If it hasn’t been asked yet, I’d love to see what you come up with for the “I’m not gonna yell at you” prompt!
Thanks so much for sending this, I hope you like it!
“I’m not going to yell at you.”
Prompt taken from here
Read on AO3
TW: abuse is alluded to
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The sound of smashing glass and a startled yelp caused Beca to look up from her phone and frown.
She shoved it into her pocket and entered the kitchen, where she saw Chloe picking shards of glass up from the floor.
“What happened?” Beca asked, causing Chloe to jump which then caused the shard of glass to slip in her hand and slice into her thumb.
“Shit,” Chloe muttered as blood began to well up in the cut the glass had left.
“Oh crap, I’m sorry,” Beca said.
Chloe shook her head and turned on the faucet before sticking her thumb underneath the running water. “It’s my fault,” Chloe said. “I was being careless, I’m sorry.”
“Are you… apologising for cutting yourself?” Beca asked, her brows pulled together in confusion.
“No,” Chloe said. “I’m apologising for breaking one of your glasses.”
“Oh,” Beca said. “It’s fine, it was an accident. I’m more worried about you, are you okay?”
“I should have been more careful,” Chloe said as if Beca hadn’t said anything. “You were kind enough to let me stay with you and here I am smashing up your stuff and-”
“Chloe,” Beca said, placing her hand on Chloe’s arm. “It was one glass. All my shit is Ikea, it isn’t expensive. And even if it was, it’s not like you did it on purpose.”
“I just don’t want you to be mad or yell or something,” Chloe said, turning off the faucet and gingerly inspecting her cut thumb.
“I’m not mad, and I’m not going to yell at you,” Beca said, handing her a paper towel. “I’d never yell at you.”
Chloe pressed the paper towel against her thumb. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but it still stung. “I know that,” she said. “Logically, I know that.” She sighed. “He’s still rattling around in my head.”
Beca pulled her teeth across her bottom lip and exhaled through her nose.
She didn’t need to ask who Chloe was talking about.
“Of course he is,” Beca said softly. “After everything that happened, how could he not be?”
“What he did… I know you’d never do that to me,” Chloe said. “I know that. It’s just… Sometimes I forget that it’s all over.”
“I wish I could fix it for you,” Beca said. “Undo all the damage he did.”
“I know,” Chloe said, giving Beca a smile so small it was hardly there at all. “You can’t fix it, but you are helping.”
“Yeah?”
Chloe nodded, and her smile grew just a fraction.
Beca smiled back at her. “Good,” she said. She grabbed the dustpan and brush from the cupboard under the sink and shooed Chloe backwards and away from the shards of broken glass. “You wanna go pick a movie to watch with dinner? The pizza should be here soon,” she asked, sweeping the shards of glass into the dustpan.
“You hate movies,” Chloe said.
“Yeah, but you don’t,” Beca replied. She tipped the glass into the trash and dusted her hands against her jeans. “I’m willing to do a lot of things for you, Chloe Beale, and watching movies is definitely one of them.”
Chloe grinned, kissed Beca on the cheek, and headed into the living room.
Once Chloe was out of sight, Beca gently touched the spot on her cheek which felt like it was burning. She sighed, closed her eyes, and then shook herself out of it.
She grabbed the vacuum cleaner from the hall closet and vacuumed the spot where the glass had smashed. She tried to hold onto that brief glimpse she’d gotten of the old Chloe - the Chloe who wasn’t so nervous, and jumpy, and unnecessarily apologetic.
She tried to ignore the memory of the Chloe who’d arrived at her apartment last month. Shaking and crying and apologising for turning up in the middle of the night. She couldn’t ignore it though. The memory came back to her during every quiet moment. She was sure she’d never forget it as long as she lived.
“Please can I stay? Chicago, he’s…”
“Bec?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve vacuumed that same spot like ten times, I think the glass is gone,” Chloe said, leaning against the doorway to the living room.
“Right,” Beca said, shaking her head slightly and forcing out a chuckle. “Did you pick something?”
“I seem to remember you telling me you’d never seen Sister Act, and I think that we need to fix that,” Chloe said, tapping the remote control against the heel of her hand. She opened her mouth to say more, but the apartment buzzer went off and she jumped, sending the remote control clattering to the floor.
“I’m sure it’s just the pizza guy,” Beca said. She pressed the button on the intercom and asked who was there.
“Alfredo’s,” a bored voice replied. “Got an order for Beca Mitchell.”
“I stand corrected,” Beca said. “It’s the pizza gal. I’m gonna grab it, the elevator’s still out and I don’t have a tip big enough for them to climb four flights of stairs. Will you be okay?”
Chloe, who had been staring into space, focused her eyes on Beca, and she gave a tight-lipped smile and nodded.
When Beca left the apartment, Chloe forced herself to take a steadying breath.
She was getting tired of this. The jumpiness, the anxiety, it was all so exhausting.
She just wanted to feel like herself again.
She wanted to go back in time so that the last two years hadn’t happened.
She wished she’d made a different decision that final night of the USO tour.
Chloe was still staring into space when Beca returned.
“They need to fix that elevator,” Beca said, shutting the door behind her with a huff. “I almost had to stop halfway and set up base camp.”
Chloe laughed, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Plate or just out of the box?” Beca asked.
“Box is fine,” Chloe replied.
Beca nodded and carried the box through to the living room. “Come on,” she said. “I hear we have some singing nuns to watch.”
Beca was almost asleep when the credits rolled, and Chloe lifted her head from Beca’s shoulder to hit stop.
“I gotta admit, that was pretty good,” Beca said, yawning and stretching.
“Told you,” Chloe replied.
“I’m gonna call it,” Beca said, checking her watch. “I have to be at work crazy early tomorrow for some big meeting.”
As Beca was about to stand, Chloe put her hand on her arm to stop her.
“Chlo’?”
“I just… I can’t thank you enough, Beca. For everything you’ve done… Everything you’re doing… I’ll never be able to repay you for it.”
“You don’t have to repay me,” Beca said. “And you don’t have to thank me. I just wish I’d known sooner. I wish I’d seen it before…” Beca trailed off, that image of Chloe crying at her door floating back into her mind. “I’m sorry that I didn’t see it.”
“You’ve got nothing to apologise for,” Chloe said. “You literally saved my life.”
Beca let out a quick breath through her nose and ran a hand through her hair, shaking it out as she tried not to let her eyes fill with tears. “I’m so glad you’re here, Chloe. I don’t ever want you to think otherwise.”
“I’m glad I’m here too,” Chloe said, allowing Beca to pull her into a hug. They stayed like that for a while until Chloe spoke again. “I’ve been having nightmares,” she said. “I think that’s why I’ve been so clumsy, I haven’t been sleeping well. Do you think… Could I stay with you tonight?”
“You don’t even have to ask,” Beca said.
Chloe let out a breath of relief and hugged Beca even tighter.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Luckily you’ll never need to find out.”
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I really like the idea that one of the weird lurkers of your blog (like me) just hangs around looking for inspiration to write papers about. Like I realize that's not how it probably actually went down, but 2017 to 2022 seems like a pretty reasonable lead time from reading your post to conducting the research to writing and publishing the paper.
In reference to this:
It’s amusing that the original post only got 22 notes (likes), but when I looked at it again it had 19, which I’m choosing to interpret as the authors sheepishly withdrawing their likes in order to preserve their anonymity.
I think they probably just googled the phrase “friends to lovers pathway” before using it as the title of their paper and pulled up my post, or the other alternative being that the post popped onto their timeline when they were in the early stages of manuscript prep, and it was a moment of academic serendipity. I definitely don’t think I inspired the work in any way - just the quote and title. But it’s funny to imagine being studied.
I should say that I don’t necessarily expect permission to be asked if people intend to prosper or advance their careers from my words or art. However, I do appreciate the courtesy of being told that it’s happened. So far I’ve been quoted in a published book, quoted to name an academic paper, a person is actively selling plushies and other merchandise based on a post of mine while claiming that it’s their intellectual property actually, and screenshots of my work are regularly considered hilarious enough to steal but not pay me for. (the cricket post in particular was screencapped, went viral on Twitter some years ago without reference to me, was shared around BBC journalist twitter, and hundreds of people in the media industry said things like ‘lol we should pay this person to write’ …. in the apparent ignorance of the fact that if they had asked I would probably be open to…. Being paid to write……… and all the other times my posts have broken containment to go viral on other platforms for other people, with comments about how I should be commissioned to write a book; obviously that’s a normal part of online journalism and media, and I’m not naive about it, but it’s a bit much to for these people to be enriching their platforms with screencapped content, without the OP’s knowledge let alone consent, and joking about how they should pay for it or would read a whole book about it, when they’re the only people who could actually do something about it in the nightmare media landscape.) And nobody told me about any of these examples, I always find out by trying to retrieve links to my own stuff, or by friends telling me that someone else has gone so viral with my recognisable work that it got around to them.
Anyway if you do use my stuff in your own stuff, do let me know! I’m not here to prosper, but I am here to connect, and I’m quite willing to link your paper (and write a lay summary for free), buy your book or art, make your acquaintance, promote your work, or just add it to my portfolio - because if I ever DID want to prosper from my work here, which I wouldn’t usually consider except that it is evidently peer-reviewed good-enough-for-others-to-prosper-from, all of that would be valuable and helpful for me to know.
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