#contractibly

[suiheisen]

felt sad. caught up on baseball from the past week. now i'm not that sad anymore.

[morganbritton132]

No one tells you when you get a Big Serious Job™ how many fucking abbreviations you’ll be forced to learn.

[thelaurenshippen]

watching bridgerton and obviously there were a lot of things wrong with the way socializing has worked in the past, but honestly the idea of a "calling hour" is so appealing. office hours for friendship. you can show up unannounced at my home between 1 and 3pm. you must leave by 3pm. I may give you a pastry. lets bring that back

[saywhat-politics]

Survival Without Subsidies

[bluesylveon2]

The best Leona moment in all of TWST canon 🤣

[itsscaredycat]

my hallucination i used to see

[letalisotium]

Anyways... what?

[teaboot]

Just got accused of assault at work. Incredible job sir I was standing perfectly still 15 feet away making no threats at all in front of nine witnesses within straight shot view of 3 CCTV cameras but if that’s the narrative we’re going with I’d be happy to give you my ID number and my boss’s contact info. I can wait while you call the police if you want. I am paid by the hour btw. Would u like to chill in the office while they drive here

[marzipanandminutiae]

"most allegedly haunted houses turn out to have gas leaks!"

no they don't. you are merely skimming the surface of mundane shit that can be wrong with old houses with your one puny little explanation that only fits a very small number of cases. try harder

[rusty-courage]

i might cry

[solargeist]

congratulations on your egg baby hatching

[roundbellylovesblog]

Heavily pregnant with a huge belly. That would be really wonderful now and someone to caress my belly tenderly.💦🤰😍

[dogwithbird]

Dirty Work

When you need a bit of lovin' 'Cause your man is out of town That's the time you get me runnin' And you know I'll be around

Your husband should've known better than to leave you all alone in that big house with Joel Miller.

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

no outbreak contractor!Joel Miller x Reader

Rating: Explicit 18+

Word count: 4.1k

Warnings/Tags: no outbreak au, author rambles, infidelity, smut, unprotected sex, oral sex (f receiving), joel miller is a man of few words and multiple orgasms

(this has been sitting in my drafts for over a year and i finally got the motivation to finish it, it's a bit of a re-imagination of the first fic I wrote because I <3 kitchen sex)

Read below or on AO3 ->

It was wrong. You were married. You’d said “I do.” In sickness and in health. ‘Til death and all of that. You had moved across the country for him; left your friends and family behind. You quit your job for him. You cooked for him. You cleaned for him. You were talking about trying for a baby, even. He loved you, and you loved him.

But your husband was gone on business trips increasingly frequently. You saw a smudge of red lipstick — not your shade — on the collar of his shirt when you did his laundry. He’d moved you to Texas, where you knew no one, and left you all alone in a big house that he insisted on making even bigger. Maybe he expected you to look elsewhere, too.

The house he bought had only been built a couple of years ago, the one that you’d described to your oldest friend as a temple to bland opulence. Naturally, your husband thought it needed to be updated. Expanded upon. A new detached garage and a complete kitchen renovation were good places to start, he supposed. He told you the kitchen renovation would be your “little project,” the garage his, and made sure to tell the contractors there was no budget before he set off for his second business trip that month.

Your husband showed affection by letting you spend as much money as you could and occasionally with increasingly passionless sex. The former was more satisfying, and so you told the contractors you wanted the most expensive Carrara marble countertops they could track down.

Miller Contracting came highly recommended to your husband by your new neighbor Mrs. Collins, who said they were a "pure joy to have around.” You understood why: the brothers were very handsome. The older one caught your eye especially. He introduced himself as Joel, wiping grime onto his pants before offering his hand and a preemptive apology for the mess. Sometimes you had a hard time pulling your gaze from his broad shoulders. A single curl at the nape of his neck would entrance you. More than once, you found yourself staring at the tool belt slung low around his hips—a hammer pushing the hem of his shirt up just enough to expose his tanned torso. He was completely oblivious to how hot and bothered his mere presence made you, which somehow made you want him even more. It wasn’t normal how many times a week you found yourself with your hand down your pants thinking of Joel. It couldn’t be normal that you fantasized it was Joel, not your husband, sleeping next to you on the rare occasion your husband was home.

You needed a distraction from temptation. You tried to make a life for yourself in Austin. Or, if not a life, at least keep yourself occupied and out of the house. Tennis and shopping and massages could only fill so much of the void. You busied yourself with various boards and societies and leagues at your husband’s request: it was a good way to make connections, he said, to make friends before you start having kids.

In the beginning, your interactions with Joel were brief and practical. Joel would ask about fixture placements or clarify blueprints the architect had drawn up, and you’d find yourself too focused on the veins in his forearms to respond right away. Once, when Tommy was running late, he asked you to hold a two-by-four steady while he cut it, and you stood shoulder to shoulder, the sharp scent of sawdust and his skin overwhelming your senses. You felt the vibration of the saw through the board and wondered what it would feel like to touch him, just for a moment. When he looked up, your eyes met for a fraction too long. Neither of you said anything.

Joel stayed late one evening, finishing the countertop installation long after Tommy had gone home for the day. You offered him a celebratory drink and he accepted to your surprise, leaning against the island with you. The silence between you stretched, not awkward but thick. When he set the glass of your husband’s whisky down, his fingers brushed yours. You didn’t move away. He looked at you for a long moment, then back at the glass.

“She’s gorgeous, Joel,” you murmured, drawing your fingers along the length of the new marble countertop. The slab was cold and smooth beneath your palm, a coolness at odds with the heat rising up the back of your neck. It was your favorite slab out of the four you’d vetted with Joel, the one you’d insisted upon even when he warned you about its endless tendency to stain, how every glass of red wine or ring of coffee would etch a memory into it forever. Still, you wanted it, and so, there it was: a swirl of creamy white, mottled and streaked, luminous under the new pendant lights. You slid your hand across the veiny surface all the way to the edge and back again.

The rest of the house felt hollow, half-lit by the lingering sunset, but here the air was thick and warm with spice and plaster dust and the faintest trace of sandalwood—Joel’s deodorant, you’d realized, after catching a whiff of it more than once on his discarded shop towels. The kitchen was only lit by a work lamp on the floor behind you, casting your shadows onto the new, bare wall in front of you.

Joel glanced up from his glass at you, a smirk spreading across his face, “mhm,” he nodded in agreement, “real beauty.”

You raised your glass, whisky trembling among an oversized ice cube, and with a gleeful bravado you declared, “To the most beautiful countertop this side of the Mississippi.” Joel suppressed an amused snort but dutifully picked up his own glass and held it toward yours. His hands were broad and nicked in places with old scars; the juxtaposition of a laborer’s calluses wrapped around a delicate tumbler made your pulse quicken. As the glasses met with a restrained clink, the sound sparked in the stillness like the strike of a match.

The whisky scorched a path down your throat, igniting a heat in your chest that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with the man sitting six inches from you. The discrepancy between the polite, measured conversation and the animal yearning in the air made you giddy, almost lightheaded. You felt like a teenager who’d never been kissed, pulse racing.

Joel’s voice startled you, the low register of it vibrating through your chest. “Is your husband gonna mind that I’m here this late?” he asked, and the words fell into the heavy air like an ice cube shattering on tile. You could tell he regretted them as soon as they were out—his jaw flexed, a faint flush blooming along his cheekbones. The question itself was so at odds with the moment you’d both let yourselves slip into. You’d half expected him to lean in, to close the last gap between your faces, but instead he’d summoned your husband back into the room.

You searched Joel’s face, trying to decide if he cared about the answer or was simply fishing for a reason to excuse himself before something happened. Maybe he was only being gentlemanly. Maybe it was a test, and you’d already failed by not mentioning your husband first. Maybe you’d misread the entire situation and made a fool out of yourself.

“Not like he’s here to know,” you said, and it came out much sharper than intended. You cringed in the next instant, hating the way the bitterness in your voice had hung a hard, ugly edge on the air. You hadn’t meant it as confession, or even as a complaint. You didn’t elaborate, didn’t ask Joel to consider the last time he’d seen him there, though you hoped he thought about it.

You tried to remember what rules governed these sorts of situations. Was fidelity measured in minutes, in miles, in the number of times your husband remembered to call you before bed? Was loyalty a question of what you did, or what you wanted to do? Every woman in your family had opinions on this—your sisters, your aunts, your own mother. You’d heard them compare marriages by the way their men failed them: the ones who drank, the ones who gambled, the ones who left red marks and bruises.

You understood that every marriage was an accumulation of secret grievances, some profound and some petty, most never spoken aloud. Your mother’s plight was familiar: the husband and father who spent all day in the garage with an AM radio and a case of Bud Light, the one who started out promising all the right things but, by their fifteenth anniversary, didn’t even pretend to believe in anniversaries at all. Your Aunt Lisa’s husband once spent the mortgage payment on poker. Aunt Carla’s husband crashed a car into a neighbor’s fence and blamed it on an allergy pill. And the women, for all their complaints, hung on. You watched as they grew used to disappointment and pain.

Your husband didn’t yell or drink or gamble. He wasn’t cruel, not really. Instead, he was just … gone. When he finally returned home from a trip, he was tired, and when he wasn’t tired, he was distracted. He bought you nice things and urged you to spend freely to fill the void. His unprovable infidelities seemed inconsequential comparatively.

You’d never allowed yourself to say it, certainly not to anyone who really knew you, and especially not to him. You told yourself it wasn’t so bad. You told yourself that you didn’t deserve to complain, not when other women had it so much worse. The truth was that you wanted to be seen, and touched, and loved, in a way that didn’t feel perfunctory or purely transactional.

You wondered: if you had children, would this be the version of marriage they’d inherit? Would your daughters one day sit in their own kitchens with their own friends and think back on their mother with sadness and a twinge of pity? Would your sons learn to vanish as a means of survival? Maybe this was just how it was, and always would be.

You did not tell Joel about your birthday last year, when your husband hadn’t called from New York: you celebrated by ordering takeout and eating it, cross-legged, on the living room carpet with the TV on mute in fear of missing the phone ring. You did not tell him about the feeling that had crept up on you that night: something like grief, but also like relief, as if you’d finally been granted permission to admit that you were completely alone. You did not tell him about the time you’d found your husband’s text messages to an assortment of women with unfamiliar names, or the way you’d convinced yourself it didn’t matter, since he’d never admit to it and you didn’t care to bring up. You didn’t tell him how you sometimes lay awake for hours, the ceiling fan spinning its blades like a roulette wheel and tried to imagine a version of your life where you didn’t have to wait for someone to finally come home to you.

The unspoken truth was this: you had already left your husband. You’d just never had a witness to it before.

Could Joel see all of this in your face? Was he quietly adding up your loneliness and cataloguing it alongside all the other minor tragedies he encountered on the job. Maybe he’d heard it all before. Maybe every house he worked in was just a different flavor of the same sadness. Bored housewife after bored housewife, looking for an outlet.

You didn’t owe Joel the whole story — couldn’t have given it if you tried — so instead you watched the way he took your answer, slow and considerate, his hands fitting around the glass as if he might squeeze it into something new.

You became hyper-aware of everything: how close you and Joel were standing, how neatly his boots aligned with your bare feet on the hardwood, how the light from the work lamp painted you both in muddled relief against the still-blank wall. He smelled faintly of sweat and something comfortable—laundry, warm skin. It made your stomach clench.

You reached for your glass again, but Joel gently took it from you and set it on the counter. He didn’t break eye contact. He didn’t lean in, not exactly, but his presence tilted towards you, shifting the gravity in the room. You saw the subtle tremor in his hand as he placed your drink down.

“Tell me to leave,” he whispered, as if he was afraid the house might overhear.

You didn’t.

Couldn’t.

You stared at each other through the silence, and out of the corner of your eye, you saw your distinct shadows cast on the wall by the work lamp become one.

His mouth was on yours before you had a chance to breathe. Hot, rough, desperate.

He broke the kiss only to lift you—strong hands gripping beneath your thighs, setting you on your new countertop like it was the most natural thing in the world. Your knees parted instinctively, heart thundering, pulse thrumming so loud it filled your ears.

His hands slipped under your dress. Callused fingers dragging up your thighs slowly, reverently, igniting sparks under your skin. And then he paused, his hand stalling along your wet slit.

His eyes met yours, dark and burning. And then he crouched down, nudging your legs over his shoulders as he dove between them.

You made a sound — breathy, shaky, resembling his name — but he was already there. Already sinking to his knees, already kissing up the soft, trembling inside of your thigh. His mouth was hot and open, each press of his lips reverent and greedy, his stubble rasping your skin and leaving goosebumps in its wake. When his teeth scraped gently, teasing, you flinched. You didn’t care if he left a mark. You wanted him to. Something to find in the mirror tomorrow, a secret bruise that would confirm that this was not just a dream.

The first swipe of his tongue through your folds made your hips jerk like you’d touched something electric, your spine bowing as your fingers slammed down onto the countertop behind you with a loud, ungraceful thud. A breath left you like a punch. “Fuck,” you gasped, eyes fluttering.

Your husband had never just… dove in like that. Never knelt between your legs like he couldn’t wait, like it was an instinct, like he’d die if he didn’t taste you. The few times he’d gone down on you had been cautious, transactional—bookended by negotiations and implied debts. You’d had to convince him. And afterward, you’d had to fake your moans so he’d think he was doing a good job. Bastard.

But Joel—he groaned like he meant it, like he’d been starving for this. That sound vibrated into you, low and raw, and then he latched onto your clit, sucking hard enough to make your vision blur. Your knees nearly buckled. You barely kept yourself upright with one hand gripping the counter, the other tangled in his hair, fisting it tight. He didn’t seem to mind. If anything, he leaned in harder, letting you use him for balance while his mouth ruined you.

You came fast. So fast it shocked you, ripped the breath from your lungs. One second you were gasping, the next you were gone, unraveling with a strangled cry. The orgasm crashed over you like a wave that didn’t wait for permission, hot and dizzying, legs trembling around his shoulders as your stomach seized and fluttered and let go. Your head tipped back against the cabinet behind you, jaw slack, fingers still clutching his hair.

When the white faded from your vision, Joel was still there, slow and deliberate now, licking you through the aftershocks, as if easing you back down. As if soothing the very nerves he’d just lit on fire.

You breathed out his name then and finally loosened your grip, letting your hand fall to his shoulder. Your legs were still shaking. You weren’t sure they’d hold you.

Somehow, you found the strength to lift them, one then the other, back down to the floor. It wasn’t graceful. You slid off the counter, your thighs sticky and weak, bracing yourself as your feet hit the ground. Joel looked up at you, lips wet, pupils blown wide.

Joel stood, chest heaving, face slick with you, eyes dark and dazed, and kissed you again. You tasted yourself on his tongue and the whole thing felt perverted and wrong — and you didn’t care.

He pulled back just enough to speak, a string of his spit clinging between you.

“You come like that for your husband, darlin’?”

You shook your head, breath still catching. God, you’d never come like that for anyone.

Joel’s lips curved, slow and smug, but there was something else in it too, something awed. Like he was proud of what he’d done to you. Like he wanted to do it again just to prove it wasn’t a fluke.

“Thought so,” he murmured, brushing his thumb over your cheek, then dragging it down your jaw, tracing the edge of your lips. “You had that … look.”

Before you could interrogate him – what fucking look? – he kissed you again. You pulled him closer, feeling the hard press of him through his jeans.

He shifted against you, so slightly, but the friction made you gasp. You thought you couldn’t handle anymore but the weight and heat of him gave you a second wind. He kissed you deeper, his hands sliding up your sides, your dress somehow still on.

Your hand slid down to feel him, fingers fiddling with his belt in a poor attempt to get his pants off.

You wrapped your hand around him and felt his cock twitch in anticipation of your next movement. You stroked him once, maybe twice, your thumb teasing along the head, slick with precome.

“Shit,” Joel hissed, jaw tightening. His hips jerked forward into your fist.

But then he grabbed your wrist, fingers curling around it tight, pulling your hand away like he was barely holding on. “Don’t — fuck, darlin’, don’t.”

You looked up at him, breathless, eyes wide, scared you’d crossed a line.

“I’ll come in your fuckin’ hand if you keep that up,” he growled, voice thick with warning — raw, half-wrecked, smirk spreading across his face. “An’ I’m not done with you yet.”

You hopped back up on the counter in excited anticipation.

“Uh uh,” he tutted, pulling you off the counter.

You blinked, dazed. “What?”

Joel’s brow furrowed, mouth still red and wet from where he'd had you moments ago.

“The marble,” he said, nodding toward the countertop. “Ain’t fuckin’ you on it. You’re soaked, darlin’, and I warned you that a speck of dust could stain this thing.”

You almost laughed before he lifted you with one arm, the head of his cock still pressed against you, and shifted down to the floor in one practiced movement. He sat back against the kitchen island, legs spread, pulling you into his lap. You were both completely naked by now, clothes stripped at some point.

Joel’s cock slapped up against your belly and you reached for it, blindly greedy, wrapping your hand around the thickness, feeling the pulse of heat radiating upward into your palm. You glanced down at the length of it, envisioning how much it would fill you up. His skin was burning, lined with veins that throbbed under your touch; his whole body was wound tight, muscles bunched and trembling from holding back.

You tilted your hips up and guided the head to your entrance, stroking it through your slick, and then with a slow, deliberate motion, you pressed down. The stretch was immediate, stinging, and so, so good. You gasped and let your head fall back, the sudden fullness threatening to buckle your knees even though you were already straddling him on the kitchen floor. Joel gripped your hips in both rough hands and held you steady, but didn’t force you. He let you take him at your own pace, patient but obviously desperate, his teeth bared against a groan as you settled into his lap.

“Fuck. Yeah. That’s it, sweetheart,” he growled, voice low and tight, watching you through narrowed, dark eyes. “Sit right there on my cock.” It sounded like an offering.

You rocked your hips, tentative at first, and the movement made both of you moan at the same time. You braced yourself backwards on Joel’s legs until he leaned forward, hands still bracketing your waist, catching one of your breasts in his mouth and circling your nipple with his tongue.

You shifted your hands to his shoulders, gripping tight, using the strength of his body to steady yourself. Then you lifted and dropped your hips, finding your rhythm as heat coiled deep in your belly.

Joel groaned against your breast, then lifted his head, mouth dragging open and wet along your jaw, up to your ear. His hands left your hips to tangle in your hair, guiding your mouth to his, breath mingling, sweat slick between you.

“This what you need?” he rasped, voice muffled against your jaw.

You could only nod, words lost to the pleasure, your body answering for you as you rolled your hips again and again, chasing the edge he kept dragging you toward.

You kept riding him, slower now but deeper, each thrust sending sparks up your spine. The kitchen floor had vanished beneath you: there was only the heat, the slide, the stretch of him filling you again and again.

But your thighs were shaking harder now, the burn setting in - weak and quivering with every lift of your hips. Your rhythm faltered, a soft whimper slipping from your mouth as your legs began to give out beneath you.

Joel felt you tremble.

“I’ve got ya,” he growled, and suddenly his grip on your waist turned commanding, solid.

Before you could even brace yourself, he thrust up into you — hard, deep, relentless.

You cried out, the air knocked from your lungs, and clung to his shoulders as he took over.

His hands guided you, slamming you down onto his cock as he drove up to meet you. The new angle hit something inside you. Your moans turned ragged, your fingers clawing into flesh.

“Fuck, Joel –” you gasped.

“Yeah?” he grunted, fucking up into you harder now, his breath hot and broken against your neck. “Needed this, didn’t’ya darlin’?”

You nodded wildly, terrified he might stop. Your body was coming apart, unraveling under him. The slap of your bodies echoed off the tile and cabinets, the slick, desperate rhythm of it building and building and building.

He was unrelenting now, chasing the edge with single-minded focus, sweat slicking his skin, his thigh muscles tensing beneath you with every upward drive. You clung to him, helpless against the force of it, your mouth parted in a soundless cry as your orgasm crested fast and vicious.

It slammed into you like a wave breaking against rock. You jerked in his lap, spine arching, every muscle seizing. Part of you tried to escape, the stimulation too much, but Joel held you tight in his arms. A strangled sob left your throat as your vision whited out. You clenched down around him, and Joel groaned.

“Jesus—fuck—” he hissed through gritted teeth, his hands bruising your hips now, holding you down as he drove up once, twice more before burying himself to the hilt with a growl and spilling into you.

Neither of you moved, your forehead pressed against the sweat-dampened skin of his neck.

“You alright?” he asked, voice rough and low against your hair.

You could barely hear, heartbeat pounding in your eardrums as the room finally stopped spinning. You gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. Joel shifted, lifting a hand to cup the back of your head.

“Didn’t mean to take over like that,” he murmured, suddenly bashful. “You just — uh, you started fallin’ apart on me.”

You exhaled a shaky breath. A beat passed, then another, before you managed a weak, breathless laugh—hoarse and low.

“You think I’m complaining?”

His chest rumbled beneath you with a muted chuckle, but he didn’t let you go. Didn’t pull out. Didn’t move except to hold you tighter, like letting go might undo the whole moment.

And maybe it would.

[technically-human]

It's already requited, they're just stupid

[lycankeyy]

Funniest thing about Tenna is for how much he's very sympathetic and also probably didn't fuck over Spamton as hard as he implies he still is very much a corrupt businessman. My man abuses NDAs. He forces people to sign contracts without letting them read the fine print that seems to more or less imply that he owns them. All of his employees hate him so much that if you fail to recruit a single one of them they're fully content to just leave him to die. In Susiezilla they all risk getting fired for the chance to beat the shit out of him actually