it, the feeling of overwhelm, blatant and battering and him, all she can think about is him saying her name, saying his want and calling his want by her name. And in the aftermath, they barely move, remain pressed close like stained glass starting to melt into syrup. 

He holds her in a way she didn’t think she’d ever be able to ask for, tucked close to the steadiness of his heart, a sound that soothes and reassures her that yes, this is real, yes, this is shared. 

“This is a good thing.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Want is whispered on broken exhales, and accepted into willing mouths. Monsters that are no longer monsters in each other’s company. 

Some things make the hunger easier to stomach. This is one of those things. This is care. She is learning how to receive it, and she is learning how to give it. She is learning that she might like giving it more than she could’ve ever imagined. She didn’t know how to for such a long time, after all, that it is something entirely new, something that feels good. 

And in that care there has been a staying. Small, but still, she can’t remember the last time she spent a week, let alone two,  in a single place. They get a motel room with a kitchenette, and she knows that money is starting to become more of a question than an expectation, because neither of them are doing the thing that makes them monsters. Playing chicken with each other’s hunger, but filling in the ache with other things.

Joel buys her that dress, light blue with buttons down the front, watches her put it on for the first time in the peeling mirror next to the bed, sheepish and smiling, rubbing his palms down his thighs. She flushes, and any hunger is smothered beneath a fine flume of want, and of something else. Something like power, being seen like this, and seeing him like this, his eyes heavy and lingering. And how easy want like this becomes, him reaching out and her responding with two steps into his arms. He drops to his knees before her, sweet in his supplication, bunches the fabric up at her hips, and gives a little more to her from the soft hinge of his mouth. A fine fissure splits and snarls in the mirror that day from the way her skull makes contact with it, perfect arc of pleasure and she doesn’t even mind the pain. 

They go to the grocery store that’s ten minutes away and pretend at normal. They buy white bread that’s so soft, she watches the easy give of it with the press of her thumb, how it reforms itself around the indent through the crinkling plastic. Tomatoes, and mayonnaise, and salt, and they sit in the back of his truck, and she watches him slice into the perfect, red skin, juice dribbling from the clean break. The end of summer, sun flirting and flaring on their curled backs in the motel parking lot. He makes them sandwiches, and she sighs at the taste, golden and the grit of salt, and the soft stick of bread to the roof of her mouth. A hum in her throat when the sense of it all slips down. She watches his jaw work. 

How nice, to let days go by in something close to stillness. She learns his body, lays him out on the coarse sheets and puts her mouth wherever she would like to. Because she gets to have him, however she would like to have him. And so she does. Lips to the center of his chest where she can feel the kick of his heart, to the soft catch of his stomach where he holds his breath, watching her beneath the shy fan of his lashes, light and shadow flickering with the trying twirl of the fan. And she’s so soft for him, only for him, soft jaw and teeth and tongue, taking him into her mouth and humming at the salt and sense of it. That gold cross glints above her with the rise and fall of his chest. And she could, and he could. As easy as exhaling, as easy as the hinge of the jaw. Though they don’t, though they don’t. They sate each other in different ways. 

He coaxes her up and up and up, squeezing at the soft of her hips, a preening laugh getting stuck in her chest when he pulls her down onto the open heat of his mouth. Sweat beads and bends in all the soft places in the close swelter of the afternoon and she exults in it, watches her hips move in the sliver of mirror caught in the corner of her eye. His hands splayed against her ass, making flesh give, animal mouthings that make her shiver. She feels beautiful. Looks back at the woman in the mirror and the woman looks back at her and she feels beautiful. 

And when they settle down around each other, when his hips press close to hers and she’s looking at him and he’s looking at her, she can begin to believe that they aren’t monsters at all. Monsters couldn’t love like this, at least she doesn’t think so. 

“Can I have one of those?”

“Mmm.” This is the way most afternoons go. Bare, they don’t leave bed again, making a game out of reaching whatever they could possibly need. She stretches one leg out, toeing at a carton of cigarettes strewn on the floor until it’s within arm’s reach, Joel’s hand held steady on her hip to keep her from slipping. Smoking, she has found, is an excellent way to press the hunger down and away, tendriled tempering. She curls back into his side, plucks the lighter from where it was tucked in the carton and settles a cigarette between his lips. The pull he takes once it’s lit jumps and jags the tendons of his throat. She lays her mouth there, feels the thrum it drags from him, and like divine machinery, it makes a smile start to curl and round her cheeks. 

He offers her a drag, and she takes one that is a little too much, makes her eyes water while he rubs his palm up and down the bare breadth of her back, soothing, all easy, easy, Maeve. Sheepish, she tucks her face down along the line of his clavicle, a small sound of protest in the back of her throat before she can stop it when his palm stills, though he’s quick to pick up the smooth circuit. She flushes, because he has made her greedy with all this touch, all this give and take, ask and receive. A different kind of monstrous, what he has made her with want made real. 

“Maeve?” She already knows that tilt to his words because he has tried this a few times now, that little edge of pain that comes with hunger. She sighs, but she does lift her head so she can look at him, the slight pull of his frown, waiting for the question that’s coming. 

“Will you eat?”

“I don’t need to.”

“Maeve.”

“I don’t, Joel.”

“I know you do.” And the unsaid of it, because I do too, because I am in pain too, because we are the same, and we must not forget that. Yes, she can set the hunger down, but there is always the picking it up, always the remembering. It turns her quiet, turns her stomach too, making her sit up, Joel’s hand falling from her spine. He sits up with her, ducking his head to catch the slant of her gaze, eyes rounding and wet. 

“Baby, all you gotta do is eat. I’ll take care of the rest.” She sighs, letting her cheek fall into the cup of his palm, fighting a question that is threatening in her throat, and that has been for a while now. She wants to know how long, just how. He held onto normal for a very long time, and if he could, maybe she could as well. Maybe this could be enough, her cheek in his palm. But, at least for now, she will not ask that, will not try that, because she can see that she is hurting him again, dark wings beneath his eyes, jolting with unanswered want. She knows that hurt, and was fine with hurting herself for a very long time, so long as it meant a gentle hand from her mother, a promise of staying. But this is different, because even when she isn’t hurting, even when she isn’t hungry, Joel doesn’t look away from her, doesn’t leave, doesn’t punish or preach. Relief, she thinks, is all he feels when she’s full. And that’s a kind of care that is new to her as well. 

She lays her hand over his, turns her face into his palm to the fated lines there. 

“Okay, we’ll eat.” 

Eating means leaving, and they both know that, but just the promise that this hurting will soon be over is enough to ward off any worry with skittering fingers. They slink out of bed, get dressed in the wavering light of the single lamp in their room. By now, night, dark and close when they step outside, that late summer cooling that comes when the sun slips down beyond the horizon. 

They haven’t, not since she refused to, not since Joel wept. And she feels a fine thread of worry tugging in her stomach, trying not to look at him too hard as they drive through the night toward some in-between place. But there is nothing to worry about, because Joel takes care of it. And so they are full again, and so they aren’t hurting any more, stumbling through the desert brush beneath the merciful glow of the moon, dark, dark, dark. 

It is amazing how little time something so monstrous takes when it is done so carefully like this. In the passenger seat, she presses her palm over her mouth, feeling the dried stick there. And in turn she reaches over to him, lays her hand over his mouth in the same place, feels the same tack there. Like her, like her, like her. He kisses the cup of her palm without ever taking his eyes off the road, the jump of muscle in his forearms, in his knuckles curled around the steering wheel. 

They are quiet when they get back to the motel, curling around themselves to conceal the truth of the stain, of the darkening damp smeared down their fronts. And this routine starts the same. At the sink, the toothpaste and the floss and the mouthwash. But there is no separation when the steam of the shower starts to seep. They both strip down and step in together. Before he can, she is already pressing her palms against his chest, holding him in the stream of the shower. She cleans what remains from his skin, water pinkening in the drain. And when she’s satisfied with that, she takes his skull in her hands and tips his head back so she can thread her fingers through his hair. He hums, eyes slipping shut in pleasure made pure. And she is so gentle for him that even now, so dizzyingly full, she has a hard time convincing herself of her own monstrosity. 

He surprises her when he takes over, beginning his ministrations with his hand holding her chin, fingers tucked at the hinge of her jaw to hold her steady, hold her mouth open so he can run the pad of his thumb over her teeth, pressing at the sharp of her canines, something dark laying heavy over his eyes. She tries for a grin, though it is only a crook of the corners of her lips with the way he is holding her face. And when she bites, just a little, holding his thumb in the merciful pressure of her teeth, he laughs, a quiet murmuring sound as he watches her from beneath his lashes. 

“Be good, please.” And she is good for him. Good means not biting down. Love means not biting down, at least not too hard. Instead, taking his thumb into her mouth and curling her tongue around it. She sucks, and he groans, and it sends a new want stuttering up her spine. Close to frightening to want and be wanted so regularly like this. The cool tile is holy against her spine, shivering down a perfect prayer. He holds her there, and she lets him, and they do something about the hunger that remains. 

When the water runs cold and clean, they get out, continue a routine that looks normal, settle down around each other in bed. Joel puts on the evening news and she keeps her ear pressed over his heart, lets the flooding beat of it drown at that slick slither of shame, still there, always there. But then, but then.

There is a woman on the news. A woman who is crying. A woman who is surrounded by the small flicker of candles held in hands, held in vigil. And the woman is crying because her husband never came home. Three weeks ago, and her husband didn’t come home, and her husband isn’t, wasn’t, the type of man who would just leave because they had children. They had children, and their father never came home. And Maeve sits up because when they show a photo of the husband, the father, she recognizes him. That night when she refused and Joel wept. She recognizes him, and her stomach starts to curdle. And Joel recognizes him too, sits up too, a careful, quiet call of her name, low, so as to not scare her into flight. But she is already shaking her head no, no, no, no, shirking and shrinking away from his touch, curling up on the end of the bed, all her angles tucked up close as panic turns into sickening white noise in her mind. 

They had been careful, hadn’t they? Always careful, always the in-between, always people that couldn’t possibly have someone waiting at home for them. After all, it isn’t hard for like to recognize like. And they were careful, and they were kind, and they always tried very hard to be gentle when they had to do what they always have to do. Not enough though, none of it, enough, and it was never going to be. 

Joel turns off the television, his movement fragmented in the melt of her tears, catching stained-glass glimpses of him kneeling in front of her, pleading, or praying, or something in between the two. Please, baby, please will you look at me? It’s not your fault, it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine. You’re good, you’re so good, please, I’m sorry, please. And it’s please over and over again, and she’s shaking her head no over and over again, trying to wrench away from his hands holding her face steady. 

In the perfect cradle of a pain like this, there is a regression, something childlike in the logic of making it better. Something young in the way he unclasps his cross from around his neck and tries to give it to her, tries to lay it against her sternum. And something young in her too, throwing a perfect fit when he tries to make this right the only way he knows how. She shows him her snarl, thrashes and tears the chain away from her skin, throws it across the room. Terrible, she regrets it immediately, regrets the way his face falls, the way he sinks back into himself. She has hurt him, and this time, on purpose. 

He gets up with a sigh that sounds very tired, doesn’t say another word as he crosses toward the bathroom. She can’t look at his face right now because it will make her cry even harder, so instead she lets her vision blur and unfocus around his form, a silhouette with his forehead resting against the bathroom door frame. 

“I’m sorry, Maeve.” All that he offers, slipping away, slipping out of sight and into the bathroom, and that young part of her panics. No, needs him to be where she can see him, where he can see her, needs to fix this. She gets down on her hands and knees in a blind stutter, runs her fingers along the grimey baseboard trying to find where she threw that wretched chain. And it’s no use because when she does find it she sees that the clasp is broken clean off, golden bones in pieces, glinting in the faded carpet. She picks up what she can find of it, feeling small, shivering small when she pads into the bathroom. 

He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub, big man made small just like her, curled over himself with his head in his hands. And now would be a good time for her to leave, she thinks. Leave the cracked pieces of his faith on the counter and start walking in any direction away from here. She is familiar with this kind of leaving. All those years ago, and her mother in a similar posture of prostration, of surrender to this thing that she could not fix for her daughter. Her mother, asking her to leave. And Maeve, finally given an opportunity to succeed in what her mother asked of her. Yes, she is very good at leaving when people get tired of her, or frightened of her, or tired of being frightened of her. She has done it many times now. 

“I’m sorry, Joel.” And the rest is said too, in a sodden slur when she holds out her cupped palms to him and shows him the broken pieces, something about her fixing it, with money that doesn’t exist, and in a place she doesn’t know, and with hands that seem to only be good for greed. But he accepts her sorry, curls his palms around hers to close her fingers over the wreckage, a prayer that she is relieved to partake in. 

They are ruinous. But they are in love. 

A strange, slow slump over the lip of the tub, and he pulls her with him. The porcelain, or whatever it is, is still pearled damp from their shower earlier and the bare skin of her shins sticks and slips as she settles in his lap. She holds his face in her hands, thumbs stroking at the soft skin beneath his eyes. And he’s beautiful, and she’s already forgiven him, and she never wants to hear him say sorry again because she would continue to forgive him for any and all of it. She wants a world for them in which they never have to say sorry.

“Joel?” He is listening, though he doesn’t say anything, and she allows something like hope to lurch hot and hazed in her chest.

“Do you think we could be normal together?”

Silence, for a long time. The sink faucet drips.

“We could try.”

Two years pass. 

It is the longest she has ever managed normal.

The truth is there was money, because her mother did love her in her own strange way. She had never touched it before though, there never seemed a good enough reason for it. But this seemed good, like the best possible reason, really.

They get an apartment in a town in New Mexico with a name that doesn’t mean anything to either of them. Something they could both agree on, the hard bake of the sun and the dry air. 

They both get jobs in the first months. She works at a grocery store, smiles bright at the mothers that bring their daughters along on their weekly errands. He works with his hands, and comes home in the slow slump of the afternoon smelling like cedar and salt. She licks it off his skin and runs her fingers through his damp, darkened hair most nights. 

Those first few months, there is a mattress, and not much else. It is enough. They put it in the middle of the apartment. They eat and they sleep and they talk and they laugh and they fuck and they watch the sun rise and fall in the harsh way it does from that mattress. They are very happy. 

And then they get some more furniture, and then they start saying hello to their neighbors when they pass them in the hall, and their neighbors start saying hello back. Normal slips into the corners of their lives like the most gracious guest. 

At the end of that first year, when it seems like normal is going to stick, Joel sends a letter to his daughter with a phone number scribbled in hope at the bottom of the page. He waits by the phone the whole week after it’s sent like an anxious ghost, makes himself sick with waiting. And when she does call, Maeve catches glimpses of him from the end of the hall, a smile, and quiet wonder in his voice. He’s not interested in going to church any more because now his daughter calls every Sunday. He sits down on the floor with his chin tilted to the side to accommodate the stretch of the coiled phone cord and he talks all morning with her. 

In the second year, Maeve finds that she likes to paint. There’s an art supply store in town, so she quits her job at the grocery store and goes to work there, gets enough of an employee discount that she can buy paints and brushes and canvases and an easel over the span of a few months. She likes the desert, likes its colors and its quiet assertion of life, so that is what she often paints. And Joel likes to watch her in the evenings, she sets up her work in front of the crooked palm of windows in the living room, an errant hum in the back of her throat to whatever song is playing on the radio. Eventually, every night, when she is doing more swaying than painting and her eyes are starting to squint shut, he gets up off the couch and pads over to sway with her, her head falling back to rest against his shoulder as he coaxes her tired body into his arms. And from the faint glow of the windows stacked and ordered alongside a few dozen other glowing windows of the apartment complex, it looks like love, because it is. 

She finds that she likes routine, likes being bored and boring. She likes that the things she worries about now are small things, like what they're going to have for dinner, or whether they’ll go to the weekly tenant meeting on Thursday nights. She likes waking up in the same bed every morning, and she likes that he sleeps on his stomach when he’s actually comfortable in a space, splayed and cheek rumpled on his pillow, an arm always extended toward her, draped over her. She likes the weight, the reassurance of it. And in the mornings he is slow to wake, all soft murmurings and soft eyes, still shut even when she presses her lips to his temple, though a smile will usually start to curl smug when she does. Good morning, good morning. It is good, all of it, so good that it makes the dormant hunger hurt a little bit less.

They eat breakfast together, leaning against the kitchen counter. Eggs and their golden tears splitting and spilling on their plates, strong coffee that he takes black and she takes with cream. Their mouths work hard around normal. She packs lunches for them both, late summer again, tomatoes again, sandwiches again, the way that he made them. And on her break at work she does her best to get it down, pinching the crust off first before eating the rest. But no, that other hunger doesn’t go away. It makes sounds a little sharper, and lights achingly brighter, it makes the steady beat of the sun fierce. But she thinks she can manage it, because she wants all this normal so much more, hunger for hunger, and want for want, a careful game of tipping the scales. 

Joel’s birthday is in a few weeks. She’s been working on a painting for him, difficult to keep it a secret with the way he is always over or under her shoulder, a hum in his throat because that’s beautiful, baby, you work so beautiful. But somehow she’s managed to keep it hidden. And today she picks up two fresh tubes of paint, pigments that she needs to finish her work. She’s painting a sunset for him, a landscape that they both know, a wound in the earth, that canyon that they visited once. She hopes he’ll like it. She thinks he will. 

She always gets home later than he does these days because he got a promotion, baby, big man, good man who got a promotion, baby, who’s a boss now, baby, working with his hands, baby, good, honest work, baby. He's already showered, hair damp and dripping dark down the back of his t-shirt, the small slide of muscle as he stands over the stove and stirs something that smells good. That same hum in his throat when she twines her arms around his stomach and presses her face into the back of his neck, deep inhale because he smells like that good, clean soap he always uses. 

And it’s all the quiet, normal things, greetings, and how was your day, and it was good, baby, how was yours, and mmhmm, good, this looks good, you look good, good, good. He turns in her arms and smacks a kiss to her mouth that makes her laugh, makes her hungry. 

“I got some new paints.”

“Oh yeah?” Somehow, squirreling around each other, he tucks her into his side, arm easy and slung around her shoulders while he continues to stir pasta and sauce in simmering pots, steam and savor washing over their faces and turning skin tacky and flushed. 

“Mmhmm.”

“Gonna paint something beautiful, baby?” Baby, baby, baby, his cheeks round with the word every time. She especially likes it, usually late at night, or early in the morning, when he slurs and stumbles over Maevey baby, Maevey, Maevey, Maevey. Heavy and sweet like thick syrup in his throat and it nearly brings her to tears it’s so nice coming from his mouth. 

“I’m gonna try.” 

“Always beautiful, always make things so beautiful.” It’s almost absent-minded the way he says it, intent on getting food on plates with only one free hand, but it still makes her stomach swoop and buoy something awful. 

They eat dinner, and they sit on the couch, and he watches her work on a different painting until the sun slips under and washes everything down dark. And they get ready for bed, moving around each other in a routine they don’t even have to think about, settle down around each other and turn out the lights, quiet whisperings of love, touch that expects more of itself for a very long time, easy, patient, soft. When she feels and hears his breath slip into that slow resonance of sleep, she moves as quietly as she can in getting out of bed. She’s been hiding his painting in the hall closet where they keep their winter coats tucked. They have winter coats now. 

She works in the quiet clutch of the night, eyes squinting in the dim light she allows for herself, working partly from memory, and partly from  mythology of a place in their shared past. The painting will be finished soon. She thinks she’ll have to give it to him early if that’s the case, giddy with the idea of finally sharing it with him. 

When she’s satisfied with her progress, still night, still close and dark and quiet, she tucks the painting back into the closet, careful not to let anything brush against it while it dries. And when she returns to bed, Joel is still asleep, on his stomach now with his arm outstretched toward her side of the bed. Nothing is easy like it is to slip back under with him. 

She’s going to finish the painting tonight. The thought makes her rush a bit in closing the store. It takes her three tries to finally get the key to click into the lock. If she does finish it, she thinks she might have to wake him up right then and there to show it to him. And she floats home on the prospect of that, smiling, easy greetings to the people she passes on her way up to the apartment. 

“Joel?” A fine whisper of worry when she doesn’t find him in the kitchen making dinner. He must have had a longer day at work, she figures, just now getting home and getting cleaned up because she can see the light slipping down the hall from the bathroom. 

And the rest happens in a strange, slow unraveling. 

Later, much later, he will tell her that she screamed when she opened the bathroom door. She will not remember that. What she will remember, the awful resignation, that understanding like a small death, that she was never going to be able to walk out of her own myth. And the blood on clean, white tile that had never seen blood before. And blood on him, on his hands and on his face and down his shirt and all over and all over and all over. 

Later, much later, he will tell her that he thought he was going to die when she told him not to touch her, when she skittered back so hard she tripped and fell in the hallway when he reached for her. What she will never tell him, she sometimes wishes she died then and there.

From the glimpse she caught, there is very little left of what he has done, only remnant viscera in the bathtub. But she doesn’t see any more than that, because she is on the ground and she is pressing her back up close against the wall as far from him as she can get and she is sobbing and yes, she is screaming. Ruinous, wretched ribbons of sound ripping through her chest. It is a mourning sound. And he drops down to his knees, reaches in the space between them, but thinks better of it with the way she shrinks away from him. Pink streaks of tears down his face, he pulls at his hair in something that looks like agony. He cries with her, and he prays to her. Like a chant, like an invocation, like one last plea for salvation, I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I’m sorry, I was so tired, I’m sorry, I couldn’t, I’m sorry, I love you, please, I’m sorry, please. And she cries harder at the broken sound of his wails, fingernails clawing at her chest like she might be able to plunge through skin and muscle and find the sick, stuttered beat of her heart that is in such perfect pain. The horrible truth is she had already forgiven him the moment she opened the bathroom door. The horrible truth, they are in this myth together. 

Eventually, when there is little left for her to mourn, the cries stop, everything swollen and slumped and sodden. She doesn’t wince or recoil when he reaches for her now, crawling to her on his knees, wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing the crown of his head into her stomach, still shivering in his sobs. And because she has already forgiven him, it is hardly difficult for her palms to find the shake in his spine. She doesn’t even have to think about it, holding him a little tighter when his hands grasp at the fabric of her shirt. 

Still, pain. Later, much later, she does not let herself think of that day too often. Of the painting that was never finished. That was left in the hall closet to dry with a sunset that wasn’t yet complete. Because if she does think of it for too long, that pain will tear open inside her all over again, and it will turn her hateful, and she doesn’t want that, not for him, not when he tries to show her how sorry he is every day. Sorry that normal ended like that. Sorry that there was always going to be another leaving. 

They leave, together, the next morning, silent as a grave. And in all the years of wandering that follow, they never return to New Mexico, a space sealed off like a tomb of the past, of a promise that could never have been kept. 

…

“Are you cold?” 

“A little, but it feels nice.” Still, he doesn’t think twice about offering his shirt to her from where it had stayed dry and folded at the edge of the lake, warmed by the sun and clinging to the pearling damp on her skin. It’s summer again, and they are in some in-between like they always are, and he is trying to find what joy he can for her like he always is. And it is a good day, one of their better ones, so she tries for what she can of a smile from behind the tuck of her knees up against her chest, squinting in the bright halo around him. He smiles too, a shy, small thing that looks like relief, and when he curls his arm around her shoulders, she lets him, tucks  into his side, and they sit at the edge of a lake in the in-between, soft grass and mud and the mild kippering of insects all around them, baking in the sun. When he holds her like this, when normal starts to creep in, so do the tears, but she tamps them down with a hum in her throat, some song that he sighs at, tucks his face into the hollow of her neck so he can feel the thrum of it from the source. He holds her like he is waiting for her to shatter, something desperate, but something fragile. And she drags her fingers through his hair, now drying in fine waves beneath the sun, and it is a moment that will have to be enough. She is learning what to hold onto, and what to let go.

“Joel?” He hums his listening, though he keeps his face ducked down to let her continue her ministrations. 

“We should probably leave soon.” 

“Yeah, we should.” And it is this string of words over and over again, the finely stitched pattern of their lives held in the cradle of these few words. She thinks that she has accepted this, settled around this, grown around the rot until it has become something else. Sometimes, she wonders if they are real, if she is real. Watch two myths walk away from the edge of a lake. It is summer, and  two myths are holding each other in their arms. It’s only real if you watch. The rest of the time, they define real for themselves. Real in touch, in sun on skin, in mouths and hands on skin. They make each other real within their own myth. All of the time, they are in love. Some of the time, they are happy. 

But before this, before now, before all the miles they have crawled in the time following that staying that turned into a leaving, she refused to eat for another two years, despite his coaxing and cajoling. And it weakened her, made her mean and sharp, and eventually withdrawn, curled like a corpse in the coarse sheets of motel beds, letting her eyes glaze and glass in the glow of the television. Lover turned patient, any care and keeping was done by his hands, moving her in a pleading pattern of preservation. Please, baby, I need you to eat, I love you I know you love me so eat, all you have to do for me is eat. All she offered in response when he would start to pray to her like that, her palm lifting in the air, and dropping back down as if judgment had been passed.  In the night, he curled his body around hers, and it was the strongest she got to feel, him weeping against her spine.  And in the waking day, death seemed inevitable, seemed like grace, and one day, she told him in what voice she had left that she would like him to, to her, of her, if the time came soon. And she hoped the time would come soon. And he got very angry, it shocked her how angry he got. Voice like thunder and lightning in his hands, shattering whatever would break against the walls of their motel room. The vision of a man who did not know what else to do. The vision of a man losing. And that broken, beating thing inside of her lurched because she loves him. Loves him, loves him, loves him. And so she eats with him. And so she lives with him. And so they walk through this myth together. Her in the passenger seat and she takes one of his hands in both of hers and keeps it for herself in her lap and he lets her. How could they be monsters? How can this be called monstrous? They are in love. They are in wretched love.

And before this, before now, when a new couple moved into that apartment in New Mexico, clean, white tile clean and white again, ready to fill the rooms with their own kind of love, full and good, they found a near-finished painting in the hall closet. A painting of a wound in the earth, and the flame of a sunset. They thought that it was beautiful. 

#joel miller fanfiction #joel miller #tlou #tlou fanfiction #joel miller angst #joel miller fluff #joel miller story #joel miller smut #joel miller fanfic #joel miller fic #joel miller au #joel miller imagine #down to the ankles

[astarion-approves]

The ever oblivious Tav

Tav x Astarion

SFW, biting, blood drinking, Tav has 0 intelligence, slight spoilers, gender neutral reader, humor, touch of jealousy, just a short silly drabble. 900+ words.

Astarion gives into his desires and decides to drink from Tav while they're sleeping.

--------

Tav slept so peacefully, their breaths soft and relaxed, and they even smiled in their sleep as they enjoyed whatever dreams were brought to them…

But tonight they weren’t safe from a pair of ruby eyes that watched them. The hunger that Astarion felt whenever he looked at Tav was building. Their neck looking more and more like a meal with each passing day.

Surely it wouldn’t hurt anyone if he allowed himself to indulge just once, would it?

Astarion could wait no longer, the vampire crawling towards Tav’s bed, his mouth open and fangs ready to attach to their delicate flesh. He let out a soft moan as Tav’s blood rushed into his mouth, his eyes fluttering shut at the taste of pure delicious blood. Not that of an animal, or some sewer rat thrown into his lap— no.

This was everything to Astarion. A simple human that he traveled with, one that he had quickly befriended and began to care for. He felt a pinch of guilt as he continued to suck, but he knew he could force himself to stop when he needed to…

“Mh.”

Suddenly, Tav’s arm was wrapped around Astarion’s back, slowly sliding up his shoulders until it came to rest in his hair. Tav gently pushed down, urging the vampire to continue feeding from them.. But the vampire released his bite, raising his head to look onto Tav’s face where their eyes were now slightly open with a smitten little smile across their tips.

“So handsome,” Tav mumbled, their other hand coming up to wipe away their blood from Astarion’s bottom lip.

And then they were pulling Astation down, smashing their lips together in a deep and forceful kiss.

At first Astarion didn’t know how to react, had Tav known he was a vampire all this time? Did they not mind that Astation approached them like a midnight snack without permission?

But then…. Astarion gave into the kiss. Choosing to cradle Tav’s upper body in his arms as he kissed back, his tongue slipping past his lips and entangling with Tav’s. The human moaned in return, no doubt tasting nothing but iron as they licked their own blood from Astarion’s mouth.

It was over almost as soon as it began. Tav pulled themselves away, giving Astarion one last smile before lying back down and going back to sleep.

For a moment Astarion thought it would lead to something… a little more fun. Perhaps another night…

In the morning, Astarion kept sneaking a peek at where Tav still slept. The human sleeping in a little longer than usual, which made sense knowing what had transpired between them. He probably took a little more blood than he should have… but having Tav hold him while he drank his blood only made him drink a little harder. He swallowed as he remembered the taste, his tongue licking over his fangs as he fought the urge to go to them once more.

“They’re sleeping in a little later than usual, wouldn’t you say?” Shadowheart approached Astarion, apparently also noticing how Tav continued to dream on with cute little snores in between.

“Hm, yes. But… I wouldn’t want to wake them! Let the little human get their beauty sleep. They deserve it.”

Shadowheart snorted. “Not like they need it.”

Astarion narrowed his eyes at her, a quick burning of jealousy building in his stomach but then quickly passing. Tav may have kissed him last night… but that didn’t mean they were together.

Soon after, Tav awoke, the human rubbing at their eyes and yawning as they eased their way out of bed. They were greeted by Gale with a cup of coffee and a pat on the back. The two joked how Tav was normally the first person up and that Gale could hardly boil water without the aid of magic.

The entire time Astarion was fidgeting, pretending to read his book while his fingers tapped on his thigh and he continued to watch as Tav rolled up their bedding between sips of apparently terrible coffee.

“I had the strangest dream last night,” Tav began, catching the attention of everyone at camp, most likely expecting a dream of their Guardian.

Astarion knew better.

But perhaps this was some kind of cover, that Tav knew the others would be worried by them sleeping in—

“I dreamt that Astarion was a vampire.”

So much for that.

“Really?” Shadowheart stole a glance at Astarion, raising a single brow at him. “I could see it. As pale as he is, and those fangs he has..”

Gale hummed and looked Astarion up and down. “I’m not sure I would feel safe with a vampire in our camp. Especially if he hid it from us.”

“It felt so real,” Tav replied.

“Wait,” Shadowheart began and turned to Astarion. “You’re not actually a vampire… are you?”

Astarion laughed, and tossed his book into his tent, rubbing at the back of his neck as he moved closer to the three. “Well... this is.. awkward—“ He stopped once he reached them, the vampire eying the two clear indicators on his bite on Tav’s pretty little neck. The other’s noticed it as well. “Should I also tell them about our little kiss?”

Shadowheart gasped. Gale took a step back in shock.

And Tav dropped their jaw in horror.

“Wait!” They dropped their coffee, heat flooding their cheeks and their hands flew up to touch their own lips. “How did you know about that?!”

Astarion just laughed as the others rolled their eyes at the ever oblivious Tav.

#astarion bg3 #baldur's gate astarion #bg3 astarion #baldur's gate 3 astarion #astarion x tav #astarion x you #astarion x mc #astarion x reader #astarion x gn! reader #astarion x gn reader #Astarion x gn Tav #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #baldurs gate 3 #baldur's gate #astarion fanfiction #astarion fanfic #astarion fan fic #humor #blood #biting #velvet writing

[vex91]

Minatozaki Sana - Lovely

Pairing: Minatozaki Sana x Female Reader

Fandom: Twice

Requested by: Anonymous

Request: Imagine: Sana comes home drunk is extremely affectionate, sweet and sappy towards reader

Summary: Sana was always a very affectionate person since she loved letting people she cares about know how much she loves them. Her affection becomes even more extreme after a few drinks and especially when it came to you.

A/N: Thank you so much for requesting <3 I'm sorry that it's bad😭

3rd's POV

Relationship with Sana meant that you had to like affection. There was no way that you would be in a relationship and a happy one at that if you wouldn't be able to take Sana's affectionate nature. Hugs, kisses, holding hands, back hugs and other things like that helps Sana show people she cares about her love for them.

Of course her love is even bigger for you since you're her girlfriend so these things were a normal occurrence in your life together. Even though she showed you her love everyday, Sana was able to slow down if the affection became too much for you and she wouldn't feel hurt by it, she would just take a break before continuing showing you her love.

What you didn't know about Sana is that her affectionate side grew after a few drinks.

That day Sana went out with the girls for a few drinks to celebrate their new album success. That was a pretty normal thing with them and you already got used to it but this was the first time that she went out with them to drink ever since you two started living together which meant that it was also the first time you'll see a drunk Sana coming back home.

Sana came back home some time before 1 AM. You already were in bed but since you wanted to wait for your girlfriend, you decided to read a book in a meantime. When you heard a sound of keys downstairs, you put your book down and followed the sound until you got to the front door. You opened them and the sight you were met with caused a chuckle to escape you. Sana stood there with her arm wrapped around Jihyo's waist for support, keys in her other hand told you that she tried to open the door but her drunken state made it quite difficult for her.

You shook your head at the sight "Thanks for bringing her back safely" Jihyo smiled at you "It's okay, I didn't wanted her to go back home in this state either. Here, I need to go before Nayeon does something that she'll regret tomorrow" She handed you your girlfriend who immediately wrapped her arms tightly around you and left in order to take care of the other girls who knowing them were in a worse state than Sana.

You somehow managed to close the door with Sana literally hanging on you and slowly you brought her into your living room "Come on love, sit down here" You tried to make Sana sit down so you could go bring her a glass of water but the girl seemed to have other plans and as you got her to sit down, she pulled you down with her and immediately her arms were back around you. She kept you closely to herself as she started giving you kisses on your head, every one of them followed by a loud exaggerated smooch sound.

"I love you so much" She mumbled into your hair as she started rubbing your back. You smiled into the crook of her "I know, you say it everyday. I love you too" You patted her knee and she immediately pulled away to look at you "You should know~" She slurred as she quickly collapsed on you and connected your lips in a messy but sweet kiss. You could taste the alcohol that she drank earlier but you didn't pulled away, you only did when you felt her hands sneaking their way to your pants.

"No so quickly Minatozaki, we're not doing anything today. You're drunk" You stood up and pulled her up with you, ignoring her constant whines "Come on, it's late" You said as you started pulling her to your bedroom. You somehow managed to help her change ignoring her constant efforts to get into your pants. You even managed to slip away from her to get her a glass of water that she fortunately took from you without any type of protest.

And now here you were, under the covers with your girlfriend. Her grip around you tight despite her falling asleep not so long ago as she didn't wanted you to go anywhere anymore. You looked at her and even in a messy state she was in she looked incredibly beautiful.

You sure were lucky to have such a lovely girlfriend.

#vex writes #twice x reader #twice reactions #minatozaki sana x reader #minatozaki sana

[risetherivermoon]

annnd now heres a ton of kiddads headcanons as well because i love them

- unlike his dad Sparrow actually needs to wear glasses, and hes practically blind without them

- Lark does the thing where your dad stands either in front or behind the couch to watch the TV while ur watching something, he'll do this to Hero whenever shes watching anime constantly

- Terry Jr. started writing the journal the teens read, before the forgotten realms trip, it was something his therapist told him might help with how angry he used to be, he just ended up using it to also record all of the things that happened in the forgotten realms (it went from angsty teen bs to horror stories real quick)

- Nicky has a minions tattoo

- Grant would skip most of his PE classes except when they were playing soccer

- Lark has beef with one of Normal's teachers at Teen High because Normal said she was being rude and stressing him out (he went to Norm's parent teacher conferences just to threaten her, Sparrow had to hold him back)

- Nicky once drank a glow stick, not on a dare or anything, he just wanted to know if it would make him glow (it didnt)

- Sparrow learned to paint and draw from Mercedes

- when Lark pisses people off who he actually doesnt want to be pissed at him, he'll bake them a pie (for some reason thats always his go to for apologies, luckily Sparrow really likes pie)

- Terry Jr. gets his nails done every two weeks, the workers at the nail salon know him

- Grant can take apart and put guns back together, he does this when hes anxious

- after losing his arm, Nicky would refuse help when doing things, instead he would just use his teeth constantly

- Sparrow drew all the other kiddads as furries when he was a kid, Nicky still has the drawing

- Lark is really good at driving but cannot ride a bike for the life of him

- Grant got Nicky to pierce his ears without telling his parents

- Terry Jr. cries at every sad movie he ever watches

- when Hero was born and Sparrow was going between working for D.A.D.D.I.E.S. and taking care of her, he used to get so overtired he would lecture the other kiddads about certain things in a gentle parenting tone (it worked on nicky)

- Nicky is a really good cook, if the doodler hadn't been released he was thinking about going to culinary school

- Terry Jr. used to babysit the teens (excluding scary ofc) when they were little a lot (he was the only person Grant trusted to watch Lincoln)

#theres always more of these but here's what ive got for now! love these guys #dndads #dndads s2 #dndads s1 #dungeons and daddies #kiddads #dungeons & daddies #terry jr stampler #nick close #nick foster #nicky close #nicky foster #nicholas close #nicholas foster #nicky close foster #grant wilson #grant li wilson #lark oak #sparrow oak #lark oak garcia #sparrow oak garcia #sparrow oak swallows garcia #autumn rambling #🍁

[pedrostylez]

Before Mi Luz

pairing: Javier Peña x fem!reader

summary: reader and Javier are coworkers that typically hate each other, but find each other helpful in relieving that stress

rating: 18+ (no minors please)

word count:4.6k

warnings etc: smut, dirty talk, unprotected p in v sex, pet names… NO USE OF Y/N.

A/N: This is the prologue to my first writing “Mi Luz” with Javi and reader. There's some context and then a dirty ending…if I have misspelled anything or whatever please tell me omg

You were carrying your box of personal items, ready for your job to start. Did you know any Spanish? No. Did you know anyone that you were working with? No. But…they had recruited you for your organization and for your ability to remember things, and that alone gave you some confidence that you didn’t originally have.

Your first day would have gone off without any issues if you hadn’t bumped into the first person you saw as soon as you entered the building. It was the damn heels you thought you had to wear, but after today you would make the argument that you were more efficient without them. No one was hurt, but you were startled, and as you went to apologize a gruff voice said “watch it.”, which you would come to find out later was Peña. You scoffed, and continued on to your office that you had been shown the previous day. That must have been the only time you would see him…right? The embassy was big, and for all you knew, you would never see him again. 

You had never yelled at anyone before-not like this. Sure, maybe at your younger sister when she stole something from your room, or at your dad when he had drank too much and hurt your mom, but you really truly weren’t like this. You were infuriated beyond measure, to the point of almost crying. And you knew plenty of people who cried when they were angry, but you weren’t one of them. You stood your ground, said your piece, and it would end there-someone would be declared a winner. Even when they tried to stoop low and make you hurt, say things that normal people wouldn’t say, you never lost your cool. 

But fighting with Peña was different. He was in your space, fucking around with your files when you had gone on lunch, and now you were screaming at each other. He was stooping lower than anyone else you had ever met, grinding every gear and just getting under your skin. Couldn’t he leave well enough alone?

Peña didn’t know how it started at all-he had come in here to ask you a question and you were missing. He waited 10 minutes exactly, until 1 pm when lunch ended for administrative staff, and when you didn’t return he started rifling through what he assumed would give him answers. Of course, it didn’t, and so he started opening more boxes. 

He didn’t hear you come in, because unlike the other girls in the office you wore either flats or tennis shoes. He teased you about it, seeing as it was not considered protocol, but you didn’t like it when he spoke to you and he didn’t necessarily get why. 

And now you were screaming at him and he was matching your energy. He needed intel and you weren’t here, what was he supposed to do? Let them get away?

You were arguing that he could have fucking called you, or had gone to the cafeteria where you had your lunch. But how the hell was he supposed to know that? Was he supposed to crawl around on his knees and wander around and beg you to help? 

He could see the fire behind your eyes, almost as if you were blacking out this argument, and it only fueled him more. You wanted to be angry? He could be just as angry. 

And when Murphy came in to break it up, Peña was pushed out of the room and heard muffled sobs. Man, had he really been that aggressive? But you started it! He could hear Murphy cooing at you to calm you down, telling you that Peña was wrong to speak to you that way. He was asking you what Peña had asked you-for the exact same intel. The way that you blindly gave it to Murphy so that only a few minutes later that blonde-headed asshole came out into the hallway to shake his head at Peña and shove the file in his chest, made Peña wonder what your deal was. 

Today was rough on multiple levels. Everything was out of place,  Peña and Murphy needed way more intel than you could provide, and to top it all off they had caught one of Escobar's closest henchmen.

Your hair was starting to frizz. The door to the embassy and into the office and therefore into your basement back room had been opened so many times that the humidity felt like it was drowning you. You picked your shirt off your chest, trying to create some airflow as you exited the bathroom directly across from the archives.

Bumping into Peña was always a hassle, just like the first time. Today it had been happening over and over because of how much information he needed, but in general, you avoided him. Murphy was nicer, smoother with talking to women since he actually had a wife, but blunt enough that he didn't waste time.  Peña on the other hand...

You could see why the girls in the office liked him-his jaw, the puppy dog eyes he used when he wanted something...but that was all he had. And he didn’t use the puppy dog eyes on you. Speaking to him wasn't typically pleasant, and you came to find out by listening to the men in the office that he really only paid for sex. It would explain why when he was talking to women in the office he relied on his eyes and talked lowly rather than with any charisma. You were thankful that he didn’t find it worth his time to try his hand at seducing you.

When he bumped into you again as you exited the bathroom, you had to hold your tongue. Was it really that difficult to see where he was going? "We got 'em." He said breathlessly, a small smirk coming to his lips as he looked at you shaking your shirt for some sort of cool air.

"Oh, that's great." You were sure you sounded monotone, but after the length of this day you didn't really care to be polite.

"It's uh...it's because of your archives of previous intel." He stated, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. "Why is it so damn hot in here?"

"People keep opening the door and letting out my cold basement air." You grumbled. It sounded like  Peña was trying to thank you for helping, but you weren't going to assume that. If he wanted to thank you, then he would, but since he hadn’t ever before, you doubted it.

 Peña's lips ticked up in the corner again. "Murphy sent me to invite you out for drinks with the rest of the office since it was because of you." He breathed, placing his hands on his hips.

You glanced at his shirt that seemed to have no buttons working, practically open to his navel with sweat covering his throat and collarbones. Eyes shooting back up to his face seeing his smirk deepening, you thought that maybe this was why others in the office swooned-that damn smirk.

"I appreciate it, but I am not sure I am going to go." You sighed, moving away from him and going back to the archives room where the air was still damp but cooler. He followed you, tilting his head as he held open the door. "Either come in or don't  Peña, stop holding open the door."

"You really want me to disappoint Murphy? And his wife?" Peña saw you eye him, and it was the first time he ever caught you. Maybe your walls were starting to come down after the year and a half you had worked with him and Murphy, and maybe he could get you to open up like Murphy got you to. In a way he was jealous that Murphy and his wife had such a good relationship with you-but he didn’t try too hard either. 

"I'm not sure that is all that new  Peña." You smirked, picking up files that had been used today and placing them back on their appropriate shelf.

 Peña scoffed at your dig at him. You were starting to make jokes at his expense, which he assumed was a good sign. He knew how tidy you kept this room, knowing every piece of information down to the letter and where it belonged. Most of the time Murphy would ask you a question regarding a member of the cartel and you could rattle off the answer before providing the file as proof. It was like you were their own personal library that they could press a button and the answers would appear.

He realized now that it was why you had gotten so upset with him and had a screaming match with him all those months ago. He never apologized to you, and just let Murphy do the talking.

But you were always sharp-tongued with  Peña. Murphy joked that you preferred blondes over brunettes, but  Peña saw the way you looked at him just now, and noted that it probably wasn’t the first time. It was like you wanted to know more, but wasn't willing to because of how much you hated him. Maybe you wanted to keep your job secure and not risk a hate fuck-others in the office weren't too worried about their job. He never had to work hard to get someone to fuck him. And if in the case that no one wanted to, he would go find "intel" of his own and pay for it, which typically meant he had to talk to you the next day to update you on a file or add information to one.

He could see your jaw ticking every time he came in the next day, smelling slightly of another girl's perfume as you noted down the information he gathered. Always silent, staring at his chin or his neck instead of his eyes. He didn't know how to win you over, but upsetting you was sometimes just as good.

He sighed, closing the door behind him as he walked away. He wasn't really keen on going to this celebration either. It was unusually hot today, and it wasn't like they caught Escobar himself. Sure, it was someone close to him, but he didn't want to celebrate too soon. The only way he was planning on going was if you were, if not to just annoy you and watch how you were when you relaxed.

He heard stories from the girls that would gather around a desk at lunchtime to chat about their weekend, and he knew that you could have a good time. He had just yet to see it. And he wanted to-desperately.

A deep sigh left your lips as you shut the archives door behind you, locking it and sliding the key into your purse. Somehow you had become the key holder, and you didn't mind it. You stayed later, and didn't trust one of the other workers to not mess up the organization system you had carefully crafted for the embassy.

Trudging up the stairs and breaking a sweat as a wave of heat hit your face, you glanced over to the pit-where all the officers desks were-and saw most of the lights off. Only one remained, cigarette in the air almost to it's end.  Peña's eyes shot up to yours, seeing that you were watching him. "Heading to the bar?"

You scoffed, shaking your head and walking towards the front door. "No, I am going to go home and take a cold shower."

"Wait-"  Peña put out the cigarette and quickly stood up, grabbing his jacket that had his keys in it. "I'll walk you out."

"You don't need to do that, I am typically here alone when leave anyways." Him asking to walk you out stopped you in your tracks. You couldn't tell if he had ulterior motives or if he was just being polite. Why was he all of a sudden being nice to you?

"I'm heading home too." He laughed, walking up to your side and pausing with you. "It's not as sweet of a victory until Escobar goes down."

You nodded, motioning to the door and beginning your trek to your car. It wasn't a long walk, but it was likely to be hot and you would need to take a few breaks. You didn't get the front parking spot typically, seeing as you worked in archives and weren't leaving during the day like the agents were. It made you thankful that you made the switch to sneakers early on, and didn’t have sores on the back of your feet like some of the ladies. 

 Peña walked beside you, slowing his stride enough to see which direction you were headed. His car was parked up front, now next to empty spots but typically next to Murphy's. "Where is your car?"

He followed your point, seeing that you were going to walk around 10 minutes uphill before you would reach your car. "I don't get VIP parking Peña." You laughed-he had never heard you laugh. He watched you start to walk away, giving the smallest of waves and he knew that something in the air was different tonight. He wanted to hear you laugh again. 

"Let me drive you over there then." He blurted, stomping out his cigarette and placing his sunglasses on his face. He wanted you to say yes, and he felt like he could persuade you easily. 

His offer surprised you, making you turn around and look at him. "What? No, it's fine." The sun was at the wrong angle and you had to shade your eyes, seeing his pink shirt had slight sweat marks on the collar. 

He smirked, pointing his thumb at his Jeep. "I have air conditioning, and that way you don’t have to sweat the whole way over."

He knew he had you willing when you stood stock still and tilted your head, looking at his car. It was a tempting offer…

And you didn’t say anything besides walk carefully over to the passenger side of his car. He was still shocked, having to move quickly to unlock it so that you didn’t change your mind last minute. He slid into his seat, immediately starting the engine and blasting the air to get it 

moving. 

You both sat in his car for a couple minutes, staring at his radio as he changed the channel until he found something he liked while the air began to cool down and you could feel yourself start to relax. The air felt nice, and his car was much quicker than yours at making the air cool. “Is your car new?”

He glanced at you, leaning back in his seat. “It’s a couple years old, but yeah I bought it new.” He took in how you leaned back, the air making your shirt move in its gusts against your chest, and how your hands weren’t clutching your bag so tight. “Do you make that walk every day?”

You nodded, laughing lightly again. “I already told you-I’m just archives Peña, I don’t get special treatment like you and Steve.” 

Not only did you laugh but he heard how you called Murphy by his first name and it irritated him. Had he really not gotten to know you that much? “You can call me by my first name too, you know.”

You scoffed, shifting in your seat and crossing your arms. “I don’t know you well enough Peña, to be calling you anything besides that.”

He forgot why he was irritated, because how you crossed your arms made your chest look…amazing. He knew he was staring too long, but in a way he wanted you to know that he found you attractive, especially since you and him didn’t seem to get along. Maybe you would be sweeter on him if you knew he found you physically attractive. 

“Eyes up here asshole.” You snapped, rolling your eyes and sitting back straight. “Are you going to drive me to my car or what?”

Well…that didn’t work. “Yeah I’ll drive you over.” He mumbled, wondering how he could get under your skin without starting a screaming match. “You just…that shirt is really nice.” He rolled his eyes at himself-that was lame as hell. 

But he got to hear you laugh again, and while he didn’t understand you, he liked hearing you happy. It made him feel like jell-o on the inside, and it was an ego boost to have you smiling because of him after so long of you not. “I think you were just looking at my tits, Peña.”

That made him choke and cough a little. “You have a mouth on you?” He let out an exasperated laugh, pulling up to your lonesome car and parking beside it so you could get out and slide into your drivers seat. 

“I’m surprised you thought I didn’t.” 

“I wouldn’t mind seeing more of what it could do.”

That was bold. You had never heard him be so bluntly flirty, seeing as any time you over heard him trying to pick up one of the office workers it was much more “want to go to the bathroom with me?” which didn’t sound like an appealing come on. You blinked at him, both of you exchanging looks for what felt like minutes. 

He knew he fucked up. Somehow he let the thought slip out of his mouth and now he was holding his breath for your reaction. He meant to say something stupid to see you laugh again, but instead came out this vulgar come on that wasn’t untrue, but not what he intended. “Um-I’m sorry I didn’t…it just slipped out.”

You glanced back down to his neck, watching his pulse pick up speed and how even with the cold air in his car it was still slick with sweat. He was nervous, and for some reason that was endearing to you. “I can do a few things…with my mouth.”

His eyes widened glancing to your eyes and then your lips and then your chest. Was he asleep at his desk? Did he fall asleep on the drive home? Was he drunk? “Yeah? Like what?” God he was pushing the limits right now. 

And suddenly you reach out and grabbed the back of his head and licked up his neck from his collarbone to his jaw. And the obscene sound that left his mouth spurred you on to do it again but end with biting his ear. 

 Peña was losing his mind. There was no way this was real. He reached out and grabbed the back of your head, pulling on your hair to detach you from his ear. You hissed, pushing back on his hand. “You want this? Here?”

You suddenly knew why the girls swooned for him. When he was in the moment with you, the breathlessness of his words, the timber of his voice made you buzz in his seat. With the cool air still blowing, the sun setting behind the building you both worked in, you nodded your head. “I could use a destress. Is that okay?”

He had to stop himself from exploding on the spot. You wanted to fuck him? Use him as your toy to unwind from the stressfulness of the job? He was on board for that. He pulled away from you, removing his hand from your head, killing the engine and getting out of the car quickly.  He walked around to the passenger side, opening your door and almost pulling you out too hard. “Get in the back seat.”

You felt yourself get wet, hopping into the back seat with his hand on your ass as he followed you in. The idea of fucking Peña had crossed your mind a few times, but you weren’t going to act on them until today when he said those words to you. No one had to know, right?

You flipped around as he grabbed your legs to slot himself between your thighs, pressing his erection to your center and pulling your skirt up. He leaned down to your neck and gave it the same treatment you gave his, biting your jaw at the end. “Fuck, I’ve been wanting you.” He groaned, palming the part of your ass that hung over his seat, kissing at your collar bone like his life depended on it. “What do you want baby? This is your chance to unwind, remember?”

You sighed, eye going skyward as he spoke to you. This is what you wanted after all. He was annoying as hell in the office but right now you needed him. You grabbed his hair and pulling him up to be eye level with you. “Sit up, Peña.”

He scrambled off of you, sitting up and guiding your hips to his and pulling you down so you could feel the friction of his jeans against your center. His hands reached forward to your chest, palming you and untucking your shirt from your skirt. “Fuck-”

The speed at which you unbuttoned his jeans and pulled his cock out was impressive. And what was more impressive was how quickly you sunk down on to him, pulling your panties to the side and letting him fill you to the hilt. He groaned, shocked at how quickly you sat on him, holding still and reaching around to your back to keep you steady. 

His mouth was open, sweat was dripping down his hairline as the back of your shirt was becoming see through with the heat. When he got out of the car and demanding you go to the back he had turned off the engine, and now it was like you were in a sauna. But somehow it made it better, because as you started to move Peña’s eyes closed in bliss. 

You leaned your head back, wrapping your arms around the front seats as leverage as you moved up and down on him.  Peña didn’t know if he wanted to lean back and watch you do the work or if he wanted to lean forward and lick your nipples, pull your hair, maybe thumb your clit. “You’re beautiful like this cariño.”

You moaned, opening your eyes to see him in awe of your body still covered. “We can only do this once, Peña.”

He grabbed your hip, halting your movements as he began to thrust upward and do the work. “Javier is just fine darlin’.” He pistoned into you, suddenly angry at how you wanted to keep this casual. Were you not absolutely infatuated like he was? The minute you let him touch you was like a reset in his brain-there was no way anyone else would fill his needs like you could. And the way you sat on his cock? And how he fit so snugly inside you? He refused to believe you didn’t feel it too. “We can see about this being only once baby-I think you’ll be too cock hungry, huh? Would you want to ride me again?”

You bit your lip and closed your eyes again, knuckles going white as your fingers sunk farther in to the seats. A light whimper escaped you, making Peña’s thrusts falter slightly, but he regained his rhythm and grabbed one of your arms to place your fingers on your clit. The way he spoke to you made you want to say yes, please but you held back. 

“I want you to cum on my cock and show me how much you’re enjoying this like I am. Don’t even fucking lie to me-play with your clit. Show me.” He felt out of control, almost in a completely different body with the way you fit so perfectly around him.

All the breath had left you when he spoke. This was his game. This is what kept women coming back. And there was no way you would be able to resist. 

He saw how much you liked his words, smirking and feeling accomplished. So this is what he needed to do to get you to be nice to him-fuck you into oblivion. “That’s it baby girl, you look so good like this, taking my cock. Does it feel good?” He watched you nod, throwing your head back again as your fingers slowed down. “Don’t stop, I want to feel you. Don’t wait for me honey-that’s so nice of you. This is for you. I want to see it.”

It didn’t take much longer for you to lose yourself, unable to control your moans as you began to release on him. The way you clenched around him was not what he expected, the flutter and the strong squeeze made him release too. He leaned forwarded groaning as he continued, burying his head into your chest. 

He slowed down, hot breath tickling your abdomen and fingers still clutching his front seats. His arms were wrapped around you, palms of his hands searing into your back and sides as he leaned slightly back. He wanted to tell you to come back to his place, that you could take a shower together and maybe you could show him more of your tricks with your mouth. But something sunk in him when he looked up to your eyes and how you were slowly coming out of a horny stupor. “Just sit here for a second, its ok.”

You felt panic rushing to your brain as you lifted yourself off of him quickly, making him hiss and hold on to your hips tighter. “Peña. I-shit, I shouldn’t have-”

“Don’t regret this, I needed this as much as you.” He said softly, desperately. He wanted to convince you to do it again. 

You looked at him and then looked out the windows of his Jeep. No one was around, and it was dark, the only light from the emergency lights surrounding the parking lot. “We can’t do this again, I really need this job-”

“No one will know, hermosa.” He was trying so hard to not be hurt by what you said, but he understood that you and he weren’t friends before this. That you had a job that you were proud of and didn’t want to risk any of it. “If you get back in the office and everyone gives you a hard time then we don’t have to do this again if you don’t want to but-” He faltered, chasing your eye line and finally grabbing your chin to force you to look at him. 

You let go of his front seat and sat up straight, hand resting on his arm that was holding your face in place. “I want to.” 

It was like cold water being poured over him when you admitted you would want to still fuck him. “I want you as much as I can have you.” Fuck he felt pathetic, completely at the mercy of you.

“One week and if no one thinks we…if I’m not completely humiliated then maybe we can-”

“You can take your stress out on me any day of the week.” It tumbled out of him, leaning forward to brush his lips against yours for a second. Any part of you he could have he would take. 

You chuckled, sliding off his lap and opening his back door. You stood up, fixing your skirt and turning around to see his cock still out going soft, completely overwhelmed. “I’ll see you next week, Javier.”

He watched you get into your car and start the engine, still not willing to move until he watched you pull away from the parking lot. He fixed his pants, stepped out the same side of the vehicle as you had, and shut the door gently. You called him by his first name and that alone felt like an improvement. Javier didn’t know what had just happened, but he knew that he couldn’t wait for the end of next week when he got to pull you close again, knowing he wasn’t going to be able to resist.

#JAVIER PENA SMUT #JAVIER PENA FANFICTION #JAVIER PENA FIC #JAVIER PENA FANFIC #JAVIER PENA X READER SMUT #JAVIER PENA X READER #JAVIER PENA X FEMALE READER #JAVIER PENA X F!READER #NARCOS FANFICTION #NARCOS SMUT #NARCOS FANFIC #PEDRO PASCAL FANFICTION #PEDRO PASCAL SMUT #PEDRO PASCAL FANFIC #PEDRO PASCAL CHARACTERS #AGENT PENA SMUT #AGENT PENA FANFICTION #AGENT PENA FANFIC

[jflemings]

— my stomach’s all in knots

pairing: kyra cooney-cross x raso!reader part 1

summary: in the aftermath of kyra’s revelation she comes looking for you, only to learn that you were looking for her too

warnings: kinda long whoops

a/n: part 2 to my lacy inspired fic! this took longer than i thought it would to write it bc i kinda lost inspo for the plot :/ but it’s here now!!

kyra couldn’t sleep even when she tried. her conversation with charli on the bus had really gotten to her, leaving her staring at the ceiling of her hotel room at three in the morning going over every interaction she’s ever had with you.

she wondered if charli was the only one who saw it, katrina for sure knew, mother’s intuition and all that, but none of her other teammates had said anything remotely close. except maybe caitlin and sam. and mary hinted at it that one time after the game against ireland. but other than that, no one else seemingly caught on. kyra huffs and rolls onto her side and away from charli who’s sleeping soundly on the other room, closing her eyes and relaxing her tense shoulders to try and be carried off to sleep.

—

to say kyra looked like shit the next morning was an understatement. her eyes were puffy and her movements were slow and sluggish in comparison to her normally energy-filled body language. she didn’t even care where she sat after she got her breakfast, only realising that she had plopped herself in between sam and steph when sam gave her a hard pat on the back

“look alive, kyra” she says cheerfully, ever the morning person, “you look like you haven’t slept”

kyra’s head falls to the table in front of her and she groans “i haven’t” she grumbles “couldn’t. thinking too much”

steph and sam share a look over kyra’s head, the two of them clearly confused about what was keeping her up through the night. steph places a gentle hand on the young midfielder’s shoulder “are you alright?”

she lifts her head and places it on her hands, her eyes accidentally falling to you from across the room. you were laughing with your sister and mary brightly, your breakfast long forgotten in front of you. the look on your face makes kyra groan again.

sam follows her line of sight and tilts her head “you two fighting?” she questions

kyra snaps her head towards her captain “no! why? do we look like we’re fighting?” she asks hastily

“either that or you’ve just realised you’re, like, in love with her or something” sam says again, mopping up her egg yolk with toast “which would mean that you’re the only one who didn’t know” she snickers to herself, not really paying attention to the colour that rapidly drains from kyra’s face.

steph does though, and she’s quick to put the back of her hand to kyra’s forehead, her brows furrowing with worry “you are so pale, are you sure you’re alright?” she asks “have you drank any water this morning?”

sam looks up from her egg and toast to see what her co-captain is going on about, eyes widening when she really takes a good look at kyra. she casts her eyes over her shoulder to search for you, only to find an empty seat where you had been sitting not even a minute ago. kyra chews on her bottom lip nervously as she watches the cogs turn in sam’s head.

she had been joking, sure, but there must have been some element of truth to sam’s attempt at a jab if this was how the young midfielder was reacting. sam’s jaw drops “oh my god you didn’t know”

kyra groans loud and places her head in her hands in distress “of course i didn’t know! how did you know?”

“it’s written all over your face” sam says nonchalantly, shrugging before putting the yolk soaked toast in her mouth “whole team knows, i think”

kyra’s eyes go wide at sam’s words, her heart beginning to beat rapidly in her chest at the thought of being so obvious about her unknown feelings that her teammates picked up on it before she did. panic really sets in when she realises what whole team means, and she takes her head out of her hands hastily “hayley, does that mean hayley knows too?” she questions, the panic present in her voice.

before sam can give kyra an answer she dreads, alanna speaks up from the opposite side of the table “hayley wouldn’t know even if you tattooed it on your forehead” the defender reassures oddly, finishing the last of her orange juice and neatly packing up her plate and cutlery “and even if she did know, she wouldn’t care” the tall blonde says pointedly as she stands.

kyra blows a breath of relief just as steph pats her head and points at her plate “you need to eat, it’ll probably settle your nerves a bit”

“…yeah, sure”

—

kyra had been avoiding you all morning. usually the two of you would partner up for drills but instead, she was glued to charli the whole time, not even so much as sparing you a glance. you got the hint pretty quickly and flung your arm around your sister

“looks like we’re partners today, hayles”

hayley looks between you and kyra “not with your partner in crime this morning, then?” she says teasingly.

you roll your eyes and shove her shoulder in the direction of the passing drill you were walking to, brushing her comment off your shoulders. she snickers and grabs a ball, dropping it at her feet and placing her boot on top of it “don’t look so disappointed, y/n, i’m just as good of a partner as your girlfriend” she flashes you a signature smile

“she’s not my girlfriend” you argue quietly, over aware of the fact that charli and kyra were maybe ten meters from you “and keep your voice down, she’s avoiding me enough as is”

hayley rolls her eyes “she’s not avoiding you, she’s probably just not all with it today. charli said that she hardly slept last night” she says, kicking the ball to you

you furrow your brows in thought. whenever you and kyra roomed together she was always the first asleep and always the first to wake up, albeit reluctantly, so the fact that she apparently didn’t sleep last night paired with the fact that she was late for breakfast this morning had you asking yourself questions.

“she was late to breakfast as well” you say lowly, passing the ball back smoothly

“yeah i saw that too” she agrees lightly “if you’re that worried about it just pull her aside and ask her. if she tells you to piss of then there’s not much else you can do about it, but at least you made the effort”

—

your sister’s words weigh heavily on your mind for the rest of the day, making your mind distant as you think about what to say to kyra. the two of you hadn’t spoken a word to eachother after training, through gym or at lunch and dinner, choosing to instead steal stolen glances from across the room.

you had retreated to the room you shared with hayley whilst some of your other teammates split off into smaller groups to hang out. next door, you could hear mary and cortnee laughing loudly over charlize who was obviously just trying to plead her case about something, your cracked door letting you hear almost their whole conversation.

once the trio’s joyous laughter subsides charlize rule’s muffled voice becomes more clear “did either of you talk to kyra or y/n today?”

your eyes go wide at the innocent question, deciding that she obviously doesn’t know that your door is open, or even that you’re in the room next door.

there’s a beat of silence before cortnee answers her “i talked to y/n this morning at breakfast but kyra was a bit, um, distracted i guess. she wasn’t really hearing anyone when they spoke to her”

“oh” the young forward replies “are they okay?” charlize asks, her voice coated in a worried tone that she’s clearly attempting to hide.

you smile at her concern and nervousness to ask the obvious question. you knew her well as a result of the pair of you playing together at sydney fc for two seasons before you made the move to arsenal, so her worry for you was something that wasn’t unusual. what was unusual, however, was the quiet that followed her question. the silence was slowly becoming awkward and you cringed at the thought of both mary and cortnee not knowing how to answer her.

“they’re okay” mary assures softly “i think they’re just figuring things out”

“figuring things out? what, like they broke up or something?” charlize asks

broke up?

you sat up in bed and let the covers pool at your waist. did she actually think that you and kyra were together? had you seriously been that obvious?

“kyra and y/n aren’t together” cortnee says confused

“they aren’t?”

oh, you would give anything to be a fly on the wall right now.

“no? well…” mary trails off “no, they’re not. they’ve just got a little thing going on, but i don’t know if they know”

“we don’t really talk about it” cortnee adds “even though kyra is crushing on her hardcore”

your world stops for what feels like an eternity as you turn your friend’s words over in your head repeatedly, the words kyra, crushing and hardcore ringing through your mind like an obnoxious primary school sports carnival chant. the confidence that cortnee’s voice oozed was hard to ignore and even harder to forget. she spoke like nothing could change her mind, like she was just simply relaying facts.

it makes your heart beat faster in your chest as you throw the covers off yourself and swing the door open, speed walking down the hall to charli and kyra’s room.

you don’t even knock properly before barging in hastily. you come face to face with charli, mini and harper, the three of them donning shocked looks as you quickly scan the room for the freckled face you’re dying to see.

harper waves at you from her spot on charli’s lap before turning her attention back to the movie that’s playing on the tv. you weakly wave back at her before locking eyes with charli

“kyra?” you question

the blonde defender smirks and nods her head sideways “downstairs”

you don’t even get out a proper thank you before you’re off down the hallway again, practically skidding to a stop as the elevator doors open. hands catch your waist before you take a tumble and you look up hoping to be met with brown eyes, but frowning when instead you’re faced with baby blues.

alanna’s eyebrows crinkle as she smirks “you alright razzle?” she says teasingly, still not letting go of your waist.

rolling your eyes at the blonde and the nickname, you try to side step her and get into the elevator but she doesn’t let you get that far before tightening her grip on your shirt. you huff in defeat and look over your shoulder “lani”

“razzle”

“please let me go” you plead, raising your eyebrows as you tug on her hands

the older defender gives you a lopsided smile “so what, no apology for almost sending me flying?”

“…sorry, lani” you say quietly, taking a breath when she lets you go “i’ve really gotta do something though.”

alanna watches you step backwards into the elevator with a small smile playing on her lips, her tired eyes looking at you softly “she’s with hayley” she mutters before taking her key card out of her pocket and turning on her heel. the doors close painfully slow, leaving you with nothing but your own thoughts and reflection as the levels count down.

—

kyra can’t seem to get comfortable in the leather lounge chair in the lobby of the hotel; she keeps shifting her weight from one butt cheek to the other and uncrossing and recrossing her legs. hayley sits on the opposite side of the midfielder, her eyes narrowed in focus as she looks over the ‘guess who’ board game.

“does your character wear glasses?”she asks, not looking up from the little characters in front of her.

when she doesn’t get an immediate response from her teammate, raso looks up through her eyelashes “kyra!”

“yeah, what” she responds after being pulled back to reality, her leg mid air and hands lazily thrown over the sides of the chair “oh! no”

hayley raises her eyebrow but flicks down the little characters that have glasses. kyra huffs and gives up on getting comfortable, throwing her legs out in front of her and sinking into the periwinkle blue leather. she grabs her own game board and rests it on her chest as she chooses a random trait to single out.

“does your character have brown hair?” she asks lazily

hayley’s lip quirks “you asked me that already” she says slowly “are you alright?”

kyra hums and rubs her nose before getting frustrated again and pushing herself back up in the chair. her back is now straight and her socked feet are planted flat on the ground “no! i can’t get comfortable in this stupid fucking chair” she huffs

“no — i know you can’t get comfortable in the chair, i mean are you alright in general” the older player clarifies “you weren’t yourself today”

kyra pauses, licks her lips and then leans over so her elbows are placed on top on her knees. her head falls into her hands “…no”

hayley hums and puts the game on the table in front of her “do you wanna talk about it?”

“promise not to be mad?” she asks quietly, anxiousness swirling in her brown eyes like a whirl pool.

hayley almost can’t believe what kyra’s just asked her. her? be mad at kyra? never. well, not never, but certainly not right now.

she raises her brows and leans back on her seat, throwing her left leg over her right one “promise” she assures just as quietly.

kyra takes a deep breath and really thinks about what she’s about to tell hayley. if alanna was right about the fact that hayley really didn’t know that she was in love with her sister — like kyra herself had been twenty four hours ago — then this could go one of two ways. either she freaks and tells kyra that she shouldn’t, or she truely doesn’t care.

“i, um, i really like y/n” she admits quietly “actually i love y/n and i think i have for a while.”

a pregnant pause overtakes the two football players and anxious coils wrap themselves around kyra’s stomach, and the longer hayley looks at her blankly the more she regrets what she just said out loud.

to kyra’s surprise, hayley smiles “yeah?” she asks cheerily

kyra furrows her brows in confusion but mimics her friend’s smile “yeah”

hayley nods in the direction of the elevator “then what are you sitting around telling me for? go see her! she’s just hanging out in our room!”

“what?” kyra’s eyes blow wide “are you serious?”

“yes! do you know how long i’ve had to sit around listening to her go on and on about you? oh my fucking god!” the winger sighs “please put me out of my misery.”

kyra wastes no time practically jumping onto her feet and into her slides, bolting off towards the elevator and bouncing on the balls of her feet as she waits impatiently. the elevator dings not long after she presses the button to go up and she hurriedly steps in, the biggest grin not once leaving her face as she waves to hayley just as the doors close.

she watches the numbers go up until they stop on the floor where the team is staying. the doors are barley open before kyra is barrelling out of them, tripping over her own feet as she goes, and then breaking into almost a sprint to get to the other end of the hallway. her slides make a loud slapping sound that she is sure will get her in trouble tomorrow but right now, she doesn’t care, she just wants to get to you.

she sees the door to your room is cracked and slows down, catching her breath as she grips the cold strep handle and pushing it open all the way. her face completely drops when she sees that the room is empty, a mess of bedsheets on one bed and your phone still plugged in on the night stand. she groans loudly and tips her head back in defeat.

“kyra why on earth are you running down the hall in slides” a voice says from behind her

kyra practically jumps out of her skin before turning around to face a tired looking katrina with her hands on her hips. kyra grimaces “sorry”

mini rolls her eyes “you two are hopeless” she mumbles, rubbing her brow bone “raz went looking for you downstairs, she practically took the door off its hinges when she burst into the room”

“she’s looking for me?” kyra asks dumbly

“yeah. can’t you just call her or something?”

kyra peers back into your room “she’s left her phone here” she explains sheepishly.

“then sit your ass down and wait” mini says, waving her hand about “she’ll come back when she realises you’re not down there”

kyra nods her head and slides down the wall next to the door, fiddling with her thumbs to keep herself occupied, the grin that she’s worn since she skidded into the elevator not going away as she waits.

—

hayley looks up at you in shock as you staunch her, your tight figure looming over relaxed one “kyra?”

your sister breaks out into a smile “our room” she responds excitedly “you just missed her actually, she practically tripped over her own feet when she jumped up to go look for you”

a blush creeps up your neck “i need to talk to her”

“i know” hayley says smugly “she needs to talk to you too”

an infuriating smirk plays on her lips exactly the way it would when the two of you were kids and she knew something you didn’t. you can’t help but slap her shoulder harshly “hayley! you can’t say that”

“can’t say what? that your friend wants to talk to you?”

one thing about growing up with hayley is that you learnt pretty quickly when to pick your battles and when to just admit defeat. usually, you would take the bait that she’s dangling in front of you, but a nagging thought in the back of your head tells you that you haven’t got time for that. if kyra has been running around silly like you have then you can’t leave her waiting any longer, even if you are so tempted to sock your sister in the shoulder again.

her smirk turns into a soft smile when she sees your body relax “just go” she waves off, clearly only playing.

you do as you’re told and turn back the way you came, greeting the elevator with an eye roll “if you could talk i know you’d be laughing at me” you mumble to the inanimate object “but i know you’d be laughing at kyra too so it doesn’t really matter”

—

you walk out of the elevator slower than you have before so you can catch your breath. your feet shuffle on the carpet almost lazily until you look up and see the person you’ve been looking for sitting outside your hotel room. her knees are pulled up to her chest and she’s wearing a smile you’ve never seen on her face before, the apples of her freckled cheeks are dusted pink and her hair is messily sprawled out against the wall.

you don’t waste any time approaching her and holding out a hand “i’ve been looking for you”

she shyly smiles “i’ve been looking for you too” she admits as she lets you pull her up “i, um, i really need to talk to you”

the two of you are practically nose to nose and your hands are intertwined in between you “go on then”

“i really like your ribbon”

you furrow your brows and feel your ponytail for a ribbon you were sure you weren’t wearing today, frowning when you feel nothing but an old hair tie “my ribbon?” you question.

kyra screws her eyes shut as her cheeks get darker “what i meant to say is that i like your ribbon because it means that you’re easier to find on the pitch, makes me feel better knowing i can see you”

“you ran around our hotel to tell me that you like the fact that i wear a ribbon during games?” you tease her, suddenly loving the way her cheeks look when they’re red.

she opens her eyes “no, i’ve been running around because i wanted to tell you that i’m in love with you but i haven’t quite figured out how to say it yet” she explains.

a smile overtakes your face and your hands grip kyra’s face softly, your thumbs tracing over her cheekbones affectionately “i reckon that’s a pretty good way to say it” you whisper to her

“yeah?” she whispers just as quietly, slowly leaning in

you guide her face towards you, your lips ghosting over her own “mhm” you mumble “‘m in love with you too”

the confirmation is all kyra needs. she closes the gap and lets her lips softly mould against your own, her hands holding your elbows to ground herself. when she pulls away, she smiles tiredly at you “you think hayley will care if you switch rooms?”

“i think hayley would move me herself if she saw us right now”

kyra smiles and kisses you again quickly “good because i don’t wanna room with charli anymore”

#pegs tillies #pegs woso #pegs writes #kyra cooney cross #kyra cooney cross x reader #kcc #woso imagine #woso fic #matildas fic #matildas x reader #kyra cooney cross fic

[cosmicstarlatte]

Customer Service (Obey Me!)

━━━━━━━━━━ ✦ ━━━━━━━━━━

They try contacting customer service. 🤷‍♂️

»Characters: Demon Bros

»Tags: Certified Shitpost™️, Pathetic Lucifer is my favorite Lucifer

»Notes: It's been a while since I've done a shitpost bulleted fic so ♡reblogs♡ are appreciated. I've had this wip since March apparently? 💀

Lucifer:

A hand on his hip and the phone in the other

This man means business

"Don't talk to me, I'm trying to keep my level of anger"

Held onto his anger for two hours waiting for the next agent

The annoying hold music only fueled him

Tried to be reasonable with the agent when he got patched through

But they were new

"Look, just get me your manager."

Waited another half hour for them

The problem got fixed rather quickly actually

smirked in satisfaction...Lucifer always wins.

If only he noticed the two stuck pages in the manual, he would've not wasted his morning

Mammon:

If he wasn't broke he would've paid someone else to make the call

Waited for an hour but it felt like eternity

"Yeah ain't there a satisfaction guarantee on this anyway!? The customers always right!"

Tried to get a replacement for his earbuds

And a refund while he was at it

Scammy? What?? Nooo....

"They fell in the wash! It's not my fault! Did I get insurance? Who has the money for that?"

Him and the agent went back and forth for a while

The agent finally caved and promised to replace the earbuds

"Finally! Ya better send 'em quick! -click-"

...

He realized he never gave the agent his address & had to start the process all over again

Levi:

Lol

Tried online chat but his specific issue needed a real agent because...of course it would

Tried to pay one of his brothers to make the call for him

They rather stab themselves or wage war against Diavolo than call customer service

Took anxiety medication before trying to call

Waited three hours on hold but played something soothing in the meantime

helloooo ruri and friends crossing

He stopped when he heard the hold music stop

"Hello thank you for calling Akuz-"

click

"It's not that important."

Satan:

This is how a pro does it.jpg

Drank his little coffee and ate his fresh little pastry

See, he set an alarm to call customer service right when they open their lines

Had the number typed and ready to go with a press

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP

Finally!

-dialing tone-

"Hello. Your wait time is 2 hours and-"

...

...

...

Slammed his phone on the floor and it broke

Went to go fight the company in person

His issue got fixed

The company had to tighten their security after this incident

Asmo:

Is that one lucky demon that happens to get patched through quickly

He was having problems with his devilgram account verification

Just as he started speaking about his issue the agent freaked out

Turns out they were a huge fan and could automatically tell it was the REAL™️ Asmo speaking

The issue got fixed and Asmo stayed talking with the agent because they sounded really cute

One thing led to another and...it went from a customer service hotline to a phone sex one real quick

This always happens when he calls customer service akskjfksls

Beel:

Collected all the snacks he had

Even cooked an entire feast

He needed everything he could get before making the dreaded call

After an hour of waiting (and barely any snacks left) he finally got to an agent!

It was a pleasant experience for both sides

Beel is getting sent replacements for his shoes plus a discount voucher for his next purchase

güd boi™️ as usual

Belphie:

Almost fell asleep while waiting

The music soothed him, they had classical music playing

He's not really sure how long he waited if he's being honest

When he finally got to the agent he sounded so weak the agent was concerned

"Mm? No I'm always like ...losing... consciousness ...it's normal...zzz..."

The agent was still so concerned they sent someone to the HOL to check on him

Beel ended up making the call for him

⬦You might also like: Coconut︱Devil-Mart⭐︱Waffle House

#HIS OWN DADDY put me on this earth to bless everyone with pathetic lucifer AMEN #shitpostcifer #obey me #obey me headcanons #obey me shitpost #obey me crack #obey me humor #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me imagines #obey me scenarios #◇˖・ﾟ— › cosmic obey me . ⊹

[howdoesagrapewrites]

Hello

I really really loved your yandere poly pavitr

And I was wondering if you could write a situation where the reader noticed the crazy behaviour and try’s to escape them or they have a big fight about it and they try to get them back or comfort reader?

𝙀𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙫𝙤𝙞𝙙 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙪𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢

Cw: yandere, reader x lovesick!Pavitr Prabhakar x lovesick!Gayatri Singh, angst, hurt/comfort, arguing, unhealthy relationships

Notes: this happens after the reader tried to escape in Bound by Webs

Yellow wallpaper. Yellow wallpaper with little flowers decorating it. Yellow wallpaper with around 5,128 flowers decorating it, you couldn't settle on the exact number. Yellow wallpaper with 5,128 little flowers decorating it, and a clock that sometimes seems to be broken. You also tried to look at other details in your room, but nothing seemed as comforting as counting flowers, you didn't have to think of anything else, except keeping in mind the exact number you had until then, otherwise you'd have to start again. There was something about counting flowers in the yellow wallpaper that felt more normal, that felt better than going outside of your room to see what your life had become after that day in the alley.

You had needs, so you ate, you drank water, you interacted, but your captors didn't take rejection kindly and you didn't take kindly to being woken up from your daydreams. So of course fights broke often, mostly with Gayatri, Pavitr refused to engage with you entirely when you were trying to communicate all the distress you were in, that angered you even more. One day you just snapped and slapped him, his cheek now red and starting to swell, you wished this would wake him up from his delusions, that he would express some sort of clarity, even if it was to hurt you, you longed for the unmistakably human response of wrath, confusion, sadness, something, something that would make him see things as they are. But he just rubbed his cheek slightly, and kissed your forehead while holding your wrists.

"It's okay, you'll feel better soon, I know you didn't mean that" He left the room and closed the door, not even slamming it, you screamed in frustration, where's your boyfriend? Where's the man you feel in love with? The one that's funny, witty, sassy, charming, kind of a nerd, full of energy, he was so many beautiful things, and now he acts like a dog, he only ever wants to be close to you or Gayatri, you don't even know if he's spiderman anymore, if there's anything left of him.

You screamed and cried, but none of them came, you don't even know if that's a blessing or a curse. You understand why this is happening, it's because you tried to escape, because you deceived them, you manipulated them. You're the boy who cried wolf.

Sometimes you are numb, and all you can think about is how you should try to escape again, complete apathy to anything but survival, but there another times when guilt completely washes over you, when Gayatri's words repeat over and over, like a broken record. "If we're monsters, you are too, and you need to accept it." Gayatri did have a point, you weren't at all that normal, not after all you've experienced, and you cling to those last remainings of sanity, you tell yourself how you're supposed to react, to act, how a normal person should react in a situation like this, but it's getting tiring, and confusing. But you were too scared to let go of it, you felt like you're clinging on a tiny float at open sea, you are sure you'll be swallowed by the wild waves at any time, but prefer to have a slower, more difficult death, to fight the inevitable instead of letting go and peacefully letting the waters envelop you like a blanket. When you're not in that situation, it's easy to think you shouldn't dwell on it, you die either way, but now, it's the decision that will change the course of your life, and you can only take one route.

"I made your favorite" Pavitr placed a plate of a delicious looking dinner in front of you, you forced a smile and tried to not look at it like eating was a chore.

"love, why don't you tell me about your day?" He cheerily asked Gayatri

"Not much, I was waiting for you and doing some work stuff on my laptop" she complied with the small talk and continued the meaningless exchange, her pupils seemed heart shaped when she looked at Pavitr, she used to look at you that way too.

You were busy with your excessive chewing of the food, hoping it'd get you hungry, but at the third bite you couldn't do it anymore. "I'm sorry, I can't" you looked at Pavitr with shame, knowing that in his altered perception of reality, you just needed tender love and care so you'd "get back to health"

He nodded and tried to motivate you to eat a little more, even if it was slower, he was interrupted. "Don't you start now, Y/N. All Pav is trying to do is give us a nice dinner, and you can't stop acting like a brat" Gayatri was harsh on you now, ever since your escape attempt, she struggled to trust you again, but you knew she missed you, you heard her breathing outside the closed door of your room when you were counting flowers, and she kept preparing your chai the way you liked it, even if she always found it too sweet, Gayatri loved you and missed you, but she was hurt by you, she was defensive and wanted to send a message: she wasn't easy to manipulate, you couldn't play her for a fool again.

You felt your tears start to dampen your cheeks, Pavitr glared at his girlfriend. "I really don't want to, I don't want to act like this. I don't want to cause you any more pain, but my instincts keep telling me to run away, that this is wrong, that I'm in danger." Your voice breaks, and even with this sharp pain inside your chest, you feel relieved to voice this, you look at Gayatri, talking directly to her. "I'm not a good liar, all that time, I did enjoy every minute we were together, but all my subconscious yells to me is that I should hate you, and I don't know who to trust anymore" you look at Pavitr "I hate when you act like I'm crazy, but maybe you were right, maybe I do want to stay here, and all this running away nonsense is just that, nonsense. I-" you wanted to keep going, you could go on for hours, but you didn't have the strength, both Pavitr and Gayatri stood up from their seats and hugged you, you cried it all out, all you couldn't express, you blurted out muffled sounds of "I'm sorry", "I don't want it" but most importantly "I love you". You loved them, it so hard not to, even as you thought you were escaping, you couldn't convince yourself not to love them, you stopped crying and saw Gayatri's heart eyes, you knew you were far too deep in to escape. You would love them even as the void consumes them. The salty water of your tears tasted just like the dangerous open sea, you let go of the float and the water baptises you, rebirths you. You kissed both of them like it was the first time, and then you ate a bite of Pavitr's food. Exquisite.

#atsv x reader #atsv pavitr #gayatri singh #pavitr prabhakar #pavitr x gayatri #pavitr x reader #gayatri x reader #pavitr prabhakar x reader #spiderverse pavitr #pavitr headcanons #pavitr x you #pavitr prabhakar x you #yandere spiderverse #yandere pavitr #yandere pavitr prabhakar #yandere Pavitr Prabhakar x reader

[the-dawn-star]

Hi, can you please write an oneshot where the human reader tried to break up with yandere Elijah Mikaelson after discovering he is a vampire that feeds on and kills people, and it violates her moral code? What happened next is entirely up to you, thanks a lot :)

A/N: Hey! Firstly, I'm not sure how happy I am with this but I hope you like it. I kind of changed the idea because writing is hard (XD) but I hope you don't mind.

-S

+500ish words.

TW/CW: Some random person being dead, talk of blood, murder and the normal vampire stuff. Yandere stuff like obsessiveness and delusion.

This wasn’t supposed to go this way. Everything has been going so great in your relationship. And now everything has been ruined... 

It was after a marvelous evening with Elijah. You had eaten well and drank a bit of fantastic wine. You had walked home hand in hand. You had thought that everyone would be sleeping at that time but instead you found Kol and Klaus in the living room talking about something you didn’t pay attention to. And on the floor was a clearly dead body with blood covering his neck.  

After that you weren’t sure what had happened. Kol and Klaus were clearly too drunk to explain themselves, so the explanation became Elijah’s responsibility. Words about vampires, of them being immortal, of death and blood.  

You wanted to throw up. Elijah had been so kind and gentle, so kind in fact that you had fallen in love with him. But this changed it. When you looked at your perfect boyfriend now you just saw all the people he had killed, the innocent people, the blood on his hands.  

You had wanted to leave. After Elijah explained what you had seen you were ready to run away from the house and never look back. But you still cared for the man in front of you and to your surprise Elijah didn’t let you leave. Saying it was for your safety, to make sure you wouldn’t do anything stupid. So that’s why you were laying on your bed that you normally shared with Elijah. But for now, you were alone and terrified of your boyfriend.  

~~~ 

You didn’t assume that you would wake up anymore. If he had killed other people, what would make it that Elijah wouldn’t be killing you too. But you did wake up..., Elijah’s hand gently on your cheek. You wanted to run away, to fight back his kindness.  

“How did you sleep?”  

“I’m fine...,” Your words were barely a whisper and very much a lie. You felt horrible. 

“I didn’t mean to tell you this way..., I was scared of you knowing..., knowing who I really am. You must understand that.”  

You did. You knew very well the feeling of being scared of showing the real you to the people around you. But in your case, you weren’t scared to show people that you were an ancient vampire who needs blood to survive.  

“And I’m sure you will understand it even better once you are turned.”  

Your eyes widened with Elijah’s words, and you ripped yourself off of his touch.  

Did you understand something wrong? What was he talking about?  

“I know it is scary, but I promise I will be there with you at every step of the process. And maybe one day you see that I’m doing this for you..., for us.”  

Elijah’s smile was gentle just like the tone he spoke the words that you did not understand. Where had you gotten this so wrong?  

“What are you saying?” You asked.  

“I have loved you ever since I laid my eyes to you. You are meant to be mine..., but we cannot be together fully as long as you are a human...”  

You didn’t know how to respond.  

“I’m doing this for you..., for us.” 

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