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samkerrworshipper · 1 year

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playgirl | Leah Williamson x Reader

warnings: smut, fingering, cunnilingus, fluffy soft smut 18 + minors dni

lots of angst, smut, hurt, fluff it’s a mixed bag lol

lots of people who are wanting to see some sammy k smut so lmk if you want to see anything specific xoxo and enjoy my lovely’s!

It was no secret that Leah Williamson got her way around. No secret to her teammates, no secret to the soccer community, no secret to all of the women in North London, no secret to you. Somehow though, for some reason it had drawn her to you, you were teammates for fucks sakes, you being on loan from San Diego and her being a accommodating captain who had offered a spare room in her house to you, whilst you figured out your bearings and in what world were you in the place to say no. From day one you had been infatuated with the woman, something that Alex Morgan had warned you of, having gotten word from Tobin that Leah liked to have fun, sometimes too much fun. Your first impression of Leah was that she was lovely, accompanying the Arsenal team to pick you up from the airport and everything. Her eyes were what truly had you enamoured with her, the way that the greyish-blue pierced through anything that she looked at.

Once you’d gotten back to her house she’d showed you around, informed you that whilst she tried her hardest to cook she wasn’t very good at it, and that she went to a teammates house most nights to eat. You’d told her that cooking was no issue, that because of your italian heritage you’d grown up in the kitchen, learning your Nona’s tricks from when you could walk. Leah was elated by that news, insisting that once you’d settled in you’d have to cook for her and you’d smiled at her and agreed. Leah had been nothing but accommodating and for a little while you’d found doubt in Alex’s words, that was until a few weeks into your stay with Leah you went out on a Saturday night with the team. It had started tame, a dinner out together as team bonding, which had ended in Katie deciding on which night club for the team to hit and from then it had gotten rowdy.

The London girls were very clearly decorated partiers, you however weren’t. You hardly drank to begin with, so whilst your teammates were busy with getting wasted on their weekend off, you were not, leaving you to observe the actions of your new teammates. Leah lasted a total of fifteen minutes in the club, something that most of the girls didn’t seem to be surprised by. Fifteen minutes in she was pulling a girl from the bar out of the club with her, both of their hands roaming in places that were not acceptable for a public space. It hadn’t taken you long to realise that the night was going to end similarly for most of the girls you were with, either them picking up somebody or heading home with their partner. Alessia was hellbent on getting you drunk, something you were not a fan of, but her being one of the only girls not on the dance floor or throwing themselves all over someone meant that you’d quickly paired up, also being the newer pair to the crowd. Eventually, you got sick of Alessia’s persistent begging for you to take a shot with her, pawning her off to Katie and then calling an uber for yourself back to Leah’s apartment.

When you made it through the door of the house you were unsurprised to hear the sound of moans filling the noise barrier, coming from upstairs. Just from the sound of the illicit moans you figured out that whoever Leah had brought home with her, was very drunk and that she wouldn’t last very long. With that thought you went about my normal nighttime routine that you’d fallen into during your time in England, by the time you’d gotten through it and fallen into bed the incessant sound coming from the room next to yours seemed to have ceased.

You got up at your normal time the following morning, ignoring the small headache you had from the combination of the glass of whiskey you’d had at dinner the night before and the lack of sleep you’d gotten. Climbing down the stairs in your pyjamas and with a mess of curls that you couldn’t really be bothered with taming this early in the morning and making a beeline straight to the coffee machine. It was when you were about halfway through your first cup of coffee for the day and second slice of toast that you heard the ruckus from upstairs, that you’d patiently been waiting for. You kept your eyes on the papers that youd had been trying to read, yesterdays copy that Leah had gotten from the shops on her way home from training. As much as Leah had tried to interest you in her beloved news, you had no interest. You waited about another minute before you were rewarded with the sound of two sets of pattering feet coming down the staircase.

“Was I seriously such a bad lay you can’t remember my name?”

Ten seconds later you were blessed with the sight of the girl that Leah had brought home from the night before, making her way down the stairs, half dressed and trying to tug her dress that left hardly anything to the imagination and struggling to pull her shoes on whilst Leah tried to grab for her.

“Lina, fuck, Lila, I’m sorry, you were great.”

The girl stopped at the foot of the stairs, glaring up at Leah. It was like watching a sitcom, except this was real life and it was all unravelling horrifically in front of your eyes.

“My fucking name is Lisa, if you gave to shits you’d know that. Fucking athletes.”

The girl turned back around, batting away at Leah’s hands that were trying to grab for her wrists. The girl made it to the front door, bringing her middle finger up towards Leah and slamming the front door behind her.

Leah stayed paused in front of the door for a few seconds before muttering,

“Good morning and good fucking riddance.”

She trudged her way into the kitchen, walking straight to the kettle and starting it, one of the things you’d learnt about Leah whilst staying with her was that the woman was hardly functional without her morning coffee and you couldn’t expect her to get anything done without her having consumed her beloved caffeine.

“Is that how all of your one night stands end?”

There was cheek in your voice, something you weren’t apologetic for but a little bit scared of, this was uncharted territory for you and Leah. You had heard her have girls over, she kept it fairly quiet though, sneaking them in well after you were supposed to be asleep and sneaking them out in the middle of the night or waiting for you to go on your morning run before disposing of them.

“Not normally, no.”

Leah’s voice held a little bit of humour, but mainly shock, her body language still reflecting her complete disbelief over what had just happened.

“Who would have thought, the mighty Leah Williamson being humbled so early in the morning. Forgetting her name? That’s amateur shit.”

Leah looked up at you, her eyes hooded with disapproval of your words but also not outright denying your words.

“We were both so drunk, I’m not even certain she gave me her name. She was a good lay but god was she whiny, glad she’s gone.”

Leah finished preparing her coffee and sat down in the seat beside you at the kitchen table. Tugging the paper she knew you had no interest in reading over to her side of the table so she could actually read it.

“How do you know that she wasn’t just whiny because you were a shit lay.”

You didn’t even know where that cockiness had come from, you bit your lip as your far older, and scarier teammate looked up from her paper at you, a little bit of a smirk playing across her face.

“Trust me honey, I’m not the problem and half of London could confirm that.”

You rolled your eyes at Leah, taking another bite of your toast and watching her very quickly become infatuated with whatever she’d stumbled upon in the papers. You took a sip of your coffee before saying anything, letting her words sit in the room and mellow out.

“Doesn’t count if you are fucking them all when their drunk, intoxication increases the amount of endorphins your brain is producing Williamson, so science says that even if you are a good lay, half of what those girls are feeling is the alcohol.”

Leah didn’t look up from her paper, but smirked as soon as the words left your mouth, giving you enough of an indication that she’d heard your words. She finished her page, taking her time reading over the words whilst you sipped dutifully from your mug. When she finished her page she flipped over to the next one, but looked up at you, her head cocked just a little bit.

“Baby, trust me, alcohol or not I’m the best lay any of those girls have had, there’s a reason why my phone is always buzzing.”

It was something that you’d noticed in your weeks at Leah’s house, whether you were sitting on the couch watching a movie together or eating dinner, her phone was always vibrating and she was always staring down at it, typing furiously like a six year old and any time you tried to ask her about it she always brushed you off.

“Is that not just because you go for the straight ones though?”

Leah choked on the sip of her coffee that she’d taken during the brief break of time between her previous words and your rebuttal. She swallowed her coffee before letting out a chesty laugh, there was condescension in it though, something unknown hidden behind it.

“Straight or not they’re all screaming my name honey.”

Leah’s voice held so much confidence, it was entertaining. Listening to her talk herself up so much, you couldn’t help but try and take her down a peg or two.

“Yeah screaming your name on the way out the door when you forget their name.”

You finished your breakfast, standing up and taking your dishes to the sink and washing them off, not taking your eyes off of Leah for a second, even whilst you stacked your dishes in the dishwasher.

“Sweetheart, I’m telling you right now, that if you got lucky enough to have me, then you’d be screaming my name all the same.”

You rolled your eyes at Leah, staying composed in front of the woman.

“So cocky Williamson, the self obsession really must be getting to your head.”

You sat yourself on the kitchen counter, watching as Leah washed her own dishes and loaded them up next to yours before turning to look at you. Normally Leah had a significant height advantage over you, but with the height of the counter you were sitting on you were set face-to-face with her.

“It’s not cockiness sweetheart, it’s self awareness. I’m a good lay, I’ve been told it many times by many different women, sober and not sober. You don’t have to hide behind the jealousy, you wanna go don’t you? Can’t really blame ya, everyone wants a bite.”

You rolled your eyes effortlessly at Leah, trying your very hardest to obtain all of the composure you’d held. You shoved her playfully on the shoulder, more as a warning than anything, because if she stayed in your personal space bubble much longe4 then you weren’t sure if you’d be able to uphold your facade anymore.

“It’s cute that you think I’m into you, considering you don’t even know who or what I’m into.”

Leah smirked at you, licking her lips as she reentered your personal space bubble, practically confining you to your spot on the counter, her hands placed on either side of your body, gripping onto the counter and looking at you with a little sparkle in her eyes.

“Tobs told me that you dated Sonnett, so I know that you aren’t straight and she told me that you're single, so that ticks those boxes. You dated Sonny, which means you have a thing for attractive blondes with a personality, I think I tick those boxes.”

You rolled your lips between your teeth before biting down on the bottom one, mainly for show more than anything.

“Bold of you to assume that you have a personality and you're attractive. It’s cute that you think you’ve got a shot.”

Leah smirked, toying her tongue between her teeth and rolling it between her lips.

“Don’t I?”

You knew where this was going, and it wasn’t that you weren’t interested, because you definitely were. But you also knew Leah’s reputation. She didn’t do relationships, she was a casual sex person and there was nothing wrong with that, but you weren’t interested in that. You also knew she was riding on her own endorphin high now, a mixture of post sex haze and hangover that you couldn’t trust.

“Baby, I’m not interested in casual sex, something Tobin should have told you. I liked Sonny, but she was a casual sex girl and I’m not doing that again, so you can have your fun with your walk of shame girls and I’ll have my fun, okay?”

You were mocking her a little bit, giving her a fake pout that she was clearly offended by. You hoisted yourself off of the bench before she could say much more, bounding towards the stairs and running back to your room to throw on my training gear.

The topic wasn’t brought up for a few more weeks, you let Leah bring her girls into the house at whatever time she pleased and Leah did her best to ignore the yearning that had developed in her gut for you.

It was all fine, all going well until you’d managed to get yourself injured. You’d had a really good run, becoming a starter on the team and scoring a few goals in some important games. Until a Chelsea player had taken your ankles out from under you and done some ligament damage, it wasn’t anything major, a few weeks at most, but you’d been recommended to wear a boot for the first few weeks, just to make sure you weren’t putting any unnecessary pressure on your foot. You hadn’t minded to begin with, but in a very short amount of time you became very frustrated, with the boot, with not playing soccer, with being sidelined without a definitive time to when you’d be back. You very quickly went from being the bubbly, happy teammate to being someone that the girls had to walk on eggshells around. Everyone took notice of your sudden mood change, but it was clear none of them knew exactly how to tackle it, none of them knew you all that well considering you were new to the club, besides Leah.

She’d tried approaching you a few times, at training, in the rehab centre, at home. Yet every single time you’d shut her down with some kind of false sarcasm, a laugh and the insistence you were fine. She was getting sick of it, getting sick of having to watch you repetitively deny help from anyone. Your attitude towards yourself and other people was shit and she could tell it was really affecting you.

She’d just gotten back from training one night, you’d opted out considering that you had done your rehab in the morning, using the excuse that you wanted to talk to some of your US teammates on a organised skype call. When Leah had gotten home the house was silent, something that she’d come to find abnormal since you’d moved in. There was always some background noise, the sound of the tv, or your music filling the house. Yet, when she walked through the door, slinging her bag onto one of the hooks near the door, she heard absolutely nothing.

She tiptoed through into the kitchen, her eyes searching the communal space before locating you. You were sitting on the sofa, looking down at your laptop, completely and utterly absorbed by whatever you were looking at and either purposely ignoring Leah or too enraptured by whatever was on your scream to have noticed her.

“Y/n.”

Leah’s words were enough to break you from your daze and when you turned to look at her Leah recognised the red rims that were painted along your waterline and the semi dried tear tracks on your face.

“Sorry, fuck, I was supposed to sort out dinner, give me a second and I’ll get it started.”

You were reaching for your crutches almost immediately, time having slipped away from you in Leah’s absence, Leah’s words stopped you though.

“No, don’t worry about it, we’ll order in, just stay sitting.”

Leah smiled at you, walking over towards the couch and picking up your crutches from your hands and placing them down on the floor, before sitting down on the couch beside you. She left enough space that you weren’t physically touching but stayed close enough that you could feel her presence.

“Is everything alright, Y/n?”

It was uncharted territory between the two of you, Leah had seen you upset, she’d been the one who’d had to drive the two of you home after doing your ankle and it hadn’t been pretty. But you’d never allowed her in, never allowed her to see you emotionally vulnerable besides that, and even when you’d done your ankle you’d tried your hardest to keep your composure, until you were lying in your bed that night by yourself and you let it all out. Leah could hear your sobs from the other side of the wall, just as you could hear the sound of the moans of whatever woman she’d booty called that night to help her deal with the itch in her body that came every time she had to watch her team take the pitch without her.

“Alex called, San Diego is trading me, so when my loan is over I’m going straight to Angel City. They said that they weren’t prepared to deal with ankle problems, that it’s for the best and that when the official trade period comes I’ll be gone. Angel City is going to honour my loan, until the season ends and then I have to go back home but I won’t even be going back home.”

Leah did her best to remember the basic American geography she’d learnt in highschool, trying to map out the two points on a map.

“Angel City’s based in Los Angeles isn’t it? You won’t be that far away, it’ll be a two hour drive.”

Leah’s voice fell on deaf ears, you were too busy biting down on your lip to even think about what she was saying. Because yes, technically she was right, it wasn’t like you were being traded to the other side of the country, but you’d been playing for San Diego for the whole of your senior career, it was your home, and they were just pawning you off like any other player.

“Plus, aren’t Christen, Ali and Alyssa at Angel City?”

You could feel more tears stemming in your eyes, you looked up in an attempt to conceal them, not wanting to embarrass yourself any further in front of your captain.

“Leah, you don’t get it. How would you feel if Arsenal had traded you when you’d done your ACL? San Diego has had me since I was 16. If I am going home I don’t want to go home to anywhere but there, I don’t want to have to play anywhere other than San Diego, the wave is my home, Alex is my fucking home and they are just turning me away because I’ve had some ankle problems. So what’s the point in me even putting the effort into fucking doing this recovery if even when I do it I’m going home to nothing.”

You’d left Leah a little bit speechless. She thought about it, thought deeply about putting herself in your shoes, something she’d never really done and she got what you were saying.

“So don’t go home, stay here.”

Your eyes looked at Leah, filled with something she couldn’t even try to pin down.

“Because Arsenal is really interested in having to deal with bidding for me and taking my contract. They probably want me even less than fucking San Diego does right now.”

Leah was a little bit shocked by the amount of aggression behind your words, never having seen this side of you, it hurt her heart a little bit.

“Turn around.”

Your eyebrows furrowed at Leah’s random request.

“Excuse me?”

“Turn around, back facing my chest.”

It took you a few seconds to realise she was completely serious, and hell, what did you have to lose at this stage? You did as she’d asked and jolted slightly as her hands found their way to your shoulders, starting to very gently massage into the tense skin across your back. Leah was shocked to feel the sheer amount of tension that must have built up over the past few weeks across your shoulders, clearly you’d been pushing down your feelings for a little bit too long.

“Arsenal loves you, the whole team loves you, if you wanted to stay you’d be very welcome. Ankle injury or not, if the Wave valued you, they wouldn’t have traded you, so I know it sucks but if they really valued you as a player they would keep you, they clearly don’t and you deserve better than that.”

It was unnerving to you how good Leah’s hands felt, rubbing gently across your back, slowly diffusing the mounds of knots that had developed across the surface of your back and shoulders.

“Do they teach you how to massage in adultery school?”

It was a weak joke that had Leah snickering just a little bit.

“Y’know that I’m not the heartless playgirl that everyone paints me out to be. I like sex, sure. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a human with functioning feelings, I still care for people, I care for you.”

Her words made you feel a little bit guilty, because you had kind of pictured her that way in your head, the woman had a girl in her bed almost every night. You couldn’t help but hear the vulnerability and honesty in her words though and you wanted to believe her words, or you wanted her to explain her words to you.

“Your hands feel good, really good.”

You could feel Leah smirking from her spot behind you on the couch.

“They’re good for more than massages.”

Her words were murmured, meant for you, not that there was anyone else in the room to hear them. At her words you were turning yourself on the couch, so you were face to face with the blonde. She was staring back at you with hooded eyes and a faint smirk on her eyes. Maybe if you hadn't been so emotional you wouldn’t have felt your breath catch in your chest as you took her in. Maybe if she hadn't been smirking at you in the ‘I dare you’ way, you wouldn’t have leant in. Maybe if she’d never gotten the opportunity to put her hands on you in the first place she never would have gotten so greedy as to have them back on you. Maybe if none of it had happened you both wouldn’t have leant in to kiss, or maybe it still would have happened.

The kiss was sweet, soft and tender. Leah pulled me gently into her lap, pulling me up and over so you were straddling her hips, giving you a little bit of leverage in the kiss.

“We can’t turn back once we do this, are you sure you want to?”

Leah’s words were murmured against your lips, as she took a little break to get her point across.

“We’ll figure it out afterwards, I just need to feel something, I need to feel loved.”

Leah’s forehead nodded against your own.

“Hold on.”

You didn’t have enough time to comprehend her words before she was hoisting you both up off the couch and towards the stairs.

“Leah, your knee.”

You murmured the words into her neck as you approached the steps, you didn’t want her to put you down but you also didn’t want her to hurt herself.

“It’s fine, I’m back in a few weeks anyways, it’s back to normal now.”

You were surprised when, with much ease Leah managed to get the both of you up the stairs without much struggle, her beelining directly towards her room. She very quickly sat the two of you down on her bed, resuming the kiss you had both previously been occupied with. Her lips were soft, everything about how she was treating you was so uncharacteristically gentle for you and you loved it, loved how she was accommodating you.

“Lee.”

Your words had Leah’s eyes cracking open quickly, a little bit of fear painted across her clear blue eyes.

“Yes, sweet?”

Her voice was so kind, practically dripping with tenderness.

“Need you to touch me, please.”

Leah smiled against my lips.

“Mm, where do you need me?”

Normally, you probably would have felt self conscious having to admit something like that, but with Leah everything felt different, you just didn’t feel the normal insecurity that came from sex.

“Fuck, pussy, please.”

Leah smirked again against your lips.

“Because you asked so nicely.”

Leah’s hands travelled down to the waistband of your sweatpants, tugging down under your ass, and once you’d hoisted yourself up, down and your right foot with ease. The left one was a little bit harder, with the moon boot and just as she’d been about to undo the velcro to remove the boot completely you stopped her.

“Just leave it, please, I just need you.”

Leah was smirking wildly at request, forgetting your sweatpant leg and letting her hand trail back up to the edge of your panties, a black lace thong that was one of your favourites. Your arms find their way over Leah’s shoulders, tangling at the back of her neck as her lips attach to your neck in synchronised harmony with her fingers finally making contact with your heat. You moan shamelessly as Leah brushed your panties to the side and works her fingers in and out of your wetness, her thumb finding its way to your clit and one of her fingers making its way down to the source of your wetness.

“So wet baby, all for me?”

Leah’s words vibrated against the skin of your neck, a place that she had busied herself with littering little marks along, trying to figure out which spot got the most sinful noises to leave your mouth.

“Fuck, yes.”

Leah smirked a little bit more, absolutely drunk off of the feeling that she had you in her arms, not some random girl that she didn’t care about.

“Mm, you feel so good sweet, can I finger your precious hole, is that something you want?”

She was hiding the question of consent in her words, something that was a major requirement for Leah, she might have been a bit of a nymphomaniac but that didn’t mean she didn’t have rules for herself, one of them was to always ask for consent.

“Fuck, please Leah, please.”

Your moans and pleads were enough consent for Leah, allowing her to very gently work one of her fingers into your pussy, slowly working in each knuckle. You were desperate though, pushing yourself down against her finger, aching for more.

“Leah.”

The word was murmured out between moans as Leah found your pulse point and bit down on it, soothing the bite with her saliva and gentle licks.

“Yes, pretty girl?”

Leah had quickly realised that you liked praise, and whatever little nicknames that she could form off the top of her head.

“More, please, harder.”

Leah bit her lip at your words, it took every bit of self control she had not to cum right there on the spot.

“So desperate baby girl, you're doing so well for me aren’t you, I think I can give you some more.”

Leah, slid another one of her fingers into your hole, when she felt no resistance she started to very gently move her fingers in and out of you, searching for that certain spot and when she had located it, gently curling her fingers against it. The sounds that left your mouth were hellish enough for even the devil to find them sinful. Leah resonated in it, bathed in the sound of your pleasure as she continued her assault of your neck.

When she could feel you beginning to clench against her fingers she placed the pad of her thumb against your clit, pushing the hood of it back to give her full access to the sensitive nub.

“Le-Leah, fuck, fuck, I’m so close.”

Leah nodded into your neck, gently brushing her finger against your spot and pumping her fingers just a little bit harder into you, elated at the way your hips met her fingers on every single thrust, your juices dripping all over Leah’s sweatpants.

“Cum whenever you're ready sweetheart, go ahead.”

It didn’t take you long, a few more swipes from Leah’s finger against your clit before you were catapulting over the edge of pleasure. Leah felt you clench tightly around her fingers and when she did he gently laid your body down against her pillows, withdrawing her fingers but replacing them with her mouth, pressing her tongue gently to your hole and coaxing you through the shakes and spasms. When you finally did come down you tried pushing Leah’s head away, frightfully aware of how sensitive you had become, but Leah continued her ministrations.

“Lee, fuck.”

You could feel your body arching up against the sheets once again, your arousal already building up again as Leah very gently laid her tongue out against your pussy. She pushed her hand up to your mouth.

“Suck.”

You obeyed her, letting her push the two fingers into your mouth and being blessed with the taste of your own pleasure against your tongue. You sucked Leah’s fingers dry as she continued to suck and lick her way across your pussy, like she was a starved woman.

“One more pretty girl, give me one more.”

Her wish was your command. You relaxed against the pillows, allowing yourself to feel every single little detail of what she was doing. You were a goner as soon as she started to suck on your clit, it was over sensitive from the previous orgasm and it didn’t take you very long to build back up to the edge again.

“Leah, fuck, Leah.”

Leah seemed to understand what you were saying, without you saying it.

“Come pretty girl, I’m here, I’ve got you, I’m here, you're safe.”

Another suck to your clit and you were done. Leah very gently lapped up your juices whilst you came down shakily from your high. Once she’d lapped it all up she clawed her way up to you, meeting you in another soft kiss, her tongue invading your mouth and giving you another taste of yourself. She collapsed down on the pillows beside you, one of her arms coming to rest around your torso as she tugged her own sweatpants off, which were now soaked in your juices.

You were spent, splayed across her pillows and Leah was certain she’d never seen a more perfect sight.

When she got up to go and fetch some supplies you groaned.

“Don’t leave me.”

Leah smiled sadly at your response, it was clear that you had been feeling alone for a while now, and now that she knew it she wasn’t going to let you feel that way, ever again.

“I’m not leaving sweet, I’m just going to fetch a few things, I’ll be back in a minute, I promise.”

She finished her statement by pressing a gentle kiss to your hairline, before getting up from the bed and making her way down her stairs, as fast as she could whilst staying at a safe pace.

When she returned to her bedroom you were in the exact same position, orgasm drunk, splayed across her sheets. She’d managed to retrieve your crutches, two glasses of water, a granola bar and a warm face cloth. You groaned as she got you to sit up against the pillows, she didn’t want to disturb you but she also knew there were some things that had to do, just to make sure that you felt better.

“C’mon sweet girl, take some sips of the water for me.”

You rolled your eyes at Leah, her fussing over you was something you hadn’t expected. She has tasked herself with the job of undoing your boot, removing your sweatpants and replacing them with a pair of her sleep shorts.

“More than that, the whole glass, please, and the granola bar.”

You rolled your eyes at her, you’d very discreetly tried to put the glass back down on your bedside table after taking two measly sips but Leah didn’t seem to be having a bar of it.

“Who would’ve known Leah Williamson would be such a mother hen.”

Leah looked at you, completely dead pan.

“I take aftercare very seriously, if you don’t feel safe or well then I would want you to tell me, I know what we just did wasn’t exactly intense but sex should always feel good, and if it didn’t I’d want to know.”

There was so much care in Leah’s words, and even if she was only a few years older than you, you suddenly felt like the age gap was so much bigger than that.

“Leah, I feel safe and good, you were perfect.”

She nodded, seemingly happy with your answer and returning to her task. She was so gentle with your ankle when she finally did undo the velcro, gently lifting it up and the sweatpants off of it before strapping it back into the boot and gently lifting a pair of her shorts over your ass. It was perfect and nothing that you’d imagined with Leah, you’d imagined her being cocky and showy, everything about her. But in this moment she was so vulnerable, so tender and warm and it made you feel so guilty for ever thinking anything else of her.

After she’d watched you consume the water and granola she’d seemed to become a little bit more at ease, changing quickly into a pair of sleep shorts and taking off her hoodie, substituting it for just a sports bra, so she was matching with me. After she was done getting dressed she slipped into the sheets beside you, one of her arms finding its way around your bare torso immediately, the skin on skin contact sending shivers up your spine.

“You are so loved y/n/n, here or back at home, there are so many people around that would do anything for you.”

Leah’s words were murmured into your ear as she threaded her fingers into your hair, tugging lightly on the hairs at the nape of your neck.

“M’ sorry that you didn’t get anything in return.”

Leah shushed you as soon as the words left your mouth.

“Hush, I don’t need anything, knowing that you felt good is all I need.”

There was so much sincerity in her words that it made you crumble just a little bit.

“You're not a heartless playgirl bitch and I’m sorry if I ever made you think that I thought of you that way. You are fucking perfect and just as good as you had said.”

Leah laughed a little bit from her spot behind you, the warmth of her breath against your neck making the hairs along your body stand up.

“I’m not too bad, huh?”

You flipped over in the bed, so you were face to face with her.

“I don’t want to be one of your one night stands who’s name you forget.”

Leah rolled her eyes, but when she realised the genuinity behind your words her eyes softened.

“Good, because I don’t want that either, y/n Williamson sounds pretty good, if you ask me.”

You snorted effortlessly at her.

“Wow a proposal on night one, do you do that to all of your bedmates to charm them, Williamson?”

Leah smirked, pressing her lips to your own.

“No, I think you’d have to be the first, what did you say about endorphins again, they must be getting to my head or something.”

You leaned in to stop her stupid babbling, pressing your lips to hers to silence her.

“I’ll never forget your name and I’m never letting you feel alone again, I promise.”

You smiled against her lips, so tied up in the serenity you were feeling, the peace away from everything that was going on in your life.

“I could never feel alone when I’m with you Leah Williamson.”

#woso #woso community #leah williamson #marry me rn #arsenal wfc #leah williamson is mom #leah williamson is mother #leah williamson x reader #leah williamson is boyf #leah williamson imagine

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

Text

Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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fdelopera · 3 months

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America owes its independence to Haym Salomon, a Sephardic Jewish Patriot

youtube

A Jewish American Hero

by Yosef Kaufmann

October 17, 1781. An eerie silence takes hold over the battlefield outside Yorktown, Virginia. After weeks of non-stop artillery shells and rifle fire, the rhythmic pounding of a drum is all that is heard. Through the wispy smoke that floats above the battlefield, a British officer can be seen waving a white flag. General Cornwallis has surrendered Yorktown, ending the last major battle of the American Revolution. The surrender of Yorktown and the nearly 8,000 British troops convinced the British Parliament to start negotiating an end to the war. On September 3, 1783, the treaty of Paris was signed. The war was over.

If not for Haym Salomon, however, the decisive victory at Yorktown never would have happened.

Haym Salomon was born in Leszno, Poland, in 1740. In 1770, he was forced to leave Poland for London as a result of the Partition of Poland. Five years later, he left London for New York City, where he quickly established himself as a broker for international merchants.

Sympathetic to the Patriot cause, Haym joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty, a secret society that did what it could to undermine British interests in the colonies. In 1776, he was arrested by the British and charged with being a spy. He was pardoned on condition that he spend 18 months on a British ship serving as a translator for the Hessian mercenaries, as he was fluent in Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Italian. During those 18 months, Haym used his position to help countless American prisoners escape. He also convinced many Hessian soldiers to abandon the British and join the American forces.

In 1778, he was arrested again and sentenced to death for his involvement in a plot to burn the British Royal fleet in the New York Harbour. He was sent to Provost to await execution, but he managed to bribe a guard and escape under the cover of darkness.

He fled New York, which was under the control of the British army, and moved to Philadelphia, the capital of the Revolution.

He borrowed money and started a business as a dealer of bills of exchange. His office was located near a coffee house frequented by the command of the American forces. He also became the agent to the French consul and the paymaster for the French forces in North America. Here he became friendly with Robert Morris, the newly appointed Superintendent of Finance for the 13 colonies. Records show that between 1781 and 1784, through both fundraising and personal loans, he was responsible for financing George Washington over $650,000, today worth approximately over $13 million.

By 1781, the American congress was practically broke. The huge cost of financing the war effort had taken its toll. In September of that year, George Washington decided to march on Yorktown to engage General Cornwallis. A huge French fleet was on its way from the West Indies under the command of Comte De Grasse. The fleet would only be able to stay until late October, so Washington was facing immense pressure to lead an attack on Yorktown before then.

After marching through Pennsylvania, with little in the way of food and supplies, Washington’s troops were on the verge of mutiny. They demanded a full month's pay in coins, not congressional paper money which was virtually worthless, or they would not continue their march. Washington wrote to Robert Morris saying he would need $20,000 to finance the campaign. Morris responded that there was simply no money or even credit left. Washington simply wrote, “Send for Haym Salomon.” Within days, Haym Salomon had raised the $20,000 needed for what proved to be the decisive victory of the Revolution.

Haym’s chessed continued after the war. Whenever he met someone who he felt had sacrificed during the war and needed financial assistance, he didn’t hesitate to do whatever he could to help.

He was also heavily involved in the Jewish community. He was a member of Congregation Mikveh Yisroel in Philadelphia, the fourth oldest synagogue in America, and he was responsible for the majority of the funds used to build the shul’s main building.

He also served as the treasurer to the Society for the Relief of Destitute Strangers, the first Jewish charitable organization in Philadelphia.

On January 8, 1785, Haym died suddenly at the age of 44. Due to the fact the government owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars, his family was left penniless.

His obituary in the Independent Gazetteer read:

Thursday, last, expired, after a lingering illness, Mr. Haym Salomon, an eminent broker of this city, was a native of Poland, and of the Hebrew nation. He was remarkable for his skill and integrity in his profession, and for his generous and humane deportment. His remains were yesterday deposited in the burial ground of the synagogue of this city.

Although there is little proof, many believe that when designing the American Great Seal, George Washington asked Salomon what he wanted as compensation for his generosity during the war. Salomon responded “I want nothing for myself, rather something for my people.” It is for this reason that the 13 stars are arranged in the shape of the Star of David.

#jumblr #haym salomon #where is his musical?#jewish history #4th of july #independence day #american history #american war of independence #american revolution #jewish diaspora in america #Youtube #NOTE: I report and block antisemites. Any antisemites who comment on this post I will report and block you. You have been warned.

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fancyfeathers · 4 months

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zainiscompletelydone333 asked a question

omg but imagine william's potential darling to be like agatha christie? a mystery writer whose mysteries are almost impossible to solve. whether or not they are as smart as the masterminds or detectives in her books, her stories do come close to confusing even sherlock or william a bit. if you've read her "and then there were none" SPOILERS its about a judge killing people for being evil and that is so william coded. anyways i'm straying far what I mean is william could be a quiet fan, and as the lord of crime, even replicate some of her stories as part of his crimes. watching his darling's face pale at the unknown criminal doing such a thing.....ASDKSHD an when he finally does officially meet her, he wonders if she'l ever base a character off him. a hero, or perhaps a villain?

For some reason this isn’t showing up in my tumblr inbox but thank god for my email cause this is a gem! Thank you @zainiscompletelydone333 for this!

Okay I love Agatha Christie, an actual icon! Fun fact she actually faked her own disappearance in 1926 and the police couldn’t find her for over a week and she just took a vacation to London after her husband threatened to leave her and she said fuck it and decided to treat herself. Then also Arthur Conan Doyle the author of Sherlock Holmes was hired to find her.

Anyway I am getting so off track but I love this lady so much so here we go!!!

But yes William would absolutely adore a darling like her. Imagine him first finding her works for the first time, perhaps one of his brothers or Sebastian or Fred was reading her work and just out of curiosity he picks up one of her books and is just immediately enthralled. Whenever he is not busy he is reading or even rereading one of her books and even begins to be teased by others for his slight addiction to her works.

Then when he and Sherlock is on the train investigating the murder that is when he gets an idea from both this and one of her books.

Weeks later an aristocrat who had been acting as a loan shark was found dead on a train in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside, just like a murder from one of her most famous book…

But what William did not know is that she was on that same train…

And of course she found the body…

As William was making his way back to his seat to join his brothers, he hears a blood curdling scream and he simply chalks it up to someone finding the body. Then the panicked woman is brought to her seat by the staff and she looks a mess, pale faced, tears rolling down her face, hyperventilating, all things someone should be after seeing a dead body.

She is being asked questions when she finally calms down enough and William’s ears prick up as he hears words he never thought he would hear…

“Oh god… this is my fault…”

He turns his head to the booth next to him and sees her in absolute terror as she speaks to the train conductor.

She is right next to him…

She is terrified, horrified even…

And she is beautiful.

After everything from that incident had settled and she is off at home, trying to work on her next work for the life of her but being horrified by what she just witnessed…

Then more deaths come to surface all with the same pattern…

They are based on her books…

The author is absolutely horrified, she is loosing sleep, not eating as she should, and has rarely left her house in weeks…

Then she gets a knock on her door from a certain detective who was hired to look into one of the deaths, Sherlock Holmes. While he may like her books, he has noticed the pattern like she has and has one request for her…

“I want to help you to solve these cases. Who better to solve murders based on books better than the author herself?”

At first she refuses and dismisses him, but then when she is laying in bed that night she realizes he was right.

Her drawing room becomes a mess of her old notes that she had tucked away from when she wrote her book, copies of her her books with dozens bookmarks in them, newspaper clippings all around, and evidence she had Sherlock get access to with his connections that she doesn’t have.

After days of pure investigation and nights of no sleep she finally was able to figure out where the next murder will be, just by what books are left…

But that’s the thing…

There is not a single work of hers left that this murderer has not take inspiration from…

The only thing left is the author, and she can only assume that she is the next target. So without telling Sherlock, she packs up her bags and fakes her own disappearance, to fool both the police and the murderer.

She spends so much time in the shadows, watching and waiting to see who looks into her disappearance, seeing how people react to it, but nothing, not a thing…

It frustrates her even further…

Then she finally decides to return home, feeling like a failure. Her house if just how she left it, even the papers in the drawing room that look like the work of a madman that she will have to clean up after her failure so she can go back to what she is good at, fictional murders not really ones…

No she can’t do that, that would only give the murderer ideas…

So she quits.

No one hears from her for months as she nods herself taking up a librarian position at a local library, at least she is doing something with her literature. She says goodbye to Mr. Holmes and tucks away all her old books and works in progress that will never be finished on the shelves to collect dust for the rest of her life.

At her time working there she gets a frequent visitor at the library, a Mr. William James Moriarty. He had a fascination with murder mystery novels and the two form a quick friendship over their shared love of them. Everything feels like a new start, a clean slate but then he had to ask…

“Will you ever write again?”

That question has her heart hurt because she adores writing, but to sacrifice lives just for what she enjoys, she would never. She shuts down his question quickly and excuses herself, but then avoids the scarlet eyed man as to not be asked that question again.

But as she is laying in bed one night…

She hears the sound of footsteps in her study downstairs…

She feels her heart stop…

She closes her eyes and prays whoever is there will just go away, but they do not. So she musters whatever courage she has left and slips out of bed to see who is there in her study that has been collecting dust for almost a year…

And she approaches the closed door she realizes whoever is behind them must be the person behind the murders that gave plagued her and-

“William?”

The pangs of shock she feels in her chest when she sees the face of William Jane Moriarty looking through her unfinished works that she shelved away what felt like years ago. She must have looked like a deer in headlights as the Lord of Crime looking up at her with a smile, his red eyes staring into her soul…

She is terrified, horrified even…

And she is beautiful.

“Your unfinished work, will it have an ending? Or perhaps will we have to write one ourselves? What do you think, darling?”

The weeks go by and the next time the author is seen in public again she has an engagement ring on her finger and the announcement is being made about their upcoming wedding. The talk of the aristocracy says that she finally has a husband who is willing to deal with her crazied ideas that ended up killing so many people, not knowing that she is on the arm of the man who killed them…

Just for her.

(I could kinda imagine it ending up as a situation like the book Misery by Stephen King where he has her finish her work even if she doesn’t want to, but what differs is that while he doesn’t necessarily keep her locked up physically he does mentally. Sure go run off, he isn’t going to stop his darling, but just watch the bodies stack up pin ways she imagined, he is using her own mind against her which is the most terrifying of prisons. Then soon fear turns into dependency, she becomes terrified of him leaving her because now she has no where else to go but him so he has no need to hide her away when she clings to his arm like a terrified and wounded animal.)

#william moriarty x reader #moriarty the patriot x reader #yuukoku no moriarty x reader #yuukoku no moriarty #william james moriarty x reader #yandere william james moriarty #yandere moriarty the patriot #yandere yuukoku no moriarty

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delusional-dinosaurr · 1 year

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We're Moving Too Fast...Aren't We? (Guro Reiten x Reader)

You're enjoying a night out, on a rooftop bar with a few other WSL clubs, and your own team, Arsenal. It was WSL tradition to throw a big party in London for the end of season, usually this is only the major clubs as the others struggle to get to grips with near relegation. Today's team attendees were yourselves at Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, The Manchesters and Villa.

"Come ooooon Y/N it's time to dance" Your mate Victoria Pelova slurs at you. You approach her and steady her with your arms.

"Think that's enough to drink now Vic, don't want you vomiting over the carpet in our house" You smile, helping her find a chair and some water, Viv takes over on 'motherly duties' so you can walk away and be with the others.

"Going on the pull tonight Y/N?" Alex Scott nudges your side. She always gets an invite alongside many other retired players, a lot are still very close friends with the teams they played for.

"Nah, you know that's not my thing anymore" You wink at her.

"Y/N I've seen you kissing multiple girls on the same night, why not here!" Leah nudges you.

"I don't like to mix business with pleasure" you joke, asking the bartender for another glass. “For the record, that was a joke. I’m not like that anymore, I’ve matured from the partygirl I was when I was 19! Magda helped a lot with that”.

"Well at least flirt around a bit, it's always fun to watch how quickly you work your magic" Leah says, convincingly.

"If you need tips on how to pull you could've just asked Lee" You tease. "but fine, I'll do it, what harm can it do".

"Okay challenge for tonight, a Chelsea girl" Alex wiggles her eyebrows at you, both you and Leah visibly shudder at the word 'Chelsea'.

"For one night fine, but mark my words, you'll never find me dating or sleeping with a Chelsea girl" You shake your head walking over to the dancefloor drink in hand.

You dance with a few of your friends, one of those being Magda, even if she is still Chelsea through and through she was like a mother figure to you during your loan spell at Linköpings when you were much younger. She sees you glancing around and stops you with her hand on your chest, letting out what seemed to be a sigh.

"Y/N... Really? I thought you grew out of this during your year in Sweden with me" She smacks your shoulder.

"It's for Leah's entertainment,and for a bet… and it's a Chelsea girl" You shudder again, making Magda laugh and nudge you.

"Well here's some advice. They don't like the gunners and wouldn't want to flirt with one, but I've heard Guro, Niamh and Jessie all say something somewhat nice about you" She sighs, gesturing over to the girls.

"It's only some flirting to show Leah I'm better at flirting than her" You offer a small smile "Promise I won't be sleeping around or trying to get with one of them" she holds out her pinky, which you interlock yours with hers.

You dance over to the Chelsea girls and greet them somewhat politely, getting hugs from all three.

"You guys had an insane season, congratulations" You hold your drink up to them, which they do in response as you all sip your drinks.

"So what brings you over here?" Jessie elbows you.

"My girls are boring or waaaaay too drunk to be dancing with me" you chuckle, sliding up a bit closer to the group.

“Reckon you’ll ever play for us Y/N?” Niamh smirks at you cheekily.

“Absolutely not, you won't catch me dead in a Chelsea shirt” You grimace, causing the three girls to laugh at your response. “Now what about you guys wearing a Y/L/N shirt to an Arsenal match one day in support of the better team?”.

“Not a chance” Guro says, rolling her eyes.

“I bet I can get you wearing an Arsenal shirt to one of my matches by the end of this year, in support of me” You smirk at Guro. Jessie and Niamh seem to be deep in another conversation with Magda and Pernille to the side, leaving you to work your magic like you told your friends you would do.

“It’s so on, if you fail, you can wear a Reiten shirt at one of our matches, I’ll get you front row seats so you can admire the view” She winks holding out her hand which you shake, sealing your bet.

“Oh believe me I am enjoying the view already” You look at her eyes and give her a soft smile.

“Wait a second…are you doing what I think you’re doing?” She questions.

“Depends on if you like it or not” You mumble, suddenly feeling slightly nervous. This was unlike your usual behaviour when it came to flirting. As you’re feeling the nerves you look into her eyes and feel yourself melt slightly at the soft look she’s giving you.

“And what if I do like it?” She says in a more suggestive tone “Is this the great Y/N getting nervous? Never thought I’d see the day”. “If you do like it, then I’d suggest we take this to the dance floor” You nod over to the dancefloor where many of your friends are dancing together. “Oh and I don’t get nervous, even if it’s a beautiful woman like you”. You whisper in her ear and see a very faint blush on her face. You smile to yourself as you both walk to the dancefloor hand in hand.

You dance together for a while, still engaging in conversation with each other. As the night goes on the drinks continue flowing and you feel yourself getting more and more confident, making somewhat bolder moves and both getting drunker.

━━━━━

“åh herregud!” You hear as your eyes shoot open. “What the hell, why are you here?”.

You look around and have absolutely no idea where you are, apart from the fact Guro Reiten is sat up next to you in a bed that you’re both sharing.

“It’s okay, we’re fine” You calm her down. “Now, how the hell did we get here? Where are we?”

“My apartment, and I have no idea how we got here together” She sighs, you admire her morning hair, messily laying on her shoulders. The light coming in through the blinds of her room makes her eyes glisten and skin glow. Wait what?

“Okay question one, do you live here alone?” You ask her, she shakes her head. “Oh my god you have a girlfriend? Shit I’m so sorry, fuck, I should go” You panic and start standing up to get ready to leave. “No you idiot, I share a house with Erin and Niamh” She drags you back down. “My question for you is, what do you think we did last night?”.

“Well from the fact we are both still pretty much in last night's clothes, not a lot” You chuckle, walking over to her mirror “Although I don’t remember me having these yesterday” you narrow your eyes at her in the reflection in the mirror whilst pointing at the trail of hickeys on your neck, causing her to blush.

“It could’ve been anyone!” She says with her eyes wide.

“Considering I woke up in your bed, I’m very sure on who it was” You roll your eyes. You sit in silence for a few seconds, both getting your bearings on what happened, how and what you’re gonna do to get away with it.

“Do you actually remember much from last night?” She asks you, leaning back against the mattress, you follow her lead and lay next to her. Her shirt has risen slightly from her flopping onto the bed and you can’t help but admire her body. “Eyes up here Y/LN” she smirks as you quickly snap your eyes back up to hers.

“I remember enough to have a good understanding of why I’m here. For the record, Leah and Alex dared me to pull a Chelsea player but as soon as we started talking that all went out the window” You break eye contact, your nerves get the better of you until you feel a hand gently moving your chin to force you back into eye contact with her.

“I guessed that after you snuck your way over to our table, they were watching you the whole time. I also really enjoyed time with you Y/N, I can make myself nice and free today if you want to re-do last night… but with less alcohol please” She says holding her stomach, you nod back enthusiastically.

“I can run home and grab my car? I can drive us somewhere if you like, as it seems we only live around the corner from each other!” You say excitedly. “That and I need to try to sneak in without waking up Vic and Gio, that’s going to be a nightmare”.

“Meet me outside in an hour? That gives me time to freshen up and look less like I had a night with an Arsenal player” She fake heaves, you roll your eyes in response and walk to the door of her room.

“WAIT” She grabs your hand “I think the girls are downstairs, let me distract them and I’ll say Cereal when you’re clear to escape” She says walking out the room. You sneak down quietly and hide around a corner from the girls.

“No I didn’t sleep with Y/N! Jesus Erin, you’ll never catch me with a gooner” She laughs. You hear a gasp from Niamh, instantly you feel that dreadful feeling of being caught.

“Did she do this?” Niamh continues fussing over Guro “In all seriousness I’m proud of you for getting some Guro, it’s about time”.

“Ugh, can we stop talking about her now, have we got any cereal in the kitchen or did you eat it all Erin?” Guro says, you notice the codeword and slowly make your way to the front door of the house and manage to escape barely making a noise. Rather than the walk of shame, you opt for an Uber home rather than walking for 10 minutes, still unable to fight that nauseous feeling.

When you arrive home you open the door to find Vic passed out on the floor in the living room, you start making her a coffee to help her with the wake up, alongside some painkillers. You lift her gently off the floor and place her on the sofa whilst making her drink, she starts waking up too thankfully.

“Morning Y/N, still wearing last night's clothes?” She jokes.

“Didn’t even make it to my bed, you’re expecting me to go through all that effort to get dressed too?” You lie.

“Morning you two” Gio sings as she walks in with a starbucks in hand.

“Where were you, young lady?” You joke, hands on hips.

“Oh I stayed at Katherine’s, I can see you two got home safe?” Gio says looking over at you both still in last night's clothes.

“Oh yeah, I got in a little after this one, but all in one piece!” You say nudging Vic.

“God how drunk was I? I don’t even remember getting home, bet it was Viv” Vic sighs. You sigh, relieved that your housemates have no suspicions of you staying out last night.

“Anyway as much as I love you both, I need to get out of these clothes, and get some shopping done” You say.

“Can I come?” Vic asks.

“Nope, unless you really want to go with me to test out which guitar I want for 3 hours” You smirk.

“Nevermind, I’d rather sit at home eating ice cream” She kisses you on the cheek as she walks off to the kitchen with the coffee you made her, you make your way up to your room. As you get dressed after your shower, there’s a gentle knock on your door.

“What? I already said I’m going guitar shopping!” You grumble. “It’s me” You hear Gio on the other side “Are you decent?” you open the door for her to come in, you’ve not put a shirt on yet but have your sports bra on.

“Now, Vic may believe your lies, but I do not. Where were you last night?” She squints at you.

“I’m not lying, I was at home just after Vic” You shrug, Gio chuckles.

“I’m sorry Y/N, I won’t tell on you, but I can tell” She gives you a soft smile.

“But..how? You weren’t even home?” You sigh.

“One, you set off our ring doorbell with motion just now. I’ve deleted the recording of you fumbling your way in earlier. Two, your neck tells me a different story” She smirks poking at one of the dark red marks “Now I’ll keep your secret safe, on one condition. You tell me who it was”.

“You know I love you right?” You look at her guiltily, again she gives you her squinted look. “It was a Chelsea player”.

“I can’t believe you! I don’t even care who it is! If the team finds out you’re so fucked” Gio gasps. You throw a shirt on and get ready to leave whilst Gio is still fussing about your ordeal.

“You’re meeting up with her, aren’t you?” She smirks.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not” You say whilst still grabbing your stuff to go.

“Listen, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking… This is massively out of your normal behaviour. The Y/N Y/L/N doesn’t do dates. So this is clearly something special. I promise I won’t tell anyone, and I can’t wait for you to tell me all about your date later” Gio wraps you in a tight hug and kisses your cheek. “Now go get your girl!” She smacks your back.

You jog out of the house yelling a ‘bye’ and ‘love you’ to your housemates. You get in your car and drive to Guro’s apartment. As you pull up outside you see her having an animated conversation with Erin and Niamh and lower the window slightly to hear the conversation.

“No Erin, it's not some random creep I’ve met. I promise she’s really nice” Guro groans.

“I trust you, but I don’t trust her. Let me meet her. Is that her now?” She points directly at your car and starts walking towards it alongside Guro and Niamh. You decide to hop out of the car and greet them.

“Absolutely not, not a chance. Guro why a gooner!” Erin groans. You two have hung out a few times together post Chelsea and Arsenal matches so you are on good speaking terms.

“Hey nothing wrong with us!” You joke back smiling at Erin.

“Right, I’m going all protective on you now” She nudges Guro to get in your car whilst you two talk. “What are your intentions with Guro, and what happened last night?”.

“I had a feeling this was coming” You sigh “I know I have this history, but that’s all it is now. My intentions with Guro however? I don’t even know, but I do know I will treat her with the respect she deserves. I’m sorta new to this whole going on a date thing and I’m super nervous and I really like her…and now I’m rambling” You blush, Erin starts grinning, Niamh gives a nod.

“Our protective duties are done. She’s all yours. I trust you Y/N” Erin gives you a hug.

“But you didn’t even let me tell you what happened last night?” You question.

“Ah we don’t need to know, because I let you two and Niamh in last night. You were like giggly schoolgirls. You and I had to carry Guro up the stairs and that was a disaster, followed by us doing the same for Niamh. I was only joking about being protective, I know you care, even if it has only been one day of getting to know her and for the record, I had a feeling you guys would hit it off one day” She winks. You laugh and have a small conversation with the two of them before leaving for your date with Guro.

“Have fun you two! But not too much, yeah?” Niamh jokes as you start pulling the car away. As you get on the road you put your playlist on in the car and sit comfortably in Guro’s company.

“What did they say to you?” She asks, looking over to you. You keep your eyes on the road.

“Well, they went all protective, I rambled, turns out Erin let us and Niamh in last night and we carried you up the stairs, and then had to carry Niamh too. Now she thinks she’s cupid as she expected us to get on well” You chuckle, Guro groans.

“I swear to God she’s so annoying” Guro whines. “What did you ramble about?”.

“You” You say quietly.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you” She teases.

“You know what I said. You, I rambled about you. How this is all very new to me and even if it has been less than 24 hours I already really care about you and think you deserve the world” You ramble “Look what you’ve done I’m rambling again!” You grumble.

“Well I think it’s cute” both you and Guro start blushing. Never in your wildest dreams did you think you’d ever be such a mess for someone.

━━━━━

"...and that's how I missed the Derby last year" You chuckle as Guro laughs along.

"To think I thought it was a sport related injury, not tripping down the stairs drunk trying to chase Frida" She laughs. You stir your coffee and admire her, you find yourself getting lost in her eyes once again.

"You know, you aren't all that bad Y/LN" Guro smiles, placing a hand on yours.

"Same with you, Reiten" You give her hand a squeeze.

"I don't wanna go back to the girls after this, I'm gonna get quizzed" Guro groans.

"You can always come over to mine? Vic and Gio will be home but we can order some food in and chill?" You offer, she nods in response.

━━━━━

You open your door and you're hit with silence, either they're in their rooms or out.

"The coast is clear, go go go" you say, dragging Guro in. Luckily you were right, neither of your housemates were home. Your phone vibrates in your pocket.

Gio - GURO REITEN?!

As you both settle on your sofa you respond to Gio.

Y/N - Damn doorbell… Just a friend x

Gio - Liar. Keep your naughty business to your room please, we will be home soon (I didn't tell Vic)❤️

You sigh as you lock your phone, look at Guro who's also looking at your phone.

"Just a friend?" Guro looks at you.

"Well… I didn't wanna put a label on it, that's a lot of pressure for us" You mumble.

"Well I don't wanna just be your friend Y/N" She strokes your cheek "I like this side of you, nervous, caring and a real charmer".

"I try, I try" You chuckle "But in all seriousness, I feel the same. How about… Dating?" You suggest.

"As long as that means I can do this…" She leans in and kisses you, you get carried away until you hear the door being unlocked, you both run up the stairs and hide from your housemates who luckily didn't spot you.

"That was a close one" Guro breathes out heavily.

You hear a hello downstairs from someone you didn't expect.

"Oh my god Frida's home from visiting her girlfriend!" You instantly jump up "I'll be right back! FRIDA FRIDA FRIDA" you run down the stairs yelling and jump into your best friend's arms.

"Oh hello Y/N, I missed you too" Frida laughs, hugging you tightly. "Where are the other two?".

"They went out, they'll be back soon though!" You smile "You should probably unpack and shower, I'll leave you to it!" you say as you run back up to your room. Guro is just sitting on your bed, admiring your room and looking at your medals and awards.

"Enjoying yourself?" you smile, she nods. You pass her your phone with your local Chinese takeaway menu on it so she can pick what she wants, once you order you cuddle on the bed just chatting quietly.

"I can't believe I'm dating an Arsenal player" Guro groans.

"I'd be honoured too" You smirk.

"You're never getting me to wear your shirt, national team maybe but Arsenal it's a hard pass" She kisses your cheek.

"What would it take to get you to wear an Arsenal shirt" You ask her.

"Hmmm" she taps her chin thinking. You smirk and lean in to kiss her. "That won't work but it'll help your case". You connect your lips and carry on from where you left off downstairs. You lean over her and kiss her from above her, it continues getting fairly heated, quiet moans, shaky breaths.

"Hey Y/N your food is…. WOOOAH! I am so sorry! I didn't know you had someone up here… wait GURO?!" Frida shrieks.

“I would say it’s not what it looks like but… yeah” You sigh as you roll off Guro.

“Y/N, a word please? In private” Frida says, waving you out of the room and shutting the door. “Okay you know I love you a lot. But Guro has been through a lot, don’t play around with her, be honest and open and you’ll be fine”.

“Frida trust me, I don’t ever want to hurt her. Yeah it’s a lot for only a day of getting to know eachother, but there’s a connection we have and I can’t explain it. Ever since I first played against her a few years back I always felt nervous seeing her. She’s just so pretty and I used to find her somewhat intimidating. I wanted to get her attention but I knew she had a girlfriend and it’d just be seen as me doing ‘a Y/N’. Main reason I stopped partying and messing about, and she doesn’t even know it.” You ramble.

“Y/N…you really do care about her don’t you? I remember the last match you played Norway that you went all blushy when you did a shirt swap with her. It all makes sense! Y/N has a loooover” Frida sings.

“Shut uuuup!” You groan. “Now can I get back to my girlfriend but not girlfriend?” You whine.

“Yep, but on one condition, you tell the team when you’re official. Both teams that is” She smirks.

“Deal” You say as you open your bedroom door to go back in.

“Come sort out your food you two, or I’m stealing your spring rolls” Frida yells up the stairs. You instantly spring off the bed.

“NOOOOO!” You run down the stairs and tackle Frida, with Guro following behind, removing you from your friend and pinning you down.

“Traitor! You’re a traitor!” You say towards Guro.

“Us Norwegians stick together” Frida fist bumps Guro and you scowl at them.

You hear a commotion at the door followed by your other housemates walking in.

“Oh. My. God. We have a Chelsea player in our house, this feels so wrong” Gio jokes, going to greet Guro “I’m Gio, but you can call me Y/N’s worst nightmare”. Guro laughs and gives Gio a small hug. Followed by Vic. The two had brought home food for them and Frida so you all sit on the sofas and eat your food, engaging in chatter.

“Guro, why her though” Frida whines.

“Hey I heard her ramble to you through the door, I think just that alone was self explanatory” Guro shrugs, your eyes go wide. Guro hugs into your side.

"I never thought I'd see Y/N with a girlfriend. You're so happy and it's barely been a day" Vic grins.

“Yeah well, get used to it” You smile leaning more into Guro.

After a few hours of chatting, eating and watching shows your housemates decide to call it a night.

“I should probably get going, I’ve got training in the morning” Guro sighs, with a sad smile on her face “I had a lot of fun Y/N, I’m really glad we did have the guts to have a drunk sleepover”.

“Me too, how about I give you a lift home? That or you can always stay for the night? I’ve got some spare clothes and I can take you home in the morning and give you a lift to training, I have no plans tomorrow so I don’t mind hel-” You ramble until Guro breaks it with a gentle kiss.

“If it helps you stop rambling, I’ll stay tonight. How about we go out for dinner tomorrow…its a team dinner with partners at Chelsea so you’re more than welcome to go with me, that’s if you’d want to do that” She blushes. You nod in response.

“We aren’t moving too fast are we?” You chuckle “Because if so, I don’t care”.

“I think we’ve both had our eye on each other for a while, so I guess we are just making up for lost time” Guro smiles, squeezing your hand as you stifle a yawn.

“Right you, let’s go to bed” She pulls you upstairs.

━━━━━

Part 2 is already in the works :)

#woso x reader #woso one shot #woso imagine #guro reiten x reader #guro reiten #guro reiten imagine

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asalescommunity · 1 year

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Can an industry based on a fitness diet provide the diet in a correct manner for women who used to complain about the diet?

The diet can be provided based on a plan, and the diet plan is going to be designed for an individual who is living a different lifestyle with a professional career that is different than 30% of people are having.

An author Piotr Sienkiewicz

+48 721 951 799

Have a read about a sales training where ask a question that is relevant to a profession in a sales department.

#An industry #A fitness #A diet plan #A business plan #A private service #A private sector #A bank #A public service #A public sector #A business loan #A sales training in London #sales training london #Finance

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thegildedbee · 4 months

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Family/Laugh: May 12 & 13 Prompts from @calaisreno

The exterior nowheres that Sherlock inhabits can be charted by his footfalls as he wends his way through the precincts of temporary cities. The silent drift of assimilating interior nowheres, however, seems to leave no traces, even as he feels unseen changes taking hold. His suspension in the January North of a darkness that persists until late morning, and then quickly returns in the afternoon, intensifies his perception that he lives in a shadow-world, a lone dark figure extracted from the frozen rain that curtains his days.

The patterns he seeks to capture as he hunts amidst the ones and zeros of cyberspace are likewise intangible – extended solitary vigils as his fingers command the keyboard to winnow through the tangle of codes – as well as tangible, of meetings with the technological mix of people here at Tallinn’s crossroads: software developers seeking the leading edge at corporate labs, security experts at NATO’s Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, the underground hackers who traverse the landscape of the digital realm’s hollow earth. Both the intangible and the tangible are intense efforts to spy glimpses of Moriarty’s covert presence in the spaces between the ones and zeros, summoning up the networks and nodes of the intersecting spheres of finance, and energy, and communications, as made manifest in trafficking, and counterfeiting, and hijacking, across the physical and human worlds.

He’s accumulated an abundance of leads, some he’s near-certain he understands, and others he’s yet to decipher – but it’s enough to reveal to him his next move on the chessboard: St. Petersburg. He’ll take the train from Tallinn, without needing to step out for border control, which is handled en route. He’ll be leaving Estonia under a new identity; he hopes to keep Lukas Sigerson in his back pocket for later uses, but it’s time to make his presence difficult to trace: it's time to step away from Mycroft’s grid. He’s left seemingly inadvertent clues to allow Mycrofts’s people to (think that they’re) following him, along a pathway that connects the nefarious doings of Mexican cartels involved in establishing meth labs in Nigeria for the Asian market. Their pursuit of him will be turned to good account in dismantling that nexus, even when they realize he is elsewhere.

St. Petersburg is a hive of hacking activity, the physical site of the infamous Russian Business Network, which catered to the needs of cyber criminals. It’s not surprising that it is the city where Vladimir Putin lived, received his education, and joined the KGB, as an agent in its foreign intelligence wing, before tunneling his way to Moscow. Sherlock doesn’t believe that there are many degrees of separation between Moriarty and the dark internet of Putin’s hellscape.

He arrives at the end of Tallinn’s usefulness on a Friday evening. As he packs up his kit in the office space he’s made homebase through a courtesy loan in deference to his Norwegian technology credentials, some of the younger workers have swept him up into their murmurating flock as they celebrate the coming weekend in search of alcohol, bar food, and music. In London, Sherlock would have begged off such a request, were anyone intrepid enough to suggest it, and he would have been unperturbed at whatever anyone might think. But he’s not Sherlock, he’s Lukas, at least for a short while longer, and although his persona is reserved, businesslike and uninclined to make small talk, Lukas possesses an average quantity of affability; and remaining unobtrusive is best accomplished by being amidst the motions of others, rather than making himself conspicuous by setting himself off from the norms of sociality.

He did not, however, anticipate the karaoke session, which is putting a severe strain on the bonhomie he is channeling to Lukas, as it’s clear that he’s going to need to accede to accepting a turn in the spotlight, lest he put a damper on the good spirits of his companions. He nevertheless protests with a smile, holding out his hands, but any input he might have been able to exert on the decision-making disappears, when two of his impromptu friends conspire to tug him toward the microphone, explaining that all three of them will venture forth together, with a song they insist is dead simple to sing, and that the well-lubricated crowd will be delighted to join in with them in belting out the familiar refrain. Which is how he finds himself being carried along within a punchy, melodic stream that turns out to be excruciating emotionally, as the verses unfurl. He listlessly despairs, marooned, a hollowed-out laugh echoing inside his head in response.

. . . When I'm lonely, well, I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who's lonely without you And when I'm dreamin', well, I know I'm gonna dream I'm gonna dream about the time when I'm with you. When I go out (when I go out), well, I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you And when I come home (when I come home), I know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be the man who comes back home with you I'm gonna be the man who's comin' home with you . . .

He’s exasperated at the universe conspiring to keep him unsettled, to deny him the solace of alone protecting him. He fears that he is fated to have any social contact whatsoever somehow conjure home and reminders of John. The song ends to raucous cheers, and the enthusiasm surges on, and he’s being importuned to name a new song of his own choice before being allowed to return to the table. He looks at the smiling faces helplessly, immobilized by the churning cacophony playing hide-and-seek inside his guts, incapable of conjuring up the simplest of answers. Undeterred, they jolly him along, prompting him to think of a film he’s recently seen, or club he’s been to, or a favorite television show. At the latter suggestion, his mind does slightly slip free, and there is John again, teasing Sherlock into watching another of his favorite shows, Sherlock pretending to be annoyed at being consigned to such a fate. He turns to the young people, and raises his voice to speak into the nearest person’s ear to be heard over the noisy crowd, and says with a question in his voice, Peaky Blinders? He seems to have pleased them, as they fiddle around to pull the selection, bouncing in high spirits and punching their fists into the air, as the music starts, a bell ringing out, and the slithering deep tones speaking of the edge of town, of secrets in the border fires, of a gathering storm -- and a tall handsome man, in a dusty black coat, with a red right hand.

As Sherlock listens to the song unspool, his mind wanders back to the show's themes, reminding him of a line of thought he’d been considering the last few days – that to focus singularly on Moriarty and faceless confederates is not quite the right way to conceptualize the dead man's web: that there must have also been family members in leading positions, positions of trust. One of the deep divides between himself and Mycroft originated in Sherlock’s refusal in uni to agree to work for SIS. Mycroft knew that he would never be able to trust completely any of the professionals who worked for him – after all they are spies working for money. To be sure, he wanted Sherlock to sign on to be able to appropriate his intelligence, but even more compelling was the fact that never having to question the loyalty of a brother would have made him an asset par excellence. Mycroft considers getting what he wants to be an inviolable law of the universe, and Sherlock doesn't think his brother will ever be able to truly forgive him for the rejection . . . especially given Sherlock's devotion to the inferior endeavors of dedicating himself to a life of metropolitan crime-solving. Family; family is what matters. A Moriarty is gone; but there are other Moriarties yet to be unearthed. ........................................................ @calaisreno @totallysilvergirl @friday411 @peanitbear @original-welovethebeekeeper @helloliriels @a-victorian-girl @keirgreeneyes @starrla89 @naefelldaurk

@topsyturvy-turtely @lisbeth-kk @raina-at @jobooksncoffee @meetinginsamarra @solarmama-plantsareneat @bluebellofbakerstreet @dragonnan @safedistancefrombeingsmart @jolieblack

@msladysmith @ninasnakie @riversong912 @dapetty

.............................................................................

#mayprompts2024 #calaisreno #sherlock bits and bobs #may prompts 2024 #johnlock

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geek-fashionista · 5 months

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A Business Proposal

A little while ago, I posted an interest poll for a series I'm planning. Since many of you responded that you were at least curious, I come today with... limited information. Limited, because the novel version of this series is currently being read by a literary agent.

But I've always felt that this story was too big to be contained in book format. Under a traditional publisher, I would lose the rights to my own property, so if they didn't want to see more of it, that's that for myself and the characters and the readers who fall in love with the characters. Self-publishing is harder. It needs to be a collaborative effort between writer and readers if it's going to succeed. Thus, I turn to the only audience I have with my "business proposal."

(Note: If you've been around long enough, you might recognize some of these characters from posts that have since been deleted.)

~*~

Working Title: Trainwrecks Length of Series: 8 seasons Length of Seasons: 24 episodes, 12 main and 12 bonus, posted biweekly. (Each season will last three months.) Episode Length: 1000-2000 words Setting: Seattle, Washington and its surrounding towns, between the years 2004-2015 Genre: Contemporary, YA to New Adult

Trainwrecks follows a diverse group of six best friends from high school to their mid-twenties, with all the romance, heartache, college and career decisions, and confusion that entails. Our main cast:

A bubbly, fat Puerto Rican girl with a passion for art and matchmaking (Ages: 14-25)

Her adopted, Argentinian brother, who is adept at music and pretty much nothing else (Ages: 16-27)

Their childhood best friend, an Asian/British/American guy who hides years of trauma behind a flamboyant and overbearing personality (Ages: 19-30)

His ill-tempered younger sister, who has just moved back to the United States from London after their parents divorced fifteen years ago (Ages: 14-25)

An equally bad-tempered Hawaiian/French guy with a love of photography and a hatred of bullies (Ages: 14-25)

The coolest, most beautiful Chinese girl you'll ever meet, who is fighting a sex addiction after a history of abuse (Ages: 16-27)

Main episodes will be written in story format. Bonus episodes will be in epistolary format: MSN chats, text messages, letters, blog posts, and eventually Twitter posts. Y'know, cuz Twitter didn't exist in 2004.

The main series (8 seasons, 24 episodes each) will be completely free to read and delivered directly to your email inbox. There will be character artwork, a bio page to keep track of everyone, a tie-in Tumblr account for memes, Spotify playlists for each character, and helpful things like family trees and relationship charts as well. Each season will have its own key artwork---cover art, if you will.

In addition to the completely free story, there will be extra content for paid subscribers and Patreon patrons, including but not limited to:

Sneak previews/early updates

Side stories

Back stories

Character and universe development notes

Entire AUs with different relationships or different genres

Money raised will either go towards paying artists or towards my student loans. And if the series gets really popular, I intend to launch a Kickstarter for physical copies that will include all the artwork and maybe some bonus items as well.

That's my business proposal. If you like it or have questions, comment on this post, scream in my inbox, chat me---do whatever but do it vocally because I need to know you're out there. And then, feel free to follow my Substack for updates.

#original fiction #writing #writeblr #original characters #writing community #writers on tumblr

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calamity-calliope · 1 year

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Taking a bit of time to address my thoughts on the New Sequence and why exactly they're so creepy.

Well, firstly, they're subtle. Very subtle. In most cases, a cult or religion is actively trying to sway the public to their side. And sure, the Sequence does it, but never obviously. The thing about Sequencers is that they can pop up anywhere, anytime, and seem inconspicuous enough but there's always something about them which refuses to sit comfortably with you. Loaning out your cottage by the observatory? This smiling, dark-spectacled "Surface astronomer" is happy to lease from you. It's almost normal. Almost. If you aren't the type that pays attention to your renters, you just might gloss right over it. That means it's working.

And you ought to wonder. Just how many live in London? How many masquerade are average citizens? You've heard there's a number of Sequencers within the Admiralty, but to what extent? They seem to be everywhere, yet on the average day, to the average Londoner, it's like they aren't there at all. But still they are, and they're busy.

Thus we get to their relation with the Dawn Machine. When one looks at a Sequencer, one has to wonder, is this fellow really their own? Or are they simply puppets of a false star? Thus far we can see that, appart from the constant chipper attitudes, and the fierce devotion to the Machine, they largely retain independent thought, and perhaps some aspects of their old personality. But there are some cases where we have to wonder if their words are really their own. Again, it's subtle. If the Machine does speak through its servants, it's smart about it. We don't yet know the full extent of the Machine's power; what it does, what it can do, and what it is going to do. The Sequence is highly secretive. We don't know the full capabilities of the Dawn Machine. For all we know, it could be much more than anyone ever imagined.

And above all, there's the looming threat which the Sequence poses. Sometimes you might forget about it, wrapped up in other things. Sometimes something horrible will unfold, or London will be threatened once again. But they are still there. Watching, waiting. They have an incredible amount of resources at their disposal, and they continue to amass more, by establishing connections across the zee and quietly infiltrating London's high society. They're always there, and they're dangerous.

That's what makes it frankly terrifying. It's a hidden danger and you have no idea how deep the roots go.

#I LOVE the writing for this faction #bravo Failbetter #they are my favorite but god are they creepy...#fallen london #sunless sea #the new sequence #the dawn machine

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hwan-g · 2 years

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DARLING. kim seungmin — 김승민

pair. bookshop owner! seungmin x f. reader | warnings. profanity, angst, unprotected sex, fingering, oral sex, slight exhibitionism | genre. dark academia, romance, love at first sight | word count. 8k

tags. @ughbehavior (@straywrds), @cb97percent, @j-0ne25, @hyuneater, @hyun-bun, @choigore, @danyxthirstae01, @hellishmoons, @lix-ables, @skz317cb97.

a/n. this was supposed to be out for his bday, but life happened. nevertheless, hope you guys enjoy!! reblogs are great, all writers appreciate them incredibly 🤍

synopsis. it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks. as you enter his life, as you walk out of it. he just needs one chance with you.

Cold, empty—wet.

A city devoid of sun, in a constant state of mourning. Century old buildings with their Victorian architecture and smell of humidity, the eternal reconstruction that makes it impossible to enter them, a church with no door, a river without bed, a shop with nothing to sell. They might as well be part of the scenery, now and forever. Occupied space and not much else.

There had been a point in time, though, and this is the part that’s important to Seungmin. There had been a time when these grand structures held great power over people—artists, especially. Endless sketches of the fabrications can be found in the Public Library, a place he used to visit quite frequently before he opened his business. Blueprints of the interior, books about the conformation and infrastructure going on and about continually, pages creating volumes, creating noteworthiness, establishing history.

He wonders if you’ll come today.

Kim Seungmin was born in Seoul, Korea on September twenty-first to a doctor mother and architect father. He strived tirelessly for most of his childhood and adolescent life for more than adequate grades, and a clean record, and when it was deemed appropriate, on the day after his seventeenth birthday, he left for London to join his sister at the University of Cambridge, an exemplary student with a bright future. He surprised everyone when instead of following in the footsteps of his parents and going for Medicine or Architecture, he chose Engineering with History of Art as his minor. A respectable career, granted, but not what he was supposed to do—not what had been predetermined for him.

Four years of nothing but rain, libraries, books, and dorm life, he’d finally graduated with Honors, and went to join the real world, with its many offers, all miserable and soul consuming. It didn’t take long for the masks to fall, the pretenses to seize. Seungmin was fucking over it, wanted nothing more to do with the path he’d led for all those years, nothing to do with his parents’ expectations, the appearances to be kept, the role he had to play, to maintain, so they can boast and gloat, and fill their bellies in their private fucking golf clubs, to their insufferable little friends with the pretty daughters, and the arranged marriages.

Yeah, fuck no.

What he did alternatively—he took a loan out. He opened a bookshop in Pimlico overlooking the Thames, and he never looked back. He lived with three roommates in a crammed-up apartment on Winchester Street, a tiny room with a twin bed, a desk and a refrigerator, until he was able to stand on his feet, and move somewhere nicer, somewhere private, and do not get him wrong, that took two entire years—years of learning the ropes of handling a business, of making orders, of studying his crowd and getting a feel of the area, and even then, sales weren’t booming, they weren’t even fucking flickering, till more café’s opened up, bringing people towards that part of the river, the hibernating one, with the sleepy tree branches looming over Seungmin’s head every time he walked to work. It was hard, being independent. But he did an excellent job hiding it, and after a while…well maybe he was just a natural pretender.

Eventually he got a bike. It was a used, secondhand thing, and he had to change the chain on it, but after that it worked just fine, so it was enough for him. With a ‘help wanted’ sign under his arm, pedaling the ten-minute ride to his shop, his only stop the local bakery where he purchases his warm cappuccinos and apple strudels every morning. The co-owner of the place, Han Jisung, always asks the same question upon arrival—the usual, then?

The usual. Seungmin was a creature of habit from a young age. He had to have a plan, an extensive list of steps to be taken, a routine. He thinks his life would’ve turned out completely different if he wasn’t like this; he would’ve ended up working a corporate job, a nine to five, sitting on a desk with a suit and tie, holding a briefcase, that kind of thing. Something simple, mind numbing. Instead, he chose the calendar, the extra assignments, the sleepless revisions. All which ended with him thousands of miles away, managing an establishment with no outside help. The point was—he needed to find someone immediately. He couldn’t possibly bear to manage everything on his own anymore, what with the seminars and people going in and out in a regular stream, only pausing for a couple hours at lunch time.

Sometimes, the strudel would go to waste. There’d be no time. Still, the usual. Why bother switching something that’s worked so well for so long?

“It’ll be raining for weeks, I heard. Better get yourself a raincoat if you want to keep riding that rusty bike of yours,” his friend advised him, handing him his order with a tight-lipped smile.

Seungmin mirrored his expression. “Will do, mate. Thanks for this.”

“No problem. Hey, don’t forget—you, me, the guys. Friday evening. Drinks at The Morpeth Arms.”

Here’s the thing. Seungmin never forgot, he wasn’t the forgetful type; in fact, he had a spectacular memory, something that helped him immensely during his academic career, and earned him a few nods of amazement, the casual ‘memory of an elephant, this one.’ No, Seungmin just hated social events, especially the ones that included drinking yourself into a stupor, traveling in packs holding on for dear life, and paying an enormous amount of money just for your liver to turn black later on. He’d rather be at home, eating comfort soup, watching his home country’s drama shows, and falling asleep on the couch, glasses inadvertently positioned on the very tip of his nose, every single time.

Yeah, Seungmin never forgot. He just had other things to do. Something warned him though, that he might not be able to get out of this one. Undeniably so. He’s bailed on his friend group more than two times in a row, had no good excuse for it today.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he replied, waving a quick goodbye, and making a run for it.

“Don’t just see, Kim Seungmin. Do!” he heard the boy yelling after him, but he had already passed the threshold of the bakery, securing his things in the basket on the front of the bike.

Jisung was a force to be reckoned with. Same age as him, of Korean descent as well, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts, he took over his mother’s bakery and revamped the entire place, a smart move, which turned out to work in his favor, tripling the monthly profits in the first six months of reopening. Things seemed to just…go well for him, whatever he did, something Seungmin envied, but tried his hardest to learn from. It's always been him, Seungmin, and Hyunjin, an Art major, currently in his last year of school, ever since he came to England. Jisung had an ex-girlfriend attending Education classes at the same university as the bookshop owner, and Hyunjin would tag along only with the promise that he’d be able to stay in the premises and sketch the gardens.

Eccentric at times, the two of them, but the interesting kind, the kind that makes you want to stick around just to witness where it is all heading. Although they could get quite annoying when they wanted to…

He unlocks the wooden door with the glass pane, the intense smell of books hitting him at once. Moving in the familiar area, he makes sure to secure his bike along the wall, so it doesn’t slip and hurt any customers, and goes to turn on the lights from the panel in the back, resting his breakfast on top of the checkout secretaire.

The small bookshop lights up like a tree at Christmas, the fairy lights he’d installed earlier in the year hanging gracefully amongst the bookshelves running from floor to ceiling, stacks upon stacks decorating each section, all alphabetized and in categories, all carrying a purpose. Seungmin fixes his glasses on his face, running a careful hand through his parted hair, before removing his brown coat, rolling the sleeves of his white, crisp shirt high up on his forearms, and getting to work.

There’s a sort of ambience he particularly enjoys, a specific scent to accompany the unique odor of books, of yellowed out pages or alternately, of freshly published novels, recently sewn together, a big section of them in front of the big window as soon as you enter, with an exclusive segment of Seungmin’s Top Ten Picks of the Month. More lights along the walls, lantern looking designs, made specifically to give off a vintage overtone to his business, and a couple velvet armchairs in the corners, with decent sized tables, and candles on each side to provide a moment of relaxation for the customers.

Cinnamon and vanilla. A tiny tea and coffee cart next to his workspace for anyone that cared for it, always filled and ready to be taken advantage of. When Seungmin cared for something, he took it to the absolute extremes, made it part of him entirely, took care of it tenderly, tended to it regularly. This is why, he thinks, he succeeded in marketing this place. Because it isn’t just a means of income for him, because he’s genuinely a book lover, an avid reader. Because this is the inside of his soul, perfect to a T.

He starts the playlist on his tablet, lowers it to a gentle hum, and stands for a minute, taking in the warm palette of colors around him, sipping on his coffee, tasting the apple wrapped in puff pastry. It’s exquisite, as always, Han really has a fucking talent, he thinks as he peals the sticker off the sign he picked up from the printer shop earlier, sticking it on the storefront window, capital black letters in Times New Roman looking outside.

Hopefully, someone will show up within the week. In the case no one’s interested, well—he’s fucked. No plan B there. He counts on the broke students pacing up and down these streets daily to fill in the position. No one else in their right mind would work at a bookshop, of all places of employment, and for that he won’t dare fault them, not one bit. He can pay a fair wage, but it’s nothing to start a proper life, he’s aware of that. It doesn’t change the fact.

A little after ten, it starts raining; the fat, gray clouds he saw looming over him on his way there, finally giving way to fat droplets of water, drenching everything in their wake, a blurry watercolor painting. Seungmin sighs, leaning back on his chair, as he checks off inventory and researches up-and-coming authors to feature for next month. He accepts that it might be a slow day, and gets comfortable in his seat, yawning and stretching his limbs.

You enter in disarray, dripping water everywhere, closing a bright colored umbrella halfway in your attempt to shut the door behind you. The tote bag is the first thing he notices, it looked heavy on your shoulder, worn down. Then your coat, a deep emerald green, an entire forest, how it looks from above, and then finally your face as you turn to him, your expression bewildered, staring down at him like a deer in headlights, slightly confused, but not lost, not entirely.

There you are.

“Good morning,” he greets, no other words present in his brain. How peculiar. He adds a soft smile, for good measure.

Normal. Nice job, Kim Seungmin.

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” you say, and he guesses you refer to the rain, so he nods, watching you observe his establishment with curious eyes, leaving your umbrella behind as you walk over to the bookshelves. “It smells nice here. Are you the owner?”

Seungmin stirs, stands up straight, his tablet forgotten in his hands. “Yes,” he mutters, doesn’t sound sure of it. “Yes, I am,” he repeats, louder this time.

You hum and disappear behind a row. He finds himself leaning to find you again, stare at you a bit longer. He snaps out of it almost immediately, clearing his throat. Three things, he grounds himself.

One, the beautiful girl from last time had just entered his shop, yet it felt more like she’d shook through the foundations of the building and was coming for his very life.

Two, said pretty girl rendered him stupid two seconds in your interaction. What did that say about him as a person? He wasn’t usually like this. He’s had dates, and girlfriends, but they never felt like this—a blow to his stomach.

Three. He absolutely fucking needed to learn your name.

“Are you looking for anything specific?” he asks, nervous, wanting to cut through the tension he felt overtaking his entire body.

“Mythology classics!” your voice is an echo, a perfect ring of a pitch, reverberating through him.

He gets up at once, jumping at the chance to be useful to you, and crosses the shop, closing the distance between you. You’re skimming through a thick book unrelated to what you’ve just told him, your eyes moving on the pages. He doesn’t dare disturb you, not at first, but then the more he looks at you, the more he can feel his heart attempting to jump out of his fucking chest, so he deems it dangerous business, and breaks the silence. Your hair is wet, he finds, he sees. He wants to dry it for you.

Dangerous fucking business.

“Those would be on the other side, after poetry,” he informs you, and your gaze devastates him. It’s bright, it’s glorious, it’s a place he’d want to explore, dive into, and lose himself forever.

It’s looking up at him, waiting for him to lead the way. He blinks and moves. Your perfume is something light and floral and Seungmin wants to offer you coffee with sugar, give you books for half off, hire you part time, let you consume him. What a strange feeling to have for an absolute stranger, serving your heart on a silver platter over a mere ‘hello,’ and hoping they’ll accept it.

It terrifies the living shit out of him.

“Thank you for showing me. I loved this place when I came last time—I thought you just worked here. It’s hard to find what I’m looking for elsewhere,” you give him an excited smile, bending at the knees in front of the small section to pick out what you need.

He wants to know everything about you. “Are you a student?”

“English lit, fourth year. Aha!” you jump up, and Seungmin steps back, surprised. You wave the paperback cover in his face. “The Oresteia. Need to write a dissertation on it.”

Seungmin speaks as if in a trance, quoting the play he knows by heart. “‘This was always going to happen. She’s been dead since the beginning.’”

You’re beaming, buzzing, electrocuting him. Then you go right back down, your search not over yet. “You’d read this? It is quite extensive, is it not, and you need to watch out for the translations, some are over complicated, and hard to understand…”

“I enjoy the classics,” he admits, shyly. “You’re welcome anytime around here. To browse, or…whatever. And if you can’t find something, let me know. I’ll order it for you.”

“You’re too kind, bookshop owner, aren’t you?”

Seungmin stares, stares, stares—at the top of your head, at your elegant hands reaching for the spines of the books, flipping them over, inspecting them. He prided himself on his eloquence, his extensive knowledge of words, his friends sometimes teased him, called him a ‘walking dictionary,’ but what does he do with all this, when he must force his throat to open, unable to voice those same words he’s studied over the years, grown familiar with. They’re all traitors to him now, he will never depend on them again. Ridiculous, what’s happening.

You’re a customer. He shouldn’t be treating you any more than, any different. Why then did that one, singular smile of yours make a home in him, right under his ribcage? He pictured butterflies erupting behind you, wild in color, beautiful in their movement, flying too close to the fairy lights. This was unreasonable. It would wreak havoc in him, rearrange his world view, have him fantasize about things that could not be, should not be. Your lips, he thinks.

Cherry flavored.

“What’s your name?” he caved in. He wanted to pull you up, feel you under his touch, see for himself if you were real.

You got up once again, two more books in your hands, as you tilted your head in question, strands of hair falling in front of your perplexed face. “Do you always ask your customers for their names?”

Seungmin swallowed. He’d been caught. What he had—honesty. “Only you.”

You smiled again. He almost clenched his chest. “Good save. I’m (Y/N).”

He repeated it internally. (Y/N), (Y/N), (Y/N) …he imagines it rolling off his tongue, your body under his, those delicate wrists pinned above your head, whispering it to you again, and again, and again.

Fuck him.

“Seungmin,” he extends his hand for you to take, trying really hard to conceal what contact with you would do to him.

He’s defenseless against his own desires, he realizes. He’s never wanted to take someone as his own so badly before. His mind was in overdrive, completely overwhelmed. You’ve exposed him, laid him bare—have your way with him. He’d do anything, he decides right then and there. Anything. Say the word and he’s yours.

You take it, kickstarting a whole new series of events and catastrophes inside him.

“Well, Seungmin, I’m done here, and I have class in about ten minutes, but I’ll pass by again soon, yeah? Ring me up, won’t you?”

You brush past him walking up to the register, and he’s left watching your figure slip away from him, so easily, no further regard to him, that forest green coat of yours flowing around you, your boots stomping with certainty. A fucking vision, you were. Stomping your way into his shop, into his life, into his heart. Oh, what is reason? What are words?

Metamorphoses, The Oresteia, Theogony. What you purchase. He hands you the books, per your request, and you slide the tote bag down to your arm, shoving the books in there at once. He watches all this, in awe, speechless, afraid to let you go, knowing he can’t beg you to stay longer. It’d be weird. And slightly creepy, he thinks but it’s more of an afterthought. He notices he doesn’t really care—anyone that would grant him the wish to stare at you more, to marvel at your cute features.

“It was nice to meet you!” You grab the umbrella again and rush out of his life, the same you stumbled in.

He watches in mystified delight.

‘Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient,’ he remembers reading once.

He becomes half water. He waits.

Friday comes. Seungmin decides to go to the Arms, straight for them, no second thought about it, one and done, but then he procrastinates getting dressed, looks for his watch for ten minutes, and his keys are nowhere to be found, so he takes that as a sign he shouldn’t go. It’d be bad if he went. He shouldn’t go.

Then he remembers he doesn’t believe in the signs of the universe and locks his apartment behind him.

Two beers, then he’ll go home, he tells himself. Just enough so his friends can’t say anything to him, can’t be mad at him, will stop calling him incessantly, whining about how he’s neglecting them so, and what kind of a mate are you, Kim, not a very good one, eh?

Seungmin thinks he’s a pretty good lad, actually. He helped Hyunjin move this past summer and has offered many a solution to Jisung’s never-ending on-and-off relationship with that indecisive girlfriend of his. Hasn’t committed a crime in his life, not even a petty one, not a traffic light. He’s never littered in all the years he’s been conscious about his person. He’s been an upstanding citizen, and a supportive friend. He’s just a bit of a homebody, and when has that ever hurt anyone, really.

The pub is filled to the brim by the time he arrives, incredibly loud, with a game playing in the background. He finds Jisung easy enough and goes to him, to that table he frequents all the way to the wall by the bar and slips his coat off wearing it on the back of the chair.

“Couldn’t have picked a Sunday, yeah?”

Jisung claps his shoulder and shakes his head. “You’d complain about any day of the week, Min, so just sit here and look pretty like you do. Hyunjin’s bringing us drinks.”

The baker’s hair had faded to a light brown from the August sun back in Seoul, his yearly vacation, and just as Seungmin is about to make a joke about it, Hyunjin enters his vision holding three pints of beer, muttering excuse me’s to the table next to them. Blonde hair, soft looking cardigan, tall, long limbs and all, full scholarship artist-to-watch-out-for Hwang Hyunjin, on his way to an amazing career.

“Would you look at who the cat dragged in—my God, Kim Seungmin, is that really you? Gracing us with your majesty’s presence? I must be dreaming!”

His ‘majesty’ sighed and grabbed the beer, an unamused look on his face. “You know, surprisingly, this isn’t making me want to show up any more than it makes me want to dump both of you and find new friends. About time, I say,” he drawled. “Cheers!”

The two men looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Cheers, fuck it,” Jisung exclaimed.

Hyunjin turned elegantly in the chair, legs crossed, mischievous expression on. “What have you been up to, huh? Who’s the girl?”

Seungmin froze, then reassured himself they had no idea about you, and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose—a habit that gave him away. The blonde ‘aha!’’d and bumped his elbow against Jisung’s, giddy as ever.

“See, I knew it.”

Jisung didn’t look particularly convinced, though. “Where would he even meet a girl, Hyun? The only dates he’s been on for the past year have been with his TV.”

“Ouch, bro.”

He wasn’t wrong, yet Seungmin wanted to let him know—about the girl that walked into his bookshop, has swept him off his feet. Just so he stops talking shit, just so it can finally set on him; that you’re real, that you happened. How you will never stop happening from now on.

Instead, he scoffed. “Fuck you, Han. You’re one to talk with that toxic shit you’re pulling.”

Jisung had the audacity to look shocked, and even appalled at the accusation. “I’m hurt you think I’m somehow at fault with how I’m being treated. I should just break it off once and for all, show you fuckers.”

Hyunjin casually sipped on his beer, palmed a few sunflower seeds. “It’s not about showing us—it’s about showing yourself, baby.”

Seungmin chuckled at that, chuckled even harder at Jisung’s blown out face, with the puffy cheeks and the big, wide eyes. He’d missed this, how carefree it all felt. It brought back memories, reasons why these people were close to him, why he could never get rid of them. They kept him sane. And gained him points with the ladies—Jisung’s humor, and Hyunjin’s angel features were a double threat. He just completed the group with the boy next door vibe, and sharp styling choices.

“Where’s Jeongin?” he asks, opening the bag of crisps laid out on the table.

“Late night studying, he’s already driving himself against a wall,” Hyunjin replies, a seed between his teeth.

“Chris has a late session, as well,” Jisung adds. “Music majors—perfectionists.”

It was at that point that you walked in. Seungmin hadn’t noticed you, not until his friends looked towards the door, and then looked again, making him curious. It was indeed you, he concluded after blinking several times, you, the most beautiful fucking girl in there, searching for empty tables with—a guy. A guy taller than you, taller than him, and fuck him, he didn’t need to see that, he didn’t have to know who you hung out with, if you had a boyfriend and how long you’d been together—he could do without all those things.

But now they’re overtaking all available space in his mind. Now there’s green inside him, eating away, molding, rotting away everything, and he’s jealous, he’s jealous, he wants you, he wants you alone, single, to himself, forever—

“She’s cute, no?” Jisung comments and nudges him.

For a moment, just for a moment, Seungmin takes off his glasses and glares at his best friend, filled with fury and green, green, green, but then he comes to his senses, reasons that Jisung hasn’t got a clue who you are, what you are to Seungmin, and so with that he breathes. He breathes and downs his beer, fuck the crisps, fuck the plan.

“It’s her,” he confesses.

Hyunjin leans in, suddenly very interested, and Jisung furrows his eyebrows, clearly confused. “What do you mean?”

Seungmin looks at you again, sees the hand around your waist, the casualness of the movement, and doesn’t want to jump into conclusions, doesn’t want the conclusions to jump him, but he’s fairly certain, he’s almost a hundred percent—

“The girl that’s kept me away, let’s say.”

At first, “No fucking way,” but then Hyunjin studied his friend’s expression, the unwavering gaze, the set of his mouth, the defeated slump of his shoulders, and his head tilted, his own mouth hung open, stared.

“I’ll be fucking damned,” he deadpanned.

“But who’s that dude, then?” Jisung questioned, hanging off the edge of his seat, thirsty for the gossip.

“No idea.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“Customer.”

“Kim Seungmin!” Hyunjin gasps, a hand on his chest, over his heart. “The scandal!”

Jisung rolls his eyes. “Don’t listen to him. Is she aware of your feelings?”

Just as Seungmin was about to answer, the entire pub breaks out in boo’ing, the team on the TV losing dramatically, the place vibrating, and his fists tighten at the sound, his whole body alert, aware of you, in the same space as him, outside of the magic of his bookstore, outside of the owner/customer dynamic.

“I’ve only seen her twice, Han. My feelings don’t even make sense to me.”

A devilish smirk spread across the blonde’s face. “I think you want to fuck her, Min. This sounds like an attraction to me.”

Jisung slaps his hand on the table and points at his face, nodding his head. “That’s an excellent observation, my dear Hyun. Kim, you just need to get her out of your system.”

Seungmin groans and gets up, grabbing his empty glass of beer. “Shut the fuck up. Anyone need a refill?”

The men glance at each other’s half empty beers, slightly concerned. “We’re good, mate.”

The truth was, he had thought about the possibility. What he’s felt for you he hasn’t felt for anyone, not this strong, not this constant, even in your absence, especially in your absence. You should’ve been just another English literature student shopping for books to him. That should’ve been it.

It wasn’t. It didn’t feel like it could be.

Waiting for the beer, he dared a peek at you. You sat with your back facing him, your head thrown back at something that guy had said, the other members of your party smiling brightly at you. Your hair was down, moved with you. Seungmin could bring your scent forth in his mind, the flowers, the sweetness that surrounded you. It physically hurt to ignore you, to pretend this wasn’t killing him. He needed more, he needed to pull you away, he needed to vomit all this out; the attraction, as Hyunjin eloquently put it, the heart stabbing, the turning of his stomach—the fucking boner he got first time he saw you in that dainty dress of yours.

He needed you to know, to make a decision. He wouldn’t sit still, there’d be no sleep for him until he did something about it, until you were aware of this, whatever the fuck it was, also.

“I’ll come back for this,” he informs the bartender, and his feet carry him before he’s even concluded thinking about it before he even sets on it.

“Excuse me,” he says loudly. The entire table turns to him. You turn to him.

“Bookshop owner!” you grin at him, and he’s at ease at once. He doesn’t need anything else. “What a coincidence. How have you been?”

You’re kind, then, you don’t shun him away. He’s chosen well. Seungmin feels his heart blooming, expanding, threatening to take over. You’re kind to him. You don’t know him, not as well as he wanted you to, but you still chose decency. Did he deserve it with the thoughts currently swimming in his head? Probably not.

He spares one glance for the hunk of a guy sitting opposite you, only one, not more than that, because he might be half his size, but Seungmin had always been exceptionally strong whenever he deemed it necessary. Then his eyes are back on you, and God, why did he ever look away?

“I’ve been well,” he touches his glasses. Catches himself. “Could I please steal you for a moment?”

Your eyes widen a bit, hands holding the table, ready to pounce on your feet. “Sure, but why? Is everything okay?”

Seungmin nods, offering you a soft smile and his hand. “Everything’s fine. It’ll only be a moment.”

“Okay,” you turn to your friends. Seungmin looks at his, already staring at him. Hyunjin winks. Seungmin blinks.

“I’ll be back guys.” You grab his hand, bringing him back, setting him on fire.

He tries to hide, push it all down, away from you, because he needs to be careful. One wrong move, he tells himself. One wrong move and that’s it. He opens the door for you, walks out after and into the chill of a September night. At least it’s quiet, at least he can hear himself think. One wrong move, it repeats, one wrong move…

“I apologize for taking you away from your friends,” he starts, walking to the side of the building to stand under a birch tree, almost completely devoid of leaves by that point. You follow, patient, kind.

“Oh, that’s—” you wave your hand, pft’ing. “They’re just classmates. We’ll be working together for a while.”

Just classmates. Seungmin stands up straight to that, in his full height. Just classmates you say, but that hand didn’t look friendly, that hand looked exactly how Seungmin feels about you, protective, territorial. You thought nothing of it, because that’s who you were, he could tell, you didn’t take things too seriously, you were alive, kind, kind, kind, what was another word—innocent.

He licked his lips, gathering the courage required to say what needed to be said, what needed to spill out his chest. He stood close, you stood closer. You were oblivious. For Heaven’s sake. This would be the hardest thing he ever had to utter.

“I—have no other way to say this, (Y/N) so, please just—fuck,” he chokes out a breath, looks you right in the eye. “I’m completely enamored by you. You have all control over this, you can curse me and walk away right now. But you need to know. I want to take you out.”

At first you just stared at him, the words slowly registering in your ears. Then, you opened your mouth to speak—closed it. Then opened it again, taking a step towards him. He remained in his place, hands in his pockets, afraid he’d reach out otherwise. He had no right, not until you gave him permission.

“You’re very handsome, you know that?” you say, placing a hand on his cheek. He doesn’t breathe, he doesn’t think. Your eyes are dark against the backdrop of the moon. Nothing moves. “And sweet, and interesting. I’m—nothing in particular. Seungmin, you’d get bored of me.”

“Never,” he’s quick to retort. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done to me, have you darling? From the moment you walked in my shop—that was it. I was done for.”

You shook your head, your fingers stilling in their caress, your hand goes to drop—his own shoots out, holds it, keeps it there, wills it to stay, desperate to show you.

“You really are very sweet,” you inhale. “No one’s ever said they want to take me out. No one’s asked.”

Seungmin doesn’t understand why, doesn’t want to ponder over it. He’s here now, and he wants you. He’d show you; he swears.

“I’m saying it. Go out with me, darling. If you hate it, you don’t have to see me ever again.”

You smile at that, your lips quivering. “Shame. I really like your bookstore.”

He smiles back. “I really like you.”

You bite your lip, and then you nod. “Okay.” A moment. “Could you kiss me, Seungmin?”

He needn’t be told twice. Pulling you closer by that arm extended on him, he closes in around you, smashing your lips together. It takes everything in him not to groan into your mouth, the softness of you, your smell, all driving him crazy, all intoxicating him, rendering him unable to think straight. You melt into him, something he loves, and he guides the kiss, his arms wrapping around that waist that he’s seen being claimed, bunching the fabric of your shirt in his fist, tightening his grip around you, devouring you.

He'd like to slip inside you, fuck slow, deep strokes into your cunt, bring you into a state of deliriousness with his cock. He can already imagine how good you’d take him, how you’d open for him. Buried in between his thighs—Heaven. Seungmin walks you to the bark of the tree and pushes you against it, deepening the kiss, his tongue pushing past your lips, exploring your mouth, tasting the ale you’d been drinking. He’s having incoherent thoughts now, nonsensical things; how he’d like to drink you, let the very flavor of you invade the top of his mouth, fill his senses, allow you to run down his throat, sip into his every pore. Fuck him, he’s whipped, isn’t he?

“There’s no going back from this, darling,” he pants against your mouth. “I’m never getting over you—never getting over this taste.”

You pull him back in. “I don’t want you to,” you whisper, your lips curving.

“Sunday, after six. Come,” he mutters, his fingers tangled in your hair, holding your head in place. You gaze up at him. “Promise me.”

“I do. I promise,” you kiss him again. “I’ll come.” Again, and again, and again.

Another day spent waiting.

By noon Seungmin thinks you won’t show. That it was all a lie, perhaps an illusion of the full moon and one too many drinks. Then he checks out a freshman buying The Iliad, a tote bag on his shoulder, the warm scent of cinnamon coming from the pale cup he’s holding, and he’s sure you will.

You happened, you will.

Oh, to trust that someone won’t drain the blood from your heart. A treacherous road.

He must’ve drank three cups of coffee by the time the stream of customers slows down, signaling lunch time. He digs for the wanted pamphlet in his drawer of take-out menus, and calls the number at once, ordering a barbeque chicken pizza with a side of cheesy bread. As he glances outside, clouds gathering already, the sky gray, dull, Seungmin throws his head back, sighing deeply, and listens to the cashier informing him of his total at the point of delivery.

“Thank you,” he says and hangs up. ‘Do you know if she’ll come,’ he wants to add, but he doesn’t, because that’d be crazy, nonsensical. Still, the question—it stands.

He breaks down boxes, organizes book labels and invoices, and even dusts the shelves. Five pizza slices and a heartburn later, Seungmin sinks back into his chair, and decides that time will not help him today. The anxiety is eating at him, at the tips of him, like a parasite, slowly making him sick, feverish. He won’t be able to keep this up for long, he wishes he’d told you to come earlier, maybe this way this endless questioning would’ve stopped by now, maybe the heartbreak would’ve been easier to swallow with people around. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to handle closing down shop with no trace of you.

God, the waiting. Seungmin doesn’t like doing this, has only done it once before–he takes the scotch out, a bottle he’s kept since opening this place, and drinks two big gulps of it. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he thinks he might have to daydrink his way to getting you out of his mind. And the rejection. And the outline of your body on his. No other way about it. Alcohol or going mad, his two options.

Fuck him.

The clock on the wall behind his desk says five minutes to six. By that point he has no hope, no patience, no heart, no will–no scotch. He drags himself over to the door to flip the sign from ‘open’ to ‘closed,’ and he leaves nothing but the fairy lights on, an indication that the shop is closed, but someone’s still inside.

He’s not drunk but he’d like to be. One thing about Seungmin, why he doesn’t like drinking–it does nothing for him. His damn tolerance is too high. He can drink and drink and drink, but it will make no difference. Only thing he’ll be left with is a dehydrated, scratchy throat; more of an annoyance than a relief.

Seungmin sweeps, mops, then proceeds to put every single book in the wrong area back to its original place. That should take him a good while, he thinks, definitely–it doesn’t. It takes him ten minutes, because this is his store, he knows it inside out, he’s done this hundreds of times before, and why aren’t you here? You should’ve been here by now.

The glasses come off. He won’t go down that road, he can handle rejection, he’ll move on, you’re just–well, you’re…unforgettable. Haunting. All he can think about, all he wants, all he craves. Outside is pouring, thunder cracking, always a blurry watercolor painting now describing what’s going on internally, draining away any opportunity of you showing up. He tells himself he’ll stay until the rain calms down, until it’s safe to ride his bicycle.

He tells himself he will never get over you, but that the water will eventually wash you away. It has to. It’s six-thirty and you are nowhere to be found. A little more. He’ll wait a little more. Out of desperation if nothing else. He won’t be afraid to admit. He kissed you, he tasted you. He’ll wait. You’ll come, you have to. You kissed back. You–

You’re standing right there. Drenched, shaking that god awful umbrella, looking through the glass, pushing the door open–spilling into his bookshop like nothing happened. Like before. Like a story repeating itself. Forest green coat, hair sticking to your face, disheveled expression.

“I’m late, aren’t I?”

Are you? Seungmin’s knees almost give way. He exhales shakily, blinking at your drowned figure. You’re not. You’re not. You’re right on time.

“You’re soaking wet,” he notes, and comes back to life, taking long strides towards you.

You chuckle nervously, shivering, apologetic. He grabs the umbrella and leaves it by his bike, his hand staying in yours, tracing your fingers, feeling for himself that you’re really there, that you really came. You look up at him, wide eyed, mouth falling open, studying him.

“Better take this off,” he mutters, and waits for your approval. He removes the coat from your shoulders, shaking off the rain droplets, catching a whiff of that cologne he so adores. He’s a fucking animal, he can’t even be near you without his mind doing a complete one eighty on him.

“I’m sorry,” you start, watching him take care of you. “I…wasn’t sure if I should come.” His hands push your hair back, listening calmly. “Bookshop owner, I don’t–”

“Seungmin,” he cuts you off, his gaze snapping down to meet yours. “Say my name, darling.”

“Seungmin.” It’s breathless, it’s surprising. It’s perfect. His cock twitches in his tailored pants.

He bites his lip. “Will you let me remove your shirt, (Y/N)? You’ll catch a cold if you stay in these clothes.”

A single moment of silence, your eyes clouding with the same intentions. “Yes.”

He expertly undoes the buttons, exposing your white, lacy bra underneath, your breasts deliciously tucked in the cups, better than his dreams, better in every way because it’s reality. Seungmin wants to take his time with you, wants to take you out on a proper date, pay for you, make sure you’re having fun, that you enjoy being with him, establish a connection before he–

He thinks he can’t wait. He thinks if he doesn’t take you right here, right now he’ll fucking die. None of the internal struggle shows on his face. You wiggle off your shirt, and he lifts his arms to remove his vest. Picturing you in his clothes, in his shop, surrounded by your smell, and the smell of vanilla…a fucking dream. His Aphrodite, compliant under his touch, willing, those lips teasing, their pink tint inviting. Fuck it all to Hell. You look absolutely beautiful, the brown of the fuzzy fabric making you appear softer, if that’s even possible. He pulls you into his arms, falling victim to his own wants, his own desires. He holds you tight, your freezing body gradually warming up under his caress, flush against him.

“‘I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself,’” he quotes in your hair, his palm rubbing circles on your lower back, hoping you’d know. That you’d get it.

“Frank Kafka,” you answer with a breathy laugh. “‘What’s happened to me? It was no dream.’”

Something opens in his heart, tears itself out. There’s no stopping it. “My darling,” he whispers, and lifts you up. You gasp, his name falling from those lips. It happens fast, he walks you to the mythology section, in front of the window, a consequence he won’t think of until later, your back hitting the shelves, as your arms circle his neck. Seungmin kisses you, then. What’s there left to do? There are no words to describe this. You taste like rain and hard candy, and his fingers get lost in between your thighs, pushing aside fabric, and feeling the slick of your cunt. All reason escapes him, all but the sensation of your excitement for him on his digits. He kneels down, has to have a taste, needs to, for his sanity. His arm snakes around your ass and keeps you there, as his tongue comes in contact with your leaking pussy, lapping your juices, slurping loudly, shamelessly.

The back of your hand presses against your mouth, moans tearing through anyway. No one’s ever gone down on you, you didn’t even know how it felt, nevermind that it felt like this, wet and embarrassing, but so good, oh my God, so good, fuck, your fingers getting lost in the mop that is his hair, tugging, your breathing ragged, fast, your knees shaking, the smell of books engulfing you–

“You taste like Heaven,” he grunts, and his tongue gets replaced by his hand, as he makes his way back to your mouth. “Taste yourself, darling, see for yourself what you do to me, how am I supposed to stay away when–that’s right, fuck my fingers, go on, my love…”

There’s still water dripping from your hair, and he leans the side of his face on it, enjoying the coolness it provides while his entire body is on fire. You’re everywhere on him, he feels all of you, and his fingers curl inside you wanting that release, craving those broken moans he’s eliciting out of you to get louder, to deafen him, to fill the entire shop and stay, echoing over and over so he never forgets this moment, so he’ll always have you. You’re biting his neck, your nails digging on his shoulders, in his back, falling, going to his belt, coming to the buckle, undoing, all the while coming undone.

Right before you start spasming, he lifts you up again and slips inside you swiftly, cupping your face with one hand, his mouth taking yours in an open-mouthed kiss, cursing at how tight you fit around him. For one second, just one single moment, he does not move, no matter how much you want him to, no matter how you’re wiggling and arching, against all of his thoughts of fucking you into the bookcase to have and admire you whenever he wants. No, he marvels in the way his cock is throbbing inside you, all of you alight, in flames, and only then–only when you mouth his name, staring in his eyes desperately–only then he finally begins thrusting, causing you to wrap your legs around his torso, holding on for dear life.

“Is it supposed to feel like this–God, please, please don’t stop, never stop–”

Seungmin wasn’t planning to. Stopping was the furthest thing from his mind as his hips picked up pace, his thrusts angled, deep and hard, bottoming out every time, skin hitting on skin, your hot breaths mingling, mixing, one one one– You felt exactly how he imagined, and a thousand times better, Christ, your tits perfectly bouncing, your cunt squeezing him closer. Books fall, all around you, the sound of them magnifying what the two of you are doing, what’s in process, an altering of souls, because he knows this will never again be the same for him, this shop without you, it will always be more, more, more, he will fuck you over every surface, he will make you part of him, he swears, you’re never leaving, not when your juices are the only thing that can get him drunk, not when you sound this hot moaning his name, his name, it’s never vibrated through him like this before, a name, you make it holy, you make it matter–

“Cum with me, cum with me Seungmin, please, let me feel you, fuck, fuck, fuck–”

He’s your servant, he would do anything you asked. He comes with a ferocity unknown to him, panting, sweaty, holding on to you, drilling the last bit of cum deep within your walls, his hands holding, squeezing, digging into your waist, forehead on your sternum dropping soft, abenseminded kisses, and you let him. You let him, because you have no idea what the fuck just happened, you only know that it was the best thing, the rightest decision you’ve ever made in your entire life.

“You look so handsome without your glasses,” you compliment him shyly, smiling.

He carefully puts you down, adjusts your skirt, and tucks himself in his pants, before touching the bridge of his nose. There was nothing there. He chuckles, and his arms are around you again. He can’t bring himself not to touch you, can’t find a reason why he should stay away, put some distance. You belong in his arms, he concludes.

You belong with him.

“So, I’m not when I wear them?” he teases, his lips on your forehead.

A weak punch on his stomach. He hufs a laugh, moving back just a breath so he can stare down at your face. You look fucking beautiful. You look like you’re his.

“You’re like a sexy professor with them on, you know what I mean, or like a–”

He kisses you. He’s falling in love. He’s already fallen.

#stray kids scenarios #skz scenarios #stray kids smut #seungmin scenarios #seungmin smut #seungmin fanfic #stray kids #stray kids seungmin #skz fanfic #skz imagines #stray kids imagines #stray kids fanfiction #—mine.

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an-aroaces-harem · 6 months

Text

Ellis Chapter 3

DISCLAIMER: I just deepl and google translated my way through this because I wanted to know what’s going on, so there are definitely mistakes but I believe I managed the general gist of the story. Anyway, it’s just a fan-made translation solely for entertainment purposes. Ikemen Villains belongs to Cybird.

Another note: I know Ikemen Villains is set in victorian London, but I will use the japanese suffixes because I prefer them.

Ellis: Guard?

At the breakfast table, Victor was told of my unexpected first job as a 'fairytale writer'.

Victor: Yes! Jud and Ellis protect Kate, so that our secret is safe.

Victor: Kate was able to observe and record Ellis and Jude up close ...

Victor: She can also fulfill her duties as a 'fairytale writer', killing two birds with one stone!

Ellis: If it's okay with Kate-san, it's okay with me.

Ellis: I don't know if something like yesterday will happen again, so ... I want to stay close to Kate-san.

Victor smiles at Ellis-kun's response and then looks to Jude-san.

Victor: Of course, Jude will take responsibility, right? You hate making loans, don't you?

Jude: Tch ...

(Although I think I'd feel safer if I stayed close to Ellis-kun ...)

I was mistakenly identified as 'Jude Jazza's woman', and my life was threathened just because I was with Ellis-kun ...

I can't help but be wary of Jude.

Jude: Don't cry when you get scared, princess.

(I'm scared ... but Victor made a good suggestion, so I can't be timid here.)

Kate: Don't worry, I'm surprisingly resilient!

Jude: ... Hah!

Jude-san snickered at my best smile and looked down at the newspaper.

Ellis: Then, it's decided.

Kate: Yes, thank you very much.

When I smiled at Ellis-kun, he smiled back softly, unlike Jude-san.

Ellis: Speaking of which, you can speak in a more informal manner.

Kate: Eh ...

Ellis: A "yeah, thank you" would be nice.

Kate: U-um, yeah ... thank you.

Ellis: Hmm, that's nice.

The air of warmth that Ellis-kun exudes is soothing and relaxing ...

Victor: Now that we've got that settled, let's get right to the task at hand.

Victor's words made my spine straighten.

(This is my first real job as a 'fairytale writer'.)

I brace myself, thinking that the first step is the most important thing in order to earn people's trust.

Victor: I actually want you to gather some information.

Victor: We've been talking about kidnappings all over London.

Kate: Is this ... a kidnapping case?

The disturbing words brought back the nervousness that was etched into my skin when I first met the members of 'Crown'.

Victor: Yes. The ages vary. From toddlers to teenagers, and, of course, adults.

Victor: The common deminator is that most of the adults are prostitutes and street performers.

Victor: The songstresses who were once popular at bars have disappeared ... but there are many people who don't have a fixed address.

Jude: The victims are not very nice people, and since they don't have a permanent address, they can't be reported missing.

Jude: And, as usual, the police refuses to act.

Sadly, as Jude-san says, those who work in the entertainment district are looked down upon.

Behind the salubrious world, they are treated as if they are being swept away.

Victor: So here's the thing ...

Victor: Did you know that there's an art fair in London right now that attracts performers?

Kate: Yes. It's not as busy as the social season, but it's pretty lively.

Victor: I want Jude and Ellis to go out there and gather information.

Victor: They're rootless, but they're more connected horizontally than you'd think.

Jude: Why do I have to go, too? Such a pointless mission.

Victor: I'm wondering if it might have something to do with the human traffickers that you just took down in private.

Victor: You're on board, right? And ... I heard today is your first vacation in a while.

It was information that Victor couldn't have known unless someone had told him ...

Jude-san cursed right next to him.

Jude: ... Ellis.

Ellis: He asked me, so I answered honestly. Sorry.

(Maybe the power balance between these two is more equal than you think ...)

Victor: So, have a good day!

Victor's cheerful voice sent us off on our way to our mission.

(It's even more crowded this time ...!)

Appetizing aromas waft from the gorgeous stalls lined up at the art fair venue.

It's not just the food that makes people happy.

There were people painting on the streets and others performing on large stages set up on street corners.

Walking along the street, one can almost smell the lively and joyful atmosphere.

(I'm totally excited and need to focus on the task at hand.)

(Yes, let's listen to them now.)

Kate: Ellis-kun, Jude-san, can you tell me about your curses?

Ellis: I don't remember if we've talked about that yet.

Ellis: I'm cursed with the curse of 'thorns' and Jude is the '13th Fairy'.

Ellis: It's the curse that became the motif of 'Sleeping Beauty'.

(The curse of thorns and the curse of the 13th Fairy ...)

The 13th Fairy is a villain who resents not being invited to the princess' birthday and tries to kill her with a curse.

(I can kind of understand why the fairy is guilty, but ...)

(What is the sin of 'thorns'?)

As I was thinking about it, Jude-san stopped and looked back at me, unamused.

Jude: We three don't have to get along with each other. You go gather information on your own.

Ellis: But, what about guarding Kate-san?

Jude: You alone are enough.

After saying this, he quickly disappeared into the crowd.

Kate: ... Does he hate me, even if he doesn't have to?

Ellis: He's like that to everyone, so maybe he doesn't hate you.

Ellis: Maybe so Kate-san won't be in danger if she's seen with him again.

(Hmm, that's not going to happen ...?)

I swallow the words that are about to come out of my throat.

Kate: ... If that's the case, he's a pretty kind person, right?

Ellis: I don't think he's nice. He loves to make people he doesn't like suffer and hear them scream.

Kate: ...

(I'm afraid I can imagine it ...)

He is the complete opposite of Ellis-kun, who spreads kindness to everyone he meets.

As if to prove this point, after we left Jude-san, he was approached by people from all over the place.

Red-faced man: Oh, you! Thanks for taking care of me the other day!

Ellis: You're welcome. Don't drink too much today.

Kate: This person is ...?

Ellis: He was drunk on the street, so I carried him home on my back. I don't know his name.

Kate: Oh!

(Did you bring a stranger home and even take care of him?)

And that's not all that's surprising ...

Furniture Craftsman: Ellis introduced me to people that helped me get my business off the ground! I'm so glad he did!

Student with glasses: Good to see you again! I'd like to thank you for helping me repair my bicycle, and I'd like to get your contact information ...

Cat: Meow.

Ellis: You're welcome.

(Even the cat thanks you ...!?)

(I can't believe so many people thanked him in passing ...)

It just goes to show how many good deeds Ellis-kun usually does.

Kate: You know more people than me, who works as a postwoman ...!

Ellis: I don't know. I think it's normal.

Seeing them smiling at him, Ellis-kun also smiled happily.

(I'm sure things like what you did for me yesterday are really ordinary things for you, Ellis-kun.)

When he sees someone in need, he extends a helping hand to anyone.

A person who sprinkles happiness.

These words came to mind as I watched Ellis-kun happily chatting with the people of the town.

(I wonder if there's any 'sin' I should write about such a person ...)

(Or rather ...)

(Why does such a kind person work for an assassination organization or in the company of someone like Jude-san?

Even though I have witnessed so much of his kindness ... the doubts that suddenly come to mind make my heart flutter.

Ellis: Kate-san, Kate-san.

Kate: ... Oh, I'm sorry! I was thinking.

Before I knew it, Ellis-kun was tilting his head and peering into my face from nearby ...

Ellis: You're thinking about me?

Kate: ... Eh!?

Like two lovers looking into each other's eyes, my heart pounds as he stares at me, so close that we're almost touching each other.

(Ellis-kun doesn't seem to be aware of it, but ... the distance between us seems to be very close.)

The same was true when he visited me in my room the morning after they took me to Crown Castle.

This is the second time I've been this close to his twilight eyes, and I look away as I feel a warmth radiating through me.

Ellis: Oh, I guessed correctly.

Kate: How do you know?

Ellis: Hmm ... somehow?

Ellis smiles and hands me a mug with steam rising from it.

Ellis: While Kate-san was thinking about me, I got a milk tea from the store there.

Ellis: Thank you for helping me with the delivery the other day.

(... Ellis-kun, I'm afraid ...)

Ellis-kun pushes away his curly hair and takes a sip of his milk tea with a sigh.

Ellis: If you have any questions, just ask.

Kate: ... Yes.

Ellis: "Yeah", right?

Kate: ... Ellis-kun, why are you a member of Crown?

Ellis: Is it because Victor recruited Jude and Jude said yes?

(Does that mean that since Jude-san is a member, Ellis-kun is a member as well ...?)

Kate: Why are you with Jude-san?

Ellis: You're full of questions.

Ellis-kun smiles and wraps his hands around the mug.

Ellis: Before I met Jude, I was living from place to place.

Ellis: I happened to meet Jude when I came to London.

Ellis: A lot of things happened, and I made a promise.

Kate: Promise ...?

Ellis: In exchange for working for him, Jude will do me a favor.

Ellis: So ... until then, we're in this together.

The feeling that something might happen when I listen to him makes my heart beat wildly.

Kate: What did you ask for, Ellis-kun ...?

Ellis: It's ...

Performer with flashy hat: What!?

(Eh ...!?)

I was surprised by the loud voice, and when I turned my head, it seemed that right behind me was the back of a special stage.

The performer was scratching his head in confusion.

Performer with flashy hat: Can't you two come? ... Oh god ...!

(He probably means two other performers ...)

Kate: Ellis-kun.

Ellis: ... Hm.

... "The common deminator is that most of the adults are prostitutes and street performers."

We exchanged glances and stepped toward the distressed-looking performer.

Kate: Um, excuse me.

Performer with flashy hat: Hmm? Yeah, I'm sorry, but I have to be onstage in 10 minutes!

Ellis: You just said two people couldn't come ...

Performer with flashy hat: The I was supposed to perform with have been out of touch.

Performer with flashy hat: How many people and days does this take ... It's been a bit strange lately.

(No communication and more than one person ...)

(If we could talk to this person, we might learn something.)

Ellis: I'd love to hear more about it, if you don't mind.

Performer with flashy hat: I'm sorry, but I don't have time for this right now! I have to think quickly about what performance I can do on my own.

After waving us away ... he stared at us again, as if a thought had just occured to him.

Performer with flashy hat: Unless you guys are willing to help me stage it.

Performer with flashy hat: Haha! What a surprise. No matter how much we're in need of manpower, we can't just bring in a bunch of amateurs.

He shook his head as if to say it was a momentary distraction, and Ellis closed the distance between them lightly.

Ellis: Cooperation? What do I have to do?

Performer with flashy hat: Haha! What's the matter with you? I'm just kidding.

Ellis: But if coorperate, you'll tell me the details, right?

Performer with flashy hat: ... What, are you just a couple of guys who are looking for something new?

He stared at us, his good-natured face twisted in puzzlement.

Performer with flashy hat: But, you know, selling information about your friends is a risky proposition.

Performer with flashy hat: I can't even guarantee that you guys don't have bad intentions. After all, we've never met before.

Kate: How do we get people to trust us?

Performer with flashy hat: I guess so ...

Performer with flashy hat: If you're not going to complain about being the target of a knife-thrower or being tied up and dunked in a tank, then ...

Performer with flashy hat: I wouldn't mind trusting you.

(Target of a knife-thrower ...!?)

Ellis: No problem. I'm good at that.

Unlike me, who was perplexed, Ellis-kun proceeded with the negotiations without fear.

(As expected, having been involved in business negotiations with Jude-san, he is used to the situation ...)

I thought that Ellis-kun had cooperated with the show and that negotiations had been concluded, but ... reality wasn't so sweet.

Performer with flashy hat: Tsk, tsk, tsk ... you can't do it alone, boy. You've got to help me out, too.

Kate: What ...!

Ellis: ... Why?

Performer with flashy hat: Of course, it's for the show!

Performer with flashy hat: A tragedy that tears lovers apart, followed by an emotional finale! You're sure to get a big cheer out of this one.

(Knife throwing ... tied up ... tank ...)

Ellis-kun peeked at me with concern as I grew increasingly pale.

Ellis: Kate-san, you don't have to do this.

(He was the target of Victor's knife-throwing, and I'm sure Ellis-kun will be fine.)

I would never be able to duplicate his extraordinary physical abilities ...

It's up to me to get information from this person.

(In this case, I have no choice but to trust Ellis-kun and this performer ...)

Kate: I understand. I will copperate.

#ikemen villains #ikevil #ikemen villains ellis #ellis twilight #resa translates something for once?

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