#the minute i remembered this tale i was like oh fuck that is perfect for esotam jake. and also just canon jake. poor guy

[around1302]

IX. SATELLITE

SPARE PARTS: a series (9/20)

RHEINENERGIE STADION, COLOGNE

(W) strong language, panic attacks

THIRD PERSON’S POV

Amelia's in between a rock and a hard place: the rock being the last tequila shot she did three hours ago, the hard place being a looming hangover. A sliver of exhaustion between.

“So you still hate him?”

“Yes.”

"Even with the orgasms?"

"Even with the orgasms."

"And he still hates you?"

"With a passion."

"Are you sure?"

The standing issue is that Amelia isn't convinced Harry hates Charlie as much as he puts out. As the party who's been in a perpetual argument with him since 2016, Charlie’s pretty damn certain he does. Amelia, on the other hand...

"Because let me just lay out the facts for you," Amelia holds her finger up, stopping Charlie before she can groan, "he begs you to kiss him again at Louis' party, he climbs into your bed on the tour bus, he fingers you on a plane with no expectation of a hand job in return, and-"

"Amelia-"

"And, he's been flirting with you for years. Has he not?"

"No," Charlie stands up, wrapping her arms around her torso near protectively as she starts to pace, "well, yes, but only because he know it annoys me. He's never meant it. He's not had a minute of celibacy in the entire time I've known him."

"Maybe he's just being a whore to get over you."

Charlie laughs, now. Hard. Amelia rolls her eyes and stands with her, and it’s only now noticeable how worn out she looks. They have to leave for the stadium in a few hours, and Charlie’s kept her up with something she could've just said in a text.

Harry's the best I’ve ever had, and I hate him.

"I'm not saying this whole thing is dumb, but it's sure not smart," she grips Charlie’s shoulders, "just be careful, yeah? You remember what happened with Zayn."

Charlie’s throat thickens. "That's entirely different."

"Is it?"

"Of course it is.” She shrugs Amelia off, "I had feelings for him, they weren't reciprocated. That's nothing like this. I don't like Harry."

"Maybe you don't," Amelia bends down to get her bag and her heels from the mattress, "I never said who was who in this scenario."

Charlie frowns, but she can't argue back as she's already out of the door. If it wasn't 4 AM she’d go after her, ask her what the fuck she means.

Charlie knows Amelia thinks Harry has a little crush on her, but that's because she's a romantic. Her and Niall have the perfect love story, and Charlie’s previous aversions to casual sex have her romanticising every person she so much as bat her eyes at.

So she screams into her palms, gets into bed, and tries and get a few restless hours of sleep before she has to perform to 50,000.

“So then Amelia jumps on this dude,” Niall belly laughs, arm over his stomach (making the mic guy’s job very difficult) as he recalls a tale from their night out, “starts pulling on his hair saying she’s the rat from Rateatoullie,” there are actual tears streaming down his cheeks, “dude didn’t bother us again for the rest of the night.”

“He probably went home and cried,” Liam chuckles as he taps his sticks against the covered speakers, absentmindedly practicing, the only other person who didn’t go out last night eating up their stories.

Well. Almost the only other person.

“Fuckin’ wish I saw that,” Harry laughs, tying his hair up into a bun. It slightly lifts his black shirt out of his purple pants, and Charlie hates the fact her eyes instantly find the motion. Harry loves it.

“You should’ve been out with us, man,” Zayn says, perched against the speaker Liam drums at. Amelia’s adjusting Louis’ outfit, completely absorbed in her art, so much so she didn’t even notice Niall telling everyone about her Remi cosplay.

“Yeah, well,” Harry’s eyes flicker toward Charlie’s as he adjusts his mic pack, mind racing, “doing other things.”

“Oh, right, yeah,” Louis speaks up, looking at the others knowingly, an amused spark glinting in his eyes, “things,” he exaggerates, earning snickers from the others.

Charlie’s heart drops as her mind goes into instant panic mode. They know; Amelia told them, or they saw her leaving his room somehow, or–

“You ignorant fuck,” Niall chipes in, the crewman happy to be finally done with his mic while scurrying off, “we banged on your door for ages trying to tell you we were going,” he grabs his guitar, slinging it over his body, “heard a few–”

“Cut it out,” Harry snaps. Niall shuts up.

Amelia finishes up with Louis, then spins to wish the band all luck. Crew’s rushing around like rats themselves and they’re all just stood here, anxiously waiting for the next move. Amelia swarms Charlie in a hug, careful of the outfit she carefully crafted (the first night of her own designs), then rushes away with Zayn to watch from the side.

“You too, Charlie,” Niall says to Charlie while people tell them to get into position behind the screen, “knocked for ages, no answer.”

“I was asleep, exhausted.” She hopes she’s a good liar.

Louis, forever the shit stirrer, appears beside the girl who’s about six over-thoughts into a spiral.

“Or were you doing things too?”

Charlie’s eyes widen as she spins her head to him, her eyes subconsciously flickering to Harry behind him. He’s too focused on bouncing on the spot, on tapping his mic against his palm, on cracking his neck. Everyone’s getting into the performance mindset and Louis throws that spanner at her?

“No,” she protests, a little too loudly, looking ahead as she instantly follows with a far too defensive, shut up.”

“She was!” Louis exclaims. Charlie turns to hiss at him, but a crew member’s starting to lift the screen and their earpieces give them a count in.

It’s too late – Charlie’s about to be flustered in front of 50,000 Germans. So she sucks in a deep breath, trying to pretend Louis didn’t nearly clock on to something, and focus on what they’re meant to do. Walk, talk, sing. That’s all. Walk, talk, sing.

“Cologne!” Liam shouts into the mic attached to his face, lifting his drum sticks up. They all step out onto the shiny stage as the crowd roars, the open top providing little fresh air as Charlie’s vacuumed with anxiety. She needs to shake this off, fast.

The band’s surrounded, Germany not being their biggest stadium of the tour so far yet feeling the most daunting. The stage extends into the crowd this time, giving them leeway to run. Also giving them the opportunity to spot so many more faces, signs, screaming, crying people. It’s always overwhelming, but God. Charlie has not felt this anxious stepping on stage since their first proper show.

Their earpieces count them into Wolves, and she lifts her shaky hand in the air to wave (to try and bring Charlie Greene to life) which only incites more screaming and crying.

Harry brushes past Charlie, nodding in her direction as if to ask if she’s okay. She swallows and quickly nod, knowing she’s being unconvincing but it’s damn difficult to feign sincerity when you’re up there. It magnifies anything you’re feeling, and this time the adrenaline rush isn’t hitting Charlie in the usual calming way. If anything, it’s making her feel worse.

They get through the song, then the next, and then she knows it’s time to talk to the crowd for a little bit. Charlie lets Harry take the reigns at first, the break cooling her off, but when she lifts the mic to her lips to say a few words herself, nothing comes out.

Not a squeak, pop, or breath.

Her breathing speeds up, her palms slick, her vision trembles. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Charlie hasn’t had a panic attack on stage in… ever. Never. This has never happened. Oh fuck.

Harry’s eyes are filled with concern, or is that anger? Charlie doesn’t know and she quite frankly doesn’t care. She doesn’t read his mind as the words HELP HER, IDIOT flash in bright, bold crimson. She doesn’t feel the way his lungs fight harder, right along side hers. All Charlie knows is that she can’t be up there right now.

Thankfully, her bandmates are the best people in the world, and Louis quickly takes over when he realises she’s not speaking where she’s supposed to. The crowd cheers nonetheless, or maybe they don’t. All she knows is the world around her is crumbling, and she has to get off this stage.

So she bolts.

Charlie runs back to the right, ignoring the crewman glaring and yelling at her to get back out there. A few even try and push her back out, but she fights it. She can feel the hot tears flowing freely down her cheeks now, and how her lungs burn so tightly against her ribs she feels like she can’t breathe.

She knows Amelia and Zayn are around here somewhere, but she just needs to be alone. She needs to breathe. She needs to go home. She needs to not be here.

Charlie runs all the way out into the hallway of their dressing rooms, not stopping till she’s far enough from crew. She leans against the wall, mic dropping the ground as she slide with it. She rips her earpiece out when the scolding becomes too much, brings her knees up to my chest, and holds them as she sobs.

“Charlie?” Harry pants, earpiece draped against his shoulder. She glances at him once, then realises she really need to focus on breathing, so she looks back at her feet.

He hurries over, his feet now beside hers. She stared at them, focusing on the stupid gold glitter of his boot. It’s calming. They can still hear the muffled yells in their earpieces, but there’s no fucking way she can handle going back out yet, and Harry can do no better once he’s seen her like this – sobbing and shaking against a cold wall.

Harry crouches, placing his mic beside hers. Gingerly, never one to know what to do in these situation, he lifts her face, thumbing Charlie’s jaw as his eyes flit back and forth between her red ones. He’s never looked at her like that, probably because he’s never seen her like this.

When Poppy happened, Charlie isolated herself from almost everyone. Especially him. As far as Harry knows, Charlie didn’t even grieve.

So, she tilts her head, ripping herself from his touch.

If I didn’t need him then, I don’t need him now.

“Charlie–” He starts, gentle. But someone hastily interrupts him.

“Charlie!”

Their heads whip to the new body, Charlie’s heart rate retuning to normal when she realises it’s only Zayn and not some crew person here to drag her ass back. He’s as out of breath as they are, which only reminds Charlie of her own lack of oxygen.

“Harry, go back out there, they’re all panicking like crazy.”

“It’s fine–”

“They need at least one singer, go. I got this.”

Harry’s jaw clenches, but Zayn’s right. The guys can only stall for so long without a singer. So Harry looks at Charlie with that look one last time, before sighing and reluctantly returning to the stage.

As Harry walks back through the hallway, he wonders how he got here. Not that he’d admit it to himself, but Harry’s subconscious knows damn well hating her for the last six years has been a lie. Irritated by her? Sure. Who wouldn’t be. But hate? No. That’s a dynamic chosen for them by her, he could never.

So when he rushes back on stage and calms the crowd, his usual showman charm coming into play, he can’t help but worry through the stalling process that is picking out random signs from the crowd and talking to fans.

Is she okay? Why was she upset? Was it him? Was it someone else? Was it no one at all?

Harry wasn’t entirely certain why Charlie was so set on being this looping pedal of insanity in his mind, but she had seemingly found asylum in it and wasn’t showing signs of seeking shelter elsewhere.

And now there’s Zayn, there’s always Zayn. He was the one who broke the once impenetrable force that is Charlie, and he’s stayed in her soft spot ever since.

It makes Harry’s stomach churn every time he thinks about it. About him, her. Them. He figures why wouldn’t the thought of them together make him sick: his friend with the girl he hates? It’s logical, it has to be.

It’s the only explanation for the way his gut twists and turns with every second he’s on stage and he knows Charlie’s using Zayn’s shoulder to cry on.

“Charlie, love, what’s wrong?” Zayn rubs soothing circles into Charlie’s right knee, trying to be as patient as he can be.

He told crew he would get Harry back out there for them if they just gave them five minutes alone, knowing damn well Charlie wouldn’t be okay in five minutes but doing the best he can with what he has.

“I don’t know,” she chokes out, honestly, “there’s so many things that I just don’t know.”

Zayn sighs, slotting himself next to her. He draws her into his chest, kissing the top of her head as she finds home in his warm sweater and kicks her feet up, makes a cup of tea. She closes her eyes, breathes in his scent, focuses on the feel of his thumb against her shoulder. He’s calming, it sucks, but he is. She can’t deny that, however much she’d love to tell herself she’s completely over Zayn Malik.

“I knew something was up when you wouldn’t come out with us last night. I know you’re a homebody, but you never usually say no to a club.”

It’s true. She’s a dancer at heart.

Charlie knows there is no way in Hell she can tell Zayn about Harry. Telling Amelia was a risk as is, telling her sort-of ex she’s sleeping with the one guy no one would ever expect her to even touch would be like placing a bomb in a needle filled room.

So, she lies.

“I think this whole stadium world tour thing is a lot more over whelming than I expected,” it’s not a total lie, “and it hit me at the worst time.”

She stifles a muffled chuckle, Zayn doesn’t.

“It’s understandable, babe.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

It slips out completely by accident. A subconscious spill. Charlie would be kidding if Zayn being here wasn’t throwing her, too. Since… since, they spent at most a few nights a week together. Even then, she would be intoxicated almost every time. They’d hang in a bar, for God’s sake.

Having him here, all day every day, is confusing in all the worst ways. Bringing back old memories and old feelings… it’s not good for her.

“Sorry,” Zayn whispers after a beat, “habits.”

“Hm,” She hums, picking at a loose thread on his jumper.

“Are you… is that why…?”

“No,” she jumps to deny, “no, I’m not…”

They’re saying nothing at all, yet everything’s passed between them. They understand each other completely, crystal. It’s a type of bond reserved only for each other, even if it’s toxic.

“Because it would be okay if that was the case.”

Charlie sits up, nearly knocking Zayn’s chin in the process. Her brows knit together as she feels her throat tense again, for an entirely different reason.

“What?”

“I don’t want to confuse you,” Zayn chews on his bottom lip, a nervous habit, as he stares at Charlie’s ear – clearly contemplating before tucking a loose strand behind her pierced ear, “but I miss you, Charlie.”

“You… what?”

“Okay, five minutes is up.” A crewman appears by the door, looking and sounding rather stressed. Charlie’s stopped having her panic attack now, par some smudged liner she could go back on stage. Or, at least, she could have up until two seconds ago.

“Look,” Zayn stands, extending his hand to Charlie, which she takes hesitantly, “we’ll talk about it later, yeah?”

“Uh, yeah,” Charlie feels like she’s been catapulted into space, “okay.” She mumbles, unconvincing and panicking for a whole other reason, now.

“Just go and kill it on stage, okay? I’ll be right there watching with Lia.” Zayn hands her mic back, to which she barely grasps it.

Charlie gulps and nods slowly, the bouncing crewman anxious in her peripheral. To save the poor man a heart attack, and to save her own heart, she quickly turns from Zayn and rushes back down the corridor.

“They’ve been stalling, so go back on and say you had a technical error. We're going to kick back off with Alive…”

Her directions fade to static as Charlie returns to the stage, to her job, the crew around her acting as nothing more than a soundtrack to Zayn’s echoing words.

We’ll talk later, I miss you.

That, and the surprising guilt that seems to wrack her the second she steps on stage and sees Harry visibly exhale in relief.

taglist: @lilfreakjez @be-with-me-so-happily @sirtommyholland @tpwksm @b-reads-things

#harry styles angst #harry styles smut #harry styles x oc #harry styles #harry styles series #1d ot5 #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles x reader #harry styles x you #one direction series #harry styles friends with benefits #harry styles fic #one direction ot5 #one direction smut #one direction #1d series #1d smut #1d imagines #spare parts series

[nancydrewwouldnever]

The Infamous Jenny Vulture Interview

So, I keep losing access to the infamous Jenny Vulture interview from March 2017 because of caps on access they have on their website. So, in case anyone else hits the same problem, I'm cut and pasting it here, to have an easier to access copy of it.

The Year of Living Publicly

Jenny Slate’s got two new films and a new home and, oh, by the way, she’s fresh off a breakup with Captain America. 

By Jasa Yuan

Published March 2017

Most pillows are just pillows, but for Jenny Slate, the floral-print puffs arrayed on her pristine white linen couch in her freshly rented apartment in L.A.’s Silver Lake are metaphors. For a bright future. For a new life. For freedom. The Obvious Child star and her bichon frise, Reggie, just moved into this sunny one-bedroom in February, and every time she looks at those pillows, she gets so excited because she remembers how she’d bought them while still married to editor-director Dean Fleischer-Camp, her husband for three years, but had to stow them away because she realized it felt like they were living in a box of tampons. Now she and Reggie don’t have to run their decorating decisions by anyone. “I’ve never lived on my own, because I really did go from one relationship to another my whole life, so I’ve never had a chance to go really girlie,” she says. “And I had my ex-husband over last night and he was like, ‘These flower pillows look great. But they’re just for you.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah! That’s right!’ I love them so much. I just love them for what they represent, which is that all my choices are for me.” She turns around. “I’m gonna pee really quick.”

The bathroom door doesn’t quite close — she’d warned me of this. “You can snoop around if you want,” she shouts. “It’s just a little mouse house. It’s fucking perfect for me.”

I have been in her presence for about two minutes. The first thing she did was offer to loan me a T-shirt because I mentioned I was hot. Slate used to do a stand-up routine about how her mom refused to sew her name into her shirt in elementary school, “because she was like, ‘You’re too friendly, and some stranger would just be like, Jenny! Come into the van!’ ”

There’s an obvious person missing so far from this tale of pillows versus patriarchy, but she’s not hiding anything; we just haven’t gotten to it yet. “When I moved in here, I’d been through my divorce and a breakup,” she says, returning from the bathroom and referring to the ten or so months she spent dating Chris Evans, best known as Captain America, and her much more famous co-star in Gifted an upcoming film about a family struggling with a young girl’s genius affinity for math. The internet went wild over their apples-and-oranges compatibility: a brash Jewish comedienne beloved for oversharing about her bodily functions on talk shows and voicing Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, a tiny stop-motion conch with a single eye and feet who talks about being so small he can hang-glide on a Dorito, in a series of YouTube shorts she made with Fleischer-Camp — and a world-famous Marvel superhero, who also happens to be a Massachusetts momma’s boy with one of the most insanely ripped bodies on the planet. “We used to talk about what kinds of animals we were,” says Slate. “Chris said it’s like I’m a chick riding on a St. Bernard’s head. We’re an odd match.”

Paparazzi tried to snap them, bloggers scrutinized their Instagrams, tabloids obsessively covered their one appearance together on a red carpet. Slate didn’t read the coverage, but it was extremely kind, with most articles praising Slate for taking a chance on Evans, or noting that his coolness factor had jumped several notches because of his proximity to her. Maybe this crazy thing could work out! There was something beautiful, in a year marked by division, to think of these two opposites finding common ground. He was 35; she was 34. They’d grown up half an hour from each other. They were both outspoken liberals. They’d said really adorable things about each other on Anna Faris’s podcast.

And then, a few weeks before I met Slate, news broke that it was over. In her life, though, she’d already spent several months dealing with that loss and having to find a place to live, crashing with friends in Venice Beach in January. “I watched You’ve Got Mail so many times, it was unbelievable,” she says. Was she weeping most of the time? “Yeah, I did it right.” Eventually, she found this new apartment and purged everything she owned except for a few clothes she loves, books, precious objects, and a velvet chair once belonging to her great-grandmother. “I was like, ‘You need all new things. You are a working woman. Maybe this is an indulgence, but just start over,’ ” she says. “It’s like, Fuck.”

The other night, she tells me, she was sitting at a bar by herself, reading a book about the Holocaust, and finally sent an SOS text to her friend Mae Whitman. “I was just like, ‘Can you please help me? I’m so lonely.’ And she came and we got shitbombed, and I woke up the next morning and saw my headphones on my neighbor’s yard. I have no idea how they ended up there.”

As Slate gives me the tour of her place, Reggie trails her every move. “He’s like a little soul mirror of me. We’re a lot the same,” she says. How so? “Needing closeness. Despair when left alone. But also he’s very excited to misbehave when left alone. So he doesn’t know what he wants.”

Ever since she was a pip-squeak at Camp Tapawingo in Sweden, Maine, Slate has known what she wanted to be: an actress, like Amy Irving or Gilda Radner or Madeline Kahn. That or “Jewish Felicity,” taking over Manhattan, like in the TV show. In the aughts, she came up in the alternative-stand-up-comedy scene in New York, where she garnered attention for a one-woman show as different characters eulogizing an eccentric millionaire, got cast on Saturday Night Live, and wasfired one season in after accidentally cursing on-air in her first sketch. That ego blow hurt a little less when she made the awards-circuit rounds for Obvious Child, a low-budget romantic comedy about two people navigating an abortion after a one-night stand, and she’s built a devoted fan base through her outrageous characters on the Kroll Show and Parks and Recreation, not to mention her great voice work with Marcel, Bob’s Burgers, The Secret Life of Pets (as an anxious Pomeranian), and Zootopia (as a villainous sheep). In 2012, she relocated from Brooklyn to L.A. Her relationship with Evans is easily the most Hollywood thing she’s ever done. She shows me a photo of her aura on her fridge, taken in New York’s Chinatown. There’s a thick concentration of “productive energy,” which is good, since she has a lot of work coming up, and a giant cloud of worry and overthinking, which seems to be dissipating. By the sink are potholders she made as a kid on a little loom and a drawing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that Fleischer-Camp brought her as a housewarming gift. “We’re good friends. That’s why we got divorced,” says Slate. “If we didn’t get divorced, we wouldn’t be able to be friends and we wouldn’t be able to do our work. We had just grown apart, and we love each other. It wasn’t easy, but not bad.” She pauses. “No, it was bad. But not essentially bad.”

Her mother, a ceramicist, and father, a lauded poet, are still married; she wrote a book about her childhood home in Massachusetts with her dad this year. Her younger sister, Stacey, a mental-health counselor in Brooklyn, had come over on the previous weekend and helped her put up pictures. (Her elder sister, Abby, is a nurse-practitioner in Massachusetts, and Slate is convinced her middle-child need for attention is what nudged her toward showbiz.) Covering the top of her dresser are snapshots she hasn’t figured out what to do with, such as the one of her in a revealing tank top at Columbia University, where she went from high-school valedictorian to pothead almost instantly. “This is me when I was a slutty virgin,” she explains. “A virgin but trying to act like I knew what was going on.”

Somewhere beneath a pile of half-read books is her bedside table. She hates computers so much she doesn’t keep one in the house, and she often turns to books when scrolling through Twitter on her phone stresses her out, which it always does. Current favorites include The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Emma, a children’s book with Barbara Cooney illustrations that she bought on Etsy and loves so much she put it on display so she could see it when she wakes up. “It’s about an old woman who doesn’t love how she’s alone, and then learns to make herself not alone through art, and draws people into her life through art. It’s the fucking best thing.”

The instinct other young actresses have to keep every interesting thing about themselves under wraps — or the toughness that female comics often give off — wouldn’t be very useful in Slate’s case. Her brand, if you can call it that, is built on vulnerability, whether she’s revealing her innermost insecurities through an animated shell or telling Seth Meyers on TV that she was so stoned in college she accidentally signed up for an astronomy class thinking she’d learn about astrology. Not to mention that she and Evans met while playing love interests in a movie that is now coming out and that she needs to promote. That’s hard to get around.

“I don’t mind talking about him at all. He’s a lovely person,” she says. “I don’t know. It feels like such a huge thing. Last year was a giant, big year for my heart. I’ve never, ever thought to keep anything private because that’s not really what I’m like, and now I’m learning those things, and they’re weird, kind of demented lessons to learn.”

She didn’t set out to have a tabloid-­fodder romance. She’d fought hard for her part in Gifted, as a teacher who falls for Evans’s character, a working-class guy trying to give his prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace) a normal childhood. Slate’s part is not huge, but it’s a big studio picture. It got her in the room with director Marc Webb and Fox Searchlight. She liked the script, but more than that, “I was just like, ‘I want viability as an American film actress. I want to find my own seat at the main dinner table, because I want to do this forever, and I want to show that it doesn’t always have to be a bikini model opposite Captain America.’ ”

Evans and Slate met at her chemistry read — the audition in which it’s determined whether two romantic leads play well together — and they instantly got along. “I remember him saying to me, ‘You’re going to be one of my closest friends.’ I was just like, ‘Man, I fucking hope this isn’t a lie, because I’m going to be devastated if this guy isn’t my friend.’ ” The first time they went out to dinner, as co-workers getting to know each other, she remembers insisting they split the bill over Evans’s strenuous objections. “If you take away my preferences, you take away my freedom,” she says she told him. “Then I was like, Oh, man, is this dude going to be like, ‘Ugh, this bra-burner.’ Instead, he was like, ‘Tell me more.’ ” They drew from that friendship for their flirting on film, but the time when they jump into bed together in the movie felt as awkward as you hear all love scenes do. “It’s one of those scenes where you bust through a door making out. I’ve never done that in my life,” says Slate. “I remember apologizing to him after. I’m pretty sure I kneed him in the balls.”

Slate was in a weird space at the time. Her marriage was dissolving, and she was working only two or three days a week, and spending her days off wandering around Savannah’s many parks and doing yoga and writing that book, About the House, with her dad. (Which, incidentally, the publisher gave away free with any donation to any charity.) Every weekend, Evans would organize a game night for the cast and crew — usually something called “running charades,” which sounds like high-speed pantomime — that she begrudgingly went to, even though all she wanted to do was hang out on the porch and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. “At first I was like, ‘What a fucking nightmare,’ ” she says. “Chris is a different speed than me — I think he really did just jump out of a plane for an interview. And so when he was like, ‘Game nights,’ I was like, ‘This is annoying. This guy’s like a sports guy. He’s the kid that likes P.E.’ ” But finally his enthusiasm won her over. “I first really liked Chris as a person because he is so unpretentious,” she says. “He is a straight-up 35-year-old man who wants to play games. That’s it. I was like, ‘I’d better not discount this, because this is purity.’ ” It also helped that she’s so competitive she constantly won.

As they got to know each other, she learned he’s still close with people from his childhood, and his best friend is a woman. “What’s the same about us is not just that we’re from Massachusetts, which was such a delight, but Chris is truly one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, to the point where sometimes I would look at him and it would kind of break my heart,” she says. “He’s really vulnerable, and he’s really straightforward. He’s like primary colors. He has beautiful, big, strong emotions, and he’s really sure of them. It’s just wonderful to be around. His heart is probably golden-colored, if you could paint it.”

They didn’t fall for each other on set. “To be quite honest, I didn’t think I was his type,” she says. (Evans has dated Jessica Biel and Minka Kelly). “Eventually, when it was like, Oh, you have these feelings for me?, I was looking around like, Is this a prank? I mean, I understand why I think I’m beautiful, but if you’ve had a certain lifestyle and I’m a very, very different type of person — I don’t want to be an experiment.” Evans never made her feel that way, but it was hard to get past how so many people seemed to feel some ownership of him and view her as an interloper. “If you are a woman who really cares about her freedom, her rights, her sense of being an individual, it is confusing to go out with one of the most objectified people in the entire world,” she says. Especially when she’s aware that in Hollywood, she says, “I’m considered some sort of alternative option, even though I know I’m a majorly vibrant sexual being.” And especially when random ladies would come up to her at CVS, “being like, ‘Oh my God, is that Chris Evans? He’s so hot!’ You’re like, ‘How dare you? That’s my boyfriend. But yes, he’s so hot.’ ”

Every time Slate mentions Evans, it keeps coming back to the same thing: As much as they loved being with one another, she says, “we’re really, really different,” with different social circles and different lifestyles. Slate comes from a DIY comedy scene, and most of her friends are fellow comics and gay guys. “Chris is a very, very famous person,” she says. “For him to go to a restaurant is totally different than for me to go. I sit in my window and I say ‘Hi’ to people on the street. I have more freedom because I’m not Captain America. I’m mostly a cartoon.” She kept waiting for everything to feel normal, but it never did. “This is what I needed to do to feel normal. To be alone.”

That meant day-to-day they mostly stayed home, “which was really nice,” she says. But it was also one of the most anxious years of her life. She fretted over the “psychos” on the internet who turned her relationship with Evans into a pissing contest with Fleischer-Camp. And she struggled seeing the person she was in love with deal with the side-effects of fame. “The stress that I saw him be put under, I’ve never seen that before, and he handled that really gracefully,” she says. What she wasn’t taking into account was that he’s used to it. “He’s not stressed,” she says. “I was the person that was stressed.”

She’s also aware in hindsight that she hadn’t processed her separation before she got together with Evans. It wasn’t as scandalous as tabloid reports made it sound — as with any long-term relationship that splinters, they’d been on the rocks long before it was official. But, she says, “When Chris and I started dating, my husband and I had only been separated for a couple of months.” The divorce actually went through while she was at the Sundance Film Festival, after she and Evans broke up. “Even though we had an amicable divorce, I think that’s still something that you need to mourn. When you get separated from somebody that you actually care about, it is the destruction of a belief system. That is really, really sad.” Throughout all of it, the divorce, the new love, she says, “I just didn’t have the tools. And I didn’t think very hard about that, to be honest. I wanted to step into the light. Chris is a sunny, loving, really fun person, and I didn’t really understand why I should be prudent.”

Are she and Evans on good terms? “We’re not on bad terms, but we haven’t really seen each other, spoken a lot,” she says. “I think it’s probably best. I’d love to be his friend one day, but we threw down pretty hard. No regrets, though. Ever.”

Slate introduces me to the mascots of her new home, two cute mice figurines in jaunty outfits who look like they’re off to travel the world. “The way I feel now is I’ve stepped out of the woods and I’m a forest animal and I’m standing on the lawn,” she says. “And if anybody tried to approach me right now, they’re seeing a creature that’s just trying to figure out what the lawn is like. All I’m thinking about is the lawn. I’m not thinking about whether or not they are going to be a fun person to be on the lawn with, because I am just trying to be on the lawn.” And what or where is this lawn? “It’s just where I am,” she says. “I like the lawn. It’s filled with air, freedom, sunlight, and I’m alone.”

Slate wants to step out in the sunlight now, with a walk around the Silver Lake Reservoir. She bids good-bye to Reggie and turns on the TV to keep him company. “I watch Twin Peaks, but Reggie watches Frasier,” she says. That morning, while Slate was walking him, a woman got out of her car and stopped in her tracks. “She was like, ‘Oh, are you Jenny Slate?’ And I said, ‘I am.’ And she said something nice to me and I said, ‘Thank you so much. I need a lot of encouragement,’ which is usually what I say because it’s true.”

Dating Evans actually, weirdly, spurred her to double down on her career, because, she says, “I don’t want people to ask me more about my love life because of him than they ask me about my work,” and in order to ensure that, she’d have to produce a lot of work. She does stand-up in small clubs whenever possible and had two films at Sundance this January, just as the paperwork for her divorce came through: The Polka King, the true story of a polka-world Ponzi scheme, opposite Jack Black; and Landline, a story of two Jewish-Italian sisters and their parents having life and love crises in ’90s New York City, with Obvious Child creators Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm (out July 21). Soon she’ll be heading to Vancouver for a road-trip movie with Evan Rachel Wood, Alison Pill, and Cynthia Erivo, which is also Wood’s directorial debut. She and Fleischer-Camp are also at work on a feature-length Marcel the Shell movie, which she says will be “a character portrait much like Billy the Kid or Grey Gardens.”

Today, she’s leaning in to International Women’s Day by wearing a sundress covered in red roses and made by a company, Day Space Night, that’s run by women. She even canceled her one meeting with a man, an appearance on Snoop Dogg’s podcast, so she could have an entirely penis-free day. And she’s planning on ending the day by going with her girlfriends to a 90-minute seminar on fertility and reproductive rights.

A vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, Slate credits Obvious Child not just for allowing her to prove she’s a legitimate actress, but also for turning her into a women’s rights activist. Back when she signed on, she says, “I still felt embarrassed of the word feminist.” Then one day discussing a costume fitting with co-star Gaby Hoffmann, Slate jokingly apologized for showing up with “crazy bush,” she says. “And Gaby did not take it as a joke. She was really serious and she looked at me and she was like, ‘I didn’t know we were supposed to apologize for that.’ I was like, Oh, I’m being a fool. I need to learn this shit right now.”

And now that she’s got a financial cushion from Zootopia and Secret Life of Pets, she can act on what she’s learned and say “no” more often. Specifically, she’s drawing the line at any movie that, she says, “makes it okay to laugh about things like women’s bodies after birth, like when women who’ve just had babies are referring to their vaginas as all ruined. I think it’s really rude for someone to disparage a vagina in the female body after it’s just fucking created and exploded a baby into our world. It makes me furious and I will not change my opinion on that.”

Also a no-go are any roles she’s offered that “seem like a weird stereotype version of me. Like Quirky Best Friend: ‘She doesn’t have a filter! She talks about poop!’ ” She thinks it’s worth it to hold out for roles with nuance, that will allow her to lean into humor and tragedy equally, and get to the heart of the human condition. In the meantime, she has plenty of personal-growth goals. She wants to learn Norwegian this summer. She wants to spend time with her family on Martha’s Vineyard. And she wants to find a farm she can help on so she can be around animals.

Eventually, she’ll try dating again, too. “I am inclined toward partnership,” she says. “I’m like a mallard, definitely looking for my other duck. But I’ve been in love in very strong ways enough times now that there are just some compromises maybe I won’t make.” He has to know who Gloria Steinem is, for one thing. She’s thinking maybe a scientist with a sense of humor. But definitely someone who’s sure enough in who he is to accept that she’s had a past without him. “Whoever is the next person is going to have to respect that I had a husband who I loved and this boyfriend who I loved so much, and I don’t want to have to act like they weren’t important.”

We’re back at the apartment and Slate is overjoyed that Reggie hasn’t peed on anything. Speaking of pasts, she’ll also soon be hitting the press tour for Gifted with Evans. “I feel pretty relaxed about it right now,” she says, sounding not entirely convincing. “That’s because I know Chris and he’s a very nice man. And we’ve gone into our separate lives. But that doesn’t also mean that I’m going to sleep well the night before, you know?”

First, she’s taking her parents to Cabo San Lucas to celebrate her 35th birthday. I suddenly have a horror flashback to a similar trip to Cabo I took years ago and warn her not to drink the water or brush her teeth with it, or to have ice or eat anything raw, or maybe to eat anything at all.

“Oh God,” she says, laughing, “having raging diarrhea is just a real on-brand nightmare for me.”

She thinks for a second. “But, you know, it would be such an icebreaker. If I showed up with, like, a spray tan and a blowout, he’d be like, ‘What happened to Jenny?’ But if I was able to say, ‘Aw, man, I have diarrhea,’ he’d be like, ‘It’s you. I remember you.’ ”

*This article appears in the March 20, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

#interview #JS #JS round one #2017 #JS Vulture interview

[evita-shelby]

Incantatrice

Chapter 18

Cw: some sex, death synbolism, minor infidelity🔞

Gif by @orpheusxx

Taglist:@thegreatdragonfruta @zablife @wandawiccan60

It was quite fun ruining his life.

Taking stock of the things that held him up and kicking each leg of the stool down, so he gets strangled by a noose of his own making.

Jessie Eden had been so horrified when she learned about Elizabeth Stark’s murder.

He needed the communist for his plans to become a politician and to get his companies back in order.

He would fuck her to get her under his spell like he did with the rest and then toss her out when he has no use for her.

Not that he needed to do much after Kitty Jurossi wove beautiful tales of the beautifully sad boy Tommy was.

Oh, it had been beautiful to see her idea of Tommy Shelby be torn to shreds when Eva gave her a strangely plausible lie.

He is not the man he appears to be, Miss Eden, the witch had said as she spun her web of half lies.

The witch shouldn’t have stayed, but she wanted to relish the destruction of Shelby a while longer.

It shouldn’t have surprised her for him to find her and demand to know why she was ruining his fucking life.

He and Polly are not so different, shoving her against a crumbling wall thinking they have what it takes to kill her and faltering in the last minute.

“You ruined mine. We had the perfect life and you just had to kill his father and brother the second we got it, Shelby.

Had you only used your reason, we wouldn’t be here.” She said as the man drunk on pain and whiskey keeps her there as if waiting for a man to shoot him for touching her.

“Yeah, well I had it too.” He said as if he hadn’t felt trapped every second he was with Grace after she told him she wasn’t leaving.

“Then why were you fucking Lizzie before your wife’s body was even cold?” she asks, tasting the alcohol and cigarettes in his breath.

Been a while since she smelled that on Luca, he’d quit smoking when Leonardo was born and their poor little lion would get coughing fits from the smell alone.

Eva remembers with fondness when she’d kiss her man and take the smoke from his mouth like she was stealing his soul kiss by kiss.

She shouldn’t be thinking this, she has a husband who is more than she ever wanted.

But here as the lamplight colors Shelby like a tragic hero and she the wicked witch, she knows in another life this man was hers.

And Shelby knew that too.

Why else would he lean in to kiss the poison on her lips instead of leaving?

Why else isn’t she stopping him?

“You could kill me right now and I would let you.” He said pulling back finding the poison sweet and addicting, just as she did.

“Isn’t it wonderful, in one life I am yours and in this one I am your enemy.” The witch said as he fights the urge to kiss her again and up the ante in this vendetta.

Luca is none the wiser when he returns home.

She feels some guilt over her kiss with Shelby. But not enough to tell him.

Not when he smells of alcohol and Polly Gray’s perfume. There was some lipstick in his collar from where he held his former flame close as he warned her about coming near her again.

“We should go dancing sometime, have the night off and enjoy our new kingdom.” He stripped as he joined her in the bath.

“We should, your poor wife has to settle for ruining a man’s love life for fun.” Eva said, enjoying the sight of her husband in all his nude and scarred glory lowering himself in her steaming hot bath.

“Where the fuck did you get this?” her husband asked as he took the cigarette in her hands and took a drag from it.

She had gotten the urge to smoke and had pilfered Tommy Shelby’s cigarette case when he had been kissing her.

“Shelby, picked it out of his pocket when I saw him leave the communist’s flat with balls as blue as his eyes.” She grinned, showing her the silver case with his initials: TMS, Thomas Michael Shelby. “He looked so pathetic; I just couldn’t help myself to take another of his comforts.”

A nice little trophy to add to her collection.

Luca laughed and gesturing for her to come join him and enjoy her spoils together. “The things you do, mia strega.”

The witch doesn’t hesitate to straddle him, to tease him and remind herself Luca is the only man she wants.

She strokes him and rubs against him as she aches for him to fuck her so hard she won’t even remember she kissed another man.

He rewarded her with a cigarette kiss while she lifted herself up slightly to let him guide his magnificent prick inside her.

The sex was always good, but it’s been a while since they were given the time and space to be as wild as they were before the children came along.

Even Paris hadn’t let them have this much fun.

“I bet Shelby wouldn’t kiss you like that.” He said as she exhaled for him and he kept his grip on her hips tight enough to keep her from moving.

So he knew.

“So you know, huh.” Eva should’ve expected that. Of course he’d have someone keep an eye on her. “Shelby’s got too much bad luck, he even tasted salty. Had to steal his cigarettes to get the taste out of my mouth.”

It is a half-truth, yes she could taste his bad luck in his tongue, but he was damnably good kisser.

No wonder Lizzie Stark had been such a doormat.

“If you see him again, maga,” Luca’s hand moved lower until he found just what he needed to drive his point home and have her forgetting entirely about this other man who stirred her desire like he did, “I’m going to kill him for putting his hands on my woman.”

“Can I watch, daddy? Can I watch you kill him?” she begs as he continued to drive her fucking insane with those pianist’s fingers of his.

“Only right for you to watch, Evuccia, you already gave Thomas Shelby the kiss of death. “ he answered as he dealt her the best punishment in her life.

Eva was out of breath and winded from the combination of her orgasm and seeing their victory as clear as crystal.

“February 5th. The day Thomas Shelby dies by your hand.” Been so long since he triggered a vision like that, she’d almost thought it had been a fluke last time. “Don’t forget to run out of bullets tomorrow. Polly won’t join us if you kill her son.”

Tomorrow wasn’t about killing anyone, all they needed was for Thomas Shelby to lose the person he trusts most and remind Elizabeth Gray, she and her son are either with them or dead.

It will have another purpose too, Linda Shelby will realize her baby son cannot grow up knowing one day someone will come and collect any outstanding debts his father and uncles have.

She will remember how he killed that boy and how he hurts her with those same hands.

Arthur Shelby will return home tomorrow evening and find her long gone.

Who knew karma wanted a piece of them too?

#eva smith changretta #luca changretta x oc #luca changretta x eva smith #incantatrice fic

[zenwhoberi]

Thoughts on Rocket’s origin stories? I mean the OG, the 2012/13 retcon, the Cates run and the film ofc (Telltale and SE optional)

oh man rocket’s backstories is kind of a whole mess. i probably need to gather my thoughts more but fuck it and i’m also mainly going from memory so feel free (all of you!!!) to correct me if i get stuff wrong! i wouldn’t say i’m a rocket expert and i’m mainly just going to ramble.

comics first. the og is absolutely batshit insane. ranger rocket and clowns and asylums. it’s bananas. once rocket made his Grand Return in a:c and gotg 2008 it’s also… never really referenced again right? except for his brief stint in the annihilators post 2008 run. i think it’s unique but equally i can understand why they would want to ground it more (as much as a talking raccoon can be grounded) as gotg went on. it’s also why peter’s earlier adventures have been brushed to the side, but i think it’s notable that ewing is the guy who brought both of these aspects back in a way (more on strange tales in a minute!).

the young series was yeah. idk. blackjack and rocket acting divorced i guess and the moment where rocket breaks down after realising he IS the only one of him was emotional but overall that series was really unfocused and messy and I wasn’t a fan of how rocket was written in it, even though the art was great. cates i thought did ok but it didn’t really give anything people weren’t expecting?

the more recent strange tales comic by ewing had it as if rocket had false memories (?) of his og shenanigans and the reality was much darker (in line with what cates put on page, darker, experiments etc) and was something he didn’t WANT/couldn’t remember. i guess you could call it mcu synergy but seeing as the mcu hadn’t explored any of it it’s also not quite right. more a ‘grounded’ retcon. the false memories aspect is a way to make it all fall in line even if it’s confusing. i think ewing does a good job of writing rocket and i’d like to see him take a real crack at making his multiple origins work in tandem.

overall in general though i LOVE the overarching idea that rocket was made as this experiment because it puts him in line with other, more ‘perfect’ (debatable but certainly on the surface) experiments he finds himself allied with, adam, phy. i wish these kinds of similarities was something explored more, but equally i like that it’s never expressly signified despite being so obvious once noticed.

so i actually think more came from telltale than people give it credit for. I think even so much of gotg3 came from that game. even having lylla in the lab and wanting to see the sky. very heartbreaking the first time i played it and rocket breaking down to peter over lylla was really, REALLY moving. made me tear up. there’s no way gunn wasn’t inspired by this in vol. 3. same can be said of vol. 3 i guess. made me cry and i liked that the relationship between rocket and the “scientists” that made him was given a face and explored w rocket and the high evolutionary, unlike in the cates run and the games.

eidos game i think also did a good job though some of rocket talking about his past didn’t always feel earned when those conversations would trigger at the beginning of the game. i liked that they brought in his og origins by making it stories he would tell the other experiments while he was captured. i also liked his fear of water beginning almost as a joke in the early hours of the game but developing into a significant aspect of his trauma and something that he has to overcome. that was a nice moment. beyond that making his origin story be the kree is kind of insane to me because what the hell would the kree want with a raccoon super soldier. guess we’ll never know!!

ultimately i think comic rocket is a mess right now and something needs to be done about it (get ewing on the phone for all your guardians needs x) and the adaptations all benefit from being more focused.

#thanks for asking and reading my rambling would love to hear #your thoughts on the whole mess <3 #ask #rocket #gotg #rakruined

[thefamilybruno]

Always You - Chapter 8

Summary:

In a wealthy suburb outside of Philadelphia, Adam Thorn, a wealthy trust fund twenty-something, is transformed into a literal beast for being spoiled, selfish, and, well, kind of an a$$hole. After years of isolation, Adam seeks companionship through Fairy Tale Romance, an online dating website, and meets an extremely handsome, extremely arrogant brewpub owner and self-proclaimed horror movie buff named Gaston.

Too afraid to accept his romantic feelings for Gaston, Adam convinces himself that he needs to find someone else, someone a little less arrogant and a little more empathetic, to break the spell. After all, what could be more important than becoming human again? And so, Adam messages a beautiful and kind bookworm named Belle. Unbeknownst to him, Gaston has also messaged Belle. What a mess.

Gaston is in love with Adam. Adam is in love with Gaston. Both of them are trying to move on from each other by courting Belle.

Idiots.

Pairings: Gaston/Adam, minor Gaston/Belle, minor Beast/Belle

Tags: Alternative Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternative Universe - Online Dating, Crack Taken Seriously, Halloween Crack, Funny, Angst with a Happy Ending

Click below for excerpt :)

Beast looked down at the letters again and picked one up with his paw. “Do you still have the letters I sent you?”

“Of course.”

“I forgot I saved these.”

“That makes me feel very special.”

Beast’s eyes scanned the page.

Dear Beasty Boy, 

Have you ever been on one of the Philly ghost tours? Long shot, but if you want to join me, I have an extra ticket. Who can say no to sexcapades and torture? 

“Did you ever go on that ghost tour?” Beast asked.

“Which one?”

“I have no idea, but you mentioned sexcapades and torture.”

“Oh, yeah, I liked that one.”

“Who’d you bring?”

“Some guy I met at a bar.”

“Do you even remember his name?”

“Not really. Maybe something that sounded like bread?”

“His name sounded like bread?”

“I may have already been drunk when I invited him.”

“What, did you invite him five minutes before the tour started?”

“Not five. Fifteen.”

“Brad?”

“What?”

“Brad kind of sounds like bread.”

“I think it was Ted.”

“That makes more sense.”

“Oh, you know what? Maybe he was fucking with me. I think he said his name was Ted Bundy.”

Beast burst out laughing. Picturing Gaston drunkenly dragging some random man with him on a late-night ghost tour - a man who called himself Ted Bundy - was too perfect. It was so unexpectedly funny that Beast couldn’t manage to pull himself together and soon enough, he had to place the phone on the floor so that he could wipe away the tears that had gathered in the corners of his eyes.

“Sorry,” Beast said. “I’m not sure why I liked that story so much.”

“Probably because it’s cute.”

It was cute. Gaston’s stories were always cute. Hell, Gaston was always cute. Clutching a paw to his chest, Beast closed his eyes, his heart heavy once again, the closeness he felt toward Gaston so terrifying that it was as though the sheer weight of it was anchoring him to his current miserable life as a beast. 

“Gaston,” Beast choked out. “I need to go.”

“Yeah, me too. Haircut appointment. They better not fuck it up for our date.”

“Bye.”

Without even waiting for Gaston’s reply, Beast hung up the phone. For the next few seconds, he sat on the floor, his head cradled in his paws, feeling as though he was suffocating. When he finally regained his composure, he scooped up the letters and tossed them into the trash can.

#batb fanfic #beauty and the beast #beautyandthebeastfanfiction #adam/gaston #beast/gaston #gaston x adam #crack fic #disney fanfiction #batb 91

[samuraiko]

21 years and counting!

"Every bride dreams of having the perfect fairy tale wedding."

Fuck that. :D There is a reason that John and I refer to our engagement, wedding, and reception as "The Comedy of Errors."

Strap yourselves in, folks.

What follows is an INCOMPLETE list of what went wrong.

John’s job not wanting to allow him the time off to go to Las Vegas to get married

Meeting John’s parents for the first time, and his dad bluntly asking if we’d be sacrificing a pig at the wedding (we’d explained we were having a handfasting ceremony)

Pranking my maid of honor and bridesmaid by making them think I’d gotten them these horrid pink dresses (my goddaughter bridesmaid threatened to run me over if I made her wear pink)

While scoping out locations, Caesar’s Palace saying they were a TRADITIONAL establishment and that handfastings like ours weren't allowed there (even though we’d be wearing traditional wedding outfits and were basically indistinguishable from a regular wedding)

Three weeks before the wedding, discovering the jeweler had mis-sized our wedding rings

Finding out a WEEK before the wedding that the best man wasn’t going to be able to attend, and press-ganging my brother into the role

Getting to Las Vegas and discovering the rental shop had lost John’s tux

The Clark County clerk misspelling my name on the marriage certificate… TWICE (and they STILL managed to mis-spell Tucson as Tuscon) *facepalm*

John’s parents missing the rehearsal the night before because they couldn’t find a parking space and never thought to valet-park the car

Breaking my tooth on the SALAD the night before the wedding, at the rehearsal dinner (I am not joking)

Discovering an HOUR before the wedding that the mother of the bride getting married just before I was, and MY mother, were wearing the EXACT same dress (the bride and I were wearing different dresses however)

Realizing 30 MINUTES before the wedding that we’d forgotten bread and wine for the ceremony, sending my brother off to get some (thinking he’d come back with a dinner roll or something) and having him return with this MONSTROUS artisan loaf and a bottle of wine

The mic on John’s tux making him sound like Darth Vader throughout the ceremony (which meant that John, me, my maid of honor, the best man, and my bridesmaid were already giggling)…

… and THEN we get to…

Getting to the vows only to belatedly realize that in glossing over the vows during the rehearsal, we’d forgotten to tell the officiant how to PRONOUNCE my last name

(Leading to video footage of the ENTIRE bridal party with identical “OH SHIT” expressions before I openly lost it at the altar and was doubled up crying into my bouquet while screaming with laughter)

John grabbing my rear through the bustle of my dress as we were having our photos taken because I was getting tired of smiling and just wanted to get to the food at the reception…

… which means that OF COURSE…

Being so busy running around and hugging everyone and talking at the reception that I FORGOT TO EAT

Pranking the photographer during the reception with the now-infamous “MOOSE!” picture

My now-aunt-in-law, having had a few drinks at the reception, offering John the sage advice that “the key to a happy marriage is to always remember to put the toilet seat back down.”

There were others along the way, but these were certainly the most memorable. And in the end, a wedding celebration should be a joyous occasion.

I wouldn't trade any of it for a typical, boring, staid wedding. This was MUCH more 'us.'

Here's to at least another 21 years. :)

#wedding #comedy of errors #weddings

[hotdamnmadison]

My Battle With Body Hair

Google the word Crossdresser for me. Right now - go ahead. And take a minute to sift through the millions of photos that pop up in front of you. Seriously go do it and come back after 3-5 minutes of scrolling...

All done? Good. Tell me, how was your scrolling experience? What did you see? How diverse were the faces?

(The following is NOT a picture of me)

Crossdressing has been a thing for a long time. Rather than bore you with the details of it's origin and first known cases - I will simply say that men and women alike have been dressing as the opposite sex for forever. Here is more info if you're a scholar.

It truly is a tale as old as time. Especially when you consider that our ancestors wore the same cloth scraps as clothing (regardless of their sex.) But like all good things - humans found a way to fuck it up - and ostracize those who continue to partake in it. My misanthropy is shining through - because society found a way to take fabric and somehow gender it.

My crossdressing journey started a while ago. I wish I knew exactly when - but I remember having a fascination with Halloween skirts in the attic of my parent's house, old unopened pairs of pantyhose still in the boxes, and panties that went from being buried deep in an ex-girlfriend's drawer to my very own private hiding place. Hey she wasn't wearing them - so someone might as well ;)

I loved it. And still do (though I'm no longer considering myself a crossdresser - I'm definitely more gender fluid.) So I kept pushing myself deeper and deeper into it. All while trying to maintain my boyish side as well...

---

Every guy tries to grow a beard in high school. If you say you didn't at least try I'm going to assume you're lying (lol okay maybe a little harsh but most guys did attempt it.) I was no stranger to that effort myself. My genetics kept me from growing anything worth keeping until I was in my first semester of college. Leading up to that - I had the "Oh God Please Just Shave It" face pubes that most 17 year old's call a beard. But I kept trying - even at one point using a "just for me" hair color to darken the hair that I WAS able to grow.

I kick myself for that everyday. Because here I am at 28 almost 29 years old with a well trimmed bit of stubble that I can't get rid of.

Note: If this is deflating for you to find out - I think you should probably unfollow/unfriend me.

But alas, yes it is true *faints dramatically* My perfection is held back by my darned facial stubble/beard. How I'd love to go back in time and tell my younger self to just fucking shave and quit trying... ugh... hindsight is 20/20. I'm not a stranger to other disliked hairy areas - under arms and legs - both areas that most men don't shave without having a really good excuse (and before you make any suggestions: I don't bike, swim, or weight lift/body build lol.)

---

This has been an obstacle for me (as you might imagine) when trying to meet people. Let's be honest - my slender body has most men caught hook, line, and sinker. They would come SPRINTING into my DM's faster than you could ever imagine. Back then I was on a website called Free Chat Now - an adult IM site that is carrying the weight of the Chat Room world on it's ever crumbling shoulders. I would add my own little 30 character pitch line to the scrolling wash of copy/paste pitches. And within 30 seconds I would have dozens of men to get back to. First things first: ASL... get that out of the way, add a little bit of flirting... and then came picture time. "Yours for mine" is what I would usually say. And inevitably I would receive a nasty toilet dick pick taken in a convenience store or office bathroom. Yum. Great.

And then it was my turn to send a pic in return. *upload, send, wait* Usually it would be a hot little picture of me in some lingerie or just a panty ass shot. Cute enough to keep them talking and jerking (I was easily entertained back then.) Something like this was typically my go-to. (This next one IS me haha)

Omg they ate it up almost every time. Usually things would go well and then *boom* the window would close - it was a tell tale sign that they couldn't hold out any longer and well.... things probably got messy (a shame that they mostly disappeared before giving me a way to reach them for future digital fun! :( lol.)

But on a few separate occasions some men wouldn't be so easily sold...

"Face pic?"

Ugh... And the game was on.

Now I personally don't use Face App anymore. Especially if I am planning to meet with someone in real life. But back in the day, when I was strictly playing around on the internet with strangers in chat rooms, Face App was a very useful tool. And besides - it wasn't REALLY catfishing - because it is exactly what I would look like if I was...

clean shaven

done up beautifully in makeup

Here is an old pic from my face app days. Don't swoon too hard ;) lol. (me again: face app'd)

Ah. Thank you Face App! Saving the day and allowing me to keep both halves of my lifestyle in tact.... At least, that worked for a while anyway.

See when push came to shove I determined that online play was no longer enough for me. I needed more. I needed the real thing. But there is no Face App for the real world. It's a commitment. It's a question I've been facing now ever since...

Who do you want to be?

And the battle continued. At first I wouldn't talk about the facial hair in my ads. And if I did a webcam play session with a guy I would simply avoid my face. (Many wanted to see me suck on things - to which I politely lied and said, "hey maybe next time".) Time and time again my amazing conversations would end at the dreaded facial hair road block. And it took me years to realize that there was no reason to be beating myself up for it.

Men don't realize that these is a huge difference between a MtF trans individual and a CIS man who likes to dress in "women's" clothing (and who also didn't realize that they were gender fluid.) Y'all remember this idiot right? ->

My favorite quote here is the "that's not a real CD...."

My guy... Yes it fucking is! Anyone with a head on their shoulders and a Barnes and Noble nearby can determine that men with beards have been cross dressing for forever (as stated in the beginning.) Unfortunately, the porn industry has lumped very gorgeous trans women in with not so gorgeous crossdressers. And dipshits like the guy above can't tell the difference.

So here I am - years later still fighting the same battle. I wear my silly little outfit killing mask to cover up my "undesirable" bodily traits....

Oh shit! I never told you all WHY I feel the need to maintain my stubble/boyish self. Well allow me to explain

(realizing I love making lists lmao)

To put it simply: change is hard I have had a beard now for a long long time and to move away from that would be a challenge for me. Seeing a new face in the mirror every day. It's just a tough pill to swallow initially

My jawline sucks without the beard I won't be posting any boy photos of myself here, so don't ask. But yeah I have shaved down ONE time completely bare over the last several years. And it wasn't pretty (in terms of maintaining a boyish side. It was however PERFECT for my Ashley side... and I was tempted to bust out the makeup and experiment but never did

Shaving raises many questions from family and friends - I get it, it's none of their business. But I would have to answer the same 3-4 questions over and over again about why I did it and things like that. I would probably do away with the leg hair and other hair as well. And I simply don't have a non suspicious reason to do so at the moment.

I'm not sure I'm ready to tip my 70/30 scale of fluidity to 50/50 just yet - Currently Ashley only gets about 30 percent of my time, and that's being generous. My boyish side dominants my existence, and in my current lifestyle I think it works well enough. I feel as though shaving everything below my eyebrows would tip things closer to 50/50 - a place I'd eventually like to be but for right now - I simply can't

Ah. Feels good to get this post off my chest. I hate righting words like beard, hair, pass, passable, leg, armpit, etc. Those words damn near trigger something in me at this point. And now I have a post to explain WHY it is so difficult for not only me, but for so many others to fully commit to the porn-driven cross dresser image. I've seen a lot of men, typically 50 plus, who are divorced and are finally crossdressing and making Double List ads. It is sad - because they sit there in a similar position that I am in. They want to be bare and fully pass under any circumstances. But society and it's standards are too hard for closeted men to meet. There is no on/off switch for body hair and genetic make up - at least nothing short of estrogen and other medications.

But someone's inability to pass doesn't mean they should be frowned upon by anyone. And you can't simply be nice to certain trans women/crossdressers because you find them attractive - and then blatantly disrespect and hate on those who don't pass. Everyone's journey is valid - even if they have to wear a silly mask to a meet up. I would invite those of you who CANNOT STAND body hair to attempt to look past it for just a moment. Is the rest of the person physically attractive to you? Furthermore, (and if it's you're thing) are you emotionally connected to this person? And the only hang up is some measly hair? That seems like a pretty crappy reason to ruin a good thing - wouldn't you say?

---

Me personally? The mask has grown on me a bit. I'd still like to one day reach a point where I no longer feel that I need it. And if that day comes, and I'm living my 50/50 lifestyle, I'll be sure share myself with people who deserve me. I'm sad to say that there are people around me who aggressively judge a known crossdresser in the town that I live. The things that they say cut me pretty deep - and I make a mental note of every slur and saying that passes through their lips. Some day I'll get comfortable enough to be the 50/50 version of myself. Hell... maybe even 40/60... And I'll be more Ashley than my boy side.

Until then... I'll continue to edit out my leg hair, under arm hair, and other blemishes using light photoshop skills. Enjoy my silly masked self and all of my "flaws" and if you don't like what you see/read, well.... I was too much woman for you anyway <3

-Ashley

----

I have a few more things to write in the coming days! Including a new challenge series that I intend on doing to better my writing skills. I'll talk more about that tomorrow morning :)

Much love,

Ash

#femboy #cute crossdreser #cross dressing #crossdressgirls #twink #gender fluid #books & libraries

[imbonewary]

Shifting Sans Chapter 10 "Seeing Double"

~

Chapter 1 - Chapter 9 - Chapter 11

~

I heard knives.

I tasted dust.

I smelled blood.

I saw their empty smile.

I felt my foot slide against the floor as I summoned blue bones, angled into them.

“Them” being plural, not just neutral.

Oh god, there’s two demons now. One was bad enough. Both were frozen in shock until “Chara” stepped forward. Through the bones. As if they weren’t there.

What the fuck.

“Those will not be necessary, Serif,” Chara said with calm stoicism. “I apologize for startling you, but…”

“You should’ve seen the look on your face,” Frisk was barely holding themself together, face split in a wide grin. “That was amazing.”

The kid was practically vibrating with poorly contained mirth.

Kid.

These are just kids, what the hell am I doing?!

I stumbled back, hitting the door, dissipating the bones. Holy shit, what is wrong with me? Am I just gonna start attacking every kid I meet because of that thing?!

Am I really so broken?

“I-I’m sorry I, I didn’t mean, I just, you were-”

“Dude, calm down, we’re fine-”

“It’s not fine, I just attacked you out of nowhere!”

“I mean, it wasn’t really out of nowhere-”

“You’re just kids! I’m supposed to be the fucking adult here!”

“They were only blue attacks, I knew to stay still-”

“That’s not the point!”

“The point is that we’d like to know why we keep triggering you so badly.”

I froze, wings flared over my head. This isn’t the first time I’d almost attacked them. They deserve an explanation. Even if I’d rather not give one. I don’t wanna think about it. But they deserve to know. Maybe it’ll even help. Even if the resets are still a thing, the Anomaly is gone and these two haven’t fallen as far. There’s still hope for them.

I swallowed hard. I can do this.

Am I filled with Determination?

Not really.

“Right, ok,” I breathed, rubbing my face with both hands, leaning back against the door. “Ok, I… I’m here. I’m fine. This is fine. I just. Need a minute. You two. Go sit down. I’ll be there in a bit.”

Frisk shrugged and clasped their hands behind their neck, moseying around the couch, while Chara hesitated before flying over the couch, their legs turning into a ghostly tail as they went and found a seat in midair between the couch and the large TV, ghost tail curled up under them like a snake. I openly stared at the two before shaking my head. I took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before letting it out slowly. I did this a second time before my soul had calmed enough that I could think relatively clearly.

I’d been planning to tell them about my experience with the resets anyways, as a sort of cautionary tale, but I hadn’t expected there to be two of them. That shouldn’t change things too much though, right? And they’ve obviously been keeping their own secrets so I should be able to trust them with mine. It’s just two kids, I can handle this.  

With one more slow breath, I walked around the couch and took my own seat. Ok, I’m ready for this. Or at least, as ready as I’ll ever be.

“So, resets,” I started. It only made sense for me to go first, after all that. “I mentioned I’m from an alternate universe and that a lot of the people I used to know are here too, just slightly different. Well, the same goes for you two. From what I’ve heard, Chara’s story is pretty much the same, just that your Asriel was an adult king while mine was still a young prince when he died. We can talk more about specifics of that later, if you want. As for Frisk… My Frisk had control of the resets and didn’t know that I remembered everything.”

“At first, the kid was alright,” I continued. Frisk and Chara were paying rapt attention now. “Tried to make friends, even got us to the surface. But then I guess they got bored and reset their “perfect ending”. They broke the Barrier a few more times but never left it alone as long as that first time. Eventually, they stopped getting us out altogether and started abusing their power. Which was fine, right? Everyone would just wake up next reset none the wiser. They didn’t know that they’d had their dreams come true, only to have them ripped away. They didn’t know that they’d died, or watched their friends and family die. They didn’t know. But I did. And I couldn't talk to anyone about it. Who would believe me?”

“It learned everything it could about us,” my voice was quiet, almost taking to myself. “Even how we responded to hardship and heartache. What was left? What more entertainment could we provide? Even though it knew us inside and out, we could still give it the thrill of the hunt. And hunt it did, every last monster it could find, over and over again. As Judge, I was the last line of defense before it could face the King. I lost track of how many times we fought in that hallway, long enough for me to know its every move and for it to know mine, a knife being its weapon of choice. The last time we fought, I stole a piece of its soul and interrupted the reset, which somehow landed me here.”

There was silence as I resisted the urge to retreat into my mind, away from the trauma, away from the spiraling thoughts that echoed so loud in the empty air. I sat there, legs crossed to keep from going fetal again. Worthless, should’ve done better, useless, couldn’t save them, lazy, couldn’t protect him, broken, how many times did you watch him die before you couldn’t cry anymore-

I took a deep breath. Talking was better than drowning.

“So, that’s why I freaked out,” I concluded, looking up from the floor I’d apparently been staring at. “I’ve been fighting for so long, and you look just like them…”

I trailed off as I registered their reactions. Chara looked suitably horrified, hands over their mouth like they might cry, meanwhile Frisk looked utterly fascinated. I could dissect that later. I really wanna think about something else.

“Fair’s fair,” I said, offering them the floor. “Your turn; what’s up with you two?”

“Well, skipping most of my story,” Chara began. “I was buried where I initially fell, on the southwest side of the cavern, somewhere between Snowdin, the Ruins, and the Deep. Frisk fell on my grave and something about his soul resonated with whatever was left of my soul; we’re still not entirely sure how that happened but it did, and that’s the important part,” they shrugged. “Frisk?”

His? I thought Frisk used they/them pronouns. No time to think about that now.

“I was avoiding going home by hiking around the mountain until I fell into the Underground,” Frisk picked up where Chara left off. “I landed on Chara’s grave and she started haunting me,” She? “which somehow gave me the reset power. After I realized what I could do, I used it to… uh,” Frisk looked away. “Don’t judge me too bad for this, but I used it to get what I wanted, to do what I wanted with no consequences, since I could just go back and act like it never happened.”

“I was only partially aware at the time,” Chara took over, feeling slightly uncomfortable. “But the more LV he gained, the more lucid I became. As much as I hated it, I encouraged him to gain more and more LV until I was able to contact him directly and tricked him into giving me control of our shared body.”

“Turns out I’m a bit of a psychopath,” Frisk deadpanned. “But Chara’s been trying to help me see the value of at least pretending I have empathy for others. Through the Chara-controlled-resets, we found a way for whoever wasn’t controlling the physical body to have an astral body, like Chara has now. The astral body’s got some pretty cool abilities and uses but we can get into that more later.”

“After being in control myself for a while,” Chara began again. “I gave the reigns back to Frisk on a more full-time basis and, with the help of Flowey, broke the barrier with the other six souls the monsters had gathered and some anime logic. We’d never managed to do that before and had wanted to save our progress but it seems we no longer have access to the reset power so you don’t have to worry about us abusing it; we literally can’t.”

I sat stunned. There was a lot to digest but the only thing I could think was…

“… it’s gone?”

#undertale #jumbletale #alternate universe #oc #shifting sans #serif #hero frisk #buttercup chara

[wasted-my-time]

Genesis

Warnings: Mention of drugs, alcohol and child mistreatment.

-To put it briefly, my mother wasn't exactly the mom of the year... Billy began his tale.

He was six years old, he was hungry.

-Mommy, there's nothing to eat. He complained after checking the fridge for the fourth time and deciding that baking soda and the moss growing on a rotten apple weren't a complete meal.

-Mommy ain't got no money, so cope on your own, little prick! She yelled at him before taking another swig from her bottle of Jameson's.

He was nine, he was left alone, he didn't see his mother for three days, but he had a newspaper run and got himself a bit of money.Luckily, Kraft Dinner was cheap and using the neighbors' microwave oven was easy.

-I don't need help, I doing better without her, I don't need help. He slowly repeated himself as the device started beeping to signal his meal was ready.

He was thirteen, he had enough. Finding his mom passed out on the couch every time he got home starting to play with his mood.

-Where did you put my fucking white horse?! Was the first sign of her consciousness he had when he walked through the door.

-I didn't touch your heroin and you know it. He answered calmly in a vain attempt to lower the temperature.

-Who took it then?! You're the only one in here, appart from me!

-I don't know, maybe you should ask the guy that was here with you last night? He countered, a bit angered by her drug induced amnesia.

-Mike? He... He was there?

-No, Mike is the one trying to make you quit. Rodger you called him, I think.

-Oh yes, I remember now... You know, he has pretty interesting ideas: He said that if I ran out of dope or money, he knew people that would trade quite a lot for a young boy like you.

He was about to say something but the sheer terror his mother's insinuation caused all words to choke in his throat. All he could do was to stare at her with eyes wider than one dollar coins.

-Oh, you heard well, so you better bring me back all what you stole from me. You have fifteen minutes, little prick. Otherwise, I'll call him, and he'll call his friend and by the end of the day, I'll be rid of you.

Fifteen minutes is a hell of a short time to give back something you didn't take. So instead of searching, he started packing, which wasn't very difficult: Apart from what he was wearing at the moment, all he had were two shirts and a pair of jeans, as for his beloved Swiss knife, it was already in his pocket.

-Don't you dare get out, I'm still your mother! She yelled when she saw him about to leave with his bag on his shoulders.

-It was about damn time you realized it! He felt like his blond head made a full turn as she slapped him across the face in response.

-Fuck you, I'm not your son.

It was the last thing he ever told his mother as he slammed the door behind him.

He was used to a lot of walking around because of his job, but a full night of constant movement completely drained him. Too scared to sleep, he had to keep going, but at eight o'clock,he climbed up the emergency stairs of a disaffected factory and decided the rusty metal would be the perfect spot to take a break.

-Just... a few... minutes. He whispered to himself just before his body gave up and let him sink into a deep slumber.

___________________________________________

-Hey, boy! Boy, are you alright? A calm voice woke him up along with a hand gently shaking his shoulders.

His first reflex was to jump on his feet, his Swiss knife pointed at the man's face.

-Woah, relax kid! I want you no harm, it's just that, how can I say, you're sleeping in my doorway and I'd really like to go home. The stranger protested, putting his hands up to appear as little threatening as possible.

To be honest, with his mid length, wavy, dark hair, his big, soft, brown eyes, and his not yet adult face, he looked quite friendly.

-You live in there?

-Yes, there's me, my friends and a bunch of other people. You, on the other hand, don't seem to have a place to stay, do you want to come in?

-Wait a second, I don't even know your name! Billy exclaimed.

-I'm Graham Mellor, and would you mind not to point that thing at me, it would be very appreciated, you know. He answered and offered his hand to shake.

The boy put the knife back in his pocket and reluctantly accepted the hand.

-I'm William.

-William what?

-I don't know my father's name, and I don't want my mother's one.

-Billy Nameless, that's good! It could be a cowboy name from those old movies! Graham joked.

-Only my friends can call me Billy.

-So, now that you know my name, do you want to come in?

-Okay, but if there's anything shady in there, I get out or you're gonna end up with a second hole down your ass. He answered, patting the pocket containing his knife.

-It's a deal, Mister Nameless. Graham nodded and led the way.

Where Billy was waiting for two or three scruffy guys with absolutely nothing to do, he found five young adults taking care of about twenty kids from eight to sixteen years old.

-Alright everybody! Here is William and he might be our guest for a while, so I want y'all to be at your best with him.

-What the fuck?!

-It's class in the morning and we do chores in the afternoon. Graham explained.

-Oh, okay then...

-You said a rude word, you must apologize!

A little girl scolded him.

-Eh.... Sorry guys?All kids nodded in one synchronized move of approval and teenagers snickered under their breath.

-Who are they... How do you... You know what I mean!

-Mostly like you, but for a few of them, their parents heard of us and brought them here because they couldn't take care of them. They visit sometimes.

-Show me around, the whole place.-Well, here used to be the offices, the younger kids sleep here and because there are a lot of separate rooms, it is also where we do classes. I think they're on a break right now, that's why they're all together.

He then led him down one flight of stairs, showing him the teenagers' dorm room then, one floor lower, the adults' one. Both were only consisting of thin foam mattresses covered by even thinner sheets and covers laying in one big room.

-That's it for us, "The Family Unit". Underneath, there are a few homeless guys that live here. They're nice but they don't want to deal with us lot. I'd gladly join them sometimes. He chuckled

-And on the ground floor?

-Junkies. Most of them are cool too, but we don't want any substances around the kids.-You won't see me disagreeing with that.

-So, do you want to try it out for a while?

An organised, more or less safe way of living. It sounded better than his mother's place.

-... Why not.

Months passed and he so to say became part of the family, taking part to chores and courses. To his surprise, he had more to eat there than he used to have with his mother and miraculously it wasn't as cold in winter, thanks to Graham gathering enough money to afford a bit of gas for the heating.

About a year later, some other changes in his life came with a loud pounding on the rusted door of the ground floor.

-Police! Open the door! A man with an English accent shouted.

The panic those words caused to the still sober occupants of that floor...

But of course they didn't open (or even approach the door) and the "police" had to kick it open only to see a couple of them running up the stairs.

-Maybe it's not that bad of a thing if they demolish this damn place... He mumbled to himself after discovering what he thought to be the only residents of the building.

He began to search the floor he just entered for something or someone that would eventually be enough to discourage promoters from tearing down the building.

He just didn't want another apartment complex that people wouldn't be able to afford.

-If you are from the police, I assume you have a badge, and some kind of a warrant. Graham asked as he got to the staircase's landing.

-No, I don't. What I have is a reason for you to help me.

-Could you elaborate?

-The new owners of your... Home want to replace it with apartments. I'm a private investigator and they hired to see what has become of their property.

-Argh, it must be about this unpaid rent of us. He answered with irony.

And this is the moment Billy and his less than perfect sense of timing decided to arrive.

-Hey why in Hell did you guys let the front door open?! He shouted as he entered the building.

-What are you doing with children in here?! Bernie yelled at Graham, taking out his pistol and pointing it at him.

-No, I swear it's not what you think! Such panicked explanation were far from satisfying for the detective, but as he was about to cock his gun, a dull sound resonated and he collapsed to the ground.

-Eeeh, I went dumpster shopping and found quite a few cans of soup. Billy explained and picked the one he just threw at the man's head.

-I hope you found some ice for his head too, now help me, we'll get him upstairs.

Bernard woke up on the third floor, surrounded by six pair of curious eyes and his head resting on the last clump of snow in town wrapped in a towel.

Unbeknownst to him, on the upper floor, twenty ears were pressed against the ground, eager to know what was going on.

-Mister Gray, can you hear me? Graham asked after seeing their "guest's" eyes fluttering open.

-How do you even know my name?

-Your wallet. Billy answered and threw it by the laying man. Don't worry, I didn't take anything from it.

-Hmm, and what do you want from me?

-Just to be left alone.

-I want to see the rest of the building first, I don't mind lying to the promoters who hired me, but I need some inspiration first. Oh, and if you give me my gun back, I'd appreciate it.

Billy put the firearm by the detective's hand carefully, but the adults couldn't help but shoot an anxious look at the ceiling, thinking about the kids upstairs and of a way to hide it.

-What's up there? He asked with suspicion.

-N-Nothing. One of Graham's friends stuttered.

-Oh, so you won't mind if I do this... He retorted, only to grab his revolver, stand up and fired three shots in a corner of the ceiling.

As the high pitched screams of the children rang above them, Graham and Billy tackled Bernard to the ground as the adults ran upstairs.

-Nothing uh? The detective chuckled.

He was good enough to tell when he was lied to, and once everything was explained properly, all suspicions were washed away.

-I'll help you. I'll scare away the promoters with something about contaminants in the ground and the soil being so soft that the whole thing would collapse, I don't know...

Relief was about to wash over the squatters' mind when the detective spoke once again.

-But I have a condition. He then pointed to Billy. You. Your name is William Forester and your mother came at my office telling me that you had ran away and required my services. If you come back with me, it's a deal.

-No, don't do this, I know her, she won't pay you! Billy pleaded.

-Well, it's still worth trying, if she doesn't, I'll charge a little extra to the promoters. He explained and patted his pockets, looking for something before adding: They won't even notice. And did you also take my cigarettes?

Graham glared at Billy, whom rolled his eyes and threw the little cardboard box to their guest.

-What about my lighter?

This time, Graham was the one to retrieve the missing object.

-So, what do you think? Bernard asked with a cloud of smoke.

-... I'll go. Billy resigned himself. But to one condition, we will go to my mother's place, instead of her coming to your office.

-Wise decision, young man.

___________________________________________

-I begin to understand why you ran away... Bernie grumbled after kicking a rat the size of a small dog out of his way while climbing up the stairs of the apartment building.

-Wait until you get into her place...Three flights of stairs later, they were in front of the dreaded door.

-Miss Forester? Bernard called as he knocked on the door.

-What time is it? Billy asked.

-Half past one. He answered after checking his watch.

-She's sleeping.The teen deadpanned before opening the unlocked door, revealing his mother snoring on the couch, surrounded by dirty dishes on the floor and various powders on the coffee table.

-Do you really want to send me back here? Or did she forget to tell you she threatened to sell me to child traffickers before I left?

-You should become a lawyer, 'cause you just won this case.

-So let's go back to the factory! He exclaimed after quietly closing the door.

-No, I called my other client to convince him that he shouldn't build anything there, but he already had reports indicating otherwise, so now he thinks I'm a liar and he won't pay me...

-And you aren't gonna get your money for finding me neither? The teen asked as they turned around to get down the stairs.

-No, to be honest, I don't get paid that often... I basically live off the two days advances I ask before each job. But it's enough as long as I keep finding new jobs.

-I could help you. I met all sorts of people since I got out of here.

-It's an idea. The detective chuckled. But first, I'll help your friends get another place.

-... And I guess he thought it was one good idea, because he's stuck with me ever since and didn't even complain.

-You kid deserved to go to school, and have an honest job! Bernie exclaimed before sitting back with them.

-Maybe I would have deserved it, but instead of that, I work with you! Billy joked.

-And you dropped school when you were sixteen! His so-called uncle retorted.

-Okay, you win...

-We should watch the news, maybe they'll talk about you lot. Bernie changed subjects after checking the clock.

They settled down in front of the television, Billy and Janie sitting by each other on the couch and Bernie took place in his armchair in the warming company of a glass of cognac.

"Breaking news, Ladies and Gentlemen, a corpse has been found on the railway crossing Broad Channel Island in Jamaica Bay..." The presentator announced as soon as she appeared on the screen.

-You don't say... Billy chuckled in faked disbelief.

-------------------------------------------------------

Next chapter: Billy's got a gun.

#The ballad of Janie and Billy #Janie's got a gun #billy's got a gun #Fan art #def leppard #aerosmith

[gretavanlace]

Missing Buttons

Josh Kiszka x reader

18+ only! Minors do not interact!

Warnings: graphic sexual content, unprotected sex, alcohol, language, drugs, angst, dirty talk, etc etc

Part 2

“That’s not how it happened at all!” Sammy complains, shoving at Danny’s shoulder in an attempt to get him to shut up.

“Yes, it is!” Danny shoves him back and gestures with his beer for everyone gathered around the fire to listen up, as Sam nearly topples out of his folding chair. “I went to climb into my bunk, and idiot over here,” he jerks his thumb at his best friend. “Is passed out, with not one, but two, randoms from the show.”

Sam holds a hand up, preparing to make his case as the group cracks up, always happy to be delighted with tales of his nonsense. “First off, they weren’t from the show...met ‘em at the bar we went to after the show. Second, yeah, we were in your bunk, but in my defense, I was cross-faded that night and I thought it was mine. Third, what the fuck man, Button’s here.”

“Oh, save it, Sammy.” You roll your eyes and hit the blunt making its way around the circle. “You fucked my best friend in the backseat of my car two summers ago. Twice.”

Jake and Josh recoil in perfect sync, but Jake takes the lead on this one. “I hate that I know this. I mean, I really fucking hate it. Detest it! I’ve sat in that backseat one too many times. I’m buying you a new car, Button.”

Button. You’ve been Button to them so long, you sometimes wonder if they even remember your real name. You earned the moniker the day you met Josh behind the curtain before an 8th grade production of, likely the worst, A Midsummer Night’s Dream to ever awkwardly tromp across a stage.

You’d been asked by your choir director to step in and help last minute when more than a few of the stagehands had come down with mono. Josh had barreled his way through the small crowds gathered in a panic, looking for anyone remotely related to wardrobe. He was decked out in costume, making a very handsome Lysander, in your opinion, but he had lost a crucial button on his vest.

His eyes had landed on yours nervously. “I have thread, and a needle.” Was all he had been able to articulate in his anxious alarm.

“Okay,” you remember nodding, trying to reassure him with a little smile. “I can sew a little, where’s your button?”

Instead of calming him, this only upset him further “I can’t find one!”

You looked around, at a loss, and then glanced down at your own shirt. In a split second decision, you ripped a button off, near the bottom, then knelt down to begin hurriedly attaching it as best you could to the vest in question. He smelled like the sun when you moved close to him, that’s what you remember most vividly about that first interaction with him.

His face, flushed pink with adrenaline and gratitude, had lit up adorably “Thanks, Button.” He nodded, touching your shoulder before scampering off to take his place.

He found you later, to thank you again, and your friendship had been cemented. After that, you were a transplant in the Kiszka household, an honorary member of the family, spending more time at their home than your own.

Later, as the band formed and gained a slow burning fame, you helped with shows; lugging equipment in and out of vans, mediating brotherly squabbles, and yes...occasionally still replacing missing buttons.

All these years later, life with your favorite boys had shifted, with their grueling, ever increasing tour dates and your own packed schedule, you saw less and less of them. But that was alright, you never had a chance to miss them too badly, one of them was always calling or texting. Either to say hello, ask an opinion, or to have you settle an argument.

“Button! Remember that exchange student Junior year?” Jake rang you out of a deep sleep, forgetting to take the time difference into consideration. “The Australian one? Was she into me or Josh? Because, he says...”

“It’s three o’clock in the morning, Jacob.” You had grumbled. “And you, she liked that stupid haircut you had.”

Or...

“We go on in, like, twenty minutes.” Danny rushed into the phone. “Should I wear that red vest, the one Sam hates? Or the brown one with the fringe?”

“Pants?” “White.”

“Red, for sure.

But they are home now, and you’re delighted, if not a little saddened. One, it wouldn’t stay this way...this beautiful night, with all of you crowded around a fire pit in the Kiszka backyard, would be fleeting. In a couple of weeks’ time, the road would beckon and life would whisk you out of one another’s day to day once again.

Two, things were different between you and Josh. Tense and stiff in a way you never would have expected between the two of you. Chalking it up to growing apart only made your heart hurt worse...though you should have expected it. These things happen under the most mundane of circumstances, throw in tours and celebrity? Fucking doomed.

“What’s wrong, love?” Jake nudges your knee and you snap out of your thoughts, to find his gaze. Your eyes meet his, but you can feel Josh’s watchful stare on your face as well.

“Bored.” You joke, laughing it off. “Thought rock stars were supposed to be crazy fun?”

“Ha ha.” Sam deadpans, “It isn’t our fault! All the hookers were booked up and fuckin’ Danny forgot the cocaine.”

“Left it on the bus for the strippers.” Danny sighs, shaking his head as if he’s made a terrible mistake.

“Strippers.” You sigh dramatically right along with him. “They have all the fun.���

Loudly, and out of nowhere, Sam begins to belt Joni Mitchell’s California. Warbling and off-key, the way he only ever is when he’s shit faced, he sings out the lyrics, changing ‘California’ to ‘Michigan’.

“Christ.” Jake takes a giant swig from his bottle of whiskey to counter his baby brother’s antics, and you follow suit, swallowing the last of your beer.

“I’m running inside to grab another.” You shake your beer around needlessly in explanation. “Anybody need anything?”

“Get Joni over here a bottle of water.” Danny calls out after you.

You hold up your hand to indicate you’ve heard and head into the house.

Their parents have left for some function or another, (you suspect they’ve actually left to give the boys the time they need to really blow off some steam in a place they feel grounded and safe), so the house is quiet and still when you slide the back door closed. It feels foreign; this house isn’t one that is often associated with silence.

You make your way over to the fridge and throw it open, snatching a beer, bottle of water, and a jar of dill pickles.

“Still with the pickles, Button?” Josh’s voice startles you, you hadn’t even heard the door. “It’s gross. Beer and pickles.”

You place the jar on the counter and spin the lid off “You have your vices, and I have mine.”

“Hookers, strippers, and coke?” he jokes, but it sounds forced.

“Exactly.” You nod around a crunching mouthful.

He stands quietly, until it feels like he’s taking up too much space in the room. It’s awkward and uncomfortable in a way that makes your stomach twist with a pang of heartache. You’re picturing finally finding the courage to stride across the room and pull his uniquely gorgeous mouth to your own when he rubs the back of his neck with his palm.

“Button...” the tone in which he speaks your nickname makes you feel nauseous. It sounds miserable and melancholy, like he’s about to tell you something he knows you won’t want to hear. You can’t bear to hear his voice utter whatever words are about to spill forth and break your heart into irreparable pieces.

“You don’t have to feel weird, Josh.” You crack open your beer and chug it, wishing you had something harder to dull the ache in your veins. “I get it, you know. I know you guys can’t come home as often. Fuck, you don’t even live here anymore. I know you’ve outgrown this shitty town, and I know that while the others haven’t yet,” you pause to breathe, lest you fall apart. “...you’ve outgrown me. It’s okay. You don’t have to feel guilty.”

He remains eerily silent, and you sort of hate him for it. Like, fucking say something...you already feel stupid enough without him staring at you like a second head has suddenly sprouted on your shoulder to ask for the time.

“Josh.” You finally prod when you can stand the spotlight no longer.

When he speaks, at last, you wish he hadn’t “Are you really that blind? Or is this just a drunken pity party?”

“You’re an asshole.” You clench your teeth, begging the throbbing lump in your throat to abate.

He stomps forward and snatches your beer, taking a drink while eyeing you. “So, I’ve ‘outgrown you’, in your words, and you’re just okay with that? The thought of me being just another someone in your past is just...whatever to you?” he tosses his hands up, mocking ‘no biggie’.

“You want me to beg you to stay a part of my life?” you’re shocked, the Josh you used to know would never push this way. He never would’ve seemed annoyed that you didn’t seem to be openly hurting. “You hardly ever call me, when you do it’s strained, you’ve kept your distance this entire visit, you’ve made it clear...let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to look back on our friendship and feel like shit about it.”

“You could pick up the phone too, you know.” Now he sounds pissed off, which is so unlike Josh it seems like you’ve got an imposter standing before you. “It’s fuckin’ radio silence from you all the time.”

“Because you’re busy!” you shout back, shocking even yourself, you can’t recall ever once raising your voice to Josh, and visa versa. “It’s shows, and interviews, and the studio, and girls, all the time. I’m not going to crowd myself into that. “

“Girls?” he shakes his head as if he’s never heard anything more ludicrous in his entire life. “That’s a joke.”

You throw your arms across your chest and seethe, you just want to get the hell out of this kitchen before you lose it completely and sob in front of him. “Guess I’m looking at the first celibate front man in the history of time. I’m fucking honored.”

“It’s you, Button.” He snaps so aggressively you cringe away, “It’s fucking always been you.”

“What?” the word stumbles out of you, small and thready and when he ducks his head to avoid your eyes, your heart feels like it could crack wide open and melt out of your chest onto Karen’s pristine kitchen tile.

“For me, I mean.” he clarifies softly. “It’s always been you.”

Speechless isn’t the word. Stunned isn’t either. Astounded? Nope. Dumbfounded? Not even close.

You’re still attempting to process, when Josh begins to quite literally lose his mind at your silence. “I didn’t mean...” he begins, sputtering along with his eyes wild and terrified, “That was...I shouldn’t have...” he reaches out for you, and for reasons you can’t begin to figure out, you pull away slightly. “Fuck,” he whispers, almost to himself, “Please, Button, just leave me to die in peace.”

A tiny smile that you can’t repress tickles your lips. “You’re losing your shit worse than the day we met.”

His eyes, so warm and bottomless, lock in on your own. “How could you not have known?”

You can’t stand the shaky ground he seems to be standing on because of you. “How could you not know that I feel the same?”

Josh’s lips part in response, but the sliding glass door suddenly springs open and Danny stumbles in with a wobbling Sam leaning into him, a lanky arm thrown across Danny’s strong and sure shoulders. “He’s fucked, I’m putting him to bed.”

“Putting him to bed.” Sam scoffs, slurring dramatically as you and Josh stare each other down. “I’m not a chile.”

“The word is child, Samuel.” Josh offers, eyes burning into your soul. “And you most certainly are.”

“I don’t know what it is about you being home that turns you into such a dumbass...” Danny wonders aloud, dragging Sam towards the staircase.

“Baby Sam!” Sammy shouts, throwing a fist into the air as he fumbles over his feet on the steps.

You both listen to them clamor upstairs in silence until Josh finally whispers, “Danny’ll be right back down, we should probably head back out.”

Nodding in shell-shocked agreement, you grab two fresh beers and head for the door, but not before clenching a to-go pickle between your teeth.

You spend the rest of the night drinking with the boys, sans Sam, simultaneously avoiding Josh’s line of sight, and stealing each and every glance at his face you possibly can.

On more than one occasion you catch Jake eyeballing his brother as if he can tell something has shifted, but he doesn’t press for answers. Instead, he trudges inside and reappears with one of his old acoustics, strumming to fill the silence here and there when it becomes a little less than comfortable.

When the fire begins to die down for the last time, no one makes a move to throw fresh logs on it. It’s late, you’re all drunk, and their parents will likely be returning soon.

“I’m gonna sleep in the basement if that’s cool?” Danny stretches his giant arms over his head and heads off towards the house without waiting for anyone’s reply, because, of course it’s cool, Danny practically lived at the Kiszkas the same as you.

“Gonna take Ronnie’s room?” Jake jerks his chin at you in question and drags the hose over to the fire pit, extinguishing the blaze with a satisfying hiss.

“No,” you grin. “Thought I’d curl up at the foot of your bed like a cat.”

“Oh,” he smiles and reaches forward to tap the tip of your nose. “I’d never make you sleep at the foot of my bed, Button. There’s a perfectly good folding chair at my desk with your name written all over it.”

You scrunch your nose up at him, “You’re a prince.”

Tossing the hose aside without bothering to properly put it away, he begins looking around for something on the ground as he heads for the house. “It seems I’ve misplaced my crown. Oh well, good night to the rabble.” He waves a regal hand and slips away into the dark.

Which leaves you, Josh, and a very awkward silence. It seems almost as though you’ve made the whole scene up in your head, a drunken daydream of sorts. It doesn’t feel the least bit real, so you let the quiet linger on, waiting for him to break it first.

When he finally does, he says something you don’t expect.

“Well, I guess I’m gonna head to bed too.” he nods for you to follow. “C’mon, I don’t want you out here all by yourself. Lions and tigers.”

“And bears?”

He looks you over as if you're certifiably insane. “No bears, Button. Don’t be ridiculous.” You laugh together lightly, and for a blip of a breath, it feels normal again.

The feeling is short lived, however, because you’re anticipating some sort of discussion about the revelations that were made tonight, Josh has other ideas apparently, because without a word, he disappears deeper into the house, and then you hear the soft click of his bedroom door closing.

Standing in the middle of the living room floor, you don’t quite know what to do now. Are you two really going to leave it at that? Pretend it never happened? Is that what he wants? Maybe he was just drunk? Maybe you misunderstood?

Finally, you shake it off and wander into Ronnie’s room, smiling to yourself when you see that Karen has made the bed with fresh linens, laid out an old pair of pj’s in case you forgot your own, and left a folded, fluffy towel for your shower in the morning. Her beautiful soul was made to be a mother, and she is never stingy with her maternal heart.

You sweep your hair into a loose knot at the top of your head, change into the pj’s, finger brush your teeth in the bathroom down the hall and settle for washing your face with the tiniest bit of liquid hand soap, praying to the gods of skincare to spare you from a breakout.

The thrown together nightly routine does exactly zero to calm your rapid fire brain, and you find yourself snuggled into Ronnie’s bed, surrounded by the scent of fabric softener and your own shouting thoughts.

You lie awake and listen to Karen and Kelly return. They speak in hushed tones, so as not to wake anyone and make their rounds, listening at doors, even your own, to make sure all are safe, present, and accounted for. It makes you feel warm, this level of care, like you’re all teenagers again with everything ahead of you.

You lie awake some more, and listen to the house fall to sleep again...and you lie awake, and you lie awake, and you lie awake...

Sleep isn’t going to come, and rightfully so, there are things that cannot be left unsaid...if they aren’t spoken aloud in the dark, there is no way you’ll ever find the nerve in the light of day tomorrow morning.

Mustering your courage, you crawl out of bed and tiptoe down the hall, breathing shallowly and hugging the wall like a cat burglar, until you stand before it–

Josh’s door.

It takes everything you have, (even though you tell yourself its stupid, its only Josh) but you tap on the door softly and wait, dizzy from your pounding heart rattling your teeth.

Soon, way too soon, like he might have been standing on the other side waiting for you, the door swings open and without a word, Josh curls an arm around your waist and pulls you inside. The door shuts silently, and then your back is flush against it, with Josh standing so close his soft breath feathers your hair.

“I was standing there, trying to talk myself into knocking on your door.” he confesses, sounding almost shy. “I guess now we know where the bravery lies.”

“I nearly passed out in the hallway.” you breathe. “So don’t feel too bad.”

“You smell good.” he whispers, reaching up to brush your bangs out of your eyes. “You smell like the fire, and soap, and you.”

“Yeah? Well you smell like weed.” you smile.

He returns your grin. “I may or may not have smoked a tiny bowl for courage.”

“Okay, so let's be courageous then, did you mean what you said?” his fingers are now playing in a soft, winding line up and down your jaw.

“Yeah, Button...” you’ve never heard his voice so low, or so sincere. “I meant what I said.”

“So did I.” your thoughts are spinning out of control at the gentleness of his touch, but you scramble quickly enough to keep hold of them. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“Was it unclear in the way I treated you? Didn’t I always treat you like I loved you? Like I was in love with you?” he secrets into your ear, brushing an innocent kiss against your cheek.

“No, and that’s unfair of you to act as if I was blind.” you point out without so much as a hint of upset. “I could ask you the same.”

He thinks it over, toying with your earlobe. “You’re right. I should have told you.”

You nod, but concede, “I should have told you, too. Does this mean we’re both idiots?”

“Oh, absolutely.” he nods, doing his best to suppress a smirk. “Hey, dummy, can I kiss you?”

Your hands fist in his shirt, pulling the warmth of his body even closer, “Yeah. C’mon, stupid.”

When his mouth presses, hot and just the perfect amount of wet, against yours, it’s like a tiny bomb explodes in your belly, igniting a raging fire instantly, as if the kindling has been there all along. And when his tongue slips inside to grace your own, your hands glide up from his chest and into his hair. It’s unruly and impossibly soft, but tangled in the best way, and your fingers get caught in his locks as you move through it.

“I like that, Button.” he whispers into your mouth. “Pull it harder.”

You tug at the roots and shiver when he steps forward, pressing his body into yours so closely you can feel the drag of his shirt float along your tightened nipples.

His name escapes you without conscious thought, like muscle memory, like your brain is calling upon all those times you’ve imagined this very moment.

“I like that even more.” his tongue licks along your neck, setting your pulse point alight. “Say my name again like that. All slow and quiet.”

“Josh...” you repeat in little more than a puff of air. “Do you plan to keep me pressed up against your door all night, or...?”

Your gentle goading seems to snap him out of his head, “C’mere...” he guides you away from the door and into his arms. “My bed?” he asks carefully, “Just to kiss? Is that okay?”

Allowing him to blindly guide you back in the darkness, you shake your head. “Just to kiss? No thank you.”

“There’s that bravery again,” his words flicker into your ear like a feather. “I’m incredibly envious, my love.”

“My love...” it robs the oxygen from your lungs and you feel a literal wobble in your knees. “Fuck...”

“Like that?” you can feel the corners of his lips curl up against your throat as he eases you down on his tiny, childhood bed.

You nod.

“Yeah?” his eyebrows lift in the soft moonlight. “You’re my love. You are. Always have been.”

“Your love?” your heart is slamming against the cage of your ribs. “Does that mean...” you falter, that bravery he seems so enamored with, apparently spent.

“Does that mean what, Button?” his lips pepper your face so delicately. “Does that mean that I’m in love with you?”

“Are you?” your eyes are wide and unblinking.

“I think I’ve loved you since you ripped the button off your own shirt to rescue me. When we were just stupid kids and I was in crisis mode over a damn button, and you stepped into that crisis with me and shared it, you freaked out with me enough to ruin your shirt for a button on a vest literally no one was ever gonna notice. It’s always been me and you since then, love, didn’t you feel it?”

“Always.” you tug at his shirt, signaling for him to yank it over his head. He pulls it off and then sinks his weight carefully down onto you. “I just, I didn’t think...”

He cuts you off by raising your own shirt over your head. “See? Like we’ve established...we’re both idiots.”

Without response, you watch him drink in the sight of your bare breasts, and then his eyes lift to yours in silent question. You nod your permission and his mouth is on you instantly, sucking and laving over your nipples, spoiling them until your back is arching away from the twin mattress below you.

His right hand is sweeping up and down over your hip and the curve of your waist sweetly, you wish he would sink his fingers in, make it sting a little. Without thought, you reach down and guide him into a bit more pressure. “Come on, Josh...grab me.” you moan, “Show me how badly you’ve wanted me all this time.”

“You like it that way?” his voice is tactical and quiet as his grip digs into your side. “You wanna hurt a little, Button?”

“Yeah...” you nod is eager and fevered.

In response, his hand darts up and grabs onto yours, dragging it down to rest over his hidden cock through his sweats. “Touch me for just a minute, love.” he demands deliciously. “Just enough to settle me down, you’re driving me fucking crazy.”

Your hand begins to play over his impossibly hard cock. “Fuck, Josh...you feel big.”

“That’s because I am, Button.” he taunts and teases you, rocking against your touch. “Do you think you can take it?”

Your hand wraps around his length through his boxers “I fucking know I can take it. I like it hard, and I like it to burn, I wanna fight back tears because you’ve shoved it in so hard and mean. Can you give it to me like that?”

“God damn...” he sounds and looks astounded in the best way possible for a second before recovering with little more than a centering breath. “Are you a little bit dirty, sweetheart? Does my Button like to fuck?”

An unbridled sound pants past your mouth much too loudly, you know it right away, but Josh seems to like it. “Shhh...” he licks at your lips and then covers them with his palm. “Can you be quiet for me if I fuck you? Hmm? Can you stay quiet while you take my cock, pretty girl?”

You could have been granted a thousand lives to live back to back and you still would have never landed on the conclusion that your sweet, soft, Josh would be capable of such depravity.

“I’ll stay quiet.” you nod, after yanking away from his palm, I’ll do whatever you want if it means you’ll fucking give it to me.” You stroke his clothed cock faster.

“I bet your gorgeous cunt smells and tastes like candy.” he sucks at your lips, bottom after the top. “Show me.”

He waits while your hand dips into your pajama pants and panties and then nuzzles his nose against your fingers when you present them, wet and glistening with your need. “That’s the prettiest cunt I’ve ever smelled, I could write a song about it. Lemme taste.”

You slip your fingers into his mouth and melt when he shudders. “Oh, Button...I want to swallow you whole.”

“Another time.” you gasp, rocking your hips up, desperately searching for friction. “I need you, need you to fuck me...please, Josh.”

Without pause, he begins ripping and pulling at your clothes, as you work to rid him of his as well. “No, not another time. I want to taste you and I won’t fuck you until I have.”

If that’s what it’s going to take to get his cock inside you, then that’s what he’ll have. You shove at his shoulders, pressing him down until his mouth is caressing its way along your drenched panties. “Hurry and get your fill, Josh.” You beg in a feigned dominant tone, hoping to get your way. “I want your cock buried inside of me, not your tongue.”

A groan rumbles out of him as he sucks your core into his sweet mouth. “Are you sure?” he hums into your cunt when you writhe under his kiss. “Because it seems like you like it, Button. It seems like you fucking love it. I want to suck your pretty little cunt forever...it was made to live in my mouth.”

Your fingers dive into his hair and then yank him up without caution or remorse when he whines out in pain. “Fuck me, Josh...” You beg with unabashed need once you can see his eyes. “Please?”

His hand is wrapped around your throat so quickly you’re left to wonder if it’s always lived there. “Like this, Button? You want me to give it to you rough? You want to hurt?”

“Yes!” you gasp, “Fuck me like I’m some girl on the road. Fuck me like I don’t matter.”

“No.” he snaps back instantaneously. “I won’t fuck you like you don’t matter.”

“Josh, I just...” you rush to explain your whorish request, but he shakes his head.

“Never. I’ll fuck you,” he shoves your legs apart even wider and lines himself up. “I’ll fucking ruin you, but I will never fuck you like you don’t matter when you’re all that fucking does matter. Don’t ask again.”

Stunned into silence, you relax down against the sheets and let him push into you. He stretches and burns his way inside as you writhe and squirm, sobbing his name and crying out for more of what, even you can’t decipher.

“Jesus...” Josh shudders and shakes the curse into the pillow your head is resting on. “You feel like a sin, it’s too fucking good.”

“Fucking me is a sin,” you grab him and pull him closer, nails digging into his sweat dampened flesh. “Do it anyway.”

“Can you be a good girl and stay quiet for me?” he mouths over your ear, holding still inside you. “Say yes, Button, or the whole house is gonna hear me fucking you senseless because I can’t stop now.”

“I’ll be quiet.” you promise, rocking your hips in a desperate attempt to feel him moving inside you. “I swear, I'll be your good girl.”

“Again.” he demands in a delectable growl. “Say it again.”

“I’m your good girl, Josh...” you gasp, spreading your legs so wide they ache. “Fuck your good girl, fuck her hard.”

He slams into you with beautifully brutal force. A cry bursts out of you before you can quiet yourself. “Shhh, stay quiet for me, Button, c’mon pretty girl.”

“Choke me.” you beg as he slams into you. “Keep me quiet.”

“Do it yourself.” his demand is the single sexiest thing you’ve ever heard.

“What?” you want to be sure you’ve caught his meaning through your frantic lust.

“Choke yourself, Button.” he curls your hand around your throat deeply. “Be a quiet little mouse for Daddy, yeah?”

Your grip sinks into your neck, restricting your airflow as he fucks into you relentlessly, rocking the base of his cock into against your clit over and over until you’re right there.

“Gonna cum..” you rasp, words fighting through your throat that is constricted by your own hand. “So fucking hard.”

“That’s my girl,” he sounds just as close to his own end. “Do it for me, Button...Cum on my cock with that pretty fucking cunt, let me have it.”

With a pulsing snap, your entire body explodes with pleasure, it rolls and rocks through you, owning you like your sole reason for existing is this moment.

“Shhhh, shh, shh,” he hums, covering your mouth to quiet the cries of his name you weren’t aware were shaking out of you. “Me too, baby...” his forehead drops to rest against yours, “Fuck, Button, fuck!”

You feel him spill inside you, warming you from the inside out, and it feels so right, so perfect, he belongs there, tucking inside of you and dripping out of you later, making your thighs sticky with his claim over you.

A silence descends upon you both, not unlike earlier, but now, it is comfortable, and lovely, and fucking blissful.

“Let’s stay right here forever.” he whispers, brushing his lips along your shoulder.” You smile at the obvious absurdity, but tag along for the ride. “Forever.”

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[spectral-kitkat]

Miraculous Rant.

Where the hell do I begin…

Season 1:

The show was decent in season 1. Some episodes were just mindless filler and probably weren’t needed in the grand scheme of things but they helped us get introduced to the characters, we got to know the plot and the world our characters inhabit. It was good. The love story between Adrien and Marinette was cute and off to a touching and fluffy start.

Season 2:

This season was immediately better than season 1. It had character development, it went more into detail about the lore surrounding the Miraculous and we got to learn more about our characters and their families and the villian’s motives. (HM really went from “I wanna destroy the world” to “I wanna wake my wife from the coma she’s in”).

We got to see new heroes which was fun! We got new characters like Luka and Kagami.

The season finale was epic! The Miraculous team all taking down all the previous villains in the show was awesome. At the end we even got Mari kissing Adrien on the cheek. It was great! (Even though it clearly reset itself in season 3 cause it’s never mentioned again)

I really enjoyed season 2 and it’s probably my favourite out of the 4.

Season 3:

Season 3 was kinda good and kinda bad. We had some great episodes but this is where the show took the wrong turn.

Marinette lost some of her character in season 3. This was the start of her descent into being the Queen of Mary Sues. It’s also where she was crowned the Queen of Stalkers! Her character took a fucking nose dive in this season. We had so many moments that just creeped me the fuck out.

1. The ENTIRETY of Puppeteer 2 🤢🤢🤢 I could not stand that episode. When we reached the dreaded statue scene I physically had to pause it like 10 times. That scene takes about 3 minutes to watch… it took me about 20. I cringed so fucking hard because of the secondhand embarrassment I was feeling. That was not sweet, it wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t the least bit cute… it was a train wreck! It was creepy and stalkerish and it’s a wonder Adrien even spoke to her again after that atrocity!

2. LB delivering the present in Chat Blanc. Two words: STALKER BEHAVIOUR!!! I genuinely could not believe my eyes when I saw LB run her hand across everything in his room and then actually SNIFF Adrien’s pillow. Like WTF!!! 🤮 I’m pretty sure whoever was responsible for that scene clearly thought it was the equivalent of when someone gets their S/O’s jumper or something and it still smells like them. But this turned it up to the nth degree and way passed the line of sanity.

Adrien was extremely under-utilised in this season. He didn’t really do anything. The only episodes we got about him didn’t really focus on him. ‘Felix’ whilst focusing on Adrien’s family didn’t really feature him. ‘Party Crasher’ while a beautiful mess was more about Mari trying to get into the party than the party itself. ‘Chat Blanc’ again focused more on Mari trying to fix her mistake.

We got even more heroes in season 3, not in the right order but they were there. It was fun seeing everyone’s transformations.

Season 3 was also the season of destroying redemptions. The big one obviously being Chloe. Season 2 was setting up this amazing redemption for her and before it could go anywhere it was wiped off the face of the earth during the finale (and don’t worry we’ll get to that dumpster fire later). Gabriel also had any remaining sympathy ripped away from him. How did the guy who stopped Gorizilla from letting Adrien die when he only thought he was CN go from that to using his son like fucking baseball in Chat Blanc when he knew his son was CN. Like I knew you were a shit father but you still cared about Adrien in some way shape or form but after that episode I can see I was clearly mistaken!

Before we get to the finale I want to talk about probably my 2 least favourite episodes from this season: Desperada and Reflekdoll

Desperada:

I fucking hated this episode! The only good thing was Luka getting to be Viperion, other than that this episode was awful!

Marinette was a selfish cringey bitch. Completely ignoring Luka to gush about Adrien to Jagged. Brushing Luka off as soon as Adrien turns up. Immediately cuddling up to Aspik and flirting with him when she needed to focus on the akuma (something which she has told CN not to do many times before)

Adrien, I love you kid but Jesus Christ you were a dumbass in this episode! Aspik’s design was terrible! Aspik himself was awful. I know Adrien tried his best but dude you were given the Black Cat miraculous for a reason! He shouldn’t have tried to be Aspik but even when he did he should’ve called it quits after like 5 resets not 25,913 times.

The only person with a brain this episode was Luka. So well done guitar boy, gold star!

Reflekdoll:

This episode was annoying! It was basically the start of the Marinette can do no wrong streak! When they have to swap miraculous I was happy cause it meant we got to see new outfits and see how they each handle the different powers. It would also serve as a way to get LB and CN to see what their partners role is first hand. Until we actually get to it…

LadyNoire is of course amazing and needs no introduction to using this new miraculous that she’s never used before. She’s cocky and confident and basically just LB in Chat’s costume with his powers.

Mister Bug on the other hand is just useless. He struggles with this new miraculous (like anyone would!) and is stupid and goofy. He has to rely on LadyNoire to solve the lucky charm. They swapped miraculous so shouldn’t that mean that Mister Bug should get the lucky vision and the creative powers that the earrings give him.

Overall Reflekdoll is awful. It was shitty writing and the start of Adrien getting the short end of the stick.

And now the season 3 finale… Just what the fuck. That is my only reaction: what the fuck!

Chloe you poor fucking child! What did they do to you!!! So much potential SQUANDERED!!!!

What was the point in bringing in all these different superheros with unique skill sets, costumes and transformations if you were just going to immediately reveal them to the main villian so they can’t be used again. That’s stupid! If you wanted the shock value that is “Oh no HM knows some of the heroes identities!” Then keep it as only some. Have like Max, Kim and Kagami outside trying to find somewhere to hide but unfortunately they get hit. Or Nino and Alya are hiding but the windows open and they get hit. Have some of the heroes hide so they’re fine! Taking away every ally of LB and CN’s was a stupid move! (Even if they wanted Alya to become a spy have her as part of the like 4 that get revealed or something, it’s not that difficult)

Season 3 was 50/50 for me

Season 4:

So I know season 4 isn’t even halfway through yet but so much is wrong with this season already that I need to vent!

So my biggest problem with this season of Miraculous: Tales of Ladybitch and Rena Rouge, I mean Rena Furtive… shit, Chat Noir! Is that CN is basically pointless! Adrien has been flung over a rainbow and is only remembered when he’s needed as

1. Marinette’s love interest

2. Someone for LB to shout at

3. A plot device

He has basically been sidelined. Partners my ASS!!!

Adrien is being blown off by pretty much EVERYONE! It’s coming to a point where this poor sweet summer child is going to crack! And it is not gonna be pretty… I definitely feel like the writers are leading up to a big fight between CN and LB which will probably end with Chat Blanc 2.0.

I REALLY HATE MARINETTE/LADYBUG!!!! In Season 3 I said it was the beginning of her descent, well in season 4 she’s done it. She’s descended, she has hit rock fucking bottom. She is so unlikable I don’t actually care about her as a person. She has entered full blown stalker territory it’s only a matter of time before she starts killing people for even looking at Adrien! Not to mention that Miss Mary Sue here can’t do anything wrong! She never has to suffer the consequences of her actions, she is always perfect no matter what she does… it pisses me off!)

She’s the Guardian now big whoop. I know what it feels like to be stressed and under pressure so I do understand why she needed to tell someone about it all. I just don’t see why that person had to Alya! Especially considering she has someone by her side every akuma attack going through pretty much the exact same thing. I know she’s worried about CB happening again but as I said before the more she leaves him out the more she is actually pushing that to become a possibility! Plus it makes sense for them to reveal their identities now since LB is now the guardian it’s probably a good idea to know who holds the cat miraculous, she knows everyone else’s identities!

Even if she didn’t want to tell CN her identity she could still explain the situation to him. If she didn’t want to tell him anything (which she doesn’t anyway) then instead of Alya she should’ve talked to Luka! Her boyfriend for all of half an episode (thanks writers…). He’s so sweet and caring and clearly loves her so much! If she wanted someone to confide in then why not choose the person you clearly wanted to date but couldn’t because of that very reason! (Yeah I know it’s kinda a moot point now since Luka knows both identities but still). He wanted to try and comfort her so it would’ve been the perfect moment for it. That way you could still date him and he’d know why you had to suddenly leave dates halfway through! But no break the boys heart instead!

Adrien and Marinette were both such fucking idiots in the first 2 episodes. Like why would you start a relationship with someone when you know your heart isn’t in it! That’s called leading someone on and is a really shitty thing to do to someone! No wonder Kagami and Luka ended up akumatized!

Another aspect of season 4 I don’t like is Rena Furtive. Yes ok having a spy for your side is a good strategy but when said spy basically tells an important member of a duo that the 2 person job doesn’t involve them… it just really ticks me off! Alya you are the sidekick to LB and CN! Chat isn’t!

Miraculous specials:

The Miraculous World specials suck! Shanghai is better than NY but still has its problems. Both specials add nothing to the overall plot/lore of the show apart from trying to set up some weird cinematic universe…

NY special:

One of the worst things I’ve ever had to sit through! The plane scene alone I paused a few times. I want to say well done to Mari for trying to move on from Adrien (especially considering I’m pretty sure she’s dating Luka at this point) but I can’t help but think it’s just to give her character some pointless development that goes nowhere and doesn’t actually develop anything!

LB can pretty much fuck off at this point! I hate her! She put all this shit on CN (like she doesn’t know exactly how that feels). It’s like why does she get to go off on holiday but CN can’t. LB should’ve stayed in Paris for 3 reasons:

1. She’s recently become the guardian meaning it would probably be best that she stayed with the Mircle Box

2. She’s the only one who can purity the akumas

3. If she’s so sure about being the boss then she should take responsibility of Paris and the citizens.

What really pisses me off about her is what she says to CN during the big fight. “I can’t trust you”… surely you could have this conversation afterwards since you’re supposed to be focusing on taking down the villian! Plus everyone bashes Adrien for giving his miraculous up in this episode but look at it from his point of view: His partner and best friend just said she couldn’t trust him which in turn caused him to cataclysm someone and essentially kill them. That’s gonna take a toll on anyone, especially a 14 year old! He probably thought in that moment. “Ladybug needs a partner she can trust and someone who won’t mess up and kill someone. She needs a better partner.” It makes sense he renounces his miraculous! I’m just upset that in doing so he loses Plagg who is pretty much his only friend who actually understands what Adrien goes through at home.

When Uncanny gets CN to come back, LB acts like it’s not her fault in the first place that he feels inadequate! She didn’t even apologise for saying what she did! He apologised for lying about not being in Paris but nope LB wasn’t in the wrong at all and didn’t have anything to apologise for 🙄… (yes the LadyNoir hug was amazing but I just wish it was under different circumstances!)

Also are we not gonna mention Gabriel Agreste almost starting WW3??? He wanted to launch a fucking missile!!!

Shanghai:

As I said before, this special is way better for several reasons.

We got MariChat! (Best side to the love square imo). This special actually had some semblance on a plot. Fei, whilst a bit op, was a cool character. It was nice to see Wang Cheng again.

However once again there were many problems.

A big one being Marinette yet again! (What a shock! 😒 I’ll come back to this). Another was that once again HM’s motivation has changed. How is getting the Prodigious gonna help bring back Emilie??

Back to Marinette… The fact that the words “Huh?! There must be some kind of mistake! I always know what's up with Adrien! … His 5 first names and every corresponding name date, his yearly schedule, even his shoe size! If there were anything to know about him, I would know it!” come out of her mouth whilst she is flipping through his schedule that she keeps in her pocketbook is a hugh red flag!!! That is not cute or adorable! That’s messed up and Adrien needs to fucking run and maybe possibly go into witness protection… Marinette is a full blown stalker! Not to mention the GPS she has (that could just be the find my friends app on iphone but still).

It also is extremely rude of her to use not only her great uncle’s birthday but also a lie about wanting to know her Chinese heritage in order to go to Shanghai to stalk her obsession, I mean crush. This could’ve been avoided if the Dupain-Chengs were going to Shanghai for the purpose of celebrating Wang Cheng’s bday and then Adrien just so happened to be in Shanghai.

Also this means LB left Paris without telling CN! I know CN did the same but again he can’t purify the akumas. Plus he has a reason he couldn’t stay in Paris, Mari just went cause her crush did. Great guardianship there Marinette.

This was also the last time CN actually did something. Even if it was for a short while before LB and her female partner took over (the beginning of a theme…)

Other things:

There are 2 other things that I wanna say but felt they needed a separate bit.

In Furious Fu, Su-Han has a rule book that he uses to tell Marinette which rules she has broken. At the end of the episode he tells her that is she breaks 1 more rule that he will take the Miraculous and the Miracle Box off her, which fair enough but wouldn’t it be helpful to leave the rule book with her?! How can she be wary of not breaking anymore rules when she doesn’t even know what the rules are??

Now the big one: Master Fu…

Where do I even start with him. He is so fucking manipulative!! He is Asian Dumbledore!

He decides to leave these extremely powerful jewels in the hands of 13 year olds! Surely leaving the miraculous to someone in their 20s would’ve been better!

He clearly favours LB over CN even though the Ladybug and Black Cat are supposed to be partners! Wouldn’t it make sense for them both to be in contact with the guardian from the start?? He randomly started introducing rules such as if LB and CN find out each other’s identities they would lose their miraculous… what kind of bullshit rule is that? It also came out of fucking nowhere!

Final Thoughts:

But to summarise all of that: Miraculous is on quite a steep decline but I’m invested at this point and I am genuinely curious as to where the fuck this will go.

Marinette needs professional fucking help before the writers even consider canonising Adrienette cause at the moment she is not what Adrien needs!

Adrien needs to stand up for himself! He needs to pull LB to the side and tell her what he feels and what he’s going through cause he is on the precipice of a breakdown!

(Small point that’s more to do with the fandom: when searching for fanfics it’s really annoying that Adrien Agreste/Chat Noir Bashing is a tag but Marinette Dupain-Cheng/Ladybug Bashing isn’t. Why does everyone think Marinette can do no wrong???)

#miraculous fandom #miraculous ladybug #miraculous salt #adrien agreste #marinette dupen chang #marinette salt #master fu salt #ladybug and chat noir #fandom salt #thomas astruc salt #adrien deserves better #miraculous season 4 #miraculous season 3 #miraculous rant

[alisonsfics]

how could i hate you?

pairing: sebastian stan x reader

request: “would you mind writing a sebastian stan x reader fic? i had this idea where the reader & him have been dating for a while. he meets her parents & the readers parents are super rude & small minded. the reader is worried about how he’ll react. you decide the ending. can it be angst & fluff? it’s personal” - 🥺 anon

word count: 2k

warnings: controlling and derogatory parents, swearing (use of the word f***ing, but it only occurs once)

“Hey, sweetheart? You almost ready?” Your boyfriend called to you, from the other room. You were trying to put on a necklace, but you couldn’t get the clasp to close because your hands were so shaky. “Almost” you croaked, trying to push back the tears.

Tonight, you were taking Sebastian to dinner with your parents. He was going to meet them for the first time. Your nerves had consumed your entire body. Your hands were shaking, and you could feel your heart in your throat.

You loved your parents, but they tended to be hypercritical. They had both lived in a small town their entire lives. Small towns breed small mindsets. They weren’t the most supportive when you decided to move to Los Angeles. They didn’t understand the appeal of a big city.

You could handle their criticism, but the last thing you wanted was for them to be rude to Sebastian. He cared so much about their approval, and you wanted him to have it.

Sebastian peeked his head into the bathroom and saw the tears that were welling up in your eyes. Before even saying a word, he enveloped you in a hug. He kept his arms wrapped tightly around you. “What's wrong, sweetheart?” He asked, while rubbing your back.

You took a deep breath and pulled out of the hug. Sebastian had a worried expression on his face. He cupped your face and left a soft kiss on your lips. “You can talk to me” he said, softly. You nodded.

“I’m really fucking nervous about tonight” you told him, your voice breaking. He pulled you back into a hug and pressed kisses into your hair. “It’ll be okay. I promise” he assured you, but you couldn’t even let yourself believe his words.

You held the collar of his shirt and buried your face in his chest. “I know how they are, Seb. They’ve always been super critical. I don’t want them to say anything rude to you” you mumbled into his chest.

He hummed, letting you know that he understood. “I’ll be fine. I’ve dealt with criticism before. Besides, how could they not like me. I’m pretty amazing, right?” He joked, causing you to giggle.

You pulled away and lightly hit his arm. “There’s that smile” he said, smiling to himself. He took the necklace out of your hand and gestured for you to turn around. He clipped the hook together and then spun you around. “It’ll all be okay” he said, before taking your arm and pulling towards the front door.

As you drove down the highway, you started to tap your fingers on your thigh. It was your tell tale sign that you were nervous. Sebastian, knowing all of your little quirks, noticed instantly. He reached his hand over and interlaced his fingers with yours. “It’s just one dinner” he said, softly.

The words brought you comfort. Your parents could attack every part of Sebastian’s character, but it was still just one night. You both could home and pretend it never happened. While you wanted their approval, you didn’t need it to be happy.

He pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Before unlocking the doors, he looked over at you. “I’ll be right by your side the whole time” he said, giving you a gentle kiss. He let you take a few deep breaths, and then you both got out of the car.

You saw your parents sitting on a bench outside. They smiled when they saw you both walking towards them. You could tell it was a fake smile, but you allowed it to go unmentioned.

“You’re only ten minutes late. That’s a new record” your mom whispered, as she pulled you into a hug. You pulled away and kept an equally not-genuine smile on your face.

“Mom and Dad, meet Sebastian” you said, introducing them officially. He gave your mother a hug, and then moved to your father, shaking his hand. “That’s a nice car you have. A little expensive for my taste, but nice” your dad said, giving his signature backhanded compliment. Sebastian noticed, but just thanked him, trying to make a good impression.

Sebastian quickly opened the front door to the restaurant and allowed you all to walk inside. His hand found its familiar spot on the small of your back as you all waited for the hostess. He gave you a hopeful smile when your parents looked away.

Eventually, the hostess walked over to the stand. “Hello. I have a reservation for four. It should be under Stan” Sebastian told her. She nodded before grabbing a stack of menus and leaded you all through the restaurant.

You made it to the private room that Sebastian had requested. “Oh a private room? He’s already trying to win us over with his money” your mother sharply remarked, barely above a whisper. Sebastian pulled your seat out for you, and you all took your seats.

“So why did you pick this restaurant?” Your dad asked, at least trying to make conversation. Sebastian lit up as he remembered the story that followed along. He gestured to you, letting you tell the story.

“This was the restaurant that Sebastian took me to on our first date. I remember how nervous he was. He wanted everything to be perfect. He ordered me one of every dessert, so I wouldn’t have to pick” you said, resting your hand on top of Sebastian’s on the table. Your parents smiled as you told them the story, and you hoped it was a good sign.

“So how did you two meet?” Your mom asked you. Sebastian looked over at you, as if asking permission to tell the story. You gave him a reassuring nod. “We met at a wedding. We both knew the bride and were invited to the wedding. We got seated next to each other during the reception, and we got along really well. The rest is history” he said, smiling over at you.

It was heart warming to watch Sebastian reminisce over the night it all began. A lot had changed since then, but he was still your rock.

After a dinner full of snarky remarks and subtle insults, you were about to blow. Sebastian had his hand on your thigh, and he was trying to calm you down. All the insults had been directed towards him, but he was the one who kept a level head. You, on the other hand, wanted to scream at your parents.

You were almost done. You just had to wait to pay the check, and then you could go home and pretend this night never happened. You were so close. The waiter set down the check, and it was like you could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Sebastian reached for the check. You heard your dad scoff under his breath. You snapped.

“Alright. Out with it. What could you possibly have to say?” You asked, finally breaking. Your mom looked taken aback. “I’m just not shocked that Mr. Hollywood is trying to pay for dinner. He’s made it clear that he thinks he’s better than us” your dad said, crossing his arms.

It made your blood boil. “He’s buying you dinner. Why can’t that just be a nice thing?” You asked. You genuinely wanted to know why they were so offended by every nice gesture Sebastian made.

Your mom's expression changed as though she had been insulted. “It’s not just about paying for dinner. He’s trying to show us how much money he has. He thinks he’s better than us because he’s a fancy movie star. So what if we live in a small town? At least we appreciate the small things. All he does is spend Daddy’s money. He’s probably never had to work a day in his life. You actors are all the same” your mom chimed in.

Now, you were glad you were in a private room, so no one had to hear your screaming fest. You instinctively reached for Sebastian’s hand. You stood up from the table, taking him with you. “We’re leaving” you said, before heading towards the door. You pulled Sebastian with you.

You stopped before you grabbed the door handle and turned around to face your parents. “You know what? I have dealt with your criticism all of my life, but you are not going to attack Sebastian. He took you out to a nice dinner, and he has done nothing but be polite and kind to you. Also, he has earned every bit of his success. He left Romania at eight years old, and he built himself an amazing life. So, don’t sit here and tell me who he is. He is a loving boyfriend, and that is all that should matter to you” you said.

You turned to leave the restaurant and had to fight back the tears. Sebastian kept his arm wrapped around your waist as you exited the building. “I’ve got you” he whispered in your ear.

When you finally made it outside, he pulled you right into his arms. “Please, don’t hate me” you mumbled into chest. He pulled away from you, and all you saw on his face was confusion. “How could I hate you?” He asked, his voice softening.

“Because I was the one who said yes when they asked to meet you. I should have said no. I should have made up an excuse. I should not have made you sit through that excruciating dinner. I am so sorry” you apologized, genuinely. He cupped your face, and you could see his heart break. “Baby, I could never hate you. None of what happened in there was your fault” he assured you.

You felt a tear run down on your cheek. You felt responsible for your parent’s actions. “But they were horrible in there” you told him, confused. He wiped away your tears, hoping to wipe away the whole experience with them. “I don’t need anyone’s permission to love you” he said, before leaning in to kiss you.

“Thank you” you said, pulling him into a hug. Sebastian was always there for you when you needed it. He always knew how to calm you down. “Of course, sweetheart. Now, go sit in the car. I left my phone inside. I’ll be back in five minutes” he said, kissing your temple. You nodded and headed towards the car.

Sebastian walked back inside, but it wasn’t to grab his phone. His phone was right in his back pocket. He had kept his cool throughout dinner because you were at his side, but he had to stand up for you and himself.

He walked back to the room and found your parents still there. They were talking to each other and wore disgusted expressions. “Oh, he’s back” your dad said, his voice filled with disappointment.

Sebastian took a deep breath and maintained his composure. “I know you don’t like me, so I’m going to say this once. I love your daughter. She's the reason that I sat through this entire dinner and continued to be polite and smile. I don’t care if you approve of me, but in front of her, you will at least be civil with me. I had to watch her cry in the parking lot because she was worried you two would scare me off. I had to watch her worry that I might just walk away. You broke her heart tonight. If you do it again, I won’t be this polite” he said, before walking out of the room. He walked straight to the car, without any form of expression on his face.

When he got in the car, he simply gave you a smile. You were still worried. “Did they say anything else to you?” You asked him. He shook his head and took your hand in his. “They had already left” he lied, dismissively.

You nodded and gazed out the window. “I love you, you know that, right?” Sebastian asked, causing you to look over at him. “Of course I know that. I love you too” You asked him, confused.

He shrugged. “I just wanted to remind you that I’m never going to leave you” he told you, genuinely.

taglist: @laurakirsten0502 @miraclesoflove @nathaliabakes @millipop18 @azghedaheda @shyinadarkplace @vanteguccir @missroro @bookfrog242 @buckys-babe17 @ice-dtae @leyannrae @sia2raw @sunwardsss @studentville-struggles @impossibleapricotlampbat @infjkiki @k-k0129 @lickmymelaninn @hailey-a-s @andreasworlsboring101 @fanofalltheficsx @lukes-orange-beanie @golden-hoax @madisondelstan @spookyparadisesheep @n3ssm0nique @v-is-obsessive @reniescarlett @multiplums @alotofrandomfangirling @helium-queen @bbl32 @who-the-hell-is-sebastianstan @blueeyeddemon1016

Let me know if you want to be added to my taglist for all my imagines or for a specific character/fandom!!

Requests OPEN

#🥺 anon #sebastian stan x reader #Sebastian Stan #sebastian stan reader insert #Sebastian Stan request #Sebastian Stan fic #sebastian stan fanfiction #sebastian stan imagine #marvel cast #marvel cast fic #marvel cast request #marvel cast imagine #marvel cast x reader #marvel cast reader insert #marvel cast fanfiction #anon request #requested #requested fic #requests open #taglist open

[r0-boat]

Ok ok, I like monster men as much as the next person (my search history can prove that) but why haven’t we touched on large monster MC and their smaller human lover? (I’m using the twins cause I’m a simp-)

Like you lived in these woods for decades, you are aware of the tale that surrounds you, ‘the monster that stalks the forest for anyone lost only to hunt them down’, which was a lie, you only wanted to have a peaceful life, humans are more annoying than anything and they won’t stop getting lost in your home! So you try to help lead them back to theirs.

But that seemed to back fire when you helped two identical looking men, unlike most who saw you approaching, they didn’t run, they seemed to have picked ‘freeze’ over flight, maybe you are scary…

You gently lower yourself and let out a soft purr, trying to show you mean them no harm, “are you two lost?” You asked as gently as you could as they stared at you “come now, I can lead you back, your friends and family will worry if you stay here too long.”

And that day sealed your fate with them, Emmet as you came to know him attached himself to you quickly, within the first few minutes of you walking him and his brother home, he asked nonstop questions which you found adorable, a smile ever growing on his face, while his brother Ingo took a while longer warming up to you, since Emmet latched onto you they kept coming back so it was only natural Ingo would come around.

They are very poor at hiding their feelings though, they should work on that, Emmet practically looks at you with hearts in his eyes and affection dripping from his voice everytime he speaks to you, Ingo while more subtle isn’t doing any better, you remember when you pulled him out of the way of another monster, holding him against a tree and covering him with your much larger build, and when you looked down at him to make sure he was okay all you could smell was his lust for you, his face glowing red as he looked dazed.

You figured they’d come around to outting themselves soon enough but teasing them was so much fun, and while you’d never pin them against each other, their little pouts when you gave the other slightly more attention, Emmet has pouted and whined so many times while wrapping himself around you cause you moved hair out of Ingo’s face, and Ingo has glared daggers at his brother just for getting a soft head pat.

Or when you pick them up they melt in your grasp, gazing at you with nothing but love, but their lust will be their downfall.

Especially when you are always in control, no matter the position, with Ingo below you crying out for you to use him more while he stuffs his cock into you and Emmet behind you, doing the same, letting out those whorish moans of his while you reach your around back to yank him by his hair so his face is closer to you, gently kissing the expressive twin, which contradicts your rough movements.

“Such good boys, perfect little mates for me.” Your sultry voice only made the twins work harder into pleasing you

“P-please! Ah! Use me, only for you!” Ingo’s cries are so cute.

“I’m your good boy! Pleasepleaseplease, oh fuck!” Just as cute as Emmet’s whines.

- noodle (sorry I was simping for a large monster lady picture and I thought of this)

HH I love giant monster ladies...

Make sure they say thank you before you let them cum. make sure your mates have manners😌

#ro.chatting #smut #ingo.thirst #emmet.thirst

[evita-shelby]

Do i love chaos and drama?

Yes i do

Gif by @crackshipandcrap

Ch.18 Incantatrice preview

It was quite fun ruining his life.

Taking stock of the things that hold him up and kicking each pillar down so he gets strangled by a noose of his own making.

Jessie Eden had been so horrified when she learned about Elizabeth Stark’s murder.

He needed the communist for his plans to become a politician and to get his companies back in order.

He would fuck her to get her under his spell like he did with the rest and then toss her out when he has no use for her.

Not that he needed to do much after Kitty Jurossi wove beautiful tales of the beautifully sad boy Tommy was.

Oh, it had been beautiful to see her idea of Tommy Shelby be torn to shreds when Eva gave her a strangely plausible lie.

He is not the man he appears to be, Miss Eden, the witch had said as she spun her web of half lies.

The witch shouldn’t have stayed, but she wanted to relish the destruction of Shelby a while longer.

It shouldn’t have surprised her for him to find her and demand to know why she was ruining his fucking life.

He and Polly are not so different, shoving her against a crumbling wall thinking they have what it takes to kill her and faltering in the last minute.

“You ruined mine. We had the perfect life and you just had to kill his father and brother the second we got it, Shelby.

Had you only used your reason, we wouldn’t be here.” She said as the man drunk on pain and whiskey keeps her there as if waiting for a man to shoot him for touching her.

“Yeah, well I had it too.” He said as if he hadn’t felt trapped every second he was with Grace after she told him she wasn’t leaving.

“Then why were you fucking Lizzie before your wife’s body was even cold?” she asks tasting the alcohol and cigarettes in his breath.

Been a while since she smelled that on Luca, he’d quit smoking when Leonardo was born and their poor little lion would get coughing fits from the smell alone.

Eva remembers with fondness when she’d kiss her man and take the smoke from his mouth like she was stealing his soul kiss by kiss.

She shouldn’t be thinking this, she has a husband who is more than she ever wanted.

But here as the lamplight colors Shelby like a tragic hero and she the wicked witch, she knows in another life this man was hers.

And Shelby knew that too.

Why else would he lean in to kiss the poison on her lips instead of leaving?

Why else isn’t she stopping him?

“You could kill me right now and I would let you.” He said pulling back finding the poison sweet and addicting, just as she did.

“Isn’t it wonderful, in one life I am yours and in this one I am your enemy.” The witch said as he fights the urge to kiss her again and up the ante in this vendetta.

#luca changretta x eva smith #tommy shelby x oc #tommy shelby x eva smith #luca changretta x oc #incantatrice

[moonwritewastaken]

14 Tales of Christmas Day 7 - cc!Karl x gn!reader

14 Tales of Christmas Day 7 (Karl)

genre - fluff, friends to lovers

warning - language

I really liked the idea for this so hopefully I did it justice! Hope you guys have an amazing day :) 

- 🌙

Christmas was approaching so you and your friends were discussing possible stream ideas for the period. Quackity brought up the idea of secret Santa with you, Dream, Sapnap, George and Karl quickly agreed to. In order to ensure it all stayed a secret, you had Jimmy pull names out of a hat and message you on discord.

While Jimmy was sorting everything out, the rest of you joked about what you’d get each other. Your laughter was interrupted by a notification telling you that you were buying for Quackity. You immediately began thinking about possible options, settling on something he can use for school or streaming.

After leaving the vc, you scrolled through TikTok for an hour before deciding to scour the internet for something your friend would appreciate. You were about 10 minutes into your search when your phone rings.

“Hey Karl, what’s up?” You’d had a crush on Karl pretty much since you’d met him and despite spending a lot of time with him, he still made you just as nervous. 

“I wanted to see if you wanted to look for the gifts together! Well not together but like- in the- in the call together” his correction makes you giggle and you agree to search ‘together’.

Approximately 40 minutes into messing around with Karl, you managed to find a case with different compartments for chords. This was perfect because he could use it for both school and streaming.

“I found the gift I’m buying, how you going?” You were relieved that you found the gift relatively quickly, you were expecting to search for hours.

“Uh, I’m still looking. I kinda know the idea that I want to do but I don’t know how if that makes sense” you nod before remembering he can’t see you.

“Mmhm makes complete sense”

*December 23rd*

The 6 of you had gathered in a group discord call, ready to start your secret Santa streams.

“Alright y/n, show us what you got!” George’s words caused you to temporarily disappear from screen to grab the small package.

“Okay so obviously I haven’t opened it yet cause it’s still in the box, so I’m going to get some scissors real quick” as you’re grabbing the scissors you hear Sapnap.

“Why the fuck didn’t you get scissors before?” You roll your eyes despite him not being able to see you. You sit back down in your chair and begin opening the packages.

“Anyway, let’s open it up!” You finish opening the package and pull out the object wrapped in protective packaging.

“Please tell me it just keeps going” you sigh at Quackity’s words and unwrap the protective packaging.

Once the object has been unwrapped, you examine it. It was a beautiful snow globe containing a Christmas tree with a white bottom with some words engraved.

“You’re my world? That’s so cute what the fuck” you don’t know who your secret Santa is but your heart feels warm at the kind words.

“Oh my god, the pun is horrendous” Dream’s hatred for the pun makes you laugh.

“You like it y/n?” You hum in agreement with Karl’s question.

“I love it, it’s super cute”

“I’m glad cause I bought it for you. I really like you and the snow globe is a reminder of that” you’re surprised that Karl feels the same and you glance at your chat to see them freaking out.

“Karl, I really like you too” your friends erupt in excitement along with your chat.

You spend the rest of the day after stream on call with Karl, shaking the snow globe. The more you watch the snow fall, the more your feelings grow.

#karl jacobs imagine #karl jacobs x reader #crew boys imagine #crew boys x reader #dsmp imagine #karl jacobs fluff #dsmp fluff #14 tales of christmas

[mypoisonedvine]

Love, Theoretically | Sebastian Stan x reader (Chapter 9)

(chapter 1) (chapter 2) (chapter 3) (chapter 4) (chapter 5) (chapter 6) (chapter 7) (chapter 8)

series summary: having lost your husband, sister, and best friend all to the same extramarital affair, you ran away to a secluded villa in the Hungarian countryside to write and get a little time away from the life you’d left behind.  you were only looking for peace and perhaps some inspiration for your novel, but instead you found an unlikely connection with the immigrant repairman– even though the two of you don’t speak the same language.

word count: 3.8k

warnings: smut (semi-public fingering, specifically), angst... I think that's it

After your impromptu motorcycle drive you stayed out all night; exploring the empty city, ducking into dive bars if they were still open, dancing in the streets to music only the two of you could hear.

The city was so eerily empty at night, nothing like a metropolitan complex like London. But it was less creepy and more peaceful, especially when you were walking with Sebastian hand-in-hand along the cobblestone path. He started to swing your hand as you walked and it made you laugh.

“Teach me more Romanian words, please,” you requested, looking at him and struggling to fight your smile. “Română?”

“Eu voi,” he nodded, looking around and pointing to the ground. “Stradă.”

“Stradă... we call it the street,” you answered. “Or road. Road?” you prompted.

“Road,” he repeated.

“Good! Your pronunciation isn’t too bad either,” you grinned.

“Copac,” he announced as he pointed to a tree.

“Copac,” you repeated. “In English, it’s tree.”

“Tree,” he smiled. “Engleza este o prostie.”

He suddenly pulled you into him and spun you around in a twirl, making you laugh. “Dans,” he said as he stepped his feet in time with yours. “A dansa.”

“Yeah, dancing,” you smiled. “I haven’t danced in years, you know, except for tonight.”

He surprised you with a sudden kiss that was unexpectedly chaste, just a press of his lips on yours that either lasted longer than it normally would or just slowed time for a moment. “Sărut,” he whispered when he pulled back.

”Sărut,” you repeated.

“Aș putea să te sărut ore în șir. Ai cele mai perfecte buze,” he breathed, running his thumb over your bottom lip which had gone slack just from listening to him talk.

Your fingers trailed down over the portion of his chest exposed by his unbuttoned collar. “I didn’t know I could feel this way about somebody,” you admitted aloud to yourself. “I wish I could stay…”

His hands lifted your face to look up at him. “Nu face asta. Nu te mai ascunde în gândurile tale. Fi cu mine.”

“Sărut?” you requested, making him grin.

“Da, iubirea mea,” he cooed as he leaned in and kissed you again, smiling into it.

You really hadn't even liked kissing all that much before you met him… you just hadn't seen the appeal beyond warming up to more exciting activities, but now? This was all the excitement you needed; you could kiss him for hours and never get bored.

That said, apparently Sebastian had exciting plans of his own, because you found yourself being backed up against a brick wall, his hands exploring your body— subtle at first, just rubbing your arms and gripping your waist, but then it got less ambiguous as you felt his fingers toying with the hem of your shirt, just barely grazing over your stomach.

His touch trailed higher, nearly reaching your breast but stopping just before: you didn't mean to whine impatiently, but you heard it muffled against his lips and felt him chuckle lightly, breaking the kiss and leaning in to whisper in your ear.

"Atât de nevoiași," he hummed, nibbling on your earlobe as your thighs clenched together much too strongly when he'd barely touched you.

You clutched at his shirt, watching as his hand moved down to the top of your pants, the tips of his fingers just barely breaching past the fabric and starting to slide down.

"Here?" you gasped, finally remembering you were in public though you hadn't seen another person out here since you left the bar.

His hand moved lower down and your stomach fluttered with the forbidden nature of it all, feeling like a rebellious high schooler fooling around behind the movie theater when you both had curfew in ten minutes. But then he found your clit right away and it was nothing like high school.

"Oh fuck," you whimpered, shuddering and pushing your hips up to silently beg for more. He rubbed circles over your bud and smiled against your neck, already making it a struggle for you to stay quiet.

“Un alt cuvânt pe care ar trebui să-l știi,” he whispered, the pitch of his voice making it clear he was saying something beautifully filthy, “este dracu. Vreau să te dracu.”

“Seba, please,” you sighed.

"Dar nu cred că o pot face aici," he added with a soft laugh.

Two fingers suddenly pushed into you and didn't seem to struggle with it at all since he already had you soaked, curling into a tender spot inside you right away.

“Yes,” you whined.

“Yes?” he repeated with a smirk.

“Yes,” you said it again, “fuck yes.”

“Fuck,” he laughed, the word that was so familiar to you almost sounding foreign when he said it. “Spui asta mult. Cred că asta înseamnă că vei veni.”

“Your fingers feel so good,” you moaned, barely enough air in your lungs to get the words out. "Please… please don't stop…"

He kissed you again, open-mouthed and desperate as you both breathed heavily, his tongue sliding against yours as if to taste your moans. Hoping to stay upright now that your knees felt a little wobbly, you slipped your arms around his neck and pulled him closer. That, in turn, led to you feeling the hard outline of his cock pressing against your thigh and you nearly melted right there, wishing you could feel him inside you now but figuring it probably wasn't worth the risk of being arrested for indecent exposure.

By now he knew you like the back of his hand, it seemed, because you were already throttling full speed ahead toward the edge, shocks of heat jumping up your spine each time he curled his fingers inside you.

"I— I'm gonna—" you stammered through your warning. He nodded, moving his fingers faster as you bit your lip a little too hard.

Just when you thought you couldn't help but cry out he kissed you one more time, rough and hungry, and muffled the sounds of you reaching your peak literally by his hand.

Everything that had twisted and snapped all at once began to soothe as you sighed and pushed his hand away slowly, feeling your walls spasm one more time when he slipped his fingers out and slid them right over your clit.

He pulled his hand out of your pants and brought his fingers to your lips; you dutifully cleaned them off for him, watching his lips twitch into a brief snarl when you took his fingers down your throat.

"Vom termina asta mai târziu," he promised darkly as he pulled you off of the wall and spun you around, and you wanted to return the favor but he stopped your hand from sliding up his thigh. "Mai târziu," he insisted, instead guiding you around the block and back to where his bike was parked.

Hopping on the back again as he started it up, you relished the change to cling onto his back tightly. He drove you through the empty streets, over sprawling hills and through stone archways, but just as you noticed this wasn’t the way to get back to the farmhouse, he slowed down and turned into a place to park.

“Why are you pulling over?” you asked, furrowing your brow as he parked the bike and motioned for you to get off with him. “Where are we going?”

“Ai incredere in mine,” he smiled as he took your helmet off for you and kissed you again, quickly, taking your hand and guiding you down a secluded path. You followed him down a few strange alleys, under clotheslines and sconces that started to dim with the oncoming morning light. Finally, he navigated you around a turn, through a tight gap, and out of nowhere you were on an overlook; one that gave you the perfect view of the sun beginning to rise over the city. “Wow,” you whispered, watching enraptured as soft yellow light overtook everything, the village and the woods in the distance beginning to come to life.

“Vremuri de genul ăsta mă fac să-mi fie dor de casă,” he sighed, before looking at you again from where he leaned on his elbows over the stone railing. “Îți faci mai ușor. Nu mai sunt singur.”

“This place is so beautiful, I’ve never lived anywhere like this before,” you admitted. “Maybe it’s just that it’s different that makes me like it so much… I guess I could say the same about you.”

Your eyes met his again, and the way he looked at you… it was like he saw right through you. Honestly, it was a bit terrifying. You'd never been so vulnerable to someone. You liked it more than you expected.

But it still scared you.

"Haide, hai să mergem acasă," he smiled as he stood upright again and took your hand.

"Let's get back to the house," you decided, but he was already leading you back to the bike where you rode through the countryside one more time, doing your best to memorize it all while you still had the chance.

You found tears in your eyes, though you didn’t remember crying, as you typed the final page of your manuscript.

It was a first draft, nothing close to a completed novel, but you were on your way to jumpstarting your career again. The only problem? You couldn’t have a career here. You couldn’t be published while living here, you couldn’t even edit this thing properly without a computer and you didn’t even have one here.

You needed to go home.

It killed you to realize that this was not a sustainable system: you living here— Hungary or Mrs. Alberti’s lakehouse— and falling in love with a near-stranger.

Sure, it was good for what it needed to be; he reminded you what it was like to be cherished and cared for, maybe you helped him break some dry spell (although you couldn’t imagine that this guy was anything but drowning in pussy all the time, but whatever). Regardless, it couldn’t last. It wasn’t meant to be anything other than… whatever it was meant to be.

You flipped through the pages of what you’d written already, admiring the journey that you saw on the paper— not just that of the characters, but your own as well. You could feel the weakness in your own voice in that first chapter, as if your hurt was right there painted on the page with the ink-pressed letters. You could remember shakily typing these words, hoping they would distract you from the fears and memories that plagued your mind.

A few chapters in, you could see the hope and optimism that built with the action of the story. You could feel your own love mirrored in the way you wrote your story, it was painfully powerful.

It brought a sense of closure, in a way; it gave you a chance to appreciate everything you’d learned from this, even if you knew you couldn’t take it with you into the next chapter. But this love didn’t feel like a subplot, it didn’t feel like a stepping stone onto the next adventure— it felt like what you’d been looking for your whole life. Maybe that’s just how it feels to be in the ‘honeymoon phase’ or whatever it’s called; maybe it’ll fade soon, with time and distance.

That was what you silently prayed for as you packed everything, folded your clothes, checked the nightstand drawers for those random trinkets they seemed to accrue. Funny how packing to leave this place took you longer than it did to throw your stuff together when you left Michael, and you’d been living there for years.

Then again, you'd known Michael so much longer than you'd known Sebastian, and yet it was Seba that meant so much to you now.

You weren’t sure what would be more difficult: leaving him, or knowing that you could never hope to explain everything in a way he would understand. You considered writing a letter and hoping that he would come upon a Romanian to English dictionary— but with everything you wanted to say, that would take him hours. After all that, would he find your words worth it? Or would he see it all as one last chore from a peculiar fling?

You were pretty sure he didn’t see it as a fling. But maybe he would understand that it was best left as a very unique rebound.

You left your room just to go get some coffee (or maybe something a little stronger, if it was available) and jumped when you saw Sebastian in the hall, causing you to quickly close the door behind you. “I didn’t expect to see you upstairs,” you greeted.

“Obținerea cearșafurilor curate,” he explained as he opened the door to the linen closet and pulled out some bedsheets.

“Oh, yeah, those could probably use a change,” you mumbled as you realized he may not have washed them since the last time you stayed in his bed.

“Vrei și tu câteva?” he asked, pointing towards your door and holding up the sheets.

“Oh, uh, I don’t need any more sheets,” you shook your head, “but thank you…”

His face curled into a mischievous grin. “Poate că trebuie să murdărim acele foi,” he purred as he set the linens down and stepped closer to you, wrapping you in his arms.

“Seba,” you mumbled, but he must not have heard the hesitance in your voice as he leaned in and kissed your neck, making you sigh a little. He hummed contentedly and lightly bit your ear, and you were almost ready to just let him do it and procrastinate this conversation a little longer, but you had to sigh and push him back.

“Esti bine?” he asked, voice heavy with concern, as he straightened up and examined your face.

“Sebastian…” you started with a sigh, the words you’d been anxiously mulling over all night suddenly abandoning you. “What happened between us meant so much to me,” you continued slowly, “but the fact of the matter is, my first marriage isn’t even over yet. I mean, it’s over, but… I’m not really in a place where I can… start a new relationship…”

He looked back at you, that same blankness of incomprehension you were so used to painting his expression, and yet it was somber; he seemed to sense the tone, even if he was losing out on the specific ideas.

“It’s not fair to either of us, really,” you sighed. “I’m still mourning my marriage— and you were a really important part of that for me. So, thank you.”

You realized you needed to express your gratitude more thoroughly. Thinking quickly, you reached for his hand and opened it, placing his palm to your chest. He looked at you, a little confused.

“Thank you,” you repeated, looking him right in the eye.

He nodded slightly.

“Someday, somebody is gonna love you the way you need— the way you deserve,” you told him, stopping briefly to bite your lip in hopes it would stop quivering. “God, I wish it could be me. But it can’t.”

He held your face and kissed you, and much to your dismay it didn’t feel like a goodbye kiss. It didn’t feel like he knew this was the end. “Nu plânge,” he whispered. “Te iubesc.”

He kissed you again and you let yourself get lost in it like a complete fucking idiot, melting into his arms as he opened your bedroom door and pulled you inside with him. For a moment, it was like any other time, like any other perfect kiss with him, but then he pulled back and looked around and you had to watch his eyes as he realized. You had to watch his face as his smile fell away and his hope turned to despondence.

The whole room was packed. Heavy trunks on the bed, the sheets already stripped so Mrs. Alberti could wash them. Everything that made it feel like your room was gone, and it was just a guest room again, feeling bigger and emptier than ever.

All that was left was the typewriter on the table, because you still couldn't lift it.

“O să pleci,” he gasped, stepping back and releasing you from his embrace. “Chiar mă părăsești.”

You knew that look he was wearing on his face; beyond heartbreak— betrayal. You were all too familiar with it. “I’m so sorry,” you whimpered, “I would stay if I could, but I can’t, can I?”

A car horn honked outside, making you wince.

“That’s my ride,” you mumbled. “I have to go…”

You started to reach for your trunks and for a moment you thought that was really it. “Nu te duce,” he interjected suddenly, grabbing at your wrist and turning you to face him.

“I’m sorry— I have to leave—” you rushed, trying to grab your bags again.

“Nu te duce,” he repeated again desperately, pulling you close, cradling your face in his hands.

“Don’t make this any harder than it already is,” you pleaded as your eyes began to water.

“Stay,” he begged, and you didn’t know that he knew that word. A tear fell; you wished he didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” you shook your head, “I can’t.”

You stood up on your tiptoes to try to kiss him one last time, but he grimaced and pushed you away.

“Să trăieşti,” he said quickly, bitterly, as he stormed out of the room.

“Sebastian, wait—!”

But he was already running down the stairs; you heard the sound of the back door slamming a moment after he was out of sight, and another honk of the horn outside reminded you that you didn’t have time to chase after him. This wasn’t how you wanted it to end— really, you didn’t want it to end at all, and maybe if it had to (which it did) then this was as good a way as any. But you hated to leave like this when the last thing you wanted was to hurt him.

Defiantly wiping the tears from your face, you lifted the first of your trunks and made your way down the stairs, bringing them to the front door where the driver of the cab was waiting to carry them the rest of the way for you.

“Could you go upstairs and get my typewriter for me?” you asked him. “I can’t carry it well myself.”

He nodded and did as he was told, another small but painful reminder of your first day here. Mrs. Alberti came around the bend wearing a knitted shawl and a bittersweet smile.

“I hope you didn’t plan to go without saying goodbye,” she teased you.

“Of course not,” you smiled, “goodbye Mrs. Alberti.”

“I didn’t mean to me, dear,” she explained, making your heart twist.

“I don’t think he wants to hear it from me,” you admitted awkwardly. “I don’t think he can, literally.”

She just sighed and looked away, just as the driver loaded the last of your things into the trunk.

“So, this is it then,” you shrugged as you turned to face her.

“I doubt that,” she smiled. “It’s not a goodbye, sweetheart, just a ‘see you later.’”

“Sure,” you agreed, knowing she was wrong. You couldn’t come back here; you couldn’t leave him twice.

The driver shut the trunk and got back into the driver’s seat, leaving you to stare up at the house and take one last moment to soak it all in.

“You be sure to call me when your book is a big hit!” Mrs. Alberti instructed with a grin.

You were too choked up to say anything back, so you just waved and nodded as you got in the car and took a deep breath. “To the train station, please,” you mumbled to the driver, covering your eyes with your hand as you felt the car reverse and turn onto the road. You couldn't open them, or you’d look back, and you couldn’t look back.

Since your eyes were closed, you had no way to know that Sebastian chased after the car for nearly a block, giving up at the turn of the road, falling into the gravel and laying there for a while, repeating that one English word he couldn’t get out of his head: stay.

#sebastian stan au #sebastian stan x reader