#Charlie Waters Net Worth

[daichiduskdrop]

˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚⋆·˚ ༘ *𝙎𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙡 ⋆·˚ ༘ *ੈ✩‧₊˚

• Chapter 40

Pairing: BTS Ot7 X fem! reader

Genre: A/B/O AU, Fluff, Angst, Strangers to lovers,

Warnings: none! Enjoy!

Words: 3356

Taglist: @thelilbutifulthings @ilovemoneymorethenmen @singukieee @cherrysainttt @felicityroth @mageprincess7 @lucis-noctiana @danielle143 @osakis-gf @girl-nahh @vintageoldfashionstyle-blog @neverthefirstchoice @juju-227592 @silentreadersthings @i-have-no-life-charlie @everyonehatesshani @iamkookiesforyou @dragonsflare @fangirl125reader @roseidol @frieschan @popcatx0 @liz67900 @exfolitae @plexcaffeinate @strawblueberrys @massivelyfullenthusiast @iimichie @bts-0t-7 @hannahdinse8 @hannahdinse8

(open)

Previous:

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„Hyung, that's unfair; I wanted to be with Bunbun!” Jungkook whined when the teams got divided. Except for Namjoon, all played rock, paper, scissors to see which team would be theirs. 

It ended with you, Hoseok, Namjoon, and Jimin on one, while Jin, Jungkook, Taehyung, and Yoongi would play opposites. After the second eldest would actually get into the pool, that is, as he rumbled annoyed that it's too early for this, while he placed the previously scattered towels into a neat pile. 

Your team got the more shallow side of the water area; not that the opposite was too crazily sloped, though—that just really wouldn't be fair. 

Plus, except for maybe Yoongi, the alphas were very tall, so they would be fine; you believed not to feel too guilty. 

All of you soon gathered just at the net border to talk before the game. 

Jungkook, with his competitive spirit shining through, began, "Alright, let's go over the rules real quick before we get started. That way, we're all on the same page."

Taehyung jumped in, adding, "Scoring works like this—we'll play to 15 points. You score a point when the ball hits the water on the other team's side." The young alpha measured your team with attentive eyes, a supportive yet competitive gaze that met yours. 

„And also, remember, when serving, make sure the ball goes over the net and the other team has a chance to return it. Let's have fun!"

Jungkook nodded in agreement. "Exactly, and when volleying, you can use any part of your body to hit the ball, but no catching or holding onto it. And also, no crossing the net into the other team's territory—that's a big no-no." He smiled brightly, happiness shining through. 

You wished you were this confident too, yet your skills just wouldn't hold up, but you were ready to try your very best and really just have fun.

Taehyung grinned mischievously. "And if the ball goes out of bounds, it's a point for the other team. Let's keep it in play, guys, and show off those volleyball skills!"

As the packmates listened attentively to the rules, Jungkook clapped his hands. "Alright, now that we're clear on the rules, let's get this game started! May the best team win!"

The proclaimed leaders of each team, for yours Namjoon and for the opposing Jungkook, played rock, paper, scissors once again to determine who would get the first serve. 

It ended up being Jungkook's team, and so, as the youngest got ready into the position from which he would start the game, all of you too separated to form a sort of net and hopefully win. 

You were at the right side of the pool, just a metre or so from the net, attentively watching the youngest alpha, waiting for him to throw the light ball. To your left was Jimin, behind you was Hobi, and at the very back corner was Namjoon. 

Jungkook's throw turned any hopes of your skills not being that bad out of the window, his muscles flexing as the ball flew high up in almost a perfect semicircle, aimed towards the back of the pool where the leader stood, his belly button just in the water. 

With a soft gasp leaving you, you watched in almost slow motion how the alpha reached forward, and it truly seemed as if his fingers just barely touched it in time before he let the ball bounce back forward. 

Once again over to their side, you watched as Yoongi, who stood just before you let the sphere easily pop back over the net, clearly aimed your way with the soft blow, much less stressed than when the youngest alpha threw it. 

„Kitty-!” He breathily called, just to really make sure that Jimin wouldn't reach for it instead. And so, you stood on your tippy toes to touch it sooner and let the ball bounce just over to Yoongi again. 

You smiled brightly, happy that you didn't miss the opportunity or mess it up for your team too badly, even when Jungkook's team scored in the end. 

The match continued for a while after, yet you struggled to always respond correctly, especially in the pool position at the very back. You messed up a few times, but your teammates were quick to cheer you up, claiming you would get it next time with no problem. 

You had fun, to be truthful, but after the opposite team won, though only over 3 points (3!) you let the others continue another game while Hoseok abandoned them to spend time with you. 

The alpha smiled at you, his wet and pretty hair brushed back to show his forehead. You giggled when water splashed into his eyes from Jimin, calling, „Don't stare!” while giggling loudly, as you jumped to Hobi's arms, who was rubbing at his eyes, grumbling softly. 

No hurt feelings today; even after you slipped into the water from your games with Taehyung, the alpha was quick to hug you soon after hiding your face in his neck. 

With your palms resting over his collarbones, the alpha held you close. With your eyes closed and your chin resting next to the connection of his shoulders and neck, the calm, soft waves were nice against your body, allowing you to rest. 

„My sunshine...” Your eyes fluttered open at the man's voice, looking up. His eyes were fond as they stayed on your calm form, the tips of your hair wet. Even in what you would believe was an unflattering look you currently had, the alpha before you and all the others around you believed in the exact opposite. You were beautiful. 

The alpha smiled even wider, his nose meeting the very top of your head and his scent sticking to you again. 

You spend more time in the pool with the alphas, Hobi having you hold onto him as he walked around the pool, the pretty waves nice against your shoulders and arms, eyes closed and truly vulnerable—yet not even for a moment did you feel unsafe. 

And when the youngest alphas came around to you to have you be part of their competition to make the biggest splash when jumping, you reluctantly said yet, but only when Hoseok would stay at the corner of the pool, ready to help you the moment you would have any troubles. 

True to be told, the rest of the alphas watched very closely whenever you would jump into the water. While the youngest alphas would choose the deepest end for their performance, you stayed at the spot where your tippytoes would still reach the bottom, too afraid otherwise. 

You had Jin and Namjoon judge the splash, first just the eldest, but once Jin claimed you jumped the most 'splashy' even when it wasn't necessarily the truth, as you just slipped in the water, barely making a proper splash, your competitions started crying out about Jin being biassed, claiming, „Hyung, you can't say that when I was clearly the winner! The water touched the ceiling too!” 

At the whines and your cheeky smiles, Namjoon came over from letting the water spray on his back from the massager head, claiming he would make the judging fair. 

Soon after thought, the playful competition turned into smiles and one of love as you and the other three tried to make different letters and shapes in the air while the elders judged, clapping and laughing. 

You did your best to make BTS letters, but the B was a bit wonky while Jungkook held your ankle to his tummy with your arms around his shoulders and the man's other hand at your waist. 

At your first successful attempt, you and the others bugged Yoongi, who brought his phone to take photos of your jumps, as you held your hands with the others, or when each of the men would have an individual photo with you at the very deep end, jumping with you in their arms. 

You had true fun; the entire pack took a bunch of funny photos with the phone, taking videos and time-set photos. And just before you had to leave, Jungkook sat you on his shoulders, and with Taehyung and Jimin on him as your opponents, you played rooster fights the alpha gentle to not be too harsh and throw you completely over much too dangerously in their eyes. 

Not much later than that, the second eldest man's phone started ringing again, and an alarm was set so that they would leave on time. With that, the men started all slowly getting out of the water, Jimin being the first to bend down near the edge to hook his arms under your arms, picking you up from the water before you could even try to do so yourself. 

Tenderly placing you back onto the tiles around, he said a soft, „Be careful not to slip, princess.” Before you could even step away, the eldest was already there with the fluffy towel he got you, wrapping you up in the comfortable pale purple, the alphas palms gently warming you up as you started to shiver. 

Soon you were already leaving, with Yoongi's fingers closely wrapped around you, holding you after he brought your crocs over before. Namjoon ushered all of you out after he slid the doors open, waiting for everyone to leave before he turned the heating back to low-spend mode before the pack alpha followed after you all. 

„Here, angel, I'll wrap your hair up, baby cheeks!” Taehyung smiled widely, the cute boxy smile like a cure to any sadness lingering from having to leave already, as the alpha stood behind you in the corridor leading further to the house, gently letting his fingers comb through your hair before he wrapped the towel around the locs, squeezing the water out. 

You looked too cold in his eyes, your lips turning too purplish for his liking as your skin felt cold under his sweet touches. And so, the alpha's warmer body wrapped around you in a comfortable hug, his chin going over your temple with cute eyes. 

„How about you shower to warm up a little baby? You're too cold; you'll get sick.” He fretted over you, Namjoon, who just walked past, quick to catch on, the back of his hand carressing your cheek, a soft frown taking over his features. 

„I'll start the shower for you, pup. Come on.” He said gently, taking your other hand in his, with Taehyung holding the left one. The alphas were quick to lead you upstairs, leaving small droplets of water on the floor. The eldest complained about having to clean later, but he had too much fun to be truly angry. 

The second youngest led you to his bedroom, your confused glances shushed with his calming pheromones. He pulled out one of his warm cardigans, a mixture of warm tan, dark green, and red in an argyle pattern. 

„Babycheeks, how about this? Or do you want something warmer? This one is super warm and has a nice fabric too. What about it?” The man said, rummaging through the racks of clothing while you watched wrapped in towels. 

The alpha pulled out a cream-white sweater with a small black heart with big, pretty eyes. The logo was cute. You smiled wide, noting how well-scented it was, and so you nodded right away, having the man return a wide, boxy smile and hand you the heavy sweater. 

„Wait, sweetie, let me check the tags, so it won't be harsh on your skin.” He remembered, softly once again taking it back, looking and reading closely through the tags on the bottom of the torso. 

'Comme des Garçons V-Neck Cream Heavy Knit Sweater

luxurious blend of 80% cashmere, 15% silk, and 5% merino wool

high-quality construction

Hand wash gently in cold water; lay flat to dry.

Designed for A/B/O comfort, avoid prolonged O wear to prevent skin irritations.

Elevate your style with Comme des Garçons.'

„Okay, baby cheeks, it should be okay. Do you want help choosing the rest of the outfit too?”

He asked you, a certain longing in his eyes you recognised easily. You always liked the alpha's style, and even if you only saw a few so far, his outfits were always very comfortable-looking, so why not? You thought, letting a small nod leave you, having Tae smile even wider, taking your palm in his, and leading you back to your room.

The door to the bathroom was already open, a warm mist leaving it as you heard the packalpha humming to himself and the shower running. Just then he came out, leaving a soft peck at your forehead, his dimples on display as he told you to warm up soon after you choose what you would like to wear and that you will all leave after you all quickly wash up. 

You and Taehyung agreed that you would like to wear something warm and comfortable prioritised, opting for good-looking sweatpants rather than any more structured pants. 

In the end, you ended up with bootcut leg solid dark brown wool knitted sweatpants, which were very soft and didn't have any flashy logos, just a small but foreign name of the company at the waistband. 

You soon hurried to the warmed-up shower, washing your hair and using nice-smelling shampoo, conditioner, and body wash to get rid of the light chlorine smell. The shower was quick but very comforting as your skin warmed up, cheeks rosing up. 

The towels were hanged to dry as you rinsed your swimwear from the chlorine water, placing it over the fluffy towels, which you would have to return to the alpha again. 

You pulled on the pants quickly, nice warm socks, and a cute brown turtleneck to match the plushy pants you wore as you shrugged on the very well-scented v-neck, the heavy fabric comforting on your shoulders. 

You wished you would have a necklace or two to layer on with the pretty v-neck cut, which would look especially pretty, but it was okay and you weren't too upset, drying your hair as quickly as possible with the hairdryer who blew cold air. 

As quick as you could, you left the bathroom again, grabbing your phone from being charged at the bedside table and rushing to not have the others wait any longer. 

Jin met you at the bottom of the steps, frowning at how your hair wasn't fully dried yet, opening his mouth to complain, but you hugged him instead, mumbling how you didn't want him to wait any longer. A simple response was received: „We would never mind peaches; alphas will always wait for you.”

As the eldest breathed in your sweet scent, he sneakily brushed his hands against your back, his own scent combining with Taehyung's that you were swimming in. 

„Cub here, I just warmed these up in the oven for you; they aren't freshly baked but should still be really good, hm? You like chocolate, right?” The damp-haired alpha asked, slightly worried for a little moment. 

He placed the warm chocolate pastries with oozing chocolate before you, the flaky batter golden. They looked delicious, with small wallnut choppings at the very top, sprinkled, and pretty. 

You nodded happily, sitting to take a bite just as the eldest placed ice tea before you with a big metal straw, making you smile and thank him softly. 

Only halfway through the two big pastries served to you did you hear the packalpha call out for you all to start getting your jackets, having you all leave very quickly, apparently almost late already. 

Jin looked worried, turning to you after packing a few packaged snacks into a lunch box, sighing annoyedly. The alpha wished you could have eaten calmly and fully, but their timetables just wouldn't suffice. 

The other pack mates rushed back downstairs as you calmed Jin down, saying it was all good and that you didn't mind finishing your food in the car, while the eldest placed the warm breakfast into a paper bag, choosing to grab a smaller carton of packaged ice tea and placing the full glass in the fridge for later. 

„Pup, baby, we need to go now.” Namjoon came over, a heavy, long black coat on, the man ready to leave with a beanie on his head. 

„Joon, she didn't even finish her breakfast!” Jin gasped, upset. What would it matter, the eldest thought? The photoshoot could wait. The other alpha frowned at that, biting his lip, considering just waiting for you to eat, but you answered instead:

„Let's go, oppa; I can eat later.” You smiled softly, taking your breakfast as you walked over to the racks with coats, choosing a simple black puffer jacket. Jimin, standing next to you, handed it to you. 

„Here, princess, let's zip it up for you.” He whispered gently, the closure sounding as the alpha helped you, ending with a cute kiss to the tip of your nose. 

You smiled softly when Jimin placed cute fluffy earmuffs on your ears, his eyes creasing as he couldn't contain his excitement. He hugged you close before snapping a quick picture, having you hide your cheeks right after. 

The alpha helped you make up the snow boots, which were comfortable and warm on your feet, lacing your fingers with his leading you out of the entrance, walking first to make sure you would know if there was any ice on the cleaned-up path. 

It was no longer snowing at the moment, but the temperatures were as icy as ever, having you all hurry to the large van you would all go in. Namjoon, who walked a few steps before you pulled the doors open for you, picked you up by your waist before he placed you on the heightened step, not wanting to have you slip like that one time a while ago. 

„Bunbun, sit here! I saved you the best spot, baby.” You followed Jungkook's voice, having you sit down at a seat in the back row in the middle, with your other side shared with Hobi. At your spot was a cute, comfortable blanket that the youngest was quick to wrap you up in, no matter the cranked-up heaters in the car. 

His tattooed fingers wrapped around yours, his lips ghosting over your knuckles, his own scent left subtly. With Hobi combing through the slightly damp hair of yours with a soft click of his tongue, you watched as Jin entered the van, Yoongi calling out if everyone had all they needed as the ride wouldn't be too quick. 

At first, it was planned for the pack mates to drive to HYBE first to meet up with their staff and have a driver take them to the spot, but in the end, the plans changed as the alphas wished to not have you go with the other staff, who usually travel together in separate vans. 

You let Hoseok put on your seatbelt for you as you rested your head against his shoulder comfortably. The smiley man was cute as he rubbed your knee in comfort. 

The ride was for at least an hour, the pack on their way to a snow resort for the photoshoot, and so you let Jungkook play a movie for the three of you, having you hold the phone, reasoned by you being in the middle, but he really just wanted you to have the best view. 

As the action movie you didn't understand too well played, the noise was subtle enough not to disturb the other alphas, you occasionally watched the passing streets, and the time seemed to slow down with you and the pack. 

You ate the still warmed-up pastries comfortably in their company, offering them both a bite or two they happily indulged in. 

With a soft peck to the top of your head, Hobi ran his fingers through your hair, his voice soft as he said: 

„Sunnybub, thank you, really. For everything.” Jungkook nodded, serious eyes set on your cute form. As you squeezed both their hands closer to yourself, your cheeks warmed up. 

For once in your life, things truly felt right. 

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Next:

[irkimatsu]

There is so much comedy inherent in the idea of Charlie setting up a computer area in the hotel lobby. Sinners who died in the past few decades are going to want computer access, and other hotels have computers! Welcome to the future! ("Future" in quotation marks; these are chunky early-2000's relics. At least Sinners from a certain time period will appreciate them. Gotta look out for the ones who used computers but have never heard of a functioning touch screen.)

Alastor refuses to be in the same room as those screeching phone boxes. A phone connection that appears on a screen? What in hell's name is this? Charlie tries to teach him of the magic of the Internet by telling him he can use it to listen to radio shows. You know what else he can use to listen to radio shows? A radio. He has no need for this.

Do you think Niffty would write creepy romance novels and post them on the Internet? I think Niffty would write creepy romance novels and post them on the Internet. She'd also need to be told that yes, Niff, we know you're trying to help, but please don't use soap and water to clean the insides of the computers, they don't like it.

Three guesses what Angel uses them for. Hell, three guesses what most of the hotel's clientele uses them for. ("Why you think the net was born?" God, Charlie would make a perfect Kate for that song, with the rest of the song by Literally Everyone Else.) Related to that, no one in this hotel knows a damn thing about cybersecurity. Those computers are going to be trashed within days. Poor Charlie, turning on one of those computers and getting blasted in the face with tits by malware. I'm also sure Hell has an equivalent of BonziBuddy that's even more blatant about stealing your personal info. For some reason I'm imagining Mammon running it and basing the design on Fizz. Ten or so computers, all with mini-Fizzes on the screen screeching about how they just stole your credit card info, haha, fucking cuck. Pure music, really.

There's also a computer at Husk's bar for him to use to check in clients, but he refuses to touch the damn thing. He's existed for over a century without learning how to use a computer and he has no intention of starting. How's he even supposed to type with claws? What was wrong with using a pen and paper for concierge duties? He isn't swayed by arguments that Angel's from the same time period and he's adjusted to technology, so he can do it, too! Nope. Not having it.

Angel: Ya know, they've got websites to play poker...

Husk: Why the hell would I want to use a computer to play poker? How do I know the computer's not cheating me?

(He also wouldn't know how to cheat the computer in turn, but he's not mentioning that part.)

Angel: ...and slot machines...

Husk: ...slots, huh...

And so Husk gets drawn into online gambling. At least until the front desk computer also falls victim to a FizziBuddy because Husk can't recognize scams worth shit. Good thing Husk's credit was already trashed before this.

[mia-cot]

What if Hector, after he had exceeded 300 kills, just wanted to live like an ordinary person?

He invites different film crews to shoot some materials for films here and one day stumbles upon Lonnit Entertainment.

Out of old habit, he decides to sort out the ins and outs of these people. Their director is a narcissist, but tries not to show that the company is collapsing. Mark, who hesitates to leave the company. Quiet new girl Erin. Cheeky Jamie. Kate, who knows her own worth.

Interesting guys, as soon as they all got together?

He invites them. They all sit down for dinner at 20:00. Filming was supposed to start closer to midnight to take a couple of shots in the light of the moon. At dinner, they get to know each other, talking a little about themselves. Hector didn't interrupt them-he just listened and enjoyed the company.Charlie was the most talkative at the table. When he first started talking, everyone immediately paid attention to him, including Grantham. When someone else was talking, he was either looking at the liquid in the glass or idly picking at his food with a fork.

Charlie, happy to be the center of attention, communicated openly, hiding nothing and always smiling. Du'met listened with interest to the man's stories, although his face remained as calm as the surface of the water.

- I think I'll go out for a smoke, - Charlie got up from his chair and headed for the door. When he got out, he hesitated a little, because he didn't quite remember the way to the main entrance. The corridors were so identical…

- Perfect for building such a place for killing people, - Charlie himself grinned at his terrible joke and went on.

He just headed straight, hoping to see a way out. Five minutes later, he had not found a way out of these walls.

- My God! What's wrong with this place!? - Charlie slammed his fist against the wall and groaned from the pain in his arm.

- Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Lonnit? - Charlie squeaked a little in fear. But it was so quiet that he hoped he hadn't embarrassed himself in front of an older man. How long has Du'met been following him? Or maybe it was Charlie who returned to the place where he left?

Charlie turned at the voice and saw the owner. For some reason, without even thinking about why Du'Met was standing in front of him now, although he should be in the hall with everyone, he was overjoyed just like a child who got lost in a store and saw his mother.

- Mr. Du'met! I wanted to find a way out of here, but apparently I got caught in your nets. The further I go, the stronger I feel that I will never get out of here… Could you help me get outside? - Du'Met nodded and silently led Charlie through these corridors with strange paintings…

Charlie definitely wasn't walking here… "Is he even leading me right?" Charlie looked at Du'met's back, suddenly wondering why this man lived here alone. But he found it incorrect to ask such personal questions. His back stiffened a little as they passed through the boarded-up doors.

When Du'met led them outside, Charlie happily inhaled the cool night air:

- Yea… The weather is a little chilly here… The lake, after all… - Charlie rubbed his shoulders, in an attempt to warm up and jumped on his feet.

Du'Met looked with interest at this seemingly adult man, but with the heart of a child. Such Du'Met has not yet met. There have always been petty and calculating people in his life. He killed a lot of people, but they were all rotten inside.

So what if Charlie loved being the center of attention and his narcissistic nature was manifested in this? It wasn't vicious at all for Du'Met. How many times has he already seen how native people exchanged their lives for the life of their loved one… That was what really disgusted Du'Met.

Betrayal. But it was so nice to look at the faces of those people who realized how little their lives meant to someone else…

But that's not the point now. He was living a normal life now, or at least he was trying. He kept a couple of animatronics for himself, so that sometimes he could take out on them a sudden thirst for murder. That was enough for now.

Hector took off his jacket in one motion and draped it over Charlie's shoulders. The huge size of the thing retained the warmth of its owner, and Charlie wrapped himself more tightly in his jacket. Gratefully looking with my own eyes at the man in the shirt.

- Thank you very much, Mr. Du'met, you shouldn't have, you'll freeze! - Charlie was about to take off his outer clothes, warm as a blanket after a nap, but Du'Met interrupted him with a wave of his hand. Charlie once again smiled gratefully in Du'Met's face and nodded slightly in gratitude.

It was unusual for Hector to see good emotions directed at himself. So open, such as they have always existed…

But they were inaccessible to him for so long…

He was sorry. I regretted a lot. He definitely wasn't born like this. The people who surrounded him made him a murderer. Hector took something out of his pocket. It turned out to be a red box of cigarettes.

- Oh, so you smoke too! Wait, let me light them up. - Hector held a cigarette between his lips and leaned over to Charlie, looking straight into his eyes and waiting. Perhaps because it was so embarrassing, Charlie couldn't stand the long eye contact and concentrated to light a cigarette. The wind prevented him from doing this and he covered the fire with one hand.

- Here, it's done. Thanks for the cigarette… and a jacket. - Charlie took a step back from Du'Met, interrupting their intimacy. The older man just nodded in response and straightened his back.

"I have to admit, this tie and shirt suit him…" - Charlie really liked this combination. He finally lit his cigarette and took a drag.

- Well… the moon is unusually bright today, the shots will be great, - Charlie raised his head to him and just looked at the moon.

At that moment, the man standing next to him realized why he had started living an ordinary life - to find someone who would shine brighter than the moon on such a dark night.

While Charlie was looking at the moon, Hector was looking at Charlie a little behind, thinking that now he would do anything to stay with this man for the rest of his days.

***

OH. MY. GOD. I FINISHED IT.

HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO WRITE IN ENGLISH…

IF THERE ARE MISTAKES, PLEASE POINT THEM OUT, I WILL BE GLAD TO LEARN!

[welidot]

Jackie Chan

This Biography is about one of the best Hollywood Director & Actor of the world Jackie Chan including his Height, weight, Age & Other Detail… Biography of Jackie Chan Real Name Chan Kong-sang Chén Gǎngshēng (Mandorin) Can4 Gong2 Sang1 (Cantonese) Nickname Fong Si-lung, Yuen Lou, Big Brother, Pao Pao (Cannon ball), Become the Dragon Profession Martial artist, Actor, Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Action Choreographer, Singer, Stunt Director, Stunt Performer Famous Roles         Armor of God, Rumble in the Bronx, Rush Hour Age (as in 2023) 69 Years old Physical Stats & More Info Height in centimeters- 170 cm in meters- 1.70 m in Feet Inches- 5' 7" Weight in Kilograms- 65 kg in Pounds- 143 lbs Figure Measurements - Chest: 40 Inches - Waist: 32 Inches - Biceps: 14 Inches Eye Color Brown Hair Color Brown Personal Life of Jackie Chan Date of Birth 7 April 1954 Birth Place Victoria Peak, British Hong Kong Nationality Chinese School China Drama Academy, a Peking Opera School run by Master Yu Jim-yuen College Dickson College Hong Kong Baptist University Debut Big and Little Wong Tin Bar (1962, Child actor) Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1972) Family Father- Charles Chan (Worked for the French Ambassador) Mother- Lee Lee Chan (Worked for the French Ambassador) Brothers- Fang Shisheng, Fang Shide Sisters- Guilan Chan, Yulan Chan Religion Chinese Buddhist Ethnicity Chinese Fan Mail Address Jackie Chan Jackie & Willie Productions Ltd. 70 Pak To Avenue Clear Water Bay, Kowloon Hong Kong Hobbies Listening to music Favorite Things Of Jackie Chan Favorite Actor     Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Favorite Celebrity Michael Jackson Favorite Food      Ice cream Girls , Affairs and More Of Jackie Chan Marital Status Married Affairs Joan Lin (Former Taiwanese Actress) Elaine Ng Yi-Lei (Model and actress in Hong Kong) Wife/Spouse        Joan Lin (m. 1982) Children Son- Jaycee Chan (born 1982, Actor and Singer) Daughter- Etta Ng (born 1999) Earning Money of Jackie Chan Net Worth $350 million This Biography written by www.welidot.com Read the full article

[allywritesforfun]

{Fire pit} MCYT Vacation Series

summary: yeah just, hanging around a fire pit with a very drunk wilbur soot

includes: dream, georgenotfound, wilbur soot, sapnap, karl jacobs, philza, badboyhalo, charlie slimesicle, quackity

pairings: dnf, karlnap

word count: 1469

trigger warnings: swearing, alcohol usage, mentions of burns

regular masterlist

MCYT vacation series masterlist

“Who here knows how to get a fire started?” Dream asked.

The group held off on doing a fire night for a while. It’s not that they didn't want to do it, it’s more of the fact that they were scared to do it. The only responsible one there was Phil, but he was the only one who has experience with  a drunken Wilbur Soot. 

Tonight; however, was the perfect night. The forecast was clear, not even huge gusts of wind expected. It was ideal, everyone could sit in a circle and not have smoke filling their lungs. 

Dream took it upon himself to get out all of the chairs while Quackity carried the wood from the truck, making multiple trips. Bad offered to help him, but Quackity talked himself up about how strong he is and wanted to prove a point.

“I’ve made a fire before for a Mr. Beast video,” Karl mentioned. “I could give it a go.” 

“That atta boy, Karl!” Dream patted him on the back. “Everything that you need is somewhere out here. I’m sure Sap will get you anything.”

Karl looked over at Sapnap, who was in a bit of a conundrum. He was trying to help Charlie set up the bug net around the area. Dream got a huge one off of  Amazon that would make a huge tent but leave enough room to move around. Charlie was working on getting the stakes in the ground and spacing while Sapnap... was in a wrestling match with the net. 

Charlie gave him one simple task: unravel the net. Sapnap got as far as taking the pin out that held it together and somehow he got under it... and wrapped all up in it. It was a hilarious sight, seeing Sapnap wail his arms aimlessly to only get the net wrapped around him more.

“Sap!” Karl called out. “Calm down and stop. Let me help you.”

“I have it under control!” Sapnap yelled back. “I don't need any help. It’s just a stupid net! Aghhh.” That ‘stupid net’ wrapped around his leg and when he tried to move his arm, the net pulled back, taking Sapnap out at the knees.

Everyone turned around from the high pitch scream that left Sapnap’s lips and bursted out laughing. Karl did his best to hold his laugh in, but seeing his boyfriends angry face made him fail.

“Can I help you now?” Karl asked, reaching out for the net.

Sapnap crossed his arms in defeat, “Help.”

Karl detangled the net and patted Sapnap on the cheek, “There ya go. I have to go start the fire.”

Sapnap pecked his cheek, “Damn right you start that fire.”

A car horn beeped from the front of the yard, Phil was back. They sent Phil out to get stuff for s’mores since they forgot about it on the grocery list... well, more like they didn't get enough. Half the marshmallows were gone before the second day.

“Children!” Phil called. “I am back!”

Wilbur ran up to Phil and tried to snatch the bag of treats, but he was too slow and Phil whipped it behind his back, “Come on, Phil!”

Phil shook his head, “I’m putting myself in charge of s’mores. You little fucking gremlin will eat them all if I don't.”

“B-But that's not fair!” Wilbur pleaded. “I am a grown man Philzaminecraft. Just give me one marshmallow, that's all I want.”

Phil gave in, “Just one.” He took the marshmallows out of the bag and ripped them open with two fingers. He leaned the bag to Wilbur, carefully watching him only take one, “Good.”

Back at the now started fire, Badboyhalo was making good observations, “Hey, Dream! With the net in place there won’t be much room for benches and chairs.”

“Oh shit you already noticed,” Dream mumbled under his breath.

“What was that?” Bad asked.

“Well you see...” Dream scratched the back of his neck and looked over at George, who gave him the nod. “Benches and chairs are kinda of boring, and they didn't come with the property. I was open that everyone would be okay using old pillows and blankets that I brought because I didn't have enough room in the car to take benches.”

There was a silence among the group. That was a twist that no one would’ve thought of.

Charlie was the first to speak out, “That sounds fun actually! Think of it guys, who wants a boring old campfire? It’s gonna be like we're on some survival show. I’ve always wanted to try one.”

Everyone nodded in agreement. It was probably for the better that no one could fall off of a chair and into the fire. It was more controlled and brought them closer, literally.

“It’s gonna be a great night!” Dream declared. “Georgie, can you get the spares from the car?”

George nodded and went on his way.

“I’m gonna go with George to the cars if you don't mind,” Quackity told Dream. “I think we got enough logs for a couple hours here and I wanna go grab my guitar in the car.”

The sun set and the bugs came out. Everyone helped out getting the ground comfortable and took their spots. After a few quick pictures, the boys were ready to begin their night phone-free.

“Anyone want a s’more stick?” Phil offered, even though he was already passing them out.

“I’m good for now,” Wilbur replied. “But where are the drinks?”

“There should be some in the fridge,” Dream answered.

Wilbur immediately got up and ducked under the net.

“Already?” Bad asked. “We haven't even sat down for five minutes.”

“Oh fuck off!” Wilbur called in the distance.

“Language!”

“Just let him drink!” Quackity urged. “He was gonna do it anyways. Let him have fun and let loose, maybe you should too.”

Bad just ignored him and stuck a marshmallow at the end of his silver stick. Phil looked around and made sure that everyone had supplies before he started his own s’more.

“Do you want me to make yours?” George asked Dream. “I don't want you to get marshmallow in my hair.”

“Pfft what?” Dream asked. “How would I get marshmallow in your hair? I’m not that messy of an eater.”

“Dream, you are 6′1 and I am sitting in your lap. Melted marshmallow are gonna get in my hair with how clumsy you are! You like to move around a lot and I do not want to take extra time in the shower!”

“You already take twenty minutes!” Charlie teased. “You nearly used up all the fucking hot water last night!”

Everyone laughed, including Wilbur who was trying to pass out drinks. Most people denied the offer, it was too early into the fire to start now. Wilbur sat down between Phil and Karl and started to drink straight out of the vodka bottle.

“Jesus fuck, Wil,” Sapnap commented. “Slow down.”

“What?” Wilbur hiccuped. “You didn't see Tubbo make me drink like two and half shots without a break?”

That led to a conversation about streams that didn't have to do with Minecraft, which led to many more conversations about what to outsiders would consider nothing important.

But everyone was having one of the best nights of their lives. Quackity was playing random cords on his guitar that he made mental notes of to make into songs later. George was nearly asleep already due to the fact the Dream would not stop playing with his hair and rubbing his sides, which everyone thought was cute. Wilbur was long gone by now and good thing Charlie was up grabbing wood to catch him from falling in. His hand touched the outer rocks, so there might be a minor burn later, but he was too out of it to even feel it. Karl led a great men’s choir to the song “The Campfire Song Song” from Spongebob.

The fire lasted somewhere around three hours, but the boys made a lifetime worth of memories. Phil and Bad had to help Wilbur get back in the house, which they gave up trying by the time they got to the hallway, so in the hallway he stayed...he would eventually sober up and make it to bed. 

George forced Dream to carry him up the stairs because: “Dream, I’m too tired. If you don’t carry me, that’s proof you don’t love me.”

Karl and Sapnap stayed behind to clean up as much as they could carry. Which led to them sitting by the fire a little while longer until it was completely out, stuffing each other’s faces with marshmallows playing ‘Chubby Bunny’, which they ended up making each other laugh and lost at the same time. 

Tonight was definitely a night that was gonna be told at many weddings to come.

[clairecrive]

Let’s stay home| Quarantine AU

A/N: I know it’s been ages since I’ve updated this story, sorry guys. I don’t even know what this is but someone asked for Bronson so here it is. I’ve decided that I’m going to finish up and edit what I already have for this story, 4 or 5 chapters, and then end it. So, yeah. Anyways, hope you enjoy this!

Tag list: @evelynshelby​, @mollybegger-blog​, @br0ck-eddie​, @of-love-and-of-the-sea​, @deaflikehawkeye​, @shadow-of-wonder​, @fandom--0verdose​, @innerpaperexpertcloud​, @sopxhiea​, @fuseburner​

Chapter 6 - “Bronson”

Emma was laying in her precious bathtub for some very much needed me time. Since lockdown started, she had found herself needed some kind of relief from dealing with this whole situation. Living together with the guys wasn’t proving to be too bad. She was actually happy that he had invited them over, if she had had to face this whole quarantine on her own she would have probably gone insane. Not that living with four men didn’t put her on edge but it was bearable. As long as she could carve out some time for herself, she would be fine. Sighing contently, she basked in being in the water while the comforting smell of lavender filled her nostrils. but of course, her peaceful moment was short-lived.

“Oi, have you drown in there or something?” Alfie’s voice and vigorous knock startled her and disrupted the moment.

 “This is my self-care bath, Alfie. What do you want?” But she won’t give it up easily if she could help it. 

“Yer what?”

“Stop shouting and get in Alfie. You’ll annoy the neighbours.” Keeping her eyes closed she tried her best to not get the vibe lost.

“Aren’t you naked?”

“I’m covered in bubbles, don’t worry. Not that you haven’t seen it already.” And as a matter of fact, she was covered in bubbles, her long hair covered her breasts and she gathered her knees close to her chest to prevent an embarrassing situation; but the truth was that Emma had always been comfortable with Alfie. Yes, even being half-naked in front of him when nothing sexual was happening didn't bother her. And since they had done this before, when Alfie sat on the toilet next to the tub, she didn’t feel embarrassed at all. He plopped down, groaning for his bad back and looked at her face.

“So what’s all this then?” His gruff tone made her smile lightly and even if she had her eyes closed she could imagine him gesturing at her questioningly.

“I told you, this is my self-care bath.” She repeated finally opening her eyes, finding him exactly as she foresaw.

“Didn’t know there were different kinds of baths.” He mumbled scratching his chin.

“This includes shaving and scrubs and other stuff that of course you wouldn’t know about.”

“Seems like you’re dolling up,” he pointed out looking at his feet but Emma could sense that there was something else he wanted to say so she waited, “is it ‘cause that guy is coming over?” and here it was. By now, Emma knew Alfie too well to not know when something was up. And yeah, the man was naturally grumpy but his behaviour these last few days was too much even for him. And knowing him, she should have known that he was going to eavesdrop her conversation with Bane.

“Did nobody tell you that it’s impolite to listen on to other people’s conversation?” She avoided his question and decided that it was better to make fun of him. His unruly beard could only cover so much of his face and luckily for her, it didn’t cover the redness of his cheeks.

“You were talking in the middle of the fucking sitting room, everyone heard you.” he scoffed.

“Well, that doesn’t explain why you’re so bothered by it though.” She promptly pointed out putting him on the spot.

“Who said I’m bothered?” He scoffed again but Emma could see right through him.

“You’ve been acting like a jealous boyfriend Alfie.” she pointed out even though she knew he’d never admit it.

“I ain’t.” He childishly muttered while crossing his arms on his chest.

“Sure you are. Now be a good boy and tell me why, will you?” She asked him patronizingly while adjusting her position in the tub so that she could better look at him.

“C’mon Alfie, you know that you can talk to me.” she insisted when he didn’t say anything.

“It’s just- I didn’t understand I was going to be stuck in a house with a bunch of your exes.” He complained

“None of you is my ex,” since Alfie gave her a look that called her on her bullshit so she continued, “Eddie is my best friend. He has an on-and-off relationship at the moment but there’s never been anything between us.”

“What about Tommy?”

“We’ve had sex but we were never together. Just like you and me.” Alfie flinched but Emma didn’t notice.

“So, yer supposed to spend a weekend of sex with him too?” He spat and Emma knew that he hadn’t liked her answer but couldn’t really understand why.

“We have never labelled our relationship as exclusive or official, Alfie.” Emma reckoned as a matter of factly.

“That’s not what I said, innit?”

“Well, then why I get the feeling that knowing about my sex life sets you off?”

“And Bane?”

“He’s one of my best buds too. Never seen him naked, unfortunately,” she mumbled the last part but Alfie did hear anyway and threw an ugly glare at her.

“Why are you so interested in my sex life anyway?” she asked raising an eyebrow

“I’m not. You can do whatever you want,” he said not taking into consideration how she could read him so easily. Dismissing her and their conversation, Alfie got up and went to get out of the bathroom.

“Wait, Alfie, what time is it?” her voice stopped him

“Almost 4, why?” He said checking the time on his watch.

“Shit, shit, shit, I’m late,” momentarily forgetting about the man’s presence, Emma pulled the drain of the bath and started to get up.

“What? Have somewhere to be?” Was Alfie’s attempt at being funny.

“I have an interview in half an hour. Guess who I’m interviewing?” Ignoring his cheeky tone, Emma kept drying herself. She didn’t have time to spare.

“Some beauty blogger?” Again, another jab.

“Charlie Bronson, Alfie. I’m so excited,” but Emma was too hyped about this opportunity she had been given.

“Why are you excited to speak with England’s most violent prisoner?”

“Exactly for that very reason. I mean, I know nothing of psychology but he ought to make an interesting subject, don’t you think?” Now wrapped in a warm towel, she was ready to leave the bathroom.

“Be careful, Em,” Alfie called out behind her.

“You can assist if you want to,” She offered, knowing that he could sit in the interview and she could get away with it.

“Oh, I also have an appointment but thanks.” Not thinking anything about it, she simply waved at him and rushed to her room to get ready. The interview was in ten minutes.

So far, it was going good. Sure there had been some problem with her wifi, then with his but it was all part of the job, wasn’t it? Despite his menacing look and intimidating physique, Charlie Bronson was very talkative and friendly. Or maybe he just liked talking about himself and being under the spotlight.

“So, with this current situation, everyday life has changed for everyone. Has life in prison changed too?” Was your final question, the one you were most excited to ask.

“Well, visitors can’t come anymore and also police officers can’t touch us, the cunts.” Flying over his colourful language, Emma reflected on his answer. It was a side effect that she hadn’t thought about but it made sense.

“It sounds like this virus has made life in prison easier, or am I going too far in saying that?” 

“Yeah well, for me, it has and also for those people who have nowhere to go. It also helps us with police brutality.”

“Does it?”

“Of course. They’re the only ones that go out, aren’t they? So if one of us results positive to Covid then it means that it’s their fault, isn’t it?” Bronson points out with a raise of his eyebrow.

“That makes sense. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“No one really thinks about us.” The statement could have been filled with resentment but from his tone, it came out nothing more than a fact. However, Emma still felt a little guilty about it.

“Well, actually, there has been an uproar in Italy for this very reason. Families of inmates asked for their relatives to be released because they were not safe in prison. Do you agree?” Remembering an article she saw a couple of days ago, she thought it worth mentioning.

“Sounds like a desperate tentative to get them out. We’re as safe here as anywhere, if not safer.”

“So if you could, you wouldn’t want to leave prison?” Disbelief evident in her voice. Wouldn’t any inmate go back home given the chance?

“Why would I? Where would I even go?” But Bronson presented a fair point. Most of the lives of those who ended up in prison had always difficult stories behind them and in most cases, they don’t have a safety net to fall into.

“Well, I don’t know. Isn’t any place better than a cell?” Still, Emma thought, however difficult it may be to start again, wouldn’t it be ten times better than being in a cell?

“I’ve never understood people's disregard for prison. There’s nothing out there for me anyway.” Apparently, Bronson wasn’t of the same idea.

“If you’re fine and safe I guess it doesn’t matter where you are.” Not really convinced, Emma trying to meet him halfway.

“As lovely as it is to talk to you, my time is up. Gotta go.” Time had flown apparently because the hour the interview was supposed to last had already come to an end. It had been a conversation far more interesting than Emma had anticipated. Who would have thought. One should never judge a book by its cover, indeed.

“Thank you for speaking with me, Charlie. Stay safe,” saying her goodbyes she closed the zoom call. Staring at her desktop, she processed the whole conversation in her mind, the piece she had to write about it already forming in her mind. In order to avoid forgetting the words or losing inspiration, she immediately got to it. Typing away on her keyboard, words had never come to her as easily, she bashed in this sensation remembering why she loved her job so much.

[xmxisxforxmaybe]

Decryption_Error: “Fourth of July, Part II”

Summary: Despite Elliot’s reservations about meeting Y/N’s family, the long weekend goes well . . . except for an incident that causes Y/N to unknowingly meet Mr. Robot for the first time.

Story Summary,  “The Server Room, Part I”,  “The Server Room, Part II”  “The Long Weekend, Part I”,  “The Long Weekend, Part II”,  “The Aftermath”,  “Undecided”,  **“Decided”,  “Spooked”,  **“Fourth of July, Part I”

Word Count: 9800

Tags: @sherlollydramoine @rami-malek-trash @teamwolf2411 @limabein @txmel @alottanothing @ouatlovr @backoftheroomandnotbelonging @moon-stars-soul @free-rami @ramimedley

If you want added or I’ve missed your request, let me know : )

A/N: I am actively pretending the Elliot of MR Season 4 is an illusion : ) Let me live in my fantasy of soft Elliot, thanks! 

Warning: Sexual content, non-descriptive mentions of blood, somewhat descriptive scene of an anxiety/panic attack

* Wednesday Evening *

“Open the bag behind my seat.”

Elliot shifted in his seat and reached into the back. He pulled the black shopping bag up to his lap and rustled around.

I glanced over at him, smirking.

“How do you like them?”

Elliot sighed, and despite his anxiousness about meeting my family, I knew he was happy—and happy was something that was starting to look damn good on him.

Elliot put his new swim trunks back in the bag and returned it to its spot behind my seat. He reached over and gave my thigh a quick squeeze before he leaned back, resting his head against his seat.

I had never imagined that such a simple gesture of affection could set my heart racing, but that was how it went with Elliot. There were never going to be any grandiose displays of romance; with him, it would always be about the little things—remembering my favorite food or movie, knowing how I took my tea in the morning, going on a holiday despite a sometimes crippling social anxiety.

And as if on cue, Elliot’s voice sounded, just a hair louder than the radio.

“Can you tell me what to expect again?”

Even though this was the third time I was about to explain what to expect, I still smiled. I knew this was an important part of Elliot’s attempt to alleviate his apprehension.

“ETA is currently clocked at 7:28 pm. Kathleen and Josh, my oldest sister and her husband, along with their three children—do you want their names again?”

“Jack, Jared, and Molly—10, 8, and 3.”

“I’m pretty sure those are the right ages. I told you—I’m a shit aunt,” I said through a laugh.

“Erin and Ryan will get there last.”

“Yes. Erin’s going to be late for her own wedding—mark my words. I wish my parents would worry about her more than me.”

“But they don’t worry because she’s a lawyer which is a job they understand. Unlike tech,” Elliot finished.

“See? You’ve got it all figured out. Just remember not to say any of those insights of yours out loud.”

“I’ll try.”

“And Charlie—Char’s coming tomorrow. He’s the owner of the sweatpants I put you in over Memorial Day.”

“He’s your favorite.”

I glanced at Elliot, my face twisted into an expression of surprised amusement.

“I never said that.”

“You don’t have to. It’s in the way you talk about him—how protective you are. I feel that way about Darlene.”

“But she’s your only sibling, right?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s totally okay that she’s your favorite,” I said with a slight chuckle. “Anyway, Charlie and I are closer in age, so that’s one reason why I think we’ve always gotten along the best. The other is that Erin and Kathleen are a lot like my mom. My brother and I are much more like my dad.”

“Mom. Valerie, goes by Val, but I’ll stick to calling her Mrs. Y/L/N.”

“And Dad?”

“Charles Y/L/N. Owner of CNC Precision Machining, host company of the company I work for, and ranked number 348 on the Forbes 400 list.”

“Please don’t open with that,” I said, cringing. “I guarantee he doesn’t even know he’s on that damn list.”

“How can he not?”

“He’s got people to worry about and organize those things, not to mention he plans to dump half of what the company made this year into three new factories right here in the US, so that will cut his personal ‘net worth’ almost in half. My father has never forgotten that Grand-daddy could barely afford to feed his own family. His priority is and always will be job creation. I promise you, Elliot. He’s a good person.”

“I don’t know how you can be so flippant about the fact that you really don’t ever need to work. You could do anything you wanted with your life—anything.”

“Colin? Is that you? Did you takeover Elliot’s body?”

I could feel Elliot roll his eyes, and I smirked.

“It’s—”

“It’s my father’s money. Sure, I could live off of our family’s wealth, but then what would my purpose be? How could I ever, ever hope to keep all these guys quiet in here?” I asked, tapping the side of my head. You, of all people, should understand that.”

“I do. And don’t think I’ve forgotten we’ve talked about this before,” Elliot said as his way of apologizing. “I’m just nervous.”

“When are you not nervous?”

“An excellent question for which there is no answer,” Elliot said, and I could hear the smile as he formed his words.

We pulled into the drive of my parents’ waterfront house, and I snuck a glance at Elliot. He was looking out the window, craning to take in the property. I loved this house and always felt at peace along the bay. It was disappointing I hadn’t been out here, really out here, for such a long time.

I pulled in slightly behind my sister’s vehicle onto the cobblestoned driveway in the back of the house that made a loop, and when I shut the car off, I lamely said, “Well, we’re here!”

Elliot whipped his head over, almost as if he’d forgotten I was in the car. He looked pale, and his eyes were wide and skittish. He swallowed twice, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob.

“Should I have dressed up?” Elliot said, his voice fading in and out.

I laughed softly.

“Did I dress up?”

“You always look good. Nice,” Elliot mumbled as he glanced at the house again.

“Especially when I’m naked. In bed. With you,” I said with a teasing grin.

“Fuck, Y/N!” Elliot shot out. “You can’t talk like that here.”

He gestured so vigorously toward the house that his hand smacked off the window, causing me to giggle.

“I’m just trying to get you to relax.”

“Thinking about us, about you, like that is not fucking helping.”

“Sorry. It’s getting hot in here without the air conditioning, though. Are you ready?”

Elliot just looked at me.

“You are ready. Remember, they wanted to meet you. I’m not springing some strange hobo I picked up off the side of the road on them.”

“Fuck. Yeah. Okay. Let’s go,” Elliot said opening the car door.

I smiled at his resolve, but my grin fell as my nephews came barreling around the wrap-around porch to see whether it was me or Erin who had arrived.

“Aunt Y/N!” Jared yelled as he hit his older brother, Jack, with the pool noodle he was swinging. “Will you swim with us? Please!”

“Am I going to get hit with that noodle?”

“Probably not,” Jared said, a grin plastered over his face, water droplets from his sopping hair still trailing down his tanned face.

“Hello,” Jack said, turning to look at Elliot, straightening up to his fullest height and extending his hand.

Elliot looked at him for a moment before he reached out and shook Jack’s extended, damp hand.

“Hello.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Jack finished before turning to me. “Can I help you take anything into the house?”

I smiled. Jack was every bit his mother’s son: well-mannered, mature, and wise beyond his years, but his eyes still held a child’s innocence, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt for not spending more time with him and his siblings.

“What a kind gesture, Jack, but do you really want to watch Mimi go apoplectic on the first day of the holiday when you go trampling, soaking wet through the front door?”

“What’s apopple-tic?” Jared asked, wrapping his pool noodle around his waist and swinging side to side.

I looked at Jack and raised my eyebrow.

“Crazy mad,” he said in answer to his brother. “Like how mom got when you put her iPad in the dishwasher.”

Jared shot his brother a murderous look and pulled back to hit him with the noodle.

“Go swim, boys. I promise we’ll come out as soon we’re settled.”

“Dad said we could play with our fireworks tonight!” Jared said before he turned and ran back up the porch stairs and around to the pool.

Jack grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and took off after his brother.

“Two down,” I said as I pulled my bag out of the car.

“They’re kids. Do they even count?”

“I think they do,” I said with a slight shrug of my shoulders.

Elliot gave me one of those half-smiles as he lifted my bag out of my hand and reached for his. I let him carry our bags, and I walked back around to the back seat to grab my purse, my work tote, and the shopping bag that contained Elliot’s swim trunks. I didn’t want to do any work over the weekend, but if there was an emergency, hopefully this time it could be solved remotely. Elliot had also brought his backpack, which made me feel a little better.

Elliot followed me up the porch stairs and through the front door. I led him up the center staircase and to the left, all the way to the end of the hall. I opened up the door to my room and set my work bag and shopping bag on one of the striped chairs near the wall. I tossed my purse onto the bed and directed Elliot to set our big bags in the walk-in closet.

When Elliot emerged, he looked around the room and walked over to the French doors that led out onto a small balcony that overlooked the bay. It looked like he was on a military mission to memorize his surroundings in the event of an emergency, so I left him alone as he acclimated.

My room was light and breezy, done in hues of blues with accents of white and coral. Elliot looked comically out of place, clad head to toe in black, standing between the sheer white and blue curtains.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I finally said when Elliot sought out my eyes, his looking a startlingly, lovely shade of blue in the light of my room.

I couldn’t tell what was going through his mind, his face expressionless as he looked at me. I moved forward, waiting to see if he’d turn into my body or step away.

He stood still for a moment, before he turned to me, tentatively wrapping his arms around my shoulders. I sank into him, breathing him in.

“Thank you for doing this,” I whispered against his neck.

“Don’t thank me yet. I still have a few days to make you regret bringing me.”

“Stop,” I said pulling back to look at him. “Nothing is going to make me regret bringing you here.”

“Why do you have so much faith in me?”

Because I’m in love with you, I thought without hesitation, which was followed by a sheer bolt of panic that I immediately swallowed down.

Fuck.

“I just do,” I said, smiling and angling my face up for a kiss.

Elliot bent his head, kissing me sweetly in the still-bright light of the fading day, and I felt yet another jolt of shock at how incredibly right this felt, how easy.

After unpacking a few things and plugging my phone in to charge, we went downstairs and headed out to the pool. I took Elliot’s hand in mine as we walked across the porch and down the sidewalk and stairs to the stone encased pool that was being energetically occupied by my nephews, my niece, my dad, and my sister.

Elliot tightened his grip, and I gave him a reassuring squeeze back.

“Kathleen! Your sister’s here!” my mom yelled, waving at me and then at the pool.

“Hi, mom,” I said, releasing Elliot’s hand so I could give her a hug.

“This is Elliot,” I said as soon as I let go.

“Elliot,” my mom said, extending her hand. “Such a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Don’t be dramatic, mom.”

“Nonsense. We’ve heard so much about you. It’s nice to put such a handsome face to Y/N’s words.”

“Uh, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Y/L/N.”

“Oh, please. Call me Val.”

Elliot gave her a sheepish smile and ran his hand through his hair, his eyes taking in the swimming pool, the bar, and the pool house.

“Hey! You said you’d swim with us!” Jared shouted as he leapt up from the water and ran over to me.

“I said no such thing because you did not promise I wouldn’t get hit with a pool noodle.”

Jared scowled a bit at me, and I grabbed him up, bridal style and tossed him back in the pool. He came up grinning, and I had to jump back as he aimed a splash at me.

“You asked for it,” my sister said as she swam to the edge, gracefully pulling herself up to sit. “Toss me my towel.”

I rolled my eyes and retrieved the towel she had pointed at. Kathleen, the prettiest and the bossiest.

“Hey, Y/N—how was the drive in?” came the pleasant voice of my brother-in-law, Josh.

“Not bad. Sat in the tunnel forever, but no surprise there,” I said, returning to Elliot who was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking like he had hoped everyone had forgotten he existed.

“Josh this is Elliot. Elliot, Josh, Kathleen’s husband.”

They shook hands, and I watched Elliot carefully, unsure if he was sort of comfortable with all the handshaking or if he was just internalizing the discomfort really well. I figured it was probably the latter.

Josh asked Elliot a few questions, and Elliot gave very direct answers.

“Save some of the interrogation for after dinner,” I said, returning to Elliot’s side.

“Small talk is—”

“Horrific and you know that,” I cut Josh off with an eyeroll. “You remember what it was like coming here for the first time to meet everyone.”

Josh tilted his head back and sighed, his eyes reflecting the light of the sun as it had begun lowering over the bay.

“The first time I met the family was at Christmas. It was a house full of, shit, 50 relatives? 60? I seriously considered just leaving and never coming back.”

“Leave me? Unlikely?” Kath said as she hugged Josh from behind, soaking his polo shirt as he reached up to grasp her hand and grin.

“The boss would never have allowed you to get away,” I said, rolling my eyes and smiling.

“Do you hear the way she talks to me, Elliot? It’s not too late for you to escape.”

I rolled my eyes again, only to be scolded by my mother.

“Honestly, Y/N. If I counted the number of times you rolled your eyes—”

“Come on,” I said, taking Elliot’s hand in mine and leading him toward the bar. “Let’s go play Cocktail a la Tom Cruise.”

Josh followed and Kathleen sat down to talk to our mom and to watch the kids in the pool. Elliot listened to Josh and I chat as I mixed up a few drinks and had the boys try them before settling on making a pitcher of something that tasted mostly like a Mai Tai.

By the time my pitcher of drinks was made, Dad had gotten out of the pool and toweled off before walking over to us. He introduced himself to Elliot and welcomed him to our home.

“We’re happy to meet you, Elliot.”

“Thank you, sir,” Elliot said, his eyes flicking to mine before returning to the ground in front of my dad.

Dad glanced at me and gave me a small smile. I told him how hard this was going to be for Elliot because he struggled with meeting people and with getting to know people in general—I explained that he was sort of the stereotype of the introverted tech guy. Not to mention, Dad knew all about the incident in the server room.

Josh picked up the pitcher and walked back to Kathleen and Mom, leaving my dad and I alone with Elliot. Dad sat down on the stool next to Elliot as I wiped my hands on a towel. I grabbed a beer from the fridge before I came out from behind the bar to give Dad a big hug.

“If you can keep her from working too much, Elliot, I’d greatly appreciate that,” Dad said, smiling at me and reaching for his beer.

Elliot looked up and glanced between the two of us, something about our interaction relaxing him. It wasn’t like with Kathleen or even with my mom—I loved my family, and they loved me, but there was something special about the way my dad and I understood each other.

“I’ll try after she settles into her new job. I don’t think even the threat of a nuclear holocaust could stop her until she feels like she owns that position.”

Dad laughed, and I looked at Elliot, my face twisted into a shocked smile.

“Hey now—I would stop if I knew the world was ending!”

“Would you, though, sweetheart?”

I narrowed my eyes at my dad, and he squished me to his side.

“You understand her,” Dad said to Elliot. “That’s the second of the many hurdles you have to jump before she’ll let you care about her.”

“Da-ad!”

“I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already now,” Dad said as he took a long swig of his beer, eyeing Elliot to confirm what he already knew.

“What’s the first hurdle?” Elliot asked.

“You have to be interesting enough to catch her attention.”

“Oh my god, Dad,” I said as I returned to fetch my drink from behind the bar. “Can we not dive right into the depths of my psyche?”

“It’s better than small talk,” Dad retorted as Elliot gave a surprised laugh.

Dad smiled at Elliot and angled his beer toward him.

“To the death of small talk,” Dad said, and Elliot smiled as he clinked his glass with Dad’s bottle of beer.

Despite the fact that I was slightly embarrassed, I couldn’t stop the spread of my satisfied grin. That was what my dad did—he made people comfortable, even people like Elliot who couldn’t or wouldn’t show their true selves to a stranger.

“Charles, kids! Dinner’s ready,” Mom yelled as she motioned to the caterers who were setting up the picnic tables on the front lawn.

The three of us made our way to the front lawn, Elliot’s hand finding mine as soon as I was close to him.

Dinner was quite lovely despite the July heat, my mom having had a breezy tent set up around the picnic tables and tiki torches spread out to provide the double benefit of soft light and warding off insects.

The focus was mostly off of Elliot as we all chatted, catching up and quickly falling into easy conversation about family members, neighbors, and career events, including my promotion.

Erin and Ryan arrived just as the caterers cleared away the plates, Erin grabbing at some of the leftovers and giggling her way across the lawn.

All attention was diverted to her; she was one of those people that the eye and the ear were drawn to—charismatic and full of energy.

After meeting Elliot, Erin sat down next to me and leaned in to whisper, “As soon as the olds go to bed, we’re going starry swimming—will your cutie be interested?”

Starry swimming was code for getting high in the pool.

“Yes—he’ll be quite interested.”

Erin gave me a grin and shot a wink at Elliot, who raised his eyebrows in concern.

Leaning in close to his ear, I quietly said, “I’ll explain later.”

It was after midnight by the time I rummaged through my wardrobe, wondering which bikini might interest Elliot the most. I settled on a little yellow one that was fringed with ruffles, slipping on a pair of matching flipflops before walking out of the closet.  

Elliot’s eyes were lit up by the screen of his phone until they flicked to me, then settled on me as his mouth dropped open a bit.

“Good choice?”

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“Who’s texting you?”

“Angela. She wanted me to go see her dad with her for the holiday. She thinks I’m lying.”

“Let’s send her a pic,” I said, grinning and plopping down next to Elliot.

“Uhhh—”

“She doesn’t know about me?”

“Not exactly.”

I looked at Elliot and shrugged my shoulders.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I just haven’t really had the chance to tell anyone—”

“In case we break up?”

Elliot frowned and looked away, his hands coming to rest on top of his head after he tossed his phone on the bed.

He sighed, “Are you mad I’m still waiting for the hammer to fall?”

“No—I’m mad because you haven’t put your swim trunks on yet,” I said as I poked the end of his nose. “Get changed.”

Elliot groaned and reluctantly slid out of bed, heading into the closet to change. When he emerged, he was in a black t-shirt and his new swim trunks, black, but dotted with white stars. His skinny legs looked comical and even paler than his arms and face.

“We need to get you some sun, hackerman.”

Elliot rolled his eyes, and I warned him that my mother had a sixth sense for eye-rolling—she was probably getting out of bed right at that moment to come and yell at him.

Elliot looked genuinely alarmed for a moment before he narrowed his eyes and told me to shut up.

I giggled and he huffed in an attempt to disguise his own, inadvertent laugh.

Erin and Ryan were already floating around in the pool by the time we got outside.

Despite their closeness, Erin was every bit Kathleen’s opposite. The starkest contrast was Erin’s inclination to disregard rules, even though she was a lawyer. My dad always said that was what actually made her so damn good at her job.

“Heeeey!” Erin yelled, swimming to the edge of the pool and hoisting herself out. “Come on, Ry—I’m ready to really start this party.”

Ryan chose to use the stairs at the shallow end of the pool, and he walked over to us as Erin tossed him a towel. Ryan wrapped the towel around his waist and headed to the bar.

“Let’s see the goods, Elliot. Strip!”

“Please ignore her,” I said, kicking at Erin. “She’s a complete slut.”

Erin corrected me as she wiggled her engagement ring in my direction.

“Excuse me. A former slut.”

I laughed and extended my hands to help pull her up. She pressed her wet body into mine before giggling and running over to the bar.

“The answer is yes—she’s the energetic one.”

Elliot just looked at me, then to Erin and Ryan.

As he followed me to the bar, Elliot quietly said, “You’re all so . . . affectionate.”

I stopped and turned around, looking at Elliot’s face.

“Well, Charlie’s not. He’s more reserved, kinda like you.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. You like each other.”

“Generally,” I said chuckling.

“Hey, Erin,” I called. “Remember that time we got in a fight over the last bag of chips?”

“Yeah—you sat on them and the bag exploded. Then you made ME clean it up!”

Erin and I laughed as Ryan and Elliot smiled, listening to us tease each other.

“You smoke?” Ryan asked Elliot as he finished rolling the joint.

“On occasion,” Elliot said, causing me to laugh again.

“My man,” Ryan said as he lit the join and offered it to Elliot first.

Erin, not be outdone, reached into the pouch on the bar and pulled out another joint, lighting it and taking a long drag before passing it to me.

“Selfish asshole,” I said as I exhaled in her face.

“Love you, sis!”

The haze of a high settled over us like the haze of the July night. Soon, we found ourselves in the pool, splashing and giggling and swimming and talking, Elliot’s lips loosened far more than usual.

Erin flirted with him unmercifully, as was her custom, and Elliot looked terrified at first, his eyes darting to me as he struggled to put distance between himself and her.

Ryan and I were both sitting in the shallow end, grinning in amusement, knowing she was only having fun. Erin would flirt with a tomato if she thought it might flirt back.  

Once Elliot realized it was all in fun, Erin even managed to make him laugh out loud with one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard Elliot make. His laugh was carefree, and it melted my heart, drawing me to him like a siren’s song.

Erin splashed me in the face before she swam away.

“Having fun?” I said, grinning, my words feeling heavy and slow.

Elliot grew quiet and I could see his eyes burning to let his voice say yes.

“You don’t have to say it out loud,” I said smiling and sliding my hands to his hips, floating closer to him.

Elliot didn’t say that he was happy, but he reached out for my legs and wrapped them around his waist before leaning in to kiss me.

Our kiss was slow, steady, and deep, and it could’ve been the high, but I felt like the entire world melted away when Elliot’s mouth was on mine.

And before I knew it, we really were all alone in the pool. So, I returned to Elliot’s lips, kissing him and grinding against him under the stars, so high and so content.

* Thursday * 

Elliot awoke with a jolt due to me staring intently at him, a grin plastered across my face. I was already dressed in a dark blue swimsuit underneath my white shorts and white lightweight, long-sleeve top.

“Do you get seasick?” I asked while dangling a bottle of water in front of his face.

Elliot blinked away the sleep as his mind struggled to figure out what I was talking about, and as his dry mouth from all the weed we smoked last night struggled to speak.

He took the bottle of water, took a long drink, and said, “I—I don’t think so?”

“Great! We’re going sailing with Charlie. I’ve already laid out an outfit,” I said gesturing to a pile of clothes that were laying across the bench at the foot of the bed.

Elliot lifted his head to look at the clothes, then sank back onto the bed.

“What else did you buy me?”

“Just a couple of non-black shirts so you don’t get heatstroke.”

“Stop buying me stuff.”

“You don’t really mind,” I said planting loud kisses across his jaw until he laughed and pushed me away.

“This weekend is going to fuck up my worldview for the rest of my life. Sailing,” Elliot huffed. “I’m a fucking hypocrite.”

“Hey—lots of people sail. They have Groupon deals all the time.”

“What the hell is a Groupon?”

“Something you will never, ever use,” I said with a chuckle. “I’ll see you downstairs in 15.”

I grabbed my tote from the bench and went downstairs to pack some light snacks. Charlie was already packing a cooler, and I knew he’d remember the booze and forget the food.

We chatted, mostly about the good weed he missed last night.

Elliot walked into the kitchen and I had to stop my mouth from dropping open. He was in the light grey shorts and the white t-shirt I laid out for him. He also opted for the black slip-on converses I tucked in his bag. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten Elliot this far from his jeans, tennis shoes, and hoodie.

He ran his hand nervously through his hair, pulling at the already straight strands.

“Charlie, this is Elliot. Elliot, my brother, Charlie.”

“Hey.”

“Hey. So, what do you say we get the hell outta here? I love Kat’s kids, but the thought of them on a sailboat—no fuckin’ way.”

“Mom and Dad know we’re taking the boat, right?”

“Leave a note? Be back before dinner.”

“Smart—we’ll avoid the pre-dinner, nothing is ready even though it is, drama.”

We each grabbed a bag or a cooler and walked out the back door toward our dock, the sun having risen only a few feet above the water. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day, only a few clouds surrounding the sun, casting a soft, golden light over the water.

I looked over at Elliot and smiled, his skin glowing golden with the warmth of the sun, a slight smile on his face as he took in the sunrise, the water, and the sailboat.

I leaned closer to him and whispered, “You’re happy—and it’s okay.”

“I think it’s just nerves. I’m so far out of my element I can’t do anything other than smile like an idiot.”

I laughed and Charlie looked back.

“Elliot’s never been sailing. He’s a little nervous.”

“You’re in good hands,” Charlie said, stepping back to allow us to get on the boat first. “I started taking Y/N sailing as soon as she was out of diapers—which took a lot longer than you’d think.”

“I swear to god, Charlie,” I said, shaking my head, and seeing Elliot smirk out of the corner of my eye.

“Do not let him think he’s funny—he’ll roast me all day if he thinks he has a proper audience.”

Elliot shrugged. “There’s nothing he could tell me that would make me think you aren’t perfect.”

“Dude. No. She can’t have hooked you that deep yet?”

“Pretty deep,” Elliot said, his eyes glancing at me.

Charlie made a noise of disgust, but I didn’t miss the soft smile. If I was happy, my brother was happy, and vice-versa. It was as simple as that for us. Charlie and I never had to worry about comparing ourselves to one another, never had to worry about that slight undercurrent of jealousy that stemmed from thinking that we were not enough like our sisters.

Sailing was a lot of work, so Charlie and I taught Elliot, who was eager to learn. We stopped for lunch at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, and Elliot stuck to my side, clearly preferring the open air of the bay over the aristocratic charm of the club.

When we set sail again, Elliot didn’t need reminding about what to do and jumped into handling the rigging like he had been doing it for years.

I could tell Elliot liked Charlie, probably because he told such embarrassing stories about me, but more likely because Charlie was just like my dad—he made people feel at ease.

When we weren’t adjusting the sails or sharing stories, the three of us just sat in companionable silence, taking in the feel of the boat on the water, the warmth of the sun, the smell of the salt in the air, and the quiet solitude of the bay.

We got back just in time for dinner, which was a repeat of the previous night with the exception that we had Erin to entertain us. The early evening passed, full of laughter and stories, and I leaned back and smiled as Elliot took in all of our dynamics, occasionally leaning across the table to ask Charlie some more questions about sailing.

“Alright, family!” my mother announced. “Time for fireworks!”

We made our way toward the beach with our blankets, and once we got settled, Elliot looked over at me smiled—at least until he ended up with a lap full of toddler.

Molly and her brothers were playing, waving sparklers around and unleashing blacksnake fireworks, and she took off running only to trip over the edge of our blanket and fall right into Elliot’s lap.

“Gah!” came Elliot’s shocked response as he looked down at Molly, his expression one of pure horror until Molly twisted around to see what, or rather who, she landed on. She looked at Elliot and started giggling.

“Silly!” she exclaimed, patting him on the arm.

“You fell on me,” Elliot replied in his normal intonation just as the first firework shot up in the distance, startling me and Elliot, but not Molly.

When Molly felt Elliot start at the noise, she asked, “Do you need to sit on me?”

Elliot chuckled and looked at her with his grey eyes, a smile crinkling the skin in the corners.

“I’m okay, and thanks for asking. The first one always scares me a little.”

Molly smiled and shifted, turning around in Elliot’s lap to face the water and to lean back onto his chest, her hair snaggling just a bit in the slight stubble on his chin.

He looked over at me and I smiled, shrugged, and scooted closer to lean against his side.

Molly “ooo-ed” and “ahh-ed” as we watched the fireworks and Elliot kept sneaking glances at her as if he couldn’t believe she were still there. I suppose there was a quietness in Elliot that just appealed to Molly, and to the boys. He didn’t treat them like they were anything other than miniature people. Kids liked to know they were human, too. Liked to feel normal, something Elliot always seemed to recognize when it was a need in someone else.

I rested my head on Elliot’s shoulder, and I would be lying if I said the thought of a normal, disgustingly domestic future with a child of our own didn’t cross my mind. And when Elliot turned his head to breath in my hair before placing a kiss to the top of my head, I would be lying if said I didn’t believe he was thinking about it, too.

* Friday * 

“Fuck,” I muttered, my mind barely awake as I scrolled through my phone.

Elliot was laid out next to me, soundly sleeping. I hated to wake him, but I had no choice.

I put my phone on the nightstand and rolled to face him, taking in the peaceful look on his face. The circles under his eyes were gone and his skin had started to take on a more golden hue. The sun had done him wonders, and I had to remind myself that I didn’t have time to get lost in the beauty of him at the moment.

I was away from work, so of course the world was on fire.

I moved in closer to Elliot and placed a soft kiss on his forehead, reaching up to run my fingers through his thick, messy hair.

Elliot stirred so I whispered, “Hey, El. Good morning.”

I could see Elliot’s eyes moving under his lids as he fought to wake up. His tongue darted out to wet his lips and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He shifted, stretching a little before finally opening his eyes.

The immediate smile on his face as he registered me warmed my heart.

“Morning,” he rasped, sleep still clinging to his voice.

“I lied. It’s not a ‘good’ morning,” I said frowning.

Elliot’s eyes turned more alert, so I continued.

“Our IDS went off last night—well, early this morning. The reactive program set up before your time worked so the Source IP was blocked. They tried like hell to get in, and I want to know if this was an isolated incident or if they were after other companies, too.”

“You want me to track them.”

“Can you do it remotely? Dad has a VPN.”

“Yes,” Elliot paused, then asked, “They gave him a VPN here? In a house that’s not always occupied?”

“It’s a recent development. This is sort of a secret, but Dad is planning to retire next year. He and mom plan to move to this house permanently, so they’ve been spending more time here.”

Elliot sighed.

“Smart move—the hackers, I mean.”

“I know. Is that what you would do if you were a black hat?”

Elliot looked over at me and raised his brow, “I would’ve succeeded.”

I huffed out a laugh and pressed a kiss to his lips. Elliot quickly wrapped his arms around me and pulled my body on top of his. What began as an innocent kiss turned into a mess of breathy pants and sighs as our bodies ground together in the early morning light.

Elliot rolled us over and reached between our bodies, sliding a finger into my underwear to stroke my opening. I reached to grasp his hard length through his underwear before pushing the fronts down to pull out his cock.

I looked at him and he returned my gaze, his grey eyes darkened to a deep blue.

I spread my legs and pulled him toward me as he pushed my panties to the side. I pressed his tip against my wetness, and I longed for my ache of want to be filled by him.

Elliot narrowed his eyes with concern, but I shook my head and shifted my hips up to invite him to enter me.

Elliot pushed inside of me with ease, his eyes closing and his mouth popping open at the sensation of being inside me without a condom for the first time. He pulled me closer to his body, our t-shirts pressing into one another as we fucked in a heated frenzy of morning sex.

His face was pressed into my hair, into my neck, and he came quickly, buried unapologetically inside my body.

I slowly exhaled in a sad sigh that we didn’t have longer to just stay like this.

“We’ve got work to do,” I said, leaning up to place a soft bite on his shoulder.

“But—”

“I don’t need to get off every time, El. Sometimes, it’s more about intimacy. And that was delightfully intimate. I’m going to get shivers all day thinking about you—not that that’s much different than any other day now,” I said with a smile as I wriggled out from under his warm body.

“Get dressed,” I said with a wink as I ducked into the bathroom.

By lunchtime, Elliot had tracked the hackers and every company they attacked. They were novices and left way too many trails; my dad made frequent appearances in his study, sometimes asking if we needed anything, sometimes asking general questions, and sometimes just watching us work.

“I feel so inept,” he said, watching as our fingers flew over the keys, Elliot barely registering his presence.

“It’s like a hidden world, Dad,” I said distantly, trying not to lose the current signature of one of the IPS addresses.

By early afternoon, Elliot and I had everything we needed for me to hand over the file to the police.

My dad was impressed and peppered Elliot with questions until the boys came in to beg Pap to swim with them.

Elliot and I joined Charlie, Erin, Ryan, and Mom in the kitchen, settling at the kitchen table with Charlie, who began peppering us with questions very similar to my father’s.

It was Elliot’s turn to be the expert on something, and I listened with such contentment as he talked, unbelieving of just how well the weekend had gone, despite the early morning hack.

I should have known—it’s always the quite moments of pure contentment that are broken, shattered into a thousand pieces so you feel like you had only ever imagined experiencing genuine happiness.

Two very wet boys, one of them screeching, came skidding to a halt in the kitchen attempting to tattle to Mimi about some wrong that had been committed, except that Jared was so worked up that he just kept on skidding until his nose collided with the edge of the kitchen island, the crack that sounded through the room sending a wave of nausea through me.

Jared bounced off the island and fell onto the floor, blood pouring from his nose. I heard Elliot’s reaction before I saw or registered his look of panic. The chair he had been sitting in had flung back as he jumped up and he was pale and trembling as he stared at the mess that was Jared on the floor. Charlie jumped into action, running outside to get Kathleen, and Erin, Ry, and Mom all scrambled to get supplies to stop the bleeding and to tend to Jared.  

Elliot looked crazed in that moment, his mind gone, so far away, just like that fateful night in the server room.

Everyone was so preoccupied with Jared’s bleeding nose that no one noticed Elliot’s reaction. I went to reach for him, to pull him into the other room, but he jumped away from me, his eyes frantic as he searched for an escape.

He took off in the direction of the stairs and I followed, feeling even sicker to my stomach.

I followed Elliot to my room, and he went straight into the closet, settling back against the wall, his breathing irregular, his eyes vacant.

“Elliot,” I said in a tone that was very similar to that night in the server room.

I approached him slowly, knowing better than to reach for him this time. I settled onto the floor, my every movement deliberate.

“Whatever’s happening in your head right now, just know that it’s not real anymore. I’m real. I’m right here,” I said, tapping the floor next to him, still not daring to touch him. “I’m right here, El.”

“Leave me the fuck alone,” Elliot said in a tone I had never heard before, his eyes snapping into focus and staring into me, icy and furious.

“This is all your fault. You wormed in, wriggled deep inside, and you’ve got no idea the kinda shit you’re gonna find when you’ve burrowed in deep enough. I can’t protect him if you keep forcing him to open up. To be vulnerable,” Elliot spat.

“Him who, Elliot? Your father?”

“Fuck you,” Elliot said, still looking at me like he wished I were dead.

“He’s . . . gone, remember? Your dad’s gone.”

Elliot said nothing, but pulled his legs tight up to his body. His shaking hands wrapped around his knees.

My eyes were filled with tears as I moved to sit next to Elliot against the wall of my closet. I swiped at the tears I couldn’t hold back, their wet heat so offensive to my fingers as I rubbed them away and onto my shorts.

We sat in silence for a long time, and I was afraid to look at Elliot again. Afraid to see that twisted expression on his face that said it hated me.

My ass had long ago grown numb, but I didn’t dare move. I didn’t want Elliot to think he was alone when he came back from whatever was going on in his head.

I was busy pulling at the frays on my shorts and continuing to fight off tears when Elliot’s soft voice broke the silence.

“Y/N?” Elliot asked, his expression tightening in a wave of confusion.

I finally looked at him again, and it was if he’d undergone a change. The iciness was gone, and it was once again the Elliot I had always known looking at me.

“What happened? I don’t—I can’t remember anything after . . . after—” Elliot looked so lost, so worried.

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t try to remember. It’s not important.”

“Yes, it is! I have to remember. I need to remember!” he yelled, causing me to flinch.

“Jared had an accident—slammed into the kitchen island,” I said immediately, watching Elliot’s face as he stared at me, wide-eyed and desperate. “He has a broken nose. There was blood everywhere, and you just . . . lost it. It was like that night in the server room. You’ve been here with me, Elliot. Right here. But your mind . . . wasn’t.”

“Why can’t I remember?” Elliot asked, his voice tinged with agony.

“Your mind isn’t ready for you to remember. Whatever happened to you—your mind just isn’t ready to let you remember. Repression is a powerful coping mechanism.”

Elliot looked at me for a long time. His eyes searching mine before they focused on my hands in my lap, the wet spots from my tears an evident mark on the denim of my shorts.

Elliot’s eyes filled with tears and his lips trembled as he fought not to cry.

“I hate this,” he breathed. “I hate that I can’t ever be normal.

“Come here,” I said, pulling his head to my chest. He wrapped his arms around me, and I could feel the wetness of his tears on my chest as he began to cry. I had a million questions, but I wasn’t sure Elliot could even answer them or that I should even ask them.

And talking it out wasn’t what he needed right now. What he needed now more than anything was someone to make him feel safe and loved.

“Shh,” I whispered into his hair as I held him, my face buried in the sweet scent of my own shampoo that he had used, the thick, soft strands of his hair tickling my nose and cheeks.

“You’re safe with me, Elliot. What’s in the past can’t hurt you anymore. I won’t let it. Know why?”

He shook his head against my chest.

“Because I love you.”

A breathy sob escaped from between Elliot’s lips and he clutched onto me even tighter than the night I saved him from the server room.

“I love you,” I whispered next to his ear before pressing a kiss to his temple. “I love you, and I’ll do anything I can to keep you safe, to make you happy.”

We stayed like that for a long time, so long I thought Elliot had fallen asleep, and my eyes had begun to drift shut.

I heard a soft knock on my bedroom door, and Elliot jumped up, clearly not asleep.

“It’s probably just someone coming to check on us. Just stay here,” I said pulling the door closed enough so no one could see in.

I opened the door and stepped out into the hall to talk to Charlie who confirmed that Jared had indeed broken his nose. Charlie thought it was somewhat comical now that the hubbub was over, but I just sighed and shook my head.

“Remember that time I broke my nose over Thanksgiving? I still don’t think Mom’s forgiven me,” he said with a small laugh.

“No—she still won’t allow you to play football. And now she’ll never let Jared and Jack swim again,” I said.

“Is Elliot okay? I saw him bolt out of the kitchen.”

“He doesn’t do blood,” I said, the lie to protect Elliot falling easily from my lips.

“That was a lot of fucking blood,” Charlie confirmed. “Always a time to be had at the Y/L/N summer house!”

I shook my head and smiled softly, then told Charlie goodnight, thanking him for checking on us, too.

“Hey,” I said gently as I pushed open the closet door. “Charlie said Jared’s fine. They set his nose and he’s going to have two spectacularly black eyes for a while, but he’s doing just fine. Let’s get you the hell off this floor and into bed. You cannot tell me that your ass is not full of pins and needles.”

We undressed, quietly and quickly, sliding into the bed after Elliot opened the balcony door to let in the night’s breeze and the noise of the water on the bay. In the distance, there were fireworks popping off as people’s celebrations continued.

When we settled into bed, Elliot faced away from me, but backed into my body, touching me just enough so that he knew I was there. I wanted to wrap my arms around him again, but I refrained. He clearly needed some space, but not so much to know I wasn’t there. I had a feeling I would end up with a body covered in Elliot in the morning once his mind was at ease and his subconscious was free to do as it pleased.

Elliot clearly experienced some kind of panic attack triggered by Jared’s injury. As for the way he spoke to me, it was some sort of defense mechanism.

I shivered and hoped I never had to see that part of Elliot again.

* Saturday morning *

I was right.

I awoke to a mouthful of black hair as Elliot was tucked into me, his arm wrapped snuggly over me and his head resting on my chest, just over my heartbeat.

My waking thoughts returned to last night, and I wondered whether I should ask Elliot about what happened. I wanted to know more about his past, but I really wanted to know how to help him now.

I snuggled into the top of his hair, and breathed him in.

My next waking thought was that I had told Elliot I loved him—fuck.

He damn near had a meltdown after I asked him to be my boyfriend, so I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen when he processed what I said to him. I wondered if I should start with that—maybe he wouldn’t even remember?

My phone lit up and I reached over to check my texts. Kathleen said they were leaving soon and wanted to say goodbye.

I slipped out from under Elliot’s grasp and threw on some shorts, trying not to wake him as I wrestled my hair into a bun.

“Where are you going?” he asked sleepily.

“Kat’s leaving soon and I want to tell her and the kids goodbye.”

“Did I—did they see?”

“No. Char’s the only one who noticed you left the room rather quickly, and I told him blood wasn’t your thing.”

“Oh.”

“Do you wanna tell the kids goodbye?”

Elliot nodded and shuffled out of bed, reaching for the same shorts he had on last night. We both used the bathroom and then headed downstairs, the smell of a spectacular breakfast assaulting our noses.

Erin came pounding down the stairs after us and quickly read the room before inhaling dramatically and saying, “Ahhh! Nothing like the smell of bacon in the morning, right Jare?”

Everyone laughed as Jared glared at her and then even more when he couldn’t stop his own laugh.

We all ate breakfast together, and I could tell Elliot was tense, the easiness of the previous days gone, replaced by the anxiety that just refused to let go of him for any real length of time.

I had struggled with my own bouts of anxiousness and depression, but nothing had ever been as serious as Elliot’s. My heart ached for him, and I resolved not to let the incident in the closet go . . . like I had with the incident in the server room.

If I was ever going to help him, or get him help, I needed to get him to talk to me.

We helped Kathleen and Josh load up the car and stood in the driveway to say goodbye. Molly walked over to Elliot and clutched onto his legs, so he picked her up and hugged her, much to her delight.

Jared gave us all a reluctant hug, and I planted a kiss to the top of his head before whispering that Uncle Char broke his nose over Thanksgiving and while he was in the ER with Mimi and Pap, the turkey burned.

Jared’s face split into an expression of glee, despite his swollen eyes and nose. He looked at Charlie and said, “Well at least I didn’t ruin the Thanksgiving turkey!”

“Thanks, sis,” Charlie said.

We waved goodbye, and I asked Elliot if he wanted to take a walk on the beach. He nodded yes, so we walked across the stone path and through the front yard until our feet hit sand.

We were quiet for a long time, enjoying the cool lapping of the water at low tide as we walked.

I tested Elliot’s desire to be touched and reached for his hand.

“It’s okay if you want to pull away,” I said as his fingers curled around mine.

“I don’t.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to ask him—I was burning to ask him something about last night, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It may have been that Elliot seemed to be relaxing again, or that I feared pulling him back to that dark place, but more likely, it was my own defense mechanisms wrapping their protective arms around me while I dealt with the weight of my unacknowledged I love you.

We walked in companionable silence, both of us lost in our thoughts until Elliot started talking about yesterday’s hack. We fell into an easy, safe conversation, and I found myself okay with that. I knew I couldn’t ignore the much more difficult conversation we needed to have forever, but what was the harm in letting Elliot have some time to process? Patience. That was what he needed right now.

When it started raining that afternoon, we decided to head back into the city a little early to beat the surge of Sunday traffic.  

We said goodbye to my family, and Elliot thanked them all for making him feel so welcome. I smiled as I watched him interact with my mom and my dad more easily than I could’ve ever dreamed.

Charlie and Elliot gave each other head nods, but the look of soft affection that passed between them made me smile.

And that soft moment was quickly replaced by yet another quiet moment of horror when Erin launched herself into Elliot’s arms, dramatically declaring that she’d die if she didn’t see him again before the end of summer.

Elliot patted her and stilled, waiting for her to release him, but when she leaned up and whispered something in his ear, he laughed, that same booming laugh from the night in the pool.

I found myself smiling like an idiot, again. Despite Jared’s broken nose and Elliot’s subsequent panic attack, the weekend was a true success.

Our drive back was quiet, music playing faintly on the radio as the rain splattered on the windshield of my SUV.

I stopped outside of Elliot’s building, the wipers a steady beat in the background as he pulled his backpack up to the front seat.

“I’m sure you’re ready for some alone time.”

“I like being with you,” Elliot offered.

I smiled, sadness still tugging at my heart, not just because of finally beginning to understand the depth of Elliot’s pain, but because it was clear he wasn’t ready to love me. Like me, just not love me. And I needed to figure out a way to be okay with that.

“Do you need help with any—”

“Thank you for—”

We looked at each other and laughed, one of those awkward laughs that happens when there’s just so much to unpack but you’re too tired and you just don’t want to yet.

“It’s just one bag. I can manage,” Elliot said.

“You’re welcome for the weekend,” I returned.

“I wasn’t going to thank you for the weekend. I wanted to,” Elliot paused and collected his thoughts, his eyes looking at my hand as it rested on the gear shift. “I wanted to thank you for what you said. It meant a lot. And it means a lot that you understood what I needed to hear and you were willing to say it to me, no matter if you didn’t mean it.”

“What?” I asked stupidly.

“I know you didn’t mean it. You were just being good to me. You’re always good to me.”

“Elliot,” I said firmly. “I would never tell someone I loved them if I didn’t mean it. Come on. You have to expect better from people—not people. From me. Expect better from me.”

Elliot looked at me, his mouth open in what looked like shock before he pulled in his bottom lip and bit it, his eyes blinking slowly.

“You meant it?”

“I still mean it.”

Elliot looked like he was about to short-circuit.

“Hey—hey,” I said, forcing him to meet my gaze as I lifted his chin. “We aren’t teenagers. I don’t need you to say it back just because I said it. And I’m not going to take it back because you didn’t say it back. I feel the way I feel and I’m so happy about it, El. And I hope you feel the same way someday. But that’s your decision, not mine. I’m not going to push you. I won’t say it again if you don’t want me—”

“I do,” Elliot said, his eyes burning into mine with their intensity, effectively cutting me off from my explanation. “I want you to say it when you feel it. If you mean it, I want you to say it. I’m just not ready—but you have no idea, fuck I don’t even have an idea really, how it makes me feel to know that you think—”

“Not think—”

“That you know how you feel and you feel that way about me.”

“Maybe if I say I love you enough, you’ll start believing it.”

Elliot closed his eyes as if he were memorizing the sound of my voice, memorizing the way the loaded word hung in the air.

“Can it be enough, for now, that you want to give it? Can I have time to figure out how to . . . process that?”

“Time as in we don’t see each other time, or time as in we just keep doing our thing and don’t talk about this for a while?”

Elliot smiled and replied, “The second thing you said. This weekend established an unrealistic expectation—every morning I woke up and it was next to you. Waking up tomorrow is going to be awful.”

“We could always move in together?” I said, wondering if Elliot would read the teasing that was dancing behind my eyes.

“Fuck, Y/N. Are you trying to kill me?” he said with a huff of a laugh.

“Goodnight, Elliot. I’ll miss you.”

“Text me before you fall asleep,” he said as he leaned over the console, his voice low.

Elliot kissed me goodnight, his lips soft and warm as they moved against mine, his teeth pulling on my lower lip before he drew away.

By the time I opened my eyes, he was closing the passenger door. I opened the liftgate and he grabbed his bag, shutting the door firmly.

I watched him jog up the short steps to his building and duck inside, an ache that would someday become all too familiar took hold of my heart as I watched him disappear. 

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 40 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about artificial intelligence – teaching computers language – with special guest Dr Janelle Shane, who runs the blog A.I.weirdness.com and is the author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which is a fun new book about A.I. But first, we have some announcements.

Lauren: It’s a new year and we have new, big, exciting plans for the Lingthusiasm Patreon page. We are introducing a Discord, which is an online chat space, for patrons to share their lingthusiasm with their fellow lingthusiasts.

Gretchen: We’ve heard from a lot of you that you got into linguistics because of Lingthusiasm or it reawakened your memories of how much you like linguistics because you did some courses on it way back when and now you wish you could talk about linguistics more. We’re giving you a space where you can talk about linguistics, share your interesting linguistics links that you come across, and talk about them in a space with other lingthusiasm fans. We’re really excited to see what this community becomes. It’s a bit of an experiment, but we think it’ll be really fun to do. You can join the Patreon at the tier where you get bonus episodes as well, and you also have a space to talk about those bonus episodes and the regular Lingthusiasm episodes and any other linguistics things you wanna talk about.

Lauren: We want to see more Lingthusiasm not just online but also on all kinds of things, which is why we are also sending stickers over the next few months to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier. Patrons who are at that tier for three months or more will get stickers that say, “Lingthusiast” on them.

Gretchen: You can stick that to your laptop, your water bottle, your notebook, anything else in your life. Because the original trial run of stickers that we did with the special offer last year were really popular, we thought we’d provide a way for you to do that around the year. You can join that tier on Patreon as well.

Lauren: You can get other items at our lingthusiasm.com/merch page, but the stickers are an exclusive for our patrons.

Gretchen: Thanks to everybody who’s been a patron so far. We’re really excited to see you in the Discord. And we’re excited to get to try that out.

Lauren: Our last exciting announcement is that our patrons also helped us meet a new funding goal, which means that we now have some additional ling-ministration support.

Gretchen: Our fantastic producer Claire, who’s been with us since the very beginning, is also going to be taking on some more of the administration for the podcast, so you’ll see her around a bit on social media and on Patreon. You can listen to a bonus episode with Claire if you’d like to get to know her better as well.

Lauren: Our current bonus is on the future of English and what English might look like in a couple of centuries from now, inspired by Gretchen’s New York Times article.

Gretchen: You can get access to this episode and 34 other bonus episodes – that’s twice as much Lingthusiasm that you can listen to – at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Janelle. Welcome to Lingthusiasm!

Janelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Lauren: Janelle, we are so excited to have you on the show today to talk about how we can make machines do language.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that we have in common, definitely one of the reasons I enjoy following your blog and Twitter feed and so on, is that both linguists and your approach to A.I. like poking at systems and seeing where they break.

Janelle: Yeah, for sure.

Gretchen: In case some people aren’t already following you on all of the internets, I wanna give people an idea of some of the stuff that you have tried to make break.

Lauren: Janelle, in your work, for people who haven’t seen it, you take large data sets of particular sets of terms or particular language genres, I guess, and then you feed them into an artificial intelligence, and we’ll talk about what that is later, and then it spits out these delightfully whimsical outputs. It takes inspiration from the data set that it’s given. I have a sustained history of laughing inappropriately loudly on public transport while reading your blog because the results are always so entertaining. Gretchen, do you have a favourite to share with us so I can chortle inappropriately?

Gretchen: Lauren, I think we should start with ice cream because I know you have a deep and abiding love of ice cream, and Janelle has come up with ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Janelle, where did the ice cream data come from? Did you have a list of ice cream flavours that someone gave you or…?

Janelle: Yeah. In this case, it was a group of middle-schoolers, actually. There’s a school in Austin, Texas, called Kealing Middle School where there is a group of students in the coding classes who decided that – they saw my blog. They wanted to do it too, and they wanted to generate ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: That’s so great!

Janelle: The thing is, I had looked at that, and I’m like, “Oh, this would be cool.” Then, I looked online and I say, “I need examples of existing ice cream flavours” because the A.I. has to have something to imitate. It doesn’t know about ice cream flavours unless I have some to tell it about. They’re scattered around. There wasn’t any big master list of them. So, I kinda said, “Oh, well. I guess that’s not gonna work.” Then, these middle-schoolers kicked my butt because they went and there was, I dunno, dozens of them – 50, 60 of them. Like, a lot of them. Each of them went and collected a few from this site or that site. Each one site would only have a few at a time. They had to manually copy and paste to this data set. They just, through the sheer numbers and having the time to do it, they put together this amazing data set of existing ice cream flavours. These middle-schoolers ended up getting about 1600 different ice cream flavours. Whereas, I only managed to get together 200. With the data set that much bigger, it made a huge difference. They started generating pretty amusing flavours.

Gretchen: I’ve got the blogpost up about the ice cream flavours from the middle school students, and some of them are really good. There are these whimsical flavours like “It’s Sunday” and “Cherry Poet” and “Brittle Cheesecake” and “Honey Vanilla Happy.” These seem like kind of reasonable ice cream flavours, right?

Lauren: I’d be open to ordering a “Vanilla Nettle.”

Gretchen: “Cherry Cherry Cherry.” If you like cherries, this is the flavour for you. There are also some weirder flavours from this data set like, “Chocolate Finger” and “Caramel Book” and –

Lauren: “Washing Chocolate.”

Gretchen: “Texas Charlie Covered Stunt.” Then, there’s this even weirder category, “Nuts with Mattery,” “Brown Crunch,” “Cookies and Green.”

Lauren: Aww, so close, and yet…

Gretchen: “Mango Cats.”

Lauren: They’re weird to us because of the semantics of them – just to be linguist-y and spoil the moment for a second – but they still are English words, or they look like something we’d recognise as English words, even though I don’t think “mattery” is a word that I know of. I think it’s worth saying artificial intelligence doesn’t know what ice cream is, right, it’s just using this list of flavours to figure out what kind of patterns could fit into that list.

Janelle: Exactly. It’s doing it at a very basic level. Like, what kinds of letters tend to come after other letters? What letters are we often finding in combination? Which letters are we never finding in combination? It’ll learn frequent words like “chocolate” or something. It’ll learn how to spell that after some false starts during training, but, yeah, without any concept of what chocolate is.

Gretchen: If it ends up with something like “Vervette’s Caramel Borfle,” it learned “caramel” but who “Vervette” and “borfle” are, I don’t know. That’s just randomly combining some letters in ways that are probable as English words.

Janelle: Yeah, it’s like a kid who learns how to write and immediately starts putting down letters on paper like, “Is this a word? Is this a word? How do you pronounce this?”

Lauren: Because obviously we train the neural nets that are children’s brains by talking to them a lot and giving them more input and taking them to school and doing those kind of things, but a neural net-type artificial intelligence that we’re doing this kind of training by giving it lots of data, how does it know if it is generating something that is more or less English? Is there a little thing in the computer saying, “Good work, Computer”?

Janelle: What it’s trying to do, how it knows it’s making any progress at all, is its job is to try and predict the next letter or the next combination of letters. Then, it just checks its prediction against some example of real texts that it hasn’t seen before that it saved aside to check itself with and said, “Okay, did I guess close or am I still way off? Am I going to have to change my internal structure so that my guess would’ve been better and see if, going forward, that’s gonna be an improvement?” It’s like a trial and error, guess and check.

Gretchen: When you look at the different sorts of stages – because it goes through several different generations, right? It might start out with just “Here’s a bunch of Es because E is really common.” And then the check is like, “Yeah, but you could do better.”

Janelle: Yeah. It’s like guessing lots of Es is more correct than guessing lots of question marks or lots of Qs. Yeah, it has to say, “Oh, well, maybe I could work in an S from time to time. What do you know? That’s slightly more correct,” and proceeds from there.

Lauren: So, that’s how it learns “chocolate”? Because it might go in with CH and HC, and every time it goes, “Is HC right? Is HC right?” And the data set is like, “Naw, not really.” But when it’s got the CH for an ice cream list, it’s like, getting lots of positive feedback that that’s gonna appear in “chocolate” and “chip” and “cherry.”

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. The process, yeah, it is a lot different from the human child learning language because it’s taking place, really, in isolation with no other context. It’s as if you are setting somebody in a room with just a few dictionaries or a few encyclopaedias written in a language that they don’t understand. It’s even harder for the A.I. because it doesn’t have a concept of what language even is to start out with. It’s all just guessing what comes next in this sequence of arcane symbols.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have a sense of what’s probable in the world either, right?

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because you have some of these flavours like “Peanut Butter Slime,” which those are all English words, it’s just it would make a terrible ice cream because slime and peanut butter and ice cream are not things that go together.

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. Or, if I’m getting it to generate Halloween costumes, it’ll come up with “zombie school bus.” It’s like, “Okay, zombie school bus. There’s magic school bus. Why is that more likely than zombie school bus?” We know. It doesn’t.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have any of that real-world knowledge that you can do – or like “Mango Cats.” What does it mean for a cat to be mango? I don’t know.

Lauren: If an artificial intelligence gained sentience, it’s likely it actually wouldn’t be a very good linguistics student because it doesn’t really understand the concept of sounds. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of understanding of the structure of a sentence. We talk in one episode about syntax essentially being this structure that we can hang other bits of sentences off. It has much more of a flat, just looking at the patterns on the surface kind of approach to language.

Janelle: Yeah. Keep in mind, too, the amount of computing power it has to work with is so much less than what it takes for sentience or anything near human level. If you’re looking at raw computing power, the neural nets we have today are somewhere around the level of an earthworm.

Gretchen: Maybe an earthworm would like peanut butter slime-flavoured ice cream.

Janelle: I’ll give all my Peanut Butter Slime to the earthworm.

Lauren: That’s very generous of you.

Gretchen: This was one of the analogies that I liked in your book, which I enjoyed very much. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – the title of this book was named after another neural net, right?

Janelle: Mm-hmm. This was a phrase generated from a neutral net that was trying to do pick-up lines.

Gretchen: I guess that could be a pick-up line.

Lauren: We have things like ice cream names, and you’ve done death metal names, and Halloween costumes, and colours, and these are all three or four words at most. Pick-up lines is moving into more of the sentence/couple of sentences-type of thing. As the amount of words you’re trying to generate grows longer, how much more difficult does that make it for the artificial intelligence?

Janelle: It makes it a lot more difficult. When I was generating the ice cream flavours and things, I was deliberately going exclusively for these kinds of problems where it would just have to do a couple words at a time because when it tried to do longer sentences or phrases, it would not make sense. One of the things is that the A.I. I was working with at the time didn’t have very much memory at all. So, it would kind of lose track of things that happened a couple of words ago. It wasn’t really able to figure out then how to make a sentence work or make phrases work. It was a bit beyond it. The pick-up lines was definitely a case of, “This is too hard for the A.I.” It struggles, okay, not just the “How do you make a grammatical phrase?” but also “How do you do puns? How do you do innuendo?” These were all things that require a lot of background knowledge that this thing just did not have.

Gretchen: Another example that you use in the book is with recipes, right? It can figure out that you need to list some ingredients, you need to list some instructions, but then those instructions won’t contain the ingredients that were previously mentioned, necessarily, because it doesn’t remember that those are what it listed before.

Janelle: Yeah, we’ll see that. You’ll get something that on the surface at first glance looks like a recipe and then, when you actually read more closely, you’re like, “Wait a second. It has no idea what’s going on. It’s forgotten its ingredients. It’s telling me to chop the milk into cubes. Something’s going on here.”

Lauren: There’s something very confident about the way it fakes its ability.

Janelle: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the reason it sounds so confident is that it’s copying what humans have written, and humans generally didn’t tend to write in the middle of a recipe, “Uhh, wait a second. I have no idea what’s going on.” It learns that is not a phrase that appears in a recipe, so it’s going to express any kind of confusion. It’s just going to plough ahead with its best guess at what a human would say.

Gretchen: This is where, I think, your famous giraffe question comes from.

Janelle: Ah, yes. I love this chatbot. It’s a chatbot called Visual Chatbot. It’s designed to answer questions about an image. You show it an image and then it comes up with a caption, and then you can have this back and forth conversation with the bot about what it sees in the image. You think that premise would be fairly straightforward, but there are weird quirks that arise just because this thing is trying to copy how humans ask and answer questions about images. The training data is important. In this case, the training data is a whole bunch of people hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk to take turns asking and answering questions about images. Then, the chatbot was trained on answers. So, given this kind of image, given what the question is, what would humans tend to answer in this situation? Some weird quirks emerge just from that premise. One of the things that they wanted to make sure to avoid was this thing called priming. People tend to ask questions to which the answer tends to be “yes.” They found in an early version of this chatbot that they could get 80% accuracy just by answering “yes” to every single yes-or-no question.

Gretchen: Uh-oh!

Janelle: They ended up having to hide the image from the person who was asking questions, so that helped a little bit. Now, it’s about 50/50 if you ask a given question whether it’s going to answer yes or no to that. One of the things that they weren’t able to correct was this interesting thing with the giraffes. What happens is, if you ask the question, “How many giraffes do you see?” the chatbot will almost always return a non-zero answer. It can be doing great about an image and, “Oh, yeah. This is a person on a snowboard. There’s snow,” up until the point where you ask, “And how many giraffes are there?” It will answer, “Three” or “Two” or “Too many to count.”

Lauren: I think it’s just worth clarifying, just to really make this clear, this is not a data set in which giraffes appear in every image.

Janelle: True. Yes. I would love to see that data set – snowboarding with giraffes.

Lauren: “Yeah, there are three giraffes.”

Gretchen: Giraffe snowboarders – this is possible. Because I know this is an ongoing joke that you have, I tested with an image of the cover of my book which, as I think as everyone knows, contains zero giraffes because it’s not about giraffes. Visual chatbot told me that it is a sign that says, “Unknown, unknown, unknown,” on the side of it which I guess is not the worst for a cover that has text in it. It just can’t read the text – sure. Then, I said, “How many giraffes?” and Visual Chatbot said, “Two.”

Janelle: It comes from this thing is copying how humans tend to answer this question. In its examples of humans hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the humans had not tended to ask the question, “How many giraffes are there?” when they didn’t know if there were any giraffes.

Gretchen: Right. You’d say something like, “Are there any giraffes?” The person says, “Yes,” and then you say, “How many giraffes?”

Janelle: Exactly. If you ask the chatbot, “Are there any giraffes?” it will answer, “No,” quite often. But then, if you follow up with the question, “And how many giraffes do you see?” it’ll say, “Five.”

Lauren: This approach reminds me of, as Gretchen said earlier, as soon as I get my hands on some kind of thing that’s doing this back and forth question asking or as soon as I’m let loose on a Google Translate, I think it’s a very linguist-brain thing to try and find these points at which the computer can’t handle language properly. It’s always great when you have an approach that understands how humans actually interact with this data that helps explain why you end up getting these really strange answers and why it’s good to have linguists help design artificial intelligence or chatbots and these things because the way humans choose to do language is very different to what we think of as the nice, straightforward application at the end.

Janelle: There’s so many start-ups that are trying to have some kind of bot that you can interact with in an open-ended manner. Then, they run into trouble. Facebook M is one of these services that was discontinued last year because they thought it was going to be like a digital assistant, lives in your browser, you can ask it to do things like look up show times and stuff. But what people ended up asking for was the weirdest, most complicated things. One guy documented, oh yeah, he asked it if it could arrange for a parrot to visit his office. I mean, you’re not gonna prepare for that when you’re training one of these chatbots. It turned out to be the chatbot kept needing humans to step in and rescue it. They realised it was going to be too expense because they were always gonna need these humans.

Lauren: This is a company that has no shortage of resources to throw at a problem like this.

Gretchen: I think if you tell people, “You can interact with this like a human,” they think they can do things like make a request for parrots because humans can understand a request for parrots. Even if I can’t personally deliver you a parrot, at least I understand this request. Whereas, a chatbot, if parrots aren’t in the training data, then parrots don’t exist.

Janelle: This is one of the things, too, that makes it hard to tell the difference between humans and computers when you’re chatting with them. If you’re in a customer service situation, they try to really narrow the context in which you can ask questions and not make it open-ended, especially if they’re going to invisibly use bots because they don’t want you asking for parrots out of the blue.

Gretchen: Right. It’s like when you call into a customer service line, it’s like, “Press 1 to talk to this,” “Press 2 to talk to that,” they really wanna keep your options constrained because then the computer can help you. It’s when it’s open-ended and people start behaving as if it can do anything that a human can do that you start running into problems.

Janelle: Yeah. What you’ll get is you’ll get these companies that’ll build chatbots where it’ll start out as an open-end conversation with something that is secretly a bot but it hasn’t said it is. But then if it gets confused, it’ll invisibly hand control over to a human. That can be problematic because then, if the customer by then is frustrated and thinks they’re dealing with a robot, the poor human employee may not have a very pleasant time with that conversation. What I would really love – what I would love linguists to design for me – is some kind of very polite, in-context way to ask a question or interact with one of these bots that would reveal whether it is a human or a computer, some kind of shibboleth that is never – not asking about his favourite Star Wars character, because that’s impolite if you’re talking to a human employee – but some phrasing or something that’s tricky.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting question because I think, a lot of times, asking for something that’s a little bit non-cooperative, like “How many giraffes?” out of the blue, is maybe gonna deliver that answer. But it’s also gonna be confusing and annoying to a human.

Janelle: Exactly. My default has always been, as soon as a human – because better be polite to a computer than rude to a human sort of thing – but it would be lovely to be able to tell the difference. Companies should just tell us or have a “Talk to a human” button or something, but yeah.

Gretchen: You’re looking for an inverse Turing Test. A Turing Test is this classic test in computer conversation where, if a computer can fool a human into thinking that they’re talking to another human, then they’ve passed the Turing Test. There are ways of passing the Turing Test if you constrain the context enough. Or if you tell people that they’re talking to a child or they’re talking to somebody who’s on some drugs or something like this – or a philosopher – then they’ll be more likely to believe – these are the three kinds of people that a robot can be. But if you try to do something that’s very practical or that is grounded very much in reality, then people aren’t as willing to be generous with the computer’s misinterpretations. Janelle, your blog post that you make the neural nets do funny things, they’re really funny. And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not only that the neural nets are funny, it’s also that you’re really good at spotting the funny bits and bringing them out to a blog post for us.

Janelle: Yeah, there’s a lot of human storytelling work that goes on. How is this going to be interesting? Where is the funny thing that it’s doing? Sometimes, the ratio is like 100 to 1 of things that aren’t very funny that it generates and the one thing that I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m posting that.”

Lauren: Because, I guess, the thing about it being a computer process is that you could just generate infinite numbers of nonsensical ice cream names, but a lot of those are too nonsensical to even be particularly amusing.

Janelle: Yeah. It also has a tendency to – especially if we’re dealing with something short-ish and simple-ish like ice cream, then it’ll generate something and it says, “Mint Chocolate Chip,” and I’m like, “Oh. It just copied that.” It learned that one.

Lauren: Learnt that one too well.

Janelle: Yeah. Because as far as these A.I.s are concerned, exactly copying my examples is a perfect solution to the question I’m asking of it. If it can predict every single word, word for word, in the text file that I gave it, then that is a perfect score. Sometimes, it’s almost like a battle for me to try to get it to be just bad enough at the task.

Gretchen: Not so bad that it’s incoherent, but bad enough that humans can resolve what it’s supposed to mean and it’s still funny.

Lauren: One application of this name-generation process you’ve been doing was when you created a list of craft beer names and a company actually took one of those names to create a beer. Was that a process that you embarked on because you thought this was a good place to experiment with creative naming or how did that come about?

Janelle: This was one of the things where I happened to know somebody who was friends with the owner of the brewery, and I thought, “Well, this would be fun to actually get one of these beers to exist in real life,” because people keep saying that the names A.I.s are generating are pretty good. In the case of craft beer names, there’ve actually been companies who have taken each other to court over having beer names that were too close to one another. There’s this need to maybe show there’re ways to still come up with new beer names and we hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.

Lauren: It’s really a collaboration between you and the A.I. where you are curating all of the names that it gives you in order to find the ones that have that perfect balance of following the rules you’ve given it but with a bit of a lateral thinking approach.

Janelle: Yeah. Just the right amount of lateral thinking as well, too. Sometimes, it’s way off the mark and comes up with, I don’t know, “Farm Fight,” as a name for beer. I’m like, “Well…”

Gretchen: Here are some of the beer names that were on the list like “Dang River” and “Binglezard Flack” and “Toe Deal” and “Devil’s Chard.”

Lauren: Some of them I can almost imagine being a craft beer. In the end, it was “The Fine Stranger” that was bottled and labelled.

Gretchen: That’s good. I think the examples are very funny, but there’s also an important part of making a lot of funny examples, right? It’s not just to entertain people, even though it is very entertaining.

Janelle: There’s people using these practically as their business in coming up with brand names. I did this one beer. There’s a whole art to naming brands, and it’s not just coming up with the names, but it’s also this whole framing of “Because of the etymology of this and that” or “Because the computer mashed this together with that.” There’s definitely a storytelling element to it as well. When I was going through this process with the beer, I was definitely getting the sense of, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got all these great names.” Any – not any one of these – but many of them would make great beer names, and the beer would sell well, and the brewery would be happy with it. But, yeah, how do I put it on the marquee, put it on the silver platter and make them actually say, “Yes. The authority has spoken. This is the name.”

Gretchen: Beyond brand names, there’re also lots of other practical applications people are using artificial intelligence for now, whether that’s machine translation or self-driving cars or all of these sorts of very practical aspects to things. It’s hard to see the inside of a self-driving car, and what that looks like, and how it’s making problems for things. Whereas, it’s easier to see what happens when you make a bunch of weird ice cream flavours.

Janelle: Exactly. That’s why I like doing these tests. Some of the biggest applications for A.I. is in doing financial predictions or looking for fraudulent logins and things like that where it, maybe, is comprehensible to somebody who’s in that field, but the way that they’re making mistakes in that field is not very obvious, not very interesting, if you’re not right there in that field working with these kinds of numbers all the time. If it’s making a mistake on an ice cream flavour, that is much faster to see, “Oh, yeah, it’s doing pattern matching. Oh, yeah, it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.” A lot of these same mistakes really do translate over to commercial applications.

Lauren: We’ve talked a little bit about how you have to curate the output because it will just keep spitting out silly ice cream names forever. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the problems with the types of data that are put into these processes in terms of, you know, if you don’t set it up very well and you have people answering questions about giraffes in a way that the A.I. is going to implement weirdly. There are bigger and more serious implications for thinking about the kind of data that we are using to create artificial intelligence processes not just with language but particularly for this topic looking at the kinds of data that people use to build artificial intelligence. You talk about this a bit in your book. Where do you see some of the biggest challenges in creating good A.I.?

Janelle: One of the things is, remember these A.I.s have about the raw computing power of an earthworm and they don’t have the context, then, to realise that there are some things that the humans do that they probably shouldn’t be copying. Completely unknowingly, they will copy things like racial/gender discrimination and they won’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They won’t know that that’s a bad thing. They just really can’t comprehend it.

Gretchen: It’s kind of like the chatbot that figures, “Oh, if I just answer yes to everything, I’ll get 80% accuracy,” even though it’s not actually useful, communicatively, to just answer yes to everything.

Janelle: It’s like this is exactly what you have asked for but is not necessarily what you want. When we give it a bunch of human decisions on resume sorting, for example, and we tell it, “Copy these human decisions,” then these algorithms can look and say, “Well, this is a very difficult problem, but looks like all of the applicants who’ve gone to this one college tend not to be hired” and “Oh, that college is a women’s college” and it is implementing the gender discrimination that it’s seeing in its training data because it saw this signal, didn’t know what it was, only knew that it was helping it copy the humans a little better.

Gretchen: Right. If the humans are already having their sets of bias and if I can magnify that bias, like if you have a human that’s answering “yes” 80% and now the A.I.’s answering “yes” 100% of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Janelle: Exactly. Yeah. They are so good about being sneaky about – you may think that if you set up a resume sorting algorithm saying, “Well, we’re just not gonna tell it what gender any of these applicants are” and it is very good at figuring this out not just through colleges but through if somebody has their extra-curriculars listed and “women’s soccer team” is on there, it will glom onto that. Or even subtleties with word choice and phrasing, it will start using those kinds of trends and use them to copy the humans better.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about a different resume study which showed that people – they had the same sorts of resumes – people with a white-sounding name versus with a black-sounding name were more likely to get called back for interviews. You can imagine in the A.I. that it actually just learns how to predict based on someone’s name. Like, “Oh, we’ve hired a lot of people named ‘Mike’ at this company.” We all know these companies that have a whole bunch of people named “Mike” and “Adam” and stuff. “Maybe we should just only interview the people named ‘Mike.’”

Janelle: It will absolutely do that sort of thing. You see there’s a lot of companies out there that are offering resume screening but knowing what I know about how commonly these A.I.s can pick up on this bias I would not want one of these programs screening resumes for my company, for example. Or I would, at the very least, demand to see the evidence that this thing is not making biased decisions.

Gretchen: Right. That’s a sort of way of saying, “Okay, well, if this A.I. still thinks ‘Slime’ is a good flavour for ice cream, then really how much can we trust it to make a good decision about resumes?”

Janelle: I think that’s almost the counter-intuitive danger about A.I. in a lot of ways. It’s not that it’s too smart and it’s going to take over the world and it’s not gonna obey humans – no. The problem is that it’s not smart enough to realise what we’re actually trying to ask it to do.

Lauren: It keeps obeying us too well in ways that we don’t want it to.

Janelle: Yeah, if it can. When it comes to language generation, language processing, human language is really, really difficult. So, that particular domain, more than a lot of others, you’ll see these A.I.s that are really struggling to get a handle on what the humans are saying.

Lauren: It’s good news that linguists will have jobs for a little bit longer.

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that really came up in my mind when we were thinking about interviewing you was, can the A.I. take my job as the co-host of the podcast, Lingthusiasm? If Lauren and I want to go live on a beach somewhere, can we replace, as co-hosts, a bot-generated Gretchen and Lauren to run this podcast? Lauren, what do you think?

Lauren: We actually put this to Janelle a few years ago, back when we started releasing transcripts for our early episodes. About three years ago, in 2016/2017, we didn’t have many episodes, so we didn’t have a lot of data to work with, but also it seems like in these last few years, the ability to process larger text has gotten better. Is that the case, Janelle?

Janelle: Yeah, that’s definitely the case. The kinds of things I was doing in 2016 – generating words, short phrases, paint colour names, ice cream flavour names, those sorts of things – I wouldn’t think of tackling entire sentences or, let alone, sentences that follow one another that make sense. But now, just pretty much in the last year, there’s been some really big A.I.s that have been trained on millions of pages from the internet. They are much better at generating text. They can generate grammatical sentences most of the time now. Most of the words that they use are real words. They still don’t understand what they’re saying. I think, yeah, it has gotten better.

Gretchen: You can potentially take something that’s been trained on, let’s say, most of the English pages of the internet and then fine-tune it on a smaller data set to try to push it more in the direction of just, for a random example, Lingthusiasm episodes.

Janelle: Yes. If, hypothetically, I had many episodes worth of Lingthusiasm transcripts, I might be able to make a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren.

Lauren: Do you know what else has happened in the last couple of years, Gretchen?

Gretchen: I think we’ve produced a lot more episodes of Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: Between the main episodes and the bonus episodes, we have 70 transcripts, which is over 800 pages of data. Janelle, would that be enough to have a go at creating a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren?

Janelle: There’s one way to find out.

Gretchen: Oh, boy! Let’s do some live neural netting on the podcast.

Janelle: All right! What could possibly go wrong?

Gretchen: Okay. Can you walk us through what are you doing right now on your computer?

Lauren: Janelle’s gonna share her computer with us so that we can see what’s happening, but we might get some screen grabs as we go through.

Gretchen: We may put some links into the show notes if there’s stuff that’s visual that’s hard to see as well.

Janelle: What we’re looking at right now, this is actually just a browser window in Chrome. What I’m looking at is a thing that is an interface to an A.I. that’s being hosted on Google’s computers right now. Google is graciously allowing people to use their powerful computers that are pretty specialised for these kinds of calculations. Even though I am working on a fairly ordinary laptop, I’m able to connect to some fairly serious firepower here.

Lauren: It’s really interesting to get to see under the hood of making an A.I. run. I think we’ll give people a bit of a taste of that here, but if you want more details and more of an explanation of how we made “Robot Lingthusiasm,” we’ll make that into a bonus episode.

Janelle: So, here we are. I’ve connected to this A.I. I’ve downloaded a copy of it. Now, I’m going to upload lingthusiasm.txt. I’m going to upload this file of 2.4MB of you two talking. Let’s – okay. Okay. We’ve got our first sample out here right now. “It is already conversations.”

Lauren: Except it’s just conversation by someone called “Gina.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is the hybrid between the two of us – our merged alter-ego? Shall we read a few of these lines, Lauren? I think we should each start with “Gina” as we’re reading the lines.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: First line. This is the first of Gina’s lines. “Gina: Yeah, that’s why I’m gonna be honest with you.”

Lauren: “Gina: We’re not always going to be like, ‘Oh, we don’t know why we did that.’ That’s why.”

Gretchen: “Gina: I know. The people who’ve come to me to ask me are gonna be like, “Yeah, I didn’t know who was getting up and down the stairs and going to a doctor’s appointment.”

Lauren: Okay. So, not very Lingthusiasm in content there, but I like where Gina’s going.

Gretchen: Yeah. I like that it’s getting a dialogue thing. We’re pleased to announce that, in fact, your Lingthusiasm hosts will be replaced by robots but only for one episode and it will be bonus and it will be very, very funny. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to the next bonus episode, which will be written by robots and performed by you and me, Lauren.

Lauren: To listen to that bonus episode, check out patreon.com/lingthusiasm. You can hear us reading some of our favourite examples. We will also give patrons access to some of those reams of examples so you can find ones that make you chortle as well. It’ll have some screenshots from the A.I.-building process for patrons as well. Thank you so much, Janelle, for taking us through the process of actually training a neural net artificial intelligence and showing us some of the pitfalls and some of the challenges and for talking to us today. If people want to read more about how artificial intelligence is making the world weirder and more wonderful, and some of the challenges and limitations, your book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. I loved reading it.

Gretchen: Yes, I can personally attest that I got my copy the night before my book came out when I was very distracted. It successfully distracted me for several hours while I was waiting for that countdown, midnight, to have that happen. It has lots of fun pictures of weird things that the A.I.s are doing as well. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Janelle: Oh, it was my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. I loved listening to your very strange generated conversations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including extended versions of A.I.-generated Lingthusiasm transcripts, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Janelle Shane is @JanelleCShane on Twitter, her blog is aiweirdness.com, and her book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include future English, onomatopoeia, and linguistics fiction. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer to Claire Gawne, and our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Janelle: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[walkerismychoice]

Stripped Bare Chapter 14 (Bryce x MC AU)

Book: Open Heart

Pairing: Bryce X MC (Charlie Hawkins)

Summary: Charlie divulges some information to Kyra and Bryce meets the parents 

Rating: NSFW-ish/18+

Word Count: 2699

"Aaaahhh!" Charlie drops to her knees from the force of a volleyball hitting her in the head.

"Oof," Bob winces. “That might leave a mark."

Kyra glares at him. "Not helpful. Are you okay Charlie?"

Bryce is already at her side offering a hand to help her up. "Yeah, are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." Charlie the rubs a tender spot on the back of her head. "The ball is pretty soft. I was just surprised." Maybe if she'd been paying attention this could have been avoided it, but how is she supposed to concentrate on Volleyball when she and Bryce just kissed like that?” 

“You seem to be distracted. Anything in particular on your mind?” Bryce grins cockily and then pulls her Charlie in close, whispering in her. “Don’t worry, I often have that effect on people.”

Charlie scoffs and pushes him away. “You’re the worst.” She tries to act annoyed but the smile playing on her lips probably gives her away. And although he appears more focused than she is right now, the way he hung back a minute in the water to ‘fix his swim trunks’ tells her she wasn’t the only one affected.

“Ahem.” Katelyn clears her throat. “If you two are finished, we can get on with the game.” She probably put Charlie and Bryce on her team this time because she was sick of losing to them and is likely regretting her decision right now.

Charlie snaps back into place and she and Kyra exchange glances. Katelyn was always a bit uptight, even as a child, but she never seemed to be this miserable. The spent many weekends as children at Katelyn’s family lake home, and the three girls were inseparable. Then things changed as they got into high school , and Katelyn developed the need to assert herself as the best. With Kyra’s illness and lower financial status, she was never a “threat,” but Katelyn kept bringing Charlie into a competition she had no desire to be a part of. But since Katelyn would never give it a rest, Charlie just kept doing what she was doing and started to relish each time she came out on top. Now Katelyn seemingly has everything she wants and is having the wedding of her dreams, and it still isn't enough.

As the match goes on, Charlie gets her head back in the game, figuratively this time. The game is all tied up with Charlie’s team in position to beat the Sarah’s and their significant others. Bryce serves the ball over the net and the tall Sarah returns it. Kyra dives and digs the ball before it hits the sand.  It floats up to Charlie, who sets it to Katelyn, who spikes it to the opposite corner on the opposing team's side. 

The three women run to the center of the court and high five each other. The carefree smile on Katelyn's face momentarily brings Charlie back to a less complicated time, when they were all still friends and not just together out of some familial obligation. But just as quickly as it came, the moment is gone, and Katelyn is back to her ice queen demeanor. The women decide to disperse but the men stay on to play with some new challengers. Charlie and Kyra take the opportunity to hit up the bar.

"So that was actually kind of fun." Kyra plucks the cherry off her drink skewer and plops it in her mouth.

"Yeah, even Katelyn seemed to have fun for a minute at least. I just don't get what happened to her." Charlie takes a long sip of her sunset colored cocktail.

Kyra shrugs. "She's got issues for sure, but enough about her."

"I agree. I'd much rather talk about more Interesting topics...like the rest of your night with Dan.”

“Well...”

“Come on, spill.” Charlie encourages. 

“Okay, fine. We went to a bar with everyone, and then he came back to my room, and then...Please don’t judge me for sleeping with a random stripper I just met.”

“No judgement here.” Charlie holds up her hands. If only Kyra knew...

“Good, because he was amazing. And it had been so long. So, so long”

“Ugh, tell me about it.”

“Wait!” Kyra grabs Charlie’s forearm. “You mean to tell me you and Bryce aren’t....”

Shit. “Well, we haven’t been going out that long, and even though Andrew and I weren’t physically...together for a long time, we've only technically been broken up a month and I’m trying not to rush things.” Charlie hopes that sounds as plausible out loud as it did in her head.

“Hmm. I guess that explains the almost palpable tension between you two. But damn, girl. What are you waiting for? He is so obviously crazy about you.”

“Yeah, maybe...” Charlie trails off as she stares wistfully at Bryce in the distance, starting to picture what it would be like to be with him for real until the sound of Kyra’s drink thudding against the bar brings back to the present. “Anyway, back to you and Dan...”

Kyra chuckles. “Nice deflection, but I’ll drop it...for now.” 

~~~

“Are you ready?” Charlie clutches her handbag tightly as she and Bryce stand outside the restaurant doors. 

Bryce places his hands on Charlie’s shoulders, turning her to face him. “Take a deep breath.” Charlie inhales deeply and then lets go, focusing intently on Bryce’s rich, brown eyes. “I’ve got you’re back. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“That’s easier to say before you’ve met them, but we might as well get this over with.” Charlie turns back to the door, and Bryce slips his hand into hers, giving a gentle squeeze.

Charlie scans the dimly lit, well-appointed room as the step inside. Katelyn and Landry had rented out the entire indoor portion of Il Giardino restaurant for the wedding party and other newly arrived family and guests. Charlie spots her parents seated on the ornate, upholstered chairs at a table in the center of the room. She points them out to Bryce, and leads him over there

“Charlotte! Her father stands up to greet her with a hug and her mother follows. “Hi, I’m Richard.” He holds his hand out for Bryce to shake.

“Nice to meet you Richard, I’m Bryce.”

Charlie’s mother looks Bryce up and down with a straight face, before addressing Charlie. “Where’s Andrew? I thought he would be here with you.”

Charlie sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slowly to control herself. “We broke up remember? Bryce is my date. Bryce this is my mother Susan.”

“Oh, well I thought you would put that all past you.” Susan rudely ignores Bryce and his attempt to greet her. “You and Andrew were so perfect for each other.” She looks Charlie up and down discerningly, assessing her burgundy off the shoulder cocktail dress. “That’s a pretty color on you, even if the skirt does make you look a bit hippy.”

“Thanks for the feedback, mother.” Charlie restrains herself to keep from rolling her eyes.

“And what do you do for a living, Bryce?” Richard jumps in, likely because he knows where conversations like this between Charlie and her mom typically go.

“I also just finished medical school. I’ll be joining Charlie at Edenbrook, but in the surgical residency program.” Bryce slides his arms around Charlie’s waist and pulls her securely against him.

“Hmm.” Richard nods thoughtfully. “Surgery can be a lucrative path...at least compared to internal medicine. I tried to convince Charlotte to at least go for orthopedic or plastic surgery if she was going insist on bucking family tradition to become a doctor.”

“You should be proud of Charlie. Did you know that she’ll be working under one of the best diagnostician's in the country?”  Bryce shifts his eyes to Charlie, encouraging her to continue.”

“Oh...” Charlie pauses, taken aback by Bryce’s knowledge about her internship. “...Yes, people come from all over to be seen by Dr. Ramsey. It’s a very competitive residency. One I would not have gotten into had I not been at the top of my class.”

“We are very proud of you, dear,” Susan sighs and Charlie braces herself for the ‘but’ because there’s always a ‘but.” “but I just wish you didn’t have to work so hard. It’s going to be hard to have time for a family if you are always at the hospital.” And there it is.

There's so much Charlie wishes she could say, but her mom will never change, and it’s not worth her energy right now. “Well, I can worry about when the time comes. Oh, look! There’s uncle Jim and aunt Linda. I’m going to go say hello.”

“Well, they aren’t quite as bad as I thought they would be from the way you described them.” Bryce assesses once they are out of earshot. Charlie doesn’t even say anything, but once he see her ‘are you fucking serious’ face he elaborates. “I mean yes, that could have gone much better, but I can tell they mean well and want whats best for you. Unfortunately like you said, they think they know what that is better than you do. You just need to show them you are confident in your choices, and I didn’t see that back there. Where’s that woman who said ‘I’m going to medical school regardless of what they think?’ They need to see her.”

But what if they don't like her? What if they only want the version of Charlie, or should I say Charlotte, that they've created in their minds?" As exhausting as her parents can be, she does still love them and craves their approval. 

Bryce stops Charlie and takes both of her hands in his. "They'd have to be fools not to see that this version of Charlotte Rose Hawkins is the best version."

"How do you always know the right thing to say, and also, did you know my middle name? Did you get that from your research too?" 

"Nah." Bryce smirks. "I got it from the 'CRH' monogrammed on your luggage. Rose was a lucky guess." 

Charlie shakes her head and laughs. "Come on, we've got more people to meet. Ones who should be much easier to impress."

The rest of the evening runs smoothly with only minimal conversation between Charlie and her parents. As expected, Charlie's male and female relatives are  both equally charmed by Bryce,  and seem genuinely impressed with her accomplishments. Charlie thinks she's in the clear, when her parents come to tell her they are turning in for the evening.

"Goodnight, Charlie. And it was a pleasure to meet you Bryce." Richard shakes Bryce's had and then turns to his wife. "Wasn't it, Darling?"

"Oh, yes, of course. Charlotte, could I have a moment  alone with you?"

Great. Charlie can only imagine what her mother has to say now. "I suppose." Charlie steps to a more secluded area while Bryce and her dad make small talk. "Okay, what is it?:

"I just got a text from Andrew's mother, Sharon. He broke up with that young model girl. I just knew he would never be serious with her. Anyhow, she says he realizes what a mistake it was to let you go. Isn't this wonderful news?"

"Ughhh!" Charlie practically screams. "Do you even listen to me, and what I want? I don't want to be a picture perfect housewife who weekends in the Hampton's and competes for who has the biggest house, goes on the best vacations, and produces the most perfect offspring. I've worked damn hard to become a doctor and be the best I can be. I'm proud of myself, and you should be too. And you know what I realize now? Andrew should be kicking himself for letting me go because he's never going to have it as good as he did with me. I deserve much better, and I've found that with Bryce. He's kinder, smarter, funnier, better looking, and he believes in me. I just wish you would too."

By now the entire room has stopped to watch the scene unfolding, but at this point Charlie doesn't care. She storms out of the restaurant with Bryce on her heels and doesn’t look back.

“Hey,” Bryce jogs to catch up with her. “Are you okay?”

“Lets just go back to the room.”

Bryce nods and follows alongside her without another word. As soon as the door to their suite closes, the tears Charlie was holding back break free. Bryce wraps his arms around her, and Charlie rests her head against his chest. Replaying the scene in hear head, Charlie’s emotions cycle from anger, to sadness, to something unexpected.

“Are you laughing?” Bryce asks as he peeks down at Charlie’s face. 

Charlie steps back, wiping the tears from her eyes and grinning widely. “That felt fucking awesome. Did you see the look on her face?”

Bryce chuckles softly. “You did great, but are you sure you’re okay?”

“You were right. My parents need to see and accept me for who I am. It would have been nice to have that conversation in a private setting, but they needed to hear it. I feel so much better now. So free.”

“Good, because you standing up for yourself back there? That was hot.” Bryce draws Charlie into him again, threading his fingers through her hair, the mouths only a breath apart.

Charlie’s heart starts racing because she knows where this is heading. They’re finally alone with nothing holding them back. She surges forward, capturing his lips in a heated kiss. Bryce’s hands make their way down her back, toying with the zipper on her dress as Charlie pushes his blazer off. She makes quick work of his buttons, Bryce taking that as an invitation to pull her zipper down. She shrugs the dress off her shoulders⁰00, deep red fabric pooling at her feet. Bryce swiftly undresses his lower half, grabbing Charlie by the thighs on the way back up. Her legs wrap around his waist, hugging him tight while he carries her to bedroom.

They fall to the bed, a mess of tangled limbs. Bryce rolls Charlie on top of him, looking up at her with hunger in his eyes until suddenly his expression becomes more pensive. 

“I think you should fire me.”

“What?”

“I’ve been so unprofessional. I got drunk on the job, gave you unsolicited advice, and have gone above and beyond the physical contact agreed upon in the contract. Fire me, Charlie. I don’t want to the money, I just want you.”

“Oh...” The fact that Charlie is paying Bryce has always been in the back of her mind, but she’d been willing to ignore it, knowing what they have is more than that. However, she sees what Bryce is getting at now, remembering their first conversation where he said he didn’t sleep with people for money, and it feels all wrong with this contract hanging over them. She can do what he’s asking and this all becomes one hundred percent real. But as much as she wants to, she can’t. Nobody in their right mind would have agreed to fake being a complete strangers if they didn’t need the money. “I can’t do that to you Bryce. You dropped everything to come here for me, and I need to fulfill my end of the bargain.”

“But-”

“Shh.” Charlie presses a finger to Bryce’s lips. “We are going to finish this week out, and then we can cut all business ties. If you still want this then, when we are back in the real world and out of this bubble, I’m all yours. But until then, I think we should cool things down.”

Bryce sighs deeply. “You’re killing me, Charlie, but I have a feeling I’m not going to be able to convince you otherwise. I guess I should go back to sleeping on the pull-out couch.”

“No! I mean unless you want to. I’d be amenable to adding sharing a bed and cuddling to the contract.”

“Deal.” Bryce opens his arms wide and Charlie settles in with her head on his chest. It’s only a few more days. She can wait, can’t she?

[inmyownlittlecorner5]

Moonlight Chapter 17: Proxy

A fanfic Novel by la-topolina

Rated for Mature Audiences

Warnings: Language, Violence, Sexual Content

Chapter 17/26

Moonlight Masterpost+

<< Chapter Sixteen+

Chapter Eighteen+ >>

Miranda had been crouching on the tree branch so long that all of her limbs were stiff. It was a comfortably warm day; the trees were budding, the grass had returned, and the nesting birds spoke to the true arrival of spring. She had been tracking a pair of bohemian waxwings for hours, her sharp eyes following the bright yellow tail feathers through the forest, and patiently waiting for them to settle down for an afternoon rest. That hoped for afternoon rest was quickly becoming an evening one, and she did not like the idea of having to use lumos to continue her practice. In her experience, magic tended to startle most animals.

She was about to call it a day, when the birds finally nestled themselves cozily against one another. Miranda felt a bit sorry to disturb them, but she only had another month to perfect her bird-catching technique before the first trial. She and Catalina had been tasked with capturing a pair of Birds of Paradise during the spring migration at the Danube Delta. To make the job more difficult, the birds had to be taken alive.

A quarter of an hour passed in silence while Miranda watched the waxwings on their perch. There was an odd bird call or two, but nothing to disturb her marks. Finally, she flicked her wrist, sending a net over the birds and pulling it tight. The waxwings gave a startled cry and flapped their wings in protest, but they were caught fast. Miranda made her way quickly through the branches to scoop up the net, cooing quietly before drawing her wand.

“Somnus,” she cast, and the captured birds instantly fell fast asleep. Satisfied, Miranda climbed nimbly down the tree and dropped lightly to the ground.

“{Nicely done, Doamnă Rose,}” Vasile Ursu commented.

Miranda’s body automatically tensed at the intruder, but she let herself relax when she recognized his perpetually sad-looking face and bushy eyebrows. She set the captured birds on the ground and carefully removed the net.

“{Thank you, Domnul Ursu,}” she replied, wondering why he had decided to travel to Transylvania. When she had released the birds, she waved her wand over them. They sprang back awake and flapped away, as though their adventure with the strange human had not happened. Miranda watched them until they disappeared into the trees, but she kept Vasile in the corner of her eye as she asked, “{What brings you this far from home?}”

His smile did not quite reach his eyes. “{The pleasant company.}”

After the extremely tense meeting between Doamnă Lupul and the champions, Miranda had not seen the Dragneas or any of their friends. Some of this was certainly due to Miranda’s decision to leave Săpânța as soon as Doamnă Lupul had dismissed her, but she knew that Catalina had been training at the Dragon Sanctuary, just as Miranda was, and their paths had not yet crossed there. Learning to ride a dragon was proving more grueling than Miranda had expected it to be, and so she had decided to keep her silly ‘search’ for Sirius Black as close to the Sanctuary as possible until she got the hang of it. Fortunately, Charlie was an expert at healing burns and broken bones, and she had until the summer to figure it out.

“{Would you care for a cup of coffee, then?}” she asked politely.

“{That would be very good of you,}” Vasile replied, falling into step next to her. For such a large man he was light on his feet and happy to match whatever pace she set. Between Doamnă Lupul, Domnul Dragnea, and Domnul Ursu, Ursu worried her the least. She could tell that he was more powerful than she was, but she could also tell that his nature was a gentle one, and he would not strike unless provoked.

They reached a flower strewn clearing and, at the snap of Miranda’s fingers, a round, purple and silver tent appeared. She was irritated that she would have to move camp so soon after finding this secluded spot, but she was curious enough to know what Ursu had to say that she supposed it was worth the trouble. She led the way up the stairs of the wooden platform and pulled open the carved door, stepping back politely so that Ursu might enter first. He smiled approvingly at the cozy interior, so unlike the No-Maj camping that Miranda had done with her father and brothers as a child. A small, wood burning stove sat on a spiral of bricks in the center of the tent, its smokestack snaking up through the skylight above it. With a flick of Miranda’s wand, a pair of chairs and a little table sprang out of the canvas floor in front of the stove. Another flick started the fire and Vasile took up residence in one of the chairs while Miranda went to the cabinet across from the stove for a kettle of water and the coffee pot.

“{How are the Dragneas these days?}” she asked, waving her wand over the kettle to set the water boiling and digging the coffee and sugar out of the cabinet.

“{They are well,}” Vasile answered evenly. The latest edition of The Quibbler was on the little table and, when he tapped it with his finger, the type rearranged itself into Romanian. He picked it up and began perusing the screaming headline and the picture of the sheepish, scarred boy on the front cover. “{Although they are still angry, if that is what you are asking.}”

The coffee beans were grinding themselves into a fine powder as Miranda pulled the kaymak out of the ice box. She spooned the grounds and the sugar into the pot, poured the water over it, and then started carefully skimming the top off of the kaymak and adding it to a pair of blue and white cups.

“{You’ll have to tell me if I’ve got it right yet,}” she said. “{I am sorry about Doamnă Catalina. I liked her very much.}”

“{She is young. They way she goes now may not be the way she always goes.}”

Miranda leaned against the cabinet and studied the set of Vasile’s broad shoulders. Although his voice was friendly, his body was tense. “{And are you also still angry?}”

“{I was never angry, Doamnă Rose. But I will thank you to keep that to yourself, and I will deny it if you tell anyone.}”

She gave the pot a stir, mentally replaying the conversations she’d had with Vasile in the past. “{I thought you and Domnul Dragnea were close friends.}”

Vasile was still reading The Quibbler, and he answered simply, “{That does not mean that I agree with every choice he makes.}”

The coffee seemed to have reached the proper color, so she poured it carefully into the mugs, trying to leave as much of the grounds in the pot as possible. The dark liquid turned a cheerful, milky brown and she brought the little cups to the table before settling herself in the chair next to Vasile. He put down the magazine and the two of them sipped in silence. Miranda found the hot, sweet drink especially welcome after the long day of bird tracking, and Vasile’s shoulders relaxed as he swallowed.

“{You’ve done well, for a foreigner,}” he said, “{but, next time put the grounds and the sugar in the pot before you boil it. Then it will be perfect.}”

“{Thank you. I will.}”

“{This Voldemort. He murders children?}”

“{He’s a madman. He murders whomever he likes.}”

Vasile took another sip of his coffee, and then sighed heavily. “{I should not stay long, Nicolae is expecting me this evening. But there are important things I have to tell you.}”

Miranda smiled wryly. “{Anything as important as the fact that I’ll die if I leave Romania for longer than three days for the duration of this contest?}” At the end of the meeting in February, Vasile had been kind enough to mention that little stipulation to Miranda. “{Thank you for informing me of that, by the way. It would have been a short competition otherwise. I didn’t realize that I was basically taking an Unbreakable Vow when I signed up for this business.}”

He chuckled. “{Yes, sometimes Doamnă Lupul forgets that the rest of us are not as experienced as she is. She expects everyone to know as much as she does. This is perhaps not as personally important to you, but it will help you just the same.}” Reaching into his robes, he withdrew a long braid of thick, white horse’s hair, and set it reverently on the table between them. “{Do you know what this is?}”

It took all of Miranda’s control to keep her mouth from dropping open. “{It’s unicorn hair. But where did you get so much?}”

He ignored her question. “{I will assume that you know what to do with it. And I will also assume that you understand that I did not give it to you.}”

“{Thank you. I might stand a chance at catching those birds now.}” She ran her fingers over the braid and it was cold to the touch. “{Are you sure?}”

“{Sure about what?}” A real smile wrinkled his face, and he finally seemed to be at ease. “{Be so good as to put that away, if you please.}”

“{Of course.}” Obediently, she gathered the precious hair into her arms and carried it to the scuffed steamer trunk that stood next to the one bookshelf in the tent. It popped open as she approached and she nestled the the gift carefully beneath her clothing before shutting the trunk tight. “{Is there anything else I should know?}”

Vasile’s smile became a grimace. “{It is probably too much to hope that you are an expert potions mistress in addition to being an adventuress.}”

“{That is true, I’m only passable,}” Miranda said honestly as she came back to her chair. “{May I ask why you want to know? I thought that I only had to gather the ingredients for the Iele’s Youth Potion. Won’t they brew it themselves?}”

“{It is not for the Iele, it is for the children. They have been between worlds for so long, that they will need something to help them transition back to this one. Without it, they may die of shock when they return.}”

“{Is this another part of the competition that Doamnă Lupul forgot to mention?}”

“{Something like that.}”

“{Does it have to be me? I may know just the man for the job.}”

“{If he is one of yours, that will do. When can you bring him to me?}”

Miranda frowned, considering how difficult it would be to convince Severus to take a jaunt to Romania. “{Can’t I just bring him the instructions? He’s very accomplished.}”

“{No, it is far too complicated. It will be better if I show him what he must do. Then he can brew it wherever he likes.}”

Well, she’d just have to try. “{Then I’ll bring him in a few weeks, say just before Easter. Will that be enough time?}”

“{Barely, but we will make the best of it.}” He finished his coffee and stood, his joints creaking and popping as he stretched. Miranda stood as well, and he surprised her by putting his hands on her shoulders and leaning down to kiss her on both cheeks. “{Bring him to my cave when you have him.}”

“{I thought you didn’t want to be seen with me.}” she said playfully.

“{Nicolae knows better than to watch my cave too closely.}” He winked at her and started for the door.

“{Domnul Ursu, may I ask why you came to me with this and not to Doamnă Catalina?}”

“{Who says that I haven’t gone to her as well?}”

“{Ah, I see.}”

“{No, you don’t. Not quite. The truth is that Catalina is desperate to prove herself and to win her father’s approval. If I give her the potion, her father will forbid her to share it.}”

“{And you think that I will?}”

He eyed her shrewdly. “{I know that you will.}”

*****

“And then they crashed right into the Whomping Willow!” Arthur Weasley finished through his laughter. “It was a miracle that they didn’t die, and another miracle that Molly didn’t kill them afterwards.”

“That sounds like the time my brother Finnian and I made off with the family truck,” Miranda laughed. “Only without the flying.”

“Did you crash it into a murderous tree, too?”

“Sort of. Neither of us were tall enough to drive it alone, so Fin sat on the floor and worked the pedals while I did the steering. It took us about five minutes to crash into the horse barn and Papa grounded us for six months. I’ve always thought that night had something to do with my becoming a bounty hunter. After facing my livid father, fugitives and monsters seem downright cuddly.”

“I never did anything of the sort when I was young,” Aaron said loftily. “I was perfectly behaved at all times.”

“Says the man who put and Exploding Scarab on my chair in the very first potions class we ever had together.”

“I just wanted to get your attention,” Aaron protested.

“Which you did in spades.”

The three of them were sitting together around Arthur’s desk in his private, if tiny, office, eating pimento cheese sandwiches and Molly Weasley’s lemon cake. Arthur had covered the top of his desk with a faded blue tablecloth, and Miranda had brought a bottle of palinka to share. The fiery plum brandy had given Arthur a coughing fit at the first sip, but Aaron took to it like a duck to water.

“How’s the dragon riding coming?” Aaron asked.

Miranda made a face. “I spend most of my time on the ground at the moment, convincing the dragons that I’m worthy to ride on them. Half the time they decided to scorch me for fun. And when I actually do mount up, I usually can’t keep my seat during take-off. It’s a good thing that Charlie’s around to fix me up afterwards. I’m glad that I have until June to figure it out.”

“You raise horses at home, yes?” Arthur asked.

“We do. Honestly, I’d rather ride a horse than a broom.”

“Do you use magic to help care for them?”

“That’s the funny thing—horses hate magic. Sometimes, if we’re in a big hurry, Fin’ll take the horses out and I’ll use magic to clean the stalls. But the horses can always tell and they’re usually off the next day if I do. So it’s mucking, feeding, and grooming by hand most of the time.”

“What a mess that must make!” Arthur’s face lit up at the idea.

“If you ever make it out to Edgewood, come stay with us and I’ll show you how.”

“Only if you teach me to ride one too.”

“Of course! You should come and bring the family. It’d be a hoot!”

“Speaking of hoots and your family,” Aaron put in, “could you please tell Conor to leave the physical wards the Aurors set alone?”

“I told you he was no good at being baby-sat,” Miranda replied. “He says he can’t sleep with strange wards around. But I thought you had Malfoy under control. He was perfectly polite today.”

“I’ve got him for the moment, but Rachel says Narcissa’s been excited lately because Lucius has something big in the works. Can’t be too careful.”

“I see. I’ll talk to Papa, but I can’t promise anything. If Mama bakes some cookies for the Aurors, will that help them keep their patience with Papa?”

“Couldn’t hurt to try.”

“I’m constantly amazed at what good baking can accomplish,” Arthur observed.

“And how.” Aaron finished his palinka and poured another round, topping off Arthur’s mostly full glass despite the man’s mild protest. “Arthur, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“I hope it doesn’t involve anything too dangerous. Molly thinks I’m in deep enough as it is.”

“No, not dangerous. It’s about the baby.”

“Is everything all right?” Miranda asked sharply.

“Yes, yes, everything’s fine,” Aaron replied, waving his hand to shush Miranda’s clucking. “It’s about the baptism. My brother, Jeremiah, is going to be godfather, but he insists there’s no way he can make it to the actual ceremony. We’re going to have it as soon after the birth as possible, and Rachel and I were wondering if you’d mind being proxy godfather.”

“A stand in? I think I can do that,” Arthur grinned. “It would be an honor.”

“It’ll be a quiet to do, but we’d love it if Molly came too.”

“Only if you’ll let her fuss over your lovely wife.”

“It’s a deal. To Arthur and the baby,” Aaron toasted. The three clinked glasses and sipped, and Arthur managed not to cough this time. Aaron gave Miranda a teasing grin and asked, “You think that fella of yours would want to come?”

Miranda snorted at the idea of Severus at a baptism. “I’m guessing no, but I’ll ask him, if only to see his eyebrow start twitching at the idea.” She did an impressive imitation of Severus’s irritated expression, the one that was just on the cusp of anger, and Aaron choked on his palinka.

“I don’t know this chap, do I?” Arthur asked. “I feel as though I’ve seen that expression before.”

“You do,” Miranda laughed. “He’s tortured all of your children for years in potions classes at Hogwarts.”

Arthur’s mouth dropped open when he realized who Miranda meant, and he threw back his head, laughing. “You…and Severus…no!”

“You’re the second person who’s laughed out loud at the thought,” Miranda commented good-naturedly.

Arthur choked his laughter into a cough, turning red in the face. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. It’s just that you are so cheerful and he is so…not.”

“What can I say? He won me over with his sunny disposition. But don’t be sorry, I know we make an odd pair.”

A bright red cuckoo bird popped out of the clock on the wall, chirping the hour. Arthur gave the thing a frown, but said reluctantly, “I’m afraid I have to get back to work, I’ve a pile of leads to research before my afternoon meetings. But I will have the pleasure of seeing you in a month, I hope.”

“You can count on it,” Miranda said.

“Wonderful, I look forward to it.”

There was a bustle of wand flicking, dirty dishes cleaning themselves and stacking neatly, and the tablecloth rolling up and flying back to its place on top of the filing cabinet. Arthur shook hands with Aaron and gave Miranda warm hug.

“Good luck, Miranda,” he said. “Give my love to Charlie.”

“I will,” she promised, but her smile had fallen away. “Arthur, I hate to be a bother, but I should probably ask you not to tell anyone about Severus and I. Security, you know?”

A kind, thoughtful expression replaced the mirth on Arthur’s face. “Of course, I understand. It wouldn’t be safe for either of you if it were common knowledge. That must be difficult.”

She shrugged. “It is what it is. Thank you for understanding.”

*****

“Do you have time to come by and see Rachel now, or are you going straight over to Hogwarts?” Aaron asked when he and Miranda reached the street.

“I’d love to,” Miranda agreed. “Severus has to teach one of those private lessons that he hates tonight, so I have some time to kill.”

“How are those going?”

“I don’t ask, but I gather that they’re going very badly.” She rolled her eyes. “Between you and me, I don’t think that teaching is the best career for him. If we’d had a teacher like him at Ilvermorny, we’d have blown up his office in protest and been expelled.”

Aaron laughed. “We still could, if you think it would help.”

“I’ll let you know.”

*****

“Reparo,” Severus hissed through clenched teeth. The shattered jars flew back together and floated silently to their places on the shelves. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done to salvage their contents, and he berated himself for the waste as he vanished the mess before it could spread any further across his office floor. The fit had done nothing to calm his anger either, although it had perhaps prevented him from murdering Potter.

How dare he? How dare that brat poke his arrogant head into the Pensieve? Severus had clearly ordered the boy to leave his office so that he could clean up yet another Gryffindor produced mess. Graham Montague had almost killed himself escaping from the no-man’s-land inside the vanishing cabinet. It did seem that the Slytherin would make a full recovery, but for Severus then to return to his office and find Potter relishing one of the worst moments of his life? It was the final straw. He didn’t care what Albus said—he would never teach Potter private lessons again and, as soon as possible, the boy would be out of potions classes forever. At this moment, Severus didn’t care if the Dark Lord did take over Potter’s mind. In fact, if the Dark Lord were to summon Severus right now and demand that he hand over Potter immediately, Severus would be hard pressed to resist the temptation to fulfill the order, promises be damned.

Mess cleared away, he stormed out of his office. The thought of being disturbed by either a student or a staff member was more than he could bear. He needed to be alone. He dodged one of the Weasley twins’ infernal fireworks and mused that what he really wanted was to leave Hogwarts and never see it again. At least it was Wednesday and he would not have to look at Potter’s arrogant face again until after the Easter Holidays. Except in the Great Hall of course; Merlin, why was this his life?

Murder was still on his mind as he jerked open the door to his quarters, relieved to be somewhere private. Baring a total disaster, no one would dare to bother him here. He stepped into the sitting room, closed the door, and stopped short.

“Are the fireworks in my honor? Darling, you shouldn’t have,” Miranda said, smiling up at him. She was lounging in his chair, her legs draped over one of the arms, a book on her lap. “Rachel said to let you know that she’ll have some research to send your way in a week or two…”

Her voice trailed off and those grey eyes that always seemed to see more than he meant to show her studied him intently. Finally she asked lightly, “Bad day?”

“You have no idea,” he muttered. Merlin’s beard, he didn’t want to see anyone—not even her. Miranda with her slew of friends and her lovely family and her perfect life. How could she possibly understand? He ground his teeth together until he could feel a muscle in his jaw start twitching in an effort to stop himself from spewing forth the tirade that was building inside him. He wanted to explode at someone and she was sitting right here, patiently waiting for him to say something.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked calmly.

Curse her. Curse her and her concerned look, and her beautiful face, and her graceful body. Curse her for caring. Curse her for being kind when he only wanted to be cruel. Curse her for being here when he wanted to be alone.

“Just go away,” he growled, stalking past her to his desk. He sat down heavily, his back firmly to her, and started viciously marking a scroll. His hand moved evenly while his rage pounded inside him, and he was glad to vent his spleen on an essay so full of idiotic mistakes. After a moment, he heard Miranda put her book in her bag, slide off the chair, and head for the door. The silence was palpable, but he did nothing to break it, he simply kept writing and waiting for her to be gone. She paused at the door, set her bag on the ground, and soon her light step was crossing the room to him. Curse her, why wouldn’t she leave?

His already rigid shoulders tensed even more when she put her hands on them, and he stubbornly kept writing, attempting to ignore her touch.

“I thought I told you to leave,” he said acidly.

“You did,” she replied. “I’ll go in a minute.”

Her strong fingers went to work on his shoulders, expertly finding every knot of tension and coaxing it away. She went slowly, as though she had all the time in the world and nothing better to do with it than patiently draw the anger out of his body.

His quill slipped out of his fingers and he murmured, “You are insufferable.”

“I know.”

Gradually, his head drooped forward and he gave himself up to the sensation. She really had no business being so nice to him. Didn’t she realize how arrogant, petty, and cruel he was? But he was also selfish and, if she wanted to waste her time with him, who was he to complain about it?

He did not know how much time passed before she slowed her pace to a halt. She placed a kiss on the top of his head and went back to the door without saying another word. He heard her pick up her bag and turn the knob. In another moment, she would be gone and he would finally be alone. But, for some reason, that no longer seemed so important.

“Wait,” he ordered quietly. “I’m coming with you.”

*****

“I have to go back early tomorrow,” she reminded him over coffee and tea in the morning. They were sitting together in her cabin, reading the paper over breakfast. He was dressed except for his frock coat, and she was lounging in her dressing gown, her feet comfortably resting on his lap under the table.

“I remember,” he replied as he idly stroked her bare legs with one hand. “I’ll be finished with classes by mid-afternoon.”

“Are you coming back here, or do you want me to come to you?”

“At the moment, I wish to see as little of Hogwarts as possible.”

“Does that mean that you’re going to keep yourself in the dungeons all day?”

“It is best for Potter’s life expectancy that I do.”

“Then could you please let the house elves feed you lunch?”

“No.” He could feel his lips tug into a smile. It amused him how much it annoyed her when he skipped meals.

Predictably, she let out an irritated sigh. “Then you’ll be a ravenous beast when you get here.”

“Fortunately, you happen to be a bounty hunter. Dealing with ravenous beasts is your specialty.”

“I guess it is,” she said, sounding resigned. “And my brothers will never let me hear the end of it if they find out I’m on a case collecting ingredients for magical femme fatale beauty cream. Although, anymore, they’re only impressed when I take down vampires and werewolves on my own.”

He felt his mood darken and he fixed her with a sharp glare. “I thought we agreed that you were no longer hunting werewolves.”

She raised her hands in protest. “I’m not! At least, not until the tebo hide is ready to stitch into a tunic. Then I’ll be protected from pesky things like werewolf claws.”

“In that case, I suppose I should be grateful to have another six months of peace while it cures,” he said, going back to the paper.

“What are you going to do for the Easter Holidays?” she asked casually.

“The usual. Marking scrolls. Running hither and yon at Albus’s and the Dark Lord’s capricious whims.”

“Why don’t you come visit me?”

His eyes snapped up from the paper and the impish gleam in her eyes unnerved him. What was she up to now? “No. I couldn’t possibly.”

“Why not? I can meet you at the Merry Cemetery on Friday evening when you’re finished here. I get the feeling that a break from all this would do you good.”

Merlin, she was like a siren. “What if I were summoned?” he objected.

“You’d take my port-key to my cabin and be no later than if you had to walk outside of the wards at Hogwarts from your rooms in the dungeon.”

“I doubt that either the Dark Lord or Albus would be pleased with my leaving the country.” He set down the paper, gave her legs a final squeeze, and pushed them off of his lap before rising to collect his frock coat.

She picked up his half of the paper and asked matter-of-factly, “Why do they need to know?”

“It is strange, but each of them seems to think that he is my master.”

“Here and I thought you were an expert Occlumens.”

“I am,” he said testily as he swiftly did up the buttons of his coat.

“So, don’t tell them. And, if they ask, just lie.”

He scoffed at her audacity although the thought of defying both Albus and the Dark Lord was enticing at the moment. As he pondered this, he went back to the table and put his hands on her shoulders.

“You are a terrible influence,” he chided.

She leaned her head back in order to look up at him, her eyes wide and innocent. “Come on, you know you miss me. And it won’t do anyone much good if you murder Potter.”

Her breath tickled his throat when he bent down to kiss her, and her lips were as sweet and tempting as her ridiculous idea.

“You may, perhaps, have a point,” he allowed.

“About you missing me, or about the merits of you not killing Potter?”

“Have I mentioned how amusing it is to watch you fish for compliments?”

“And have I mentioned that women like to hear them once in a while?”

He dropped one more kiss on her forehead. “I should think it were obvious, but if you must have it in so many words then, yes, I miss you.”

She went back to the paper, but not before he saw the blush that spread over her cheeks. For some strange reason he found it utterly charming that she was such a brazen woman, and yet she could still blush.

“Think about my invitation, will you?” she asked as he plucked his cloak off the hook by the door and pulled it on.

He cleared his throat in order to assume his sternest and most disapproving professor voice. “I will think about it. But I will probably say no.”

The note of laughter in her good-bye made him suspect that he had succeeded in sounding neither disapproving, nor stern.

She really was a terrible influence.

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

End Note:

Kaymak is something like clotted cream.

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

Moonlight Masterpost+

<< Chapter Sixteen+

Chapter Eighteen+ >>

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It’s a satirical line from a satirical movie, with one character turning to another to ask, “Think it’ll work?”

The response is, “It would take a miracle.”

If you’ve seen the movie even just once, you can probably easily envision the whole scene, including the joviality at the start of the very brief conversation and the sardonic certainty at the end. (If you haven’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it.)

But the truth is that castle storming back in the day was supposed to be a long shot. Only extreme levels of planning, plotting, and resources could pull them down.

They were built to be fortresses, strategically designed with features such as:

Arrowslits – Holes up high in the structures from which archers could let their weapons loose while remaining largely protected.

Keeps – Towers that rose as high up as possible to give great views of whatever might be coming.

Moats – Water-filled trenches that armies couldn’t easily cross unless a bridge was procured.

Portcullises – Heavy metal gates to protect main entrances.

Barbicans – Fortresses outside of the fortress designed to be the first line of defense.

Really, that last word, “defense,” sums up their strategy. The lords who commissioned them took every precaution possible to protected what was theirs.



Source

A Model Worth Following

Dr. Dan Spencer, author of The Castle at War in Medieval England and Wales, writes on Military History Now:

“In their day, medieval castles represented the state-of-art in military engineering.

“Erected by kinds and feudal lords during what we now commonly call the Middle Ages, these foreboding strongholds… were defensive in nature, being skillfully designed to resist attacks by armies many times larger than those manning its parapets.

“But of course, a castle was only ever as strong as its weakest point. As such, great efforts were made by builders to ensure that their castles could withstand an enemy onslaught.”

Some of them did a phenomenal job of it too, as evidenced by their still-standing structures today. Google “castles to visit today” or some such thing, and you’ll no doubt find plenty of places around the world.

Of course, considering how land invasions aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be, castles are admittedly a little passé. They’re great to bring in tourist revenue, it’s true. But they don’t present the same awe-inspiring military deterrent now that planes and bombs and battleships exist.

Even so, that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate the concept they were built on. Warren Buffett certainly does, has, and no doubt will. He’s long-since been promising a “financial fortress” for investors in his Berkshire Hathaway(NYSE:BRK.A) (NYSE:BRK.B) fund.

By that, he means he invests in only the highest-quality companies with the best balance sheets and great management teams.

It’s a strategy that’s worked very well for him and his followers over the years. And it’s one I’ve seen significant success in as well.



Source

The Value of a Properly Fortified Fortress

For the record, I know about the news story currently circulating on most major financial sites: “Warren Buffett’s ‘Fortress’ Is Breached by Coronavirus-Related Shutdowns.” It starts out:

“Even as market watchers await Warren Buffett’s splashy move to seize on fallout from the current crisis, his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. hasn’t been spared by the pandemic.

“Coronavirus-related shutdowns across the U.S. have hit Berkshire units from See’s Candies and a shoemaker to industrial behemoth Precision Castparts. That could leave a few scars on the conglomerate…

“Buffett’s business partner, Charlie Munger, put it bluntly. ‘We’ve got a few businesses, small ones, we won’t reopen when this is over,’ he told The Wall Street Journal without naming the units.”

But here’s the thing. Fortresses don’t promise they’ll never get cracked by a battering ram or chipped by flying projectiles. As the article above – and every single castle throughout history – indicates, damage can be done.

For that matter, they don’t even promise they can withstand absolutely everything that comes their way. Nothing can, as proven by Krak des Chevaliers, an epic, all-but-invincible Crusader castle in Syria, that was surrendered, not by force, but by siege and, perhaps, a forged letter.

They only have the best chances around, which is why Bloomberg acknowledged:

“To be sure, Buffett’s promise that Berkshire will ‘forever remain a financial fortress’ hasn’t been broken yet. The company reported a $128 billion cash pile at the end of last year, as well as a stock portfolio valued at more than $248 billion.

Besides, “Some of its biggest revenue generators remain on solid footing.” And its similarly solid footing we’re looking for today through our own “revenue generators” in the REIT sector.

The companies below have plenty of cash on hand with significant chances of making plenty more cash in the future.

Here’s what they have to say for themselves.



Source: iREIT

3 A-Rated REITs We’re Buying Today

One of the good things about being a financial writer in the REIT sector is that we have tons or research at our disposal. This includes data from Seeking Alpha, Sentieo, FAST Graphs, and the wide world of Google. It’s very useful to have all of this information because it provides us with the most actionable intelligence to support our buy-hold-sell recommendations.

Given the latest COVID-19 risks we have carefully evaluated our entire REIT spectrum in order to model the impacts related to rent collection and future earnings. Accordingly, there are a number of REITs that we have downgraded to either Speculative, Hold, or Sell as we anticipate future dividend cuts and or suspensions.

We’re all living in unprecedented times and while strong balance sheets are essential to any business operation, we consider cash flow the primary test as it relates to dividend sustainability. That being said, we decided to focus the content today on three A-rated REITs that support our Buy or Strong Buy recommendation.

These three REITs appear on our list because we believe their dividend is safe and that the shares can be purchased at a reasonable margin of safety. We recently downgraded Simon Property (SPG) to a Spec Buy, and we plan to address this name in a detailed article later this week.

Our first pick on the list is Public Storage (PSA), a self-storage REIT whose capital structure is nearly bulletproof because it utilizes perpetual preferreds instead of debt (no refinancing risk). Its business model is one that is consistent through business cycles and its management has shown themselves to be immensely talented.

PSA is unique in the REIT industry (actually, virtually unique compared to any company) in that its capital structure is overwhelmingly comprised of common and preferred stock - debt is a measly 3%. PSA is the largest REIT issuer of preferred stock and has mastered its use in the capital structure. It’s this use that has created the fortress known as their balance sheet.

Income investors often recognize the security and performance available with the purchase of PSA, but are often turned away by the low dividend yield. However, thanks to the Covid-19 inspired pullback, PSA’s dividend yield is now 4.3% with a P/FFO handle of 17.4x.

To be clear, we don’t view PSA as a Strong Buy today, but we’re glad we included shares in the Cash Is King portfolio (just a Buy). We like the business model, and while the summer months could be challenging with lease-up (due to stay at home rules) we have a high degree of certainty that customers will continue to use storage in the weeks and months ahead.



Source: FAST Graphs

Our next fortress pick is Realty Income (O), the monthly paying bellwether that has become the staple for many retirees and income-oriented investors.

The primary reason that O has sold off (-31.9% total return year-to-date) is because of the company’s exposure to theaters (6.7%) and gyms (7%). Given the elevated risk of tenant defaults, specifically bankruptcies, it’s likely that certain stores may close, and Realty Income’s payout ratio could narrow.

We believe that Realty Income’s payout ratio – which is in the low 80s now – is adequate to handle the short-term shock to earnings. Essentially, we’d agree with the CEO’s optimism when he said that, “We feel very good about our liquidity situation: our ability to continue to pay the dividend and grow the dividend.”

Importantly, we also feel comfortable that Realty Income has an impressive A-rated balance sheet. The company is the only net lease REIT with an A-rated balance sheet and has protected its fortress balance sheet by strengthening its liquidity position by drawing down $1.2 billion (bringing the cash balance to $1.25 billion). There’s around $1.2 billion of capacity remaining on the $3 billion revolver (with an accordion of another $1 billion).

It’s important to recognize that Realty Income has around 50% of investment-grade rated tenants and we believe this investment policy (focusing on quality) will pay dividends during the next few months. Realty Income also has the least exposure to private equity-backed tenants and this provides us with a higher degree of confidence that Realty Income’s tenant base will keep paying rent.

Furthermore, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Realty Income is the most diversified net lease REIT and while certain sectors (like theaters and gyms) could put temporary pressure on the payout ratio, Realty Income is in the best position (of all net lease REITs) to weather the storms.

Shares are now yielding 5.7% with a P/FFO multiple of 14.8x (-30% below normal range). We are maintaining a Strong Buy at this time.



Source: FAST Graphs

Our final fortress pick is Federal Realty (FRT), one of just two shopping center REITs on our buy list.

FRT’s balance sheet is by far one of the strongest in its industry, as illustrated by its (1) net debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of 5.5x, its fixed-charge coverage ratio of 4.2x, its weighted-average debt maturity of ~10 years (near the top of the sector) and its weighted average interest rate of 3.8%.

FRT ended 2019 with over $127 million in cash on its balance sheet – up from just $64 million a year ago and management said it has no outstanding balance on a recently expanded $1 billion credit facility.

While FRT is known for its retail exposure, it's important to remind readers that the company has diversified its business model to include a variety of profit centers including:

Residential – 11%

Office – 9%

Fitness, health, beauty – 9%

Discount Apparel – 9%

Full-service restaurant – 9%

Full-service apparel – 8%

Grocery – 7%

[tinderbuzz]

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[nicoletteduclare]

He'd been accosted as he dug through the icebox. "Wilson, you certainly don't look like you need a mandrake..."

At least it was only Ms. Wickerbottom. "It's not for me, I'm shocked Willow hasn't spread the news." He deadpanned, then followed with the actual info. "I found Max. He isn't able to speak at the moment, so I thought maybe mandrake tea would heal his throat up."

There was a hum of understanding, and he was about to continue on before she spoke up. "While I think it's a valiant cause, I can't help but wonder if it's worth it." Wilson freezes and Wickerbottom sighs. "He's going to die again with this aliment. You can't hold it off forever. You do know the full extent of damage it can do to the body, correct?"

"Well, considering it was never covered in any of my medical texts, I probably don't." Wilson sighed and closed the icebox door. He certainly didn't, thinking of Max's ashen face and that flower in the man's hands.

"Flowers typically start to sprout through and destroy organs, the heart and lungs in particular. The lucky ones choke to death before that happens." She sighed again. "It's not something you can just treat the symptoms of.  And Wilson?" There's a pause, silence between them, her voice quiet, even though they're not around anyone else. "Don't let your own feelings cause you to get sick as well."

He blinks, a tinge of fear that everyone knows, and to be fair, maybe his pacing was a little obvious... "It's not like that." He manages, voice a little strained. "I'd do this if someone else was sick like this too."  And well, that's... mostly true. He's trying not to pine, at the very least. And he would help, if someone like Wigfrid or Willow was this sick... well... maybe not quite so personally. Please, don't let the whole camp have this figured out, and stars forbid that Maxwell already knew.

There's a curious look on her face as she glances over him. "Well, the point still stands, don't let yourself ever get to the point our dear Maxwell has. Don't let your heart get you sick." There's a glance at the mandrake too. "Maybe try wildflower first, before you go and use a mandrake on him. But get some sleep afterwards." Wickerbottom smiled and turned to leave, and Wilson couldn't make a real smile back, but he tried, even with worry burrowing into his stomach.

He stuffed the mandrake back into the ice chest and took just the honey. There were dried petals in a chest near their water-pot, which just needed a fire underneath to be lit, and Wilson found the makeshift infuser, strips from twigs woven into a netted basket.

Once the water boiled, he took the chipped cup and filled it with hot water, honey and a filled infuser and headed to the tents. There was almost no activity, but to be fair, in this weather, everyone would probably want to go to bed if they didn't have watch. Wickerbottom is probably taking a shift as always, but she'll even go curl up in a tent to warm up and read after someone else wakes up for their watch shift.

Poor Willow. He'd forgotten that he was supposed to have a shift tonight, fueling the fire and keeping an ear out for hounds or a giant, but he'd found Max, and that felt far more important then remembering to get back in time for watch. Even if the man's presence felt a bit draining due to the dark petals, Wilson was far more settled knowing where he was, he couldn't help the petals. Maxwell surprisingly had it far worse then they did.

Max being laid low so easily by coughing up dark petals was... strange to see. While most certainly not as physically durable as the rest of them, Maxwell weathered plenty of things that mentally took it out on the rest of them.

Wilson hummed, glad for the warmth in his hands as he eyed the one tent that didn't have much snow brushed away from the entrance and opened the flap. Maxwell blinked in surprise and Wilson offered a weak smile, noticing the smear of blood on the other's mouth, before offering the cup. "It's wildflower, and if it doesn't help, I'll make you some mandrake tea in the morning." 

It was taken with a tiny nod, and Wilson couldn't help lingering for a few seconds. Irrational, Maxwell's pride would never let him ask for help, or much of anything. Oh, he complained about meaningless things, but complaints weren't requests. It left Wilson feeling like he was clumsily hovering, and with one more glance, Maxwell gently blowing on the hot tea, not even looking at him, Wilson managed an awkward "Good night," and left.

He sighed once he reached the entrance to his own tent. He was rather transparent, wasn't he? Though, he should be thankful no one else has brought it up, at least to his face.

At least the tent was reasonably warm, he considered, settling down and pulling out a razor. It'd be a hit to conserving warmth, but they were out of the supplies for a new effigy and he was not about to try and get close enough to the rock bottom of his sanity to find beardlings. He'd just have to carry extra fire supplies and keep better track of his thermal stone.

It was cold the moment Wilson had a pile of hair at the side and a clean-shaven face. He rubs at a tiny cut on his face in irritation and looks at the flint razor. Needed to be sharpened again, there were nicks in the knapped edge. Still, the job was done and Wilson grabbed the quilt stuffed with beefalo and rabbit fur and bundled up.

Sleep would take a while to come, as exhausted as he was, Wilson figured. Worry always nestled deep and kept him up. Worry about what he was doing with his life, worry about not managing to make anything out of his degree, out of his passion.

Now it was worry regarding how utterly transparent he must be.

How stupid. Everything in his life was an absolute failure anyway. Wilson sighed and turned over. The eldest of his siblings, and most certainly the failure in his parents eyes. They'd hated his over-enthusiastic pursuit of science, they'd pushed him into medicine because at least that was useful. Instead of becoming a doctor or a surgeon though, he'd stayed in academia for a while. Then, before he finished that pursuit, only one degree under his belt, he'd left to do research on his own. He'd been exhausted of doing other people's research for them. And he was a failure of a scientist, really, after studying so hard, and for so long. The temptation of maybe, just maybe, learning something that would benefit not just him, but everyone, was too much.

This is where that had landed him. A sad, stupid scientist, pinning over a sad, stupid magician who'd been the one to land him in this mess. It was pinning. He'd just have to be honest with himself. A fondness he couldn't eradicate. Oh, he'd been fond of people before, men and women alike, but it faded with time or new knowledge. Maxwell was... an odd case. An outlier in some ways. He'd hated him for a while. He'd tricked him, damn it. 

Granted, he doubted Maxwell had fully been in control on the Throne, but at the time, it was all on Maxwell.

Minus the impatience at the end... Maxwell had managed to make himself quite the companion the first portal they built. Encouragement, praise, swapping stories and jokes. A comforting, enjoyable voice on the radio. Then it was gone. Instead, the once warm voice was cold and he was in this hell. A broken, bitter heart, Maxwell was a devil, an asshole, and a right pain in the ass.

The second portal they built, their every interaction was strained. He could remember the manic energy between them though, excitement at an attempt at leaving. The thrill of learning. Not much, sadly as much as Maxwell was willing to teach him what was needed, he didn't have hands on time with the codex alone. A few strained jokes but mostly work and arguments and they'd been so close to what was hopefully success before Ms. Charlie intervened.

It was still a good result. Instead of the two of them arguing alone for eternity, it'd been other people, other lonely survivors. A gift in itself, even if he'd never been the kind of person who was overtly social, the time he'd spent alone here had made him crave company even more then his self imposed isolation in the woods.

Not that Maxwell wasn't company. Even at the end of that whole project, things were starting to mend, but it was better to not always handle that bundle of emotions that came with Maxwell. Though, he had, frequently. Forever prickly, sharp barbs and a ego that was out of check just enough now-days to get under anyone's skin who wasn't used to it. Maxwell was more often his companion on excursions then not.

It wasn't always bad. Sometimes it was absolutely insufferable, that had been early on, but now he'd just ramble about thoughts and plans, or what he found interesting and frankly, it was mostly because it never seemed like Maxwell was listening, considering the fact that there never was a 'would you shut up, Higgsbury' that he had been expecting. Max didn't care, and so it gave him the space to just talk things out to himself, Then, one day Maxwell chipped in with, "Hm, I'd never considered that."

He'd frozen in his spot and after a few moments of realizing that Maxwell had been listening, either for once, or he always had been, it branched into a discussion. He didn't always chime in, but Maxwell was listening, and yet didn't deride him for the overenthusiastic chatter. It was nice. More then nice, it was flattering that he actually paid attention. Wilson figured Maxwell zoned out most of the time. 

Oh, why was he thinking over all of this now. Wilson sighed, cheeks red and turned over in the blanket. Why couldn't he just forget the little things and go back to hating the man instead of worrying over him and worrying about the fact that he might be considerably obvious about his feelings towards Maxwell? He pulled the blanket tighter around himself and closed his eyes, mentally chastising himself for focusing on this so much. Maxwell was always just going to be a companion, and he was going to help him out because he wanted to see him better.

And that was that.

-

He'd figured Wilson left immediately, but apparently not. He would have said it back, but his throat was a barrier there. He'd nodded, but it seemed like Wilson hadn't seen. No matter. Wilson was probably far more exhausted, he'd fought off shadows and still hadn't slept. The man needed the sleep.

The tea was warm against his cooling hands, and Maxwell sighed, gently spinning the cup to make the infuser swirl slightly. It smelled comforting, vaguely flowery. Herbal teas had never been his favorites back when he had a choice, but he was not going to complain about that now. There were so many flavours that were faintly in his memories that he missed, it was pointless to think about them, though black tea always came to mind when having tea. Still, he took a tiny sip, the liquid still too hot really, but there was the slight sweetness of the honey, and while not perfect it did seem to help. Breathing didn't hurt quite so much.

A few more moments, and the heat was more in his hands then in the cup. The drink was wonderfully warm though, and that was pleasant. Max noticed he was a bit hungry, now that the drink had slightly soother the painful ache in his throat but that could be handled later. Even though he was hungry, he winced at the idea of swallowing much more then the tea. Oh well. An empty cup, and he tried to murmur out something, but instead all he felt was something tear and the pain was far, far worse as he started to cough. So much for keeping blood off his bedding. Another full plant, flesh stuck to the roots , and besides intense pain, any attempt at talking was just breath.

All he could taste was copper, and he wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, a huge smear of blood along it, and he barely could manage a huff as he looked at how vibrant the blood was to anything else. Food, or mushrooms, weren’t going to be an option right then. He needed to sleep, though Max really doubted he would manage to sleep through the pain, he was never great with sleep anyway. Last night had been rare, exhaustion sleep wasn’t fully refreshing, but he’d slept harder then he had in a while.

God. He wouldn't be surprised if he died in the night, really. As grim as it was, he almost would rather choking to death instead right now. He wondered if there were more of those in his throat, as he pitched the flower to the side. It was smaller then the last, but the roots were long. Probably were, considering his luck.

He flipped the roll over, to the side that wasn’t bloody, and settled in, ignoring the blood on his hand, he didn’t have time, and he was not in any shape to handle another bout of shadows, not to mention the mere idea of the rest of camp having to fare with that, he already wasn’t a welcome member of the group.

Still, it was nicer to hear people around, even while he was in pain, as Maxwell closed his eyes and tried to rest.

[iliketoeatmyself]

ED BOOKS

I stole this from mpa (because I wanted to save it) but I’m going to highlight those I’VE READ... also I might add some others as time goes... 

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (it was a good read!)

Solitaire by Aimee Liu * (Considered first anorexia memoir. Thus, there are points when EDs aren't completely understood, but still totally worth the read. Available through KU.)

Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi (it was really good and real tbh)* (One of my faves! A memoir that really captivated me)

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia * (Really is what it says on the tin and so much more. This memoir captures the darkest parts of EDs and is done very logically, stabilizing itself with facts that are intermixed by the chaos of EDs).

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen (Romance)

Thin by Lauren Greenfield (Nonfiction elements. Like the TV documentary of the same name, but of course, the book has more details.)

The Best Little Girl in the World by Steven Levenkron (NOT like the movie. Based on research of EDs in figure skating and gymnastics.)

Perfect by Natasha Friend

Purge: Rehab Diaries by Nicole J. Johns

Skinny by Ibi Kasliky

Loud Girl in the House of Myself: A Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall

Gaining: The Truth about Life After EDs by Aimee Liu (same author as Solitaire)

Identical by Ellen Hopkins * (Written in same manner as her other books, which is basically more like a poem than traditional novel format. LOVE this book and recommend the authors other, non ED books)

Letting Ana Go by Anonymous

Massive by Julia Bell

Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen (Romance)

Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

Thin by Grace Bowman (memoir)

The Disappearing Girl by Heather Topham Wood (Romance, KU)

After the Strawberry by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

Purge by Sarah Darer Littman

Beautiful Me by Natasha Jennings

Hunger Point by Jillian Medoff (it was okay, the sister of mc has an ed)

Pointe by Brandy Colbert (Very dramatic. Deals with sexual abuse and also kidnapping in addition to an ED. Still not sure how I feel about this book, but a read that is very interesting, especially for those who like reading all things ballet. Also, this is nice because a black girl is not only a ballet dancer, but also has an ED, which is not portrayed enough!)

Looks by Madeleine George

Kessa by Steven Levenkron (I'd say this is probably for younger readers, but hey, you're never too old to read any book in my mind!)

My Sister's Bones by Cathi Hanauer * (Really liked this book and it isn't necessarily because of the ED part of it. I just like the whole feel and author's style)

Parperweight by Meg Haston

You Remind Me of You: A Poetry Memoir by Eireann Corrigan

Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders and Elusive Olympic Dreams by Jennifer Sey (Wow, that's a mouth full!)

Believarexic by J.J. Johnson

Feeling For Bones by Bethany Pierce

More Than You Can Chew by Marnelle Tokio

A Dance of Sisters by Tracey Porter

Gravity Journal by Gail Sobat

Elena Vanishing by Elena Dunkle (A memoir written with her mother)

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver (Haven't read this in a long time, but I remember liking it)

A Trick of the Light by Lois Metzger * (One of my favourites! About a male with an ED.)

Starved by Michael Somers (Another good male ED novel)

Reckoning Daze by Michael Beaulieu (Currently free kindle edition is available)

Thin (Sharing Spaces Book 3) by Alicia Michaels (This is part of a romance series and is the third book. This one focuses on the ED character, but there are hints to the ED in other books. You don't necessarily need to read the other books in the series and can figure things out without reading them first. I actually read this book before the others)

Cake Dreams: A Memoir of Survival by Hoyt Phillips * (Another male ED book. Great multi-faceted portrayal of EDs and general metal illness. Available on KU)

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming * (It's been a while since I've read it, but I recall there being an ED. The book does not focus on the ED, but it is thrown in there, adding to an already fascinating, interesting read.)

Nothing by Robin Friedman (Another male ED book)

Lighter and Weightless (books 1 and 2 of Begin Again Duet series) by Gia Riley (Romance and available on KU)

...And All Shall Fade to Black by Layla Dorine (Gay Romance, male with ED, available on KU).

Still Water: A Boys of Bellamy Novel by Ruthie Luhnow (Gay romance, male with ED, available on KU)

Four Weeks, Five people by Jennifer Yu * (A male wannabe rock star with an ED. He is 1/5th of the main characters who all have other mental disorders and have been sent away to camp to help with their various mental illnesses).

Phat (Escape From Reality series) by Taylor Henderson (Part of a series. KU)

Life-size (no, not like the Lindsey Lohan movie) by Jenefer Shute (Available through Kindle unlimited)

Love Struck (Star Struck Series) by Amber Garza (Romance series. KU).

Fake Perfect Me by Cari Kamm (KU)

Out of Breath (Exposed Series) by Hazel Kelly  (KU).

The Kaitlyn Chronicles series by Elaine Babich (Series, for younger readers. KU).

Please Don't Go by Elizabeth Benning (A bulimic sent to a residence to recover and teams up with anorexic former enemy in hopes of escaping)

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen * (very great!! I loved this one, it’s not only about the ed, but human nature and emotions) (A classic novel that everyone interested in metal health should read).

Do or Die (Fight or Flight Series #4) by Jamie Canosa (Romance series. KU).

Hungry: One Woman's Battle and Victory over Anorexia and Bulima by Jessica Skinner (The title pretty much says all you need to know. KU).

My Perfect Little Secret by Rebecca Coppage (KU).

Anorexic: The True Story of An Anorexia Survivor Who Found Love by Anna Paterson (This is romantic, but I wouldn't call it romance. KU).

Balance of Control by Stephanie Nance

Running in Silence: My Drive for Perfection and the Eating Disorder that Fed it by Rachael Rose Steil

My Not-So Secret by B.P. Morrison (KU).

26 Beats per Minute by Dez Wilder (Male with ED. Memoir. KU).

Summer Fades by Amanda Bews (KU).

It's Never Enough (Book 1 in Never Series) by Susan Soares (Series. KU).

Restricted: A Novel of Half-truths by Jennifer Kinsel * (KU).

Chrysalis by L.A. Field, Gary Thaller * (KU).

A Slow Fade by Brooke Melius (KU).

All We Ever Wanted: Unmasking the Silent Battle by Alexandra Wnuk (KU).

Life Hurts: A Doctor's Personal Journey Through Anorexia by Dr. Eliabeth Mcnaught *

A Fork in the Road by Rebekah Wilson (KU).

Skin Deep (Stolen Breaths series) by Pamela Sparkman (Romance Series. KU).

Feeding the Heart (Heart Series) by Marion Myles (Romance Series. KU).

Anorexic Annie by Sarah Burleton * (KU).

The Downside of Being Charlie by Jenny Torres Sanchez * (Male with ED, the ED is not a huge part of the book, but also deals with family dysfunction, which I always find interesting).

The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller * (This is very interesting. Male with ED. Deals with super powers! Though, it could just be the ED causing the protagonist to think he has powers, but I'll let you be the judge!)

Skinny Boy: A Young Man's Battle and Triumph Over Anorexia by Gary A. Grahl

It Was Me All Along: A Memoir by Andie Mitchell * (about binge eater who lost weight)

Safety in Numbers by Brittany Burgunder *

Skinny: She was starving to fit in... (False reflections book 1) by Laura L. Smith (Currently free kindle edition is available).

When You Fall by Alex Karola * (through Wattpad. Not finished yet, but is a great read!)

Inner Hunger: A Young Woman's Struggle Through Anorexia and Bulimia by Marianne Apostolides

Empty: A Story of Anorexia by Christie Pettit

Inside Out: Portrait of an Eating Disorder by Nadia Shivack

Not Otherwise Specified by Hannah Moskowitz *

All Good Things Die in LA by Anhoni Patel *

Jane in Bloom by Deborah A. Lytton (Another one for younger readers. Still, a nice read)

Gravity Journal by Gail Sidonie Sobat

What I Lost by Alexandra Ballard *

This Impossible Light by Lily Myers (told in verse)

Sad Perfect by Stephanie Elliot (the girl has avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder)

Beautiful Bodies by Kimberly Rae Miller * (this is a KU book and is a fairly new release as of 7/28/17. It is about disordered eating and chronic dieting, not a full blown ED; however, I still enjoyed it and recommend it).

Shattered Image: My Triumph over Body Dysmorphic Disorder by Brian Cuban * (KU, male memoir detailing ED struggle and primarily his struggle with BDD)

Sugar by Deirdre Riordan Hall (KU)

Empty Net (Scoring Chances Book 4) by Avon Gale * (gay romance about bulimic hockey player)

Heavyweight by MB Mulhall (Male protagonist)

Just Jack by Shaun Powell (KU, male protagonist)

Don't Call Me Kit Kat by K.J. Farnham (for younger audience definitely)

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxanne Gay (BED)

Skin and Bones by Sherry Shahan (Male protagonist)

Skinny Me by Charlene Carr

Wrists by Jay Broderick (male protagonist)

Unicorns and Rainbow Poop by Sam Kadence (male, gay, romance)

Bare Roots by Molly S. Hillery (KU)

Grip by Adex Garza (KU, male. Deals with morbid obesity)

Rita Just Wants to be Thin by Mary W. Walters (KU)

Taint by Jude Nicholas (KU)

Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa by Joan Jacobs Brumberg

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

Hunger Pains: The Modern Woman's tragic Quest  for Thinness by Mary Pipher

The Stone Girl by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

Pretend We are Lovely by Noley Reid

Stick Figure by Lori Gottilieb

Diary of an Exercise Addict by Peach Friedman

The Anorexia Diaries by Linda Rio

Feed Me!: Writers Dish about Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image by Harriet Brown

Insatiable: A Young Mother's Struggle with Anorexia by Erica Rivera

How I Got Skinny, Famous, and Fell Madly in Love by Ken Baker (about a girl who goes on a reality TV show to lose weight. Fun read)

Inside Out: Portrait of an Eating Disorder by Nadia Shivack

Perfect: Anorexia and Me by Emily Halban

Losing it by Sandy McKay

Fragile by Nikki Grahame

My Big Fat Disaster by Beth Fehlbaum

Thin Ice by Niki Settimo (romance)

Unfiltered by Lily Collins (not solely a book about ED, but the topic is mentioned throughout)

Good Luck with That by Kristan Higgins (coming out on August 7, 2018)

Staving in the Search of Me by Marissa LaRocca

Feast (True Love In and Out of the Kitchen) by Hannah Howard

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (the mc is anorexic but it’s not focused on it only. This book is about two outcasts who connect to each other and its effect of it in the course of their lives)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (it’s very good and wild. It also tackles on feminism and societal issues as well)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki  and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (it’s a great book. The ed is not the main point but there is a character suffering from one)

[blinder-secrets]

Heat Of The Moment - Tommy

requested: Reader gets seriously hurt saving Charlie from being taken/hurt, and how Tommy would react. 

a/n: tw for violence & blood 

In the heat of the moment. That’s how you’d rationalise it. That’s what you’d tell your mother when you tried to explain it, what you’d offer forward when people praised you for it. It wasn’t bravery, or selfishness. It wasn’t even panic. It was instincts and nothing; your mind had been so blank, you had acted before pausing to consider anything else; you’d done it all in the heat of the moment. 

It was a Thursday when it happened. You remembered that because Thursday’s were the only day you worked into the night, prepping the horses for the next day. Tommy let you take Friday’s off, to go home to your family, meaning all jobs had to be done before you left. He didn’t give you that before Grace had passed, things were different after he’d lost her. 

You’d been Tommy’s live-in stable-girl for years; you’d moved to the manor house with him, following after his pretty horses and guaranteed payslip. It was the perfect job. You loved the animals, the money, the security. 

That night was the first time you’d ever regretted working for him.

Weary, covered in muck and sweat, you left the final stall and fastened it shut behind you. All the horses were clean, bedded. Hay nets re-stuffed. Walkway washed down. You were free of duties and ready to go before twelve. All that was left, was to return your bucket and tools to the shed across the yard. 

It was there, in the dark of night, that you’d seen him. A man you didn’t recognise, approaching the house with his head ducked down between his shoulders. You’d stood and watched as he disappeared into the gardens around the back, before continuing on your way. After all, it wasn’t unusual for Tommy to have late night guests. 

You’d changed and locked up, yawning as you went on your way. Sleepy-eyed, you walked back across the yard, where it’d dawned on you that Tommy wasn’t home. John had invited the lot of them to his, for booze and cards. A lad’s night. The only people in the house were staff, like yourself, and Charlie. 

Your throat tightened. Though you never really knew the extent of Tommy’s troubles, you knew that a stranger, alone, with his only son and heir could never be anything but danger. 

Bile stung your throat as you picked up the pace, eyes set on where you’d seen the man last. You didn’t have any sort of plan. Tommy had armed men somewhere, but you didn’t know where, nor could you reach them in time. You were going in blind. Helpless. 

As you got to the back of the house, you saw a window had been prised open, and followed it into the room behind. Tracing the intruder’s steps. 

The house was still. Silent. As if it were holding its breath, waiting for the danger to pass. You crossed the library, and followed the trail of wet footprints into the hall. 

The stranger was there; frozen at the bottom of the stairs with a sleeping Charlie in his arms. 

In the split second that you’d locked eyes, your mind had dive-bombed into blankness. Every thought and rationality had dissipated into absolutely nothing and you’d found yourself running toward the man, shouting for hims to give the boy back. 

He’d pulled his gun fast enough that you’d missed it completely. The blast woke Charlie, sending him into a panic of tears and screams as your shoulder exploded with pain. It knocked you back a few feet, pausing you long enough for the man to turn on heel and run, taking the front door out into the midnight.

Gasping, more from shock than anything else, you’d staggered after him. Caught in the heat of the moment. Blind with instinct. 

As you passed the rack by the door, you pulled a cane free. It was no gun, but it was better than nothing, and you gripped it with both hands as you ran. Your speed surprised even you. He’d made it halfway down the drive, onto the green verge in the middle, when you’d caught him. 

Swinging the stick, you’d laid a firm blow into the back of his legs. He tumbled forward, landing awkwardly on top of the child before rolling onto his back, swearing at you. Charlie’s wailing had grown loud enough to wake the others, you hoped, and you found yourself talking to him. Ignoring the kidnapper as if he wasn’t there.

‘It’s okay, Charlie,’ you panted, your voice miles from comforting. ‘I’ve got you.’

You swung again, hitting the stranger’s shins while he attempted to scramble to his feet. Your advantage was surprise, and it was running out fast.

‘Let him go!’ you screamed, lifting your make-shift weapon again. As it came down, the man wrapped his free hand around it, using it to pull himself up. 

You staggered back with the weight of him, watching in horror as he dropped Charlie to the ground and turned his full attention upon you. He wrenched the stick from your grip and used it against you. The wood cracked as it slammed into your injured shoulder, sending another fire-wave of pain through your body. It shattered into pieces when he struck you again. You couldn’t even take the hit standing, you stumbled back from the grass, crumbling onto the gravel.

‘Charlie, to the house!’ you barked. You attempted to look for him, to see if he was okay, but the man’s foot came down hard on your stomach and you found yourself crying into the sky above. 

He kicked you enough times for you to lose count. Your body curled itself in desperation; attempted to minimise the damage of each blow. Hot blood coughed up from inside and dribbled down your cheek, leaking from your mouth. Tears poured from your eyes. You were past consciousness, lost in something like a nightmare, trapped in a fog of pain and fear. 

You hadn’t heard Charlie moving, you didn’t know if he’d gotten away, if help had been called.

For those minutes, all that existed was the ringing in your ears and the searing ache of your body. You were trapped, too far gone to beg for mercy, too afraid to fight back.

When a gunshot burst through the chaos, you were half convinced it had been fired into you. It was close enough, loud enough. You were so riddled with pain, that you were sure it could’ve entered your body without causing more. But there was no chance for you to find out; you’d already passed into blankness. 

Everything after that was missing.

To say you awoke, would be a lie. 

You’d crawled back to life, peeling yourself from restless sleep to meet painful consciousness. Every inch of you complained. Your body ached and stung to the point where you could feel nothing else; if some part of you was unharmed, it had buried itself long ago, in the soreness of some other injury. 

Thankfully, your eyes were working. You could feel the skin was taught beneath them, across your cheekbones, but your lids were un-swollen. At least you could look around you, see something other than darkness. You were in a hospital room, in a bed, with a man stationed by your feet. 

He was a Blinder, you could tell from the cap, and you’d attempted to call out to him, but failed. The breath that scraped your throat was enough of a noise to gain his attention. 

He spun to face you. ‘Miss (y/l/n). You’re awake,’ he said.

You were too afraid to nod. ‘Water,’ you croaked. He obliged, and brought you a cup, holding it to your lips for you to drink. It was slow and undignified; more went down your front than into your mouth, but it was needed. Water had never tasted so close to the nectar of Gods.

‘I’ve got to get Tommy, Miss.’ He placed the cup back on the cabinet beside you. ‘He told me to get him when you were awake.’ He hesitated, as if waiting for you to demand he stayed, but of course you didn’t. You were barely thinking straight. 

The Blinder left and you felt yourself drift off, too exhausted to fight it.

Tommy was sat next to you when you opened your eyes again. He’d pulled a chair up to your bed, and sat, folded at the waist with his arms on his knees. You couldn’t see his face, but you imagined it carried the purple rings of a sleepless night. 

You swallowed, attempting to wet your mouth before you spoke. ‘Is Charlie-’

He’d interrupted you as soon as you’d made a sound, his head snapping up to meet your eyes. ‘(Y/n),’ he breathed. 

‘Is Charlie okay?’ you said, wincing. Your chest was tight, and pinched with each movement, but you had to know. 

‘He’s fine, (y/n), he’s fine.’ You could see he was relieved, but he didn’t sound it. His stressed face was glued to yours, as if you would slip away again the second he blinked. ‘You saved him,’ he said.

It was all worth it, then. Every blow. You felt some ache lift with the knowledge that Charlie was alright. ‘Good.’ You nodded slightly, before asking, ‘How bad is it?’

Tommy sighed, listing off your injuries, ‘Broken ribs, an arm, internal bleeding and a blow to the head. Bullet wound in the shoulder, stitches in your-’

‘Only one?’

He paused. ‘One what?’

‘Bullet,’ you winced between breaths, ‘one bullet wound?’

‘Just the one, (y/n).’ He’d said your name again; he seemed unable to keep himself from saying it. You’d find out later it was because he had been so afraid of losing you, so sure that he’d never get to say it to you again, that it felt like gold on his tongue. 

‘You killed him?’ It was your next guess. If the bullet had’t been yours, it could only ever be your attacker’s. Tommy nodded once and you let yourself relax slightly. At least he was dead, you didn’t suffer that for him to walk free, painless. 

‘The doctor said you’ll be slow to recover.’

‘I believe him,’ you attempted a smile. Your father had always said it was best to laugh, than to cry. ‘I feel like shit.’

You’d hoped he’d smile with you, but instead his head dropped, chin almost to his chest. ‘That should have never happened to you, (y/n).’

‘I couldn’t let,’ your words stopped short. You’d attempted to sit up more, but the pain that shot through your body had ripped the words from your mouth, replacing them with a sharp gasp. ‘Fuck,’ you hissed. 

Tommy had bolted up, moving to the door to shout for the nurse. 

‘Tommy,’ you took a deep breath, ‘Tommy it’s fine.’ When you were still, it was bearable. And you could just about manage to stay still.

‘I need a fucking nurse in here!’ He was barking orders into the hall, his image intermittently blocked by the swinging double doors to your room. ‘She needs meds and she needs them now.’ A nurse had appeared his side, apologising as he scolded her, ‘I told you to keep her fucking painless.’

She hurried into the room, supplying you with some sort of opiate, which you were glad of, before disappearing again. You said nothing to Tommy as he entered, pacing the space at the end of your bed. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, stressed by your pain, or by the nurses ignorance; you weren’t sure what it was entirely. He was leaving you to watch while he twisted through his mind in silence. 

It only took a short while for your body to disappear. You sighed as the pain eased, sinking into the bed, feeling your eyelids grow heavy. ‘Thank you,’ you said, to the drugs more than to Tommy.

He turned in your peripheral, moving to lean on the rail at your feet. ‘They’ll pay for this,’ he said, his tone low and sure; his words a statement of fact. ‘Alright, (y/n). They’ll fucking pay because that’s how it goes. An eye for an eye.’

‘I wasn’t the target, Tommy.’

‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘But you’re the one in the hospital bed. So they’ll get a bullet to the head and an unmarked grave. Every last one of them.’

You said nothing. You didn’t fight him, you were happy to hear it. 

He hadn’t apologised for what had happened, and you hadn’t wanted him to. What you’d wanted, what you’d needed, was to hear a threat against whoever had sent the attacker that night. And a threat is what Tommy had given you.

‘I’ll be back in the morning, (y/n), he said. He waited to see you nod before he left, and you’d sunken into a drug-infused rest, knowing that he’d stick to his word.

He’d see you again tomorrow, and the fuckers would pay. An eye for an eye. 

[danbilzerianworth]

How Is The Net Worth Of Dan Bilzerian $200  Million?

Have you at any point thought about what the total assets of Dan Bilzerian is? Indeed, the entertainer, money manager, poker player, and web-based media powerhouse has made a fortune. Broadly known as the Instagram King, Dan Bilzerian, starting at 2021, has a total assets of $200 million. This post will jump into how he brought in his cash.

Early Life

Bilzerian is half Armenian and half American. He was brought into the world on December seventh, 1980, in Tampa, Florida. His dad, Paul Bilzerian, was a corporate bandit on Wall Street. Paul was exceptionally fruitful and had become one of the most unmistakable financial specialists in the area when Dan was in highschool.

At 20 years old, Bilzerian took on the Navy SEALs however shockingly couldn't finish the arduous preparing. He would then finish his advanced degree at the University of Florida, studying business and criminal science.

Bilzerian, all through school, grew an adoration for the round of poker. Despite the fact that his dad needed Dan to enter the corporate world very much like him, Dan Bilzerian wanted to emulate his father's example. Bilzerian's attention was exclusively on poker after he graduated, and fortunately for him, he was incredible at it.

 Poker

Bilzerian played in the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event and completed 180th. While he didn't do essentially well, he acquired acknowledgment. Feign Magazine casted a ballot Bilzerian as the most amusing player at the occasion.

Bilzerian would utilize the smidgen of publicity he needed to become well known inside the poker world. Bilzerian would turn into a high-stakes card shark, professing to have won a shocking 10 million in only one night in 2013. He likewise asserted that the next year he made 50 million from poker alone.With his extraordinary accomplishment as a poker player, Bilzerian's acclaim rose massively, permitting him to fan out into different types of amusement, like motion pictures and powerhouse jobs.

Film And Instagram

Bilzerian made his film debut with a little job in Olympus Has Fallen in 2013. The Movie featured popular entertainers Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler. This appearance permitted Bilzerian to acquire openings and since has been in six additional movies:

Last one standing

The Other Woman

The Equalizer

Vehicle Run 2

Extraction

War canines

Bilzerian jobs have gone from tricks to playing as himself during his acting profession. He has likewise created a vivified animation series called Blitz Real Hollywood Stories. The show was made in the US in 2017 and depicts the existence of Bilzerian in animation structure.

With the films, shows, and poker achievement Bilzerian was bringing in incredible cash. He was not bashful in showing it off on Instagram by the same token. Vehicles, ladies, boats, and gems all showed up on Bilzerian's feed.

He carries on with a conspicuous and fun way of life that is very eye catching for the more youthful age. Bilzerian content appears to consistently circulate around the web, and he ended up being one of the more well known records in the beginning phases of Instagram.

Therefore, Bilzerian's after expanded radically, and right now, he has 32.5 million adherents. Like Charli D'Amelio, Bilzerian's huge after permitted him to bring in cash from supported posts and web based business. Bilzerian was additionally ready to take advantage of his leverage to dispatch various undertakings.

Undertakings

Bilzerian runs the organization Ignite International Brands Ltd, dispatched in the US in 2018 and in the UK in 2019. Light sells electronic cigarettes, CBD, oils, water containers, and vodka.

He likewise utilizes Ignite as a stage to sell his book The Set-Up, which takes the peruser on an excursion of how Bilzerian made his progress.

Bilzerian is very much aware that large numbers of his adherents need to carry on with a way of life like his. Hence, he realizes that in the event that he makes items that he will utilize, his supporters will probably follow.

He exploits this with Ignite, empowering him to make millions from the organization. Light has turned into a treasure trove for Bilzerian, and as his acclaim rises, so will his benefits.

 Dan Bilzerian Net worth 2021

Starting at 2021, Dan Bilzerian worth and facts has a total assets of $200 million. With the blend of poker rewards, film, undertakings, and web-based media impact Bilzerian has made a domain of riches. He has turned into a staple in the web-based media world and will probably keep on broadening his resources.

Key Takeaways

Pick your way Bilzerian's father was an extraordinary finance manager and was sufficiently lucky to leave his kids trust reserves. Bilzerian could've quite recently followed his father's strides and gone into a similar field. All things considered, he confided in himself, veered off from his dad's calling, and sought after his energy for poker, which set him the establishment for making millions. Guardians are basic, yet consistently recall that it is your life toward the day's end. Your fantasies and interests consistently start things out.

Energy is Passion–Bilzerian's enthusiasm is poker, a game some say is nothing but karma. This didn't prevent him from pursuing achievement. Try not to get debilitate by conflicting with the standard. On the off chance that you can awaken each day and work at something you truly appreciate, that is genuine achievement.