#black bordello

[spilladabalia]

Black Bordello - End Of Reality - 25/01/2023

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

I'ma tell y'all something, and y'all bet not FW me about it, but, WHY, I'm sittin here making some lists for Spooky Season or whatever and I tried to go find Tallulah from Bordello of Blood

And I found her or whatever, and was gonna look for some content and whatnot, because in my memory, this was Denise Matthews, AKA Vanity, of Vanity 6 fame and so forth

So I was like... tryna pull up some things and Mr. Google wasn't helping, no matter what.

Well, the problem was, he kept saying it was some other chick and my memory was like... surely, everyone is wrong but me lol. Because they was saying it was this lady:

And I am not culturally competent enough to know what kinda name that is, but it had looked like a white lady name to me, therefore, I bunny hopped down the lil rabbit hole and...

I found that lady.

And I was like, well... that certainly isn't Vanity Denise, so I was wrong, but I can maybe prolly still throw Tallulah on the thing. Lemme see where this woman is from and stuff.

I... am going to keep her. Because even though she look mad ambiguous outside of that movie, I'm gonna just stick with the memory that there was a Black hoe vampire at the Cunningham Wake. Trinidadian don't necessarily mean Black, but I read her as Black and I'm reading her now as Blindian.

With her Vanity lookin ass.

(This is Vanity. That lady stole her face and didn't even capitalize on it. I surely would have.)

[dio-the-thot-exterminator]

HHIIIIIIIII I also doodled these at the bottom of the page, there was no room for Hanna :(

and Debbie’s looked ugly asf so yall not gonna see hers lmao

[yeyinde]

LEASH CALLED YOU

PUPPY (RUINER) x F!Reader | 18+ Good dogs get rewards, and Puppy thinks you are the best prize to be found in this hovel. So, he takes you.

WARNINGS: smut | P-in-V, rough sex; D/s undertones; VERY HEAVY DUBCON!!; slight breathplay. female gendered anatomy. implied/referenced human trafficking, sex work. canon typical violence. implied threat of violence. loss of agency. obsessive behaviour. this is basically playing house with a psychopath who decides you're his. and he pretty much killed half the city and the guy who was kinda a god. or a king. or something. so like, what are you gonna do? say no? Pff. WORD COUNT: 7,4k imagine writing like, 7k for Some Guy after seeing one (1) gifset of him.

He finds you in South Rengkok.

Nestled amongst a conglomerate of seedy, black market shops in the red light district, you gaze out at the sea of people from a vaulted window in a seamy bordello. A voyeuristic view into the coquettish bedroom they placed you in—red satin sheets and pink, heart-shaped pillows. All dolled up and pretty. 

The harsh light cuts shadows under your eyes and frames you in a heavy, oversaturated glow. You look like you're bathing in red. In blood.

The sight makes something curdle in his stomach. He isn't sure why. There's not much of a difference between you and the other workers—all locked up tight; enticing passersby to join in on the garish body auction set to take place soon—but where they see the dollar signs in this, dancing and swaying their hips, pressing their palms flat against the window plane and fluttering their lashes, all lovely and coy, at the men who press back, you sit. Motionless. A little doll.

You don't belong here, he thinks. You're something much too soft and fine, like silk in his hands, and much too delicate to be in this part of town that stinks like wet, oxidising metal and saltpetre.

The slip of your black, lacy kimono barely covers your skin. He tracks it. The shadows, the dips. The curves. His eyes fix on the protrusion of your collarbones beneath the moody fabric, pushed to the side, and hanging off your shoulder in what, he guesses, is meant to be enticing. Kittenish.

They dolled you up to skirt this line between sultry vixen and twee innocence. The sight of it does something to his guts. Has them rolling over each other in tandem with each heavy thud of his heart. It's the way you look that catches his attention, sure, but more than that, it's the look in your eyes.

They glow under the neon smear, hazy and drifting far away, turned inward. Lost.

And then you look up. Catch his gaze through the glass. 

There's a moment when everything inside of him dims, quiets. Thoughts, missions. Reason, purpose. It falls under a thick blanket of whisper-soft snow. It's just him—something, nothing—and you. This little cosm of his own making. 

You make a motion, then, as if to entice him inside but you hesitate, staring back at him instead. He knows the LED screen on his mask is doing something funny, voicing the thoughts he can't say, because your lips quirk slightly at the corners—bemusement, maybe; he's never been good at reading people—but then HER is husking out orders in his head, all biting witticism, and acerbic humour. 

Later, Puppy, comes the clandestine whisper—hot oil down his nape—and he catches the warbled curiosity as it trickles through. Good Puppy’s get rewards. But there's work to do. 

Work. Yes, work. 

His helmet flashes. He catches the red flicker on the smeared reflection of the window. Garish red. Kill, kill, kill. 

You see it, and you flinch. 

Good, is the sudden thought. Good. 

Puppy isn't sure about much—not anymore, and maybe not ever—but he knows this: he likes the way your eyes widen. Fear, undoubtedly. Round and doe-eyed as you take in the horrible words scribbled in neon. 

Fright, dread. It looks good on you. 

Pretty, pretty, pretty.

His hands shake. He thinks about how you'd feel under him. How he'd feel inside of you. And—

Purpose, he thinks. Purpose. 

There's an emptiness inside of his heart. A hole left over from the remains of LITTLE BROTHER. The dream, the reason, turned into a ghost. Shrapnel in his chest.

He doesn't blame HER for his absence. For the machinations, the schemes. It all led somewhere in the end, even if that place was here. Alone. Stuck, now, with a gaping wound in his chest. 

But—

Not for long, maybe. 

It'll be an awkward fit—BROTHER was this unknowable, untouchable shadow that lingered in his peripheral vision; a driving force keeping him moving. The space carved inside Puppy for him feels like a cavernous chasm. You're so slight, so small, in comparison to that gaping void, that he wonders if you'll be enough to quench the hunger that brims up from those depths. Rapacious. Wanting. 

It's different, of course. You are real. BROTHER was—

Not. 

He satiated himself on artificial dreams and empty memories. Those spectral, hallucinatory feelings of desperation to save his younger brother carried him to the very end. 

But BROTHER was always chimerical. 

You are something he can touch. Have. Keep.

He sees the flash of uncertainty etched into the painted lines of your face as you look around the cesspit you've fallen into, and he knows that you, too, could be that for him. Purpose. Purpose. Purpose. 

(His, his, HIS.)

The people wandering around, perusing the shops, stop and stare at you. At this little wisp, all shaken and terrified, and in need of saving. Needing him—

His hand clenches around the pipe. 

You're too good for their eyes. For this place. 

He'll kill them all, and come for you. 

The room that houses his new target is in a penthouse on the better side of the city. Vaulted ceilings. Golden chandeliers. Crystalline glass in a mosaic of iridescent pastel. It looks blemishless, clean, in comparison to the hovel that is South Rengkok. It scrapes against the chalky insides of his skull as he slinks forward, and emerges from the shadows.

He makes his way through the levels, one by one, until all that remains behind him is a river of blood and a breadcrumb trail of dead bodies. Boss’ finest. It's all mostly just—

Cleanup. 

A necessary evil, HER calls it, and so, he sees it through. 

When he gets to the top, he hears noises. High-pitched, elongated. A sharp grunt. 

He finds his target sitting down on a sprawling chaise, knees notched apart. A woman sits in his lap, hands pressed against his chest. 

Both of them are naked. Their clothes are in a messy pile by the door. 

Puppy watches for a moment. Enthralled, almost, by the sharp juxtaposition their bodies make, and then—

Confusion. 

She looks just like you. 

His meaty hands are tight around her waist, jerking her down with each sloppy cant of his wide hips. Dwarfing her frame in his bearish paws. She mewls into the room, the reecho of her synthetic moans daggers into his temple. 

The pipe in his hand jerks with the rough spasm of his fingers. 

Puppy doesn't care much for killing. Doesn't care much for anything at all, really, except for HER, BROTHER. The mission. His objectives. 

Cold, they call him. Unfeeling. 

He thinks, suddenly, of Wizard. About something he'd said back when Puppy didn't have a name. 

You're—heh, you're a killing machine! It must feel so good, you know? To kill.

It doesn't. He feels nothing at all. Neither pity, nor guilt. Regret is an abstract concept in his mind; intangible. Unreachable. 

He's—

Ambivalent, HER once supplied. You feel nothing, Puppy, because you are nothing. 

Yes. Yes, he thinks. And yet—

There's a strange heat in his veins. A caustic feeling welling deep inside of his guts at the sight of them coupling. His hands on her body is an affront. An insult.

It makes him angry. Furious. 

He'll kill him, he'll—

(Go, Puppy!)

In the man's hands, she looks soft. Delicate. Breakable. 

Yes, so breakable. So—

She moans, then, and he jerks his chin up, catching her reflection in the marble pillar. 

Ah, he thinks. Ah. 

She isn't you. 

He gets to work. 

The success of his mission has HER offering a bleak congratulations in the back of his head. Job well done. He takes it all in, feeling a distinct thrum in his bones that is usually absent following his massacres. Its place, in the hollow gaps of his ribs, is strange. Foreign. 

Excitement, he finds. How peculiar. 

It offsets the adrenaline rush, the lingering anger coursing through his veins. Killing the Target, his companion who was entirely too similar to you, leaves him feeling satiated and starved at the same time. A paradoxical sensation that shouldn't exist together, but somehow found a way, a home, within the slurry of his chest.

He wants to find you. Has this pulsing need in the back of his head to make sure that the woman he killed wasn't really you. But you are contralateral to his current mission. His objective.

Almost pityingly, the route HER generates takes him right past you: a tantalising tease.

Puppy isn't sure what to call this. Madness, perhaps. Don't be stupid, Puppy, comes the choppy, mechanical whir in the back of his head. You are—human, after all. 

The way it's said by HER has his hackles rising, but he doesn't have enough insight on the topic to pursue the strange cadence any further.

Indulge. You earned it.

Your face flashes before him—different, this time. Gone is the thick gold on the crease of your eyelids, the heavy red on your lips. You're barefaced. Gaunt. Your complexion reminds him of the bruised blue of the sky above. Midnight. Iridescent rainbows in an oil spill.

He wants to touch you. His hands shake. 

A series of numbers flicker at the bottom. The price, he surmises, for you. 

An auction. Right.

Tonight, HER supplies. He feels the clinical amusement in the back of his head. Oh, but Puppy—

To offset the generosity, HER pulls up the amount he carries on him. Cruel. Mocking. It's compared and contrasted. The difference is staggering. He can't afford you. Doesn't even come close to the asking price.

(Couldn't even afford the entrance fee.)

Sorry, Puppy—

The mechanised warble is pushed down before it can start.

That's fine, he reasons, dismissing it all. Dismissing HER.

He has no intention of paying for what's rightfully his, anyway. 

The bordello—boasting some strange mix between classic geisha-sensualism and modern sex appeal (and somehow missing the mark for both)—appears closed for the night.

A fallacy, of course, as everyone is just inside. Squirrelled away with cheap vodka, cigars. Waiting their turn to cash in their victory tokens. 

He looks at your window, shutters closed with a looping scrawl on neon pink that says be back soon~!, and makes his approach. 

There's no plan for this. Not that he's ever really had any to begin with—most of what he does is driven by an endless need to fulfil someone else's objective through the brutal physicality he wields—but he makes an effort to go stealthier than usual. 

He doesn't want to risk triggering a failsafe that will keep him away from you any longer than he needs to be. 

Not that it matters—

These lowlives—some assemblage of Creeps, local gangsters, and general nobodies—are mere nuisances in the face of his ice-cold ire. His rage. Tearing through them is nothing. The fight they put up is flimsy. Tissue paper defences.  He supposes they never really anticipated him showing up to reap his dues at an event that has been advertised for several weeks now (how he missed your face on those gaudy billboards hanging above the taverns in the red light district, he'll never know). A high-class event, they snicker from behind the thin doorways.

Politicians gambling away public funds to buy pretty prizes. Gangsters, pimps, all looking to pocket more flesh for their own abattoirs. 

Killing them is insubstantial to this cleanup mission, he knows, but there's a thrum of vindictiveness that roars through his chest when they squeal, begging for forgiveness that they must know won't come. 

(He's barely merciful on a good day.)

HER is a cheerleader in his ear, egging him on. Go, Puppy! Get your prize, Puppy! and he lets it fuel himself forward until he's covered in viscera and gore—a jaw bone breaks off, tacks on to the lip of his boot; blood drenches the sleeves of his leather jacket, stains his collar—and surrounded by pulpy, broken bodies. Alone. 

It's quiet, now. The only sound is his heavy, ragged breath muffled by the mask covering his head. The harsh thud of his pulse cottons his ears, blotting out everything except the heady rush of blood raging in his veins. 

HER watches with an alien sense of amusement that prickles in the back of his head. Wrongness permeates from their mirth as they take in the carnage spread out amongst the halls. 

It all means nothing to him. A means to an end. 

Nothing to them, either. To HER. This is a game.

The wet end of the pipe drags against the herringbone floor in a metallic squeal done to announce his presence from anyone unlucky enough to survive the brutal apathy of his initial assault. He hears nothing. Just the grind of rusting metal on wood. Porous. Hollow. 

It all ends in a muted bloodbath. A bloodied trail of bodies leads right to your door. 

Untouched, despite the garish horror painting the walls in rotting red. Congealed blood blackened under the thin oxygen in the room. 

There's no movement from within, but he knows you're here. Can feel you through the wood. Catch the rabbiting of your heart. Your gasping breath. 

With the hand not clutching the pipe, he reaches for the handle, turns. Locked. He expected it. You must have propped something up against the knob during the first onslaught of his fury. Smart. 

But it's not enough to keep him out. 

He pries open the door to your room with one hand, shattering the flimsy back of the vanity stool you jimmied beneath the handle. Cute. Resourceful. His heart pounds in his chest. He can't wait to have you. 

Go, Puppy!

He takes a moment to shut the door behind him—no escape—before he slowly swivels his head toward you. Taking you in. 

(Finally.)

You stare at him with that same look on your face as before. Terror, he reasons, and tries to piece it together on the men who looked at him as he cracked skulls open with the blunt end of his pipe, tore jugulars out with his bare hand. Fear, he thinks. They look at him with fear. Loathing. 

But you're missing that one. There's no hatred on your face, no curses spat out even when he stalks forward with the same steady gait as always, the bloody end of his pipe leaving a macabre breadcrumb trail for anyone to follow. 

There's a sea of dead bodies behind him. Businessmen. Lowlives. Commonfolk. The other girls. It didn't matter. 

They were in the way. 

All of them. 

(The man, too, who came to collect you like a prize winner at a seedy casino. His head, in particular, is rendered into nothing but a pulpy mess of grey matter, tissue, blood, and bone.) 

He thinks you might cry, but you don't. You stare. Owlish. Wary. Between the thick, brick wall—your cage—and him, there's nowhere for you to run. He slows at that, coming to a stop several paces away. Watching you back. Assessing. Calculating.

You're nervous. Shaken. He's under no disillusionment that you hadn’t heard the screams just outside of your door. Heard the thuds. The cracking of skulls. The breaking of bones. A bloodbath only several paces away. A massacre. Scary enough to you that it made you try to save yourself, to lock whatever it was that stalked the halls from getting to you. 

How terrified you must have been. 

Puppy doesn't feel much for anyone. Maybe the odd moment of sympathy for the inhabitants of his city, the ones who beg and plead for his help with the things they can't control, can't fight back against. He extends small mercies where he sees fit. 

But for some odd, unfathomable reason, he has the sudden inkling to reach out. Pity. You're so pitiful to him. Poor thing. You poor, poor—

In a moment of pure absurdity, the words: are you good? flash across the curved plain of his mask, and you make a noise somewhere between a yelp and snort. Mangled in the back of your throat. 

“Does it matter?” 

And, oh—

Your voice does something to him. Turns his insides liquid. He's melting, he thinks. Burning up and turning to a heap of molten ore by your feet. 

He tries to reign himself back in, forcing himself to focus. Focus. Puppy ponders your question for a moment before ultimately deciding that it doesn't. 

(Or, rather, it does; but maybe not in the way you'd want it to.)

In the end, he gives you a shrug. Banal. Dismissive. It makes your brows furrow. A valley forms between them. Irritation bleeds through the flat apathy you forged. 

There's a scoff. He thinks you look prettier like this—a feral, hissing cat. He wants you beneath him, clawing at his chest. Spitting curses in his name. 

(Wants to try to tame you. Wants to fail.)

“Of course,” you hiss, hands fisting in the sheer fabric of your kimono. “You're no different from anyone else, are you?” 

Puppy shakes his head in response. He isn't a good man. He's made of spare parts stitched together to create an amalgamation of likeness to some king he barely even knows. A megalomaniac. A madman. 

In all honesty, there probably isn't much that separates him and the men who vied for your affection, paid for your attention. Threw coins toward an auction just for the possibility of taking you home. 

But there is a difference. 

Puppy will have you. This he is certain of. 

There's nowhere for you to go. This city doesn't want you. Doesn't deserve you. He'll take you with him, chained at the wrist if he has to. Shackled. Caged. 

You are so funny, Puppy, HER intones, amused. A puppy with a puppy. 

Yes, he decides. His puppy. All his. 

He found you first. 

Puppy lets the pipe—drenched in blood, bone; in viscera that makes you recoil sharply with a flinch—fall to the floor with a metallic clang. With his hands free, soaked, he lifts them up, offering his palms to you. 

It's not a peace offering, but he's seen what untamed cats can do when cornered. And while you're no match for his unfathomable physicality, he'd rather you didn't hurt yourself trying to maim him. 

Still—

Mine, mine, mine flashes, lightspeed, across his visor. He gives you a moment to let the words, the meaning sink in. 

—you’re his. With that ironclad notion comes the freedom to do whatever he wants. 

Whenever he wants. 

And then he moves. 

The difference in your size is almost hideous. Grotesque. He towers above you—a looming mountain—and knows that it would take at least three of you side by side to even hope to match the width of him. 

His hands, too, dwarf you. 

It curls something noxious inside of his guts. A poison-soaked miasma that subsumes in his bloodstream, pulses in the base of his spine. A hunger. A heat. You're so small in comparison to him. So delicate. He could break you in two, shatter every bone in your body. 

And there's not much you could ever hope to do to stop it. 

He shudders at the thought, and knows he likes it more than he should. 

Later, though. Soon. He wants your hands on his skin. Wants to see you come to terms with the vastitude of him, and watch as the realisation that you are well and truly his sinks in. 

He reaches out, palms upward, and waits. 

It doesn't take long. 

(Well-trained, is the hiss. He ignores it, lest he claw his own skin off.)

You flick a scathing glare in his direction first, caustic and hateful, but you bend to his whims without a word. You touch him hesitantly, running the soft pads of your fingers over the metal of his hand, feeling the bumps. The groves in his circuitry. 

Everyone so far has tried to chisel in his head. Galvanise him down into a mindless toy (HER makes a noise, he ignores it), but you seem to avoid his head. Touching the places on his arms not smeared with blood or gun oil, running down the thick wires in his artificial arm. The veins on his real one. The hair dusting his knuckles. 

Then you spot the blood caked, dried and blackened, under his nails, and you recoil slightly. Pulling back. Dropping to his chest. 

His breath whirs out in a deep tremble when you shiver at the muscles—hard iron, brass—that hums under your palms. It's tentative. Soft, almost. Exploratory as you navigate the newness of his body and this strange situation you've found yourself in. 

There's a fractured look on your face that he can't quite place when you slide the cup of your hand over his beating heart. 

(Surprise, maybe. You must have thought him a machine.)

You stay there for a moment, quiet. Pensive. Gaze inward as you mull something over, something he can't fathom, can't ascertain. 

“You…” your voice comes out on a stilted breath after a brief silence. “You killed them all.”

It's not really a question. He grunts his affirmative, anyway, and reaches out to settle his hands on your hips. You jump when he touches you. Tense and angry in his arms, but you let him pull you in close. Are almost docile when he tucks his chin against your crown, lets his hands slide to the small of your back. 

You make no move to pull away. He lets that notion marinate in the back of his head, bending reality to suit his whims when he decides that you must not want to. He hugs you tighter, nuzzling the top of your head when you shudder. 

He's not sure where you're going with this particular line of thought. Doesn't, entirely, see why it matters much. Everyone is dead except him, you. The only two breathing in this disgusting bordello that reeks of thick, spicy incense and myrrh to hide the scent of sweat, stale cigarettes, and sex. Something plastic. Synthetic. Lubricant, he imagines. Latex. 

Knowing that you spent an insurmountable time in this cesspool has anger spiking inside of him once more, but it's quelled, immediately, when remembers what the other men who lurked in these dilapidated corners look like now. Viscera, tissue, and bones are now all painting the cheap panelled walls in a deep maroon splatter. 

(He'll burn it all down before he leaves tomorrow.)

He keeps you close, shackled. A parody of a lover's embrace. 

Your hand drifts up, a slow crawl to the base of his neck. Puppy lifts his chin. The bright red question mark shading the room in an ethereal neon glow. 

“You killed them,” you repeat, knuckles grazing the over-sensitive skin where his mask melds to flesh. “But you didn't kill me. Why?”

He feels the press against his jugular. A soft ache in his throat. It doesn't hurt, but he knows you want it to. 

Puppy's puppy has fangs. 

Puppy reaches up, snatching your wrist in his mechanical hand. Feels, instantly, the grind of delicate bone under harsh, unyielding metal. 

You don't flinch. 

“Why?” 

Under the harsh edges of your anger, your feigned indifference, he catches sight of the look that drew him to you in the first place. Absolute despondency. A vacancy in the hollow of your eyes. Misery, maybe. 

If he were someone else, he might have felt pity for you. Ripped from the arms of whatever birthed you into existence, thrown into this disgusting hovel, and now—

A pet for a pet. 

Kept. Chained. 

Puppy will keep you forever. He knows this just as sure as he knows his heart pulses in his chest. The sun rises. Falls. He'll take you with him, wherever he goes.

You're his. 

A fine consolation prize you've found for yourself, HER quips, and he's content to ignore it for now. Their amusement is clinical, a kittenish scratch in the back of his head. 

But he does agree. You're a fine prize, aren't you? His little treasure found in a trash heap. 

His, his, his

all his, all his, all his—

(You look at the promises, the answers, flickering across the surface of his visor, and shudder—)

Puppy doesn't say anything when you lead him by the wrist to sit on your bed, simply opting to follow along with your demands for now. It's cute, he finds, the way you try to bully him around even when your hands shake, knees tremble. 

He rests his forearms on his thighs, letting his hands dangle in the space between his spread knees—the picture of ease; the manufactured torpor of predator—and he waits. Watching, rapturously, as you flit in front of him. All soft and pensive as you look him over. Taking stock of the blood on his leather jacket. The stains on his pants. The flat surface of his mask, broken only by the protrusion of his nose. 

Boss was a megalomaniac. A narcissist. Knowing that he's made in his image, his likeness (spare parts; a fractured failsafe), he can only assume you like what you see when you look at these scraps that make him whole. 

Whatever you find, it shades the appraising glance in a hue of calculative decision—suddenly firm, now: wily. 

“Okay,” you say, and bring your hands to the sash holding the sheer kimono in place. “I'll be yours—” his hands twitch; reaching for you already. You dance out of the way from his grasping knuckles with a scoff. “Only if you're mine, too.”

If he had a mouth, he might have grinned. 

You seem content to take the lead after a noncommittal response to your demand of shared ownership (the idea alone of which has him thickening in his slacks), placing your hands on his shoulders to steady yourself before swinging your thigh over his lap, taking (what he hopes becomes) your rightful seat. 

It places your barely covered centre right against his prominent bulge, sending an electric buzz down the base of his spine. The look when you feel him throb against you is equally as scathing as it is feverish, and nearly comes undone at your glare alone, panting harshly against your collarbones. 

“Down boy,” you murmur silkily before dropping your cunt right over him. 

Whiteout. Static. He sees nothing but blurry slashes of red, red, red—

His hands are bruising on your waist, and he's not sure if he's pulling you closer to him or pushing him away. Maybe both. Tugging, tugging, until he can feel the red-hot heat of you burning through the fabric of his trousers.

You can't kiss him so you pepper sweet, soft kisses against the column of his throat, teeth nipping the seam where metal meets flesh. Marking the column of his pale throat up with the brand of your claim. Your ownership. 

A collar in red, black, yellow, and blue—

He doesn't have a mouth to claim you back, but his hands punch your flesh until it's pressed harshly against bone. Bursting blood vessels under your skin. It puddles there. He runs his fingers against the pool of blood that softens your skin, and understands, then, why the sting in his neck feels so fucking good. 

He feels consumed. In a tailspin. You grind against him, and he sees stars. 

Puppy can't think when you do that, and you seem to know this because you don't stop rolling your hips over his straining cock, pinched tight in his slacks. It's too much. 

He wants you. Wants you. Wants you. 

You pull back, and huff at the projection on his face. 

“You're impatient,” you say, but you're slipping your hand inside the waistband of his pants in spite of your exasperation, fingers dancing over the soft skin of his groin. 

It feels molten when you touch the base of his cock with your knuckle. Just a nudge. Just a press. He thinks he could come undone like this. Just like this. With your hands on him. Soft, dewy skin. 

But he wants you pinned under him, taking him. Has thought about nothing except your knees spread, thighs open. Pussy bare to him. Full of him. Nothing but him. Him, him. It made him ache. Burn. A low grade fever in his guts at the enticing image of you beneath him. Pretty lips open, moaning. Eyes wide, doeish. 

“You’re too—”

You start to say something, but he can't take this anymore. It's too soft. Too gentle. He wants you bent over. Wants to be inside of you already. 

And so, he follows through. 

You make a noise in the back of your throat when he gets his hands on the underside of your knees, and unceremoniously tips you back onto the velveteen sheets. The flimsy silk of your kimono spreads, unveiling the softness of your body. Your bare breasts, nipples pebbling under his stare. 

With it haloed around you in an inky black spill over your arms, leaking from beneath your body, he thinks you look ethereal. Unreal. Otherworldly. 

The slip covering your pussy is barely in the way. He can see dewy lips peeking out from the sliver of black nestled across your slit, wet and red. Red. Red—

“P–Puppy—!” You yelp when he tugs his trousers down with one hand, the other keeping your leg up, pinched tight on the underside of your knee. Spread open. Nearly bare. 

He presses the heel of your foot where his neck meets shoulder, keeping it in place with a soft pat to your calf, before dropping his hand down to join the other in ripping the thin scrap of fabric keeping you from him. He's graced with another yelp, but it isn't in pain or distress, and he ignores it outright. 

Mindless, it seems, in this pursuit to be inside of you as quickly as possible. 

Your panties—if they could even be considered such a thing—are pushed deep into his back pocket. Saved for later. 

And then he turns back to you. Spread open. Waiting and willing under him. The sight of you like this steals his breath from his lungs. Sparks embers in his guts that smoulder, billowing smoke through the hollow of his chest. 

He tastes ash in the back of his throat. Wishes, suddenly, that he could quench it on the slick, hot taste of you—

Gripping himself in one hand, he presses the blunt head of his cock against your slit, glistening from your wetness in the jaundiced glow of the moody light above your head. He's glad he didn't cut the power to this shithole because the way you quiver beneath him as he rubs between your folds is nothing short of mesmerising. 

You're wet. Soaked. All for him, even if you keep hissing out that this is just a bodily reaction to stimulus, don't be so full of yourself, you psychopath—

His hand drops. The flat side of his thumb pressed against your clit. You arch so prettily when he touches you like this, knees shaking, eyes fluttering. He presses harder, makes small circles against your sensitive flesh that have you whimpering. Whining. 

“No more, no more, no more—”

He can feel the molten centre of you flutter around his weeping tip. Silken, inviting. He wants more. Knows that you want it just as bad, too. 

Impatient now, he lifts his fingers from your clit, and wraps it tight around your thigh, gaining leverage before he slowly, agonizingly, begins to presses inside—just the tip, the first inch—but the way you wrap around him (all tight, wet silk) makes his mind grow fuzzy around the edges. Electricity rockets down his spine. 

He thinks he blacks out for a second, short-circuiting at the white-hot pleasure of being inside of you, because when his eyes focus, he's pushed all the way inside, trembling above you. 

You're whining his name with tears dripping down your temples, legs quivering around him, and he wonders if this is that version of heaven, the real one, he'd read about once. 

It's too much. Not enough. He rolls back on his hunches to see the way you swallow him down to the base. Pulled taut, and far too pretty for what he's doing to you. Poor, pitiful thing. He'll ruin you, he's sure. Mess you up so badly, no one else would ever be able to touch you without thinking of him. Only him.

It's a thought that sends a thrill down his spine, and he rolls his hips just to watch you squirm. Builds up a sickeningly sweet momentum as he forces your body to acclimate to his girth, to the unyielding stretch of his cock. You're too tight around him, and he worries that the taut stretch might be too much for you, but it's passing. Temporal. He knows he doesn't really care. You'll take it all. All of him. 

Nothing will tear him away from this pretty cunt of yours. 

It flicks against a long dormant part inside of his hindbrain, and he pants for it. Chasing this feeling, this high. 

The slow crawl within you isn't enough to satiate himself. His belly rumbles. His throat burns. 

Puppy gives you no warning before he snaps his hips into you as hard as he can. 

Your wet cries start the beginning notes of his new ascension, and he pounds into you harder. Faster. He fucks you like he's starved for it. Aching. Desperate. Belatedly, he thinks about your pleasure, about bringing you to the same highs the tight clutch of your pussy is bringing him, but he can't focus. Can't think. It's mindless, this lust. Turns him inside out and makes him greedy. Selfish. 

He wants, wants—

Never, in all of his insignificant life, has he ever wanted something as much as this. As you. Pressed beneath him, mewling out his name as he forces himself inside of you, as deep as he can reach—

(and then deeper still because Puppy wants to crawl inside of you; want to nestle against your heart, tucked under the bracket of your ribs and with the way he fucks into you like this, bed whining in protest with each furious, sloppy snap of his hips, he just might make that dream a reality—)

—and fuck. Fuck. 

Somewhere in the tangled web of his thoughts, all white-noise, static pleasure, he can hear HER utter things in secret under the heavy pants of his ragged breath (things like, you deserve this, Puppy; good boy, Puppy; treat your toy—kindly—Puppy), and it spurns him on. Makes him ache to drive those mechanised whispers out of his head, filling the space they leave behind with the sweet echo of your voice in ear. 

Scream. For. Me flashes across the visor in bloody red, and he sees when it registers in your glossy, wet-eyed stare. Cuts through the haze of sex, the lashings of fear that still curl in the shaded valleys when you look at him, and digs its talons into tissue, bisecting the chemical slurry turning your thoughts to mush. There's a moment of clarity. Brief, ephemeral, because he's pressing in as deep as he can once more, grinding against some spot inside of you that makes your eyes roll, and your head drop. 

My

Name

It flashes again, and finally—

Your pretty mouth drops open, spittle running down the corners as you struggle to keep up with his frantic, feverish pace, but nothing comes out—nothing he wants to hear, at least. Please, you beg, and he feels the plea like a punch to his gut. 

You're so pretty when you beg. 

But that's not what he wants. 

Bad girl

It comes as a warbling flicker. Distorted in his anger. 

You shudder under him, eyes widening when he drops his hands down to your throat, palm swallowing you whole from chin to sternum. For him, it's as gentle as he could be, but you gasp for breath, tears pebbling in the corner of your eyes. Hazy, murky, with fear and pleasure; the warring sensations separated only a hairline fracture, a thin sliver. 

He shifts forward and has you take on more of his weight, stifling more air from your lungs, and making you feel the power flex of his massive body cocooning you entirely. No escape. 

Your hands unfurl from the white-knuckled grip on the sheets, slamming against his shoulders as you try, futilely, to push him away. You're frenzied. Desperate. 

Puppy finds it endlessly charming.

His hand lifts, offering a slight respite that you seize eagerly, greedily, gulping down wet, feverish lungfuls of air. 

“Y–you bastard—”

He likes it when you cuss at him. A feral, hissing cat. He falls over you once more, shadowing you under his bulk, and pistons his hips into the apex of your thighs, feeling the slickness of your cunt drench his groin. 

Angry, spitting thing. And yet—

You're so fucking wet for him. 

You like this. The way he bends you mercilessly to his whims. Folds you in half. 

His hand stays around your throat, feeling each breath and moan that reverberates up his arm. The other drops from your knee, falling to the black, iron headboard that grinds into the wall with each thrust. Centering himself. Gaining more leverage. 

Puppy fucks you like this. Trapped beneath him—a tumulus over you—and unable to do much except take his cock however he decides to give it to you. And give it to you, he does—

(Mercilessly. Pounding you so hard, your breasts jerk, and your eyes flash vividly as you struggle to stay afloat in that equinox of pleasure-pain that rages over you.)

HER says he doesn't have a face, and maybe that's true. It might just be a flat mess of wires sutured to flesh. But

Puppy wants to devour you. Swallow you whole. Wants to taste the sweetness of your cunt on his tongue. Feel your lips on his. He wants to pry apart your chest and suckle from the marrow in your ribs. 

He wants you. 

Wants you. Wants you—

He's not entirely sure if he's human, but he breathes like you. Heaves. Gasps. Can feel the wet, molten clench of your pussy around the thickness of his cock as he spears you open. Pleasure blooms at the base of his spine. Punches through his groin. Bludgeons him. It makes his head feel heavy, fuzzy. Somnolent with the mindless drive ticking in the back that pushes him forward. Makes him want to imbue himself in whatever it was that made you. A pithy god of old. Stardust. 

He wants to remake himself in your image. Spare parts just for you—

How romantic, Puppy. 

“Fuck—!”

Your voice is saccharine in his ear. A velvet gust of smoke curls in the back of his head. 

With his hand around your throat, he feels the words before he hears them. It sends a thrill down his spine—dancing fingers pressing tight to each vertebra as it splits open the ventricles housing his spinal fluid, letting it all leak out into his bloodstream. 

It's ecstasy, maybe. Or the closest thing to it he could ever reach. 

“What are you doing to me?” You slur the words out against his metal cheek, hushed and fractured. Raw. “It feels so—good—oh, Puppy—!”

He shifts his pelvis into the bracket of your thighs. The head of his cock rubbing over that spot inside of you that makes your eyes roll back, and your cunt squeeze him tight. A pretty box wrapped, velveteen, around him. 

There's friction in the pit of his stomach. Tension in his groin. It pulls taut, feels heavy. 

He's close. So, so close—

You seem to realise this, too, your eyes growing wide once more as he twitches inside of you, pressed deep. Cockhead nudging into your seal. 

“No, no—”

Despite your protests, your body is tightening up, quivering under him. 

He takes it as an invitation.

Puppy's hips stutter to a slow grind as he hits the apex of his pleasure, cock throbbing, spitting his release, deep inside of you. 

Around him, beneath him, you tremble. Shake. He can feel the tremors of your own hastily reached climax when you squeeze his cock tight in a vice, undulating pulses that seem to rocket from the sensitive nerve endings around him all the way to his brainstem. 

It's good. Too good. 

He doesn't have any other ambition right now outside of burying himself inside of you over and over again. 

He wonders how deep his spare parts go for a belated second, how much of himself was forged in Boss’ likeness, but dismisses it immediately. It's unimportant to him. 

“You're awful,” you gasp sweetly in his ear. “Terrible. A terrible man—” And fuck. He wants to ruin you again.

Puppy pulls you close, pawing at you until you're situated in his arms. Manoeuvred around like a little doll. He finds you precious, really. So malleable. So soft. He presses you flat to the lumpy mattress and folds himself over you. Thick thigh strewn over your hip, pinning you down. An arm tucked under your nape, bent at the elbow to curl over your shoulder, fingers brushing your collarbones. Shackled.

This is new. Foreign. He's never felt this before—all soft edges; sickeningly sweet. Unable to help himself, he bears his weight down, arching above you. Staring, openly and unabashedly. Drinking you in. 

He wants to crawl inside of you. Worm his way to the place where you burn. 

You're stiff in his arms. Silent. 

But that's fine. That's okay. He'll melt you eventually. Make you understand that Puppy is yours now, silly. All yours. And you're—

All his. 

Just like you wanted. 

He owns you. And in turn, is owned by you. 

It's fitting, he finds, considering all his miserable existence was spent handing his leash off to whoever grabbed it quick enough. Their hands were rough. Indelicate. He takes your hand in his, knuckles bleached white from the quivering fist you've rolled them into, and pries your fingers loose. Threads his between the gaps before you can swat him away. 

He can feel your pulse like this, pressed palm to palm. A precious little thing. So fleeting. A hummingbird in an ivory cage. 

Poor thing. 

“What—what are you going to do?” You rasp, voice hoarse from the grip he had on your neck. The sound of it—gritty sand, smoke—makes him shiver. He likes it, he finds. Wonders if you'll sound the same if he scraped your throat raw with the tips of his fingers. 

His cock. 

You huff when you feel him twitch against your hipbone—cock tacky from his cum, your wet cunt—but make no move to pull away. 

He purrs. 

Keep you, is projected and you suck in a sharp breath like you'd expected that. Then, he adds a heart. A red one. Mine. 

“I'm not yours. I'm not anyone's—” he doesn't bother correcting you. You'll learn soon enough. “And you don't even know me. Why do you even want this? I could be a liability. I could kill you in your sleep—”

Could, not should, he notes, fondly. 

Hahahaha passes by and you let out an aggrieved snarl at the sight. “You're so fucking horrible—!”

He nods in response, and presses the jut of his nose to your sweat-slicked hairline. Breathes you in. Amber. Humus. Loam. You smell like ozone. The streets after a heavy rainstorm. 

You smell good. Like home. 

“Do you even like me? Or am I just something to fuck?” is whispered so softly into the air that he might have missed it if he hadn't been trying to suffuse atoms. 

He hears the fragility in your voice. The paper-thin foundation holding you aloft. 

In all honesty, he doesn't know what he feels for you. It's all—

Abstract, perhaps. Grainy smears of feelings, sensation, all roiled around inside of him. Intangible. 

He just knows he wants you. Has wanted you since he first saw you, sitting all pretty in a glass cage. Untouchable to anyone except the highest bidder in your upcoming auction. 

(Spare parts. A pretty bird in a cage.)

What a pair you make. 

He likes that, though. The way you fill this barren hole in his chest. Pilliating the listlessness that rolls like a marble inside of him. In turn, he wants to do the same. To stuff you full of him. So full, there's room for nothing else. No one else. 

There are flickers of life buried deep within you that he longs to dredge up. He thinks you'd be beautiful with your hands wrapped around his pipe (disgusting, Puppy), and that, for him, is enough. 

He's sure one day you'll feel the same. 

Until then—

His fingers tighten around yours and you wince at the pressure before gasping when the metal gears in his joints begin locking in place. Stiffening. Shackled to him, now, until he decides to release you. 

Goodnight flashes. He sees the words reflected in the glossy canyons of your eyes. Smeared red bleeding into the dawning realisation that you are his. 

And no one else's. 

There's no escape. 

[the-witchhunter]

DP x DC Dead Soulmates

This is probably the only soulmate au I'll ever do so enjoy

Soulmate au where your soul mark turns black when your soulmate dies

Danny and Jason are soulmates. The problem? Both of their soul marks are black. Sure, they came back, but not in a typical way, so each thinks the other is dead

So what do we get? Longing. Two guys longing for a love they thought lost to them, thinking tenderly of a future they don't think they could have, even without the added craziness of their lives. Standing on rooftops, smoking in the cold november air, their breath indistinguishable from the smoke, their spent cigarettes flicked off the edge like discount shooting stars, lamenting their fates, probably to each other for the dramatic irony of it all

they both get it. The quiet kind of grief, longing for somebody they never got the chance to know, thinking about how things could have been different, how the should have been different. That understanding is what draws them towards each other

and then? Jason sees Danny's mark, Jason shows his own, they stare at each other, silent for a moment, before arms wrap around the other, lips pressed together, and quiet tears fall like rain to the rooftop beneath their feet

longing, angst, and then happy ending

and you can thank this song for inspiring the mood for this

[arebirthingofsorts]

the entirety of buzzfeed unsolved but the stories are in chronological order: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGGIwil6tMX95BMdYvMY8Co5Y2J8yxpe-

supernatural was very hard to do so under the cut i've added my reasons for some difficult episodes to list! if anyone has qualms with it or if you notice any mistakes in the playlist please let me know!

the london tombs, la llorona, and the voodoo episodes were difficult due to no real timeframe being known for when they began so i based the london tombs off of ryan saying the bridge has been around since ancient rome which is why it's one of the first videos in the playlist. la llorona required me to do my own research which led me to believe the story came about in the 1500s? possibly predating that but the first written versions were apparently from the 1500s. for the voodoo new orleans episode i did some research and based it on when it could have been brought to the area.

for bigfoot, mothman, and the men in black, i listed those based on the first encounters/evidence presented

many of the locations, i listed based on when they closed their operations or the owners passed before becoming noted haunted locations. (winchester house, sorrel-weed, villa montezuma, whaley house, old city jail, pythian castle, vulture mine, waverly hills, bellaire house, eastern state, rolling hills)

other haunted ones are currently still operating so i listed those based on when they first opened or got into the hands of the current owners (viaduct tavern, st. augustine, tombstone, goatman's bridge, the viper room, bobby mackey's, moon river)

dauphine orleans hotel was listed as the date ryan said a license to may bailey was given for the bordello. im very unsure about this one so if anyone has suggestions on how to list this one, please reach out EDIT: decided on 1775 because ryan mentioned that year as the site the hotel is on and i felt more sure about it that choice

farnsworth was listed as the year of the battle of gettysburg due to the house being named after a soldier who died in that battle + notable events happening and around the house

the bermuda triangle was tricky so i listed that as the date the term "bermuda triangle" was first coined EDIT: it's been moved to close to the top of the playlist due to the first alleged reporting of weird bermuda shit being by christopher columbus in 1492. this made more sense to me

colchester and morris-jumel are museums now so those were dated as when they were officially museums

the uss yorktown and the queen mary are listed as when they docked for good.

the alien abductions episode is in the 70s area of the playlist because 2/3 of the stories happened in the 70s.

the date the island of the dolls began is where i based "3 horrifying cases of ghosts and demons" since there are separate episodes for the winchester mansion and the sallie house

i based all the haunted locations on those things because i figured that the ghosties would appear after the notable deaths and wild events instead of listing all of them as when they first opened.

i hope all of this makes sense. enjoy.

[guess-my-next-obsession]

In The Cold, Cold Night: Chapter One

pairing: cowboy/frontier!joel miller x oc (Dorothea) / unrequited tommy miller

rating: M (talks of death, bordellos, gender constructs, other wild west things, tommy is a cocky flirt)

wc: 7.2k

series masterlist | playlist

It was a hot and dry spring in Texas, the corn fields out in front of the Mackey family farmhouse dying underneath the brutal and unforgiving sun. John Mackey, the patriarch of his small, humble family, tried his best to conceal his worry over the season’s meager harvest, but his wife, Jessa, and his eldest child, Dorothea, or Dottie as her family called her, had a unique ability to see right through his hardened exterior to the vulnerable, frightened man inside.

Although she was a grown woman, her twenty-fourth birthday passing just seven months prior, Dorothea chose not to venture out from her parent’s watch like all the other girls in their small town had done years before. She liked the predictability of home—the sound of her father’s work boots hitting the hardwood after a long day in the field, the smell of her mother’s cooking, the loud chatter of her five younger brothers as they ran around the house and farm like they were wild animals. Though a part of her did crave more, it was a small enough part that she could ignore, fixing her brown eyes instead on taking care of the things she already had.

“Daddy!” James, the youngest of the clan at only six years, came hurtling into the kitchen as his father sat at the dinner table sipping on a fresh cup of black coffee, Jessa Mackey and Dorothea standing at the sink scrubbing this morning’s dishes. “Look what the lady at the store gave me and Ed.”

“Let me see what’cha got,” the gruff man said, lowering his cup and newspaper to the tabletop as he fixed his attention on his son.

James wore a wide, boyish grin as he reached into the front pocket of his dirty, denim overalls and pulled out a burlap sack, his tiny fingers pulling the drawing string loose so that he could dump out the contents on top of his father’s morning news.

“Well, what’s all this, now?” John said, catching a few of the tiny glass spheres as they began to roll off the uneven table.

“Marbles,” he said, full of wonder and excitement. “She even taught me how to play with ‘em.”

“Can you teach me?” he asked, setting the handful of marbles into the little boy’s hand.

“I forgot,” he smiled bashfully. “But Eddie—“

“I didn’t ask Eddie, now did I?” John smiled back. “Come on, figure it out. You learned once, you can remember.”

“Oh, will you leave him be,” Jessa scolded lightly, chuckling at her husband’s insistence as she walked over, drying her hands on a cloth before throwing it over her shoulder. “Where’s your brother?”

“Outside playin’ with Sarah,” James said, looking up at his mother with round eyes as she carded her fingers through his dust-covered brown hair.

“Who’s Sarah?” Dorothea asked as she dried her hands off on her apron, her brows stitching together.

“She’s new ‘round here,” her youngest brother replied. “She ain’t got any friends—“

“Doesn’t have,” John corrected, lifting his newspaper back up.

“How old is she?” Jessa asked.

“My age,” the boy said, a big toothy smile on his face. “May I go play with ‘em, mama?”

“Yeah, go on,” Jessa smiled and watched as her son ran out of the room with his bag of marbles in hand, the wicker screen door slamming against the wooden frame of the old home as he bolted through it. “I gotta talk to Maggie about givin’ him new toys every time I send ‘em over.”

“She likes it,” Dorothea interjected. “Can’t have babies of her own, it only makes sense she spoils everyone else’s.”

“Don’t matter,” Jessa took a seat at the table to rest her aching feet. “We don’t need another tab.”

John’s eyes lifted to meet his wife as if he were daring her to continue.

“If that girl’s new, maybe I should bake a pie and take it over to her mama and daddy,” Dorothea suggested, sensing the building tension. “We got some blueberries that’ll turn any day now.”

“Sure, honey, go on,” John said, looking back to his paper.

“Don’t use more than y’have to, Dot,” Jessa ordered. “I need flour to make biscuits for supper.”

“I’ll only use what I need, ma,” Dorothea promised with a saintly smile, flashing her emerald green eyes at her mother before heading into the pantry to start out on her baking.

“Daddy!” Sarah’s squeal could be heard from a mile away, causing her father, Joel, to turn his head in the direction of the dirt road, spotting his daughter riding on the handlebars of of a brand new, candy red-painted bicycle, his younger brother pedaling towards the opened gate of their farm. “Look what Uncle Tommy got!”

Joel shook his head at the needless expense as he watched them ride up to where he stood near the porch, his white cotton shirt soaked down his spine from spending the better half of the afternoon fixing the old wooden steps.

“You ain’t got nothin’ better to spend your money on?” Joel asked as they came to a skid in front of him, Sarah hopping off the handlebars and skipping up to her father’s side to hug his hip, his hand smoothing her wild curls out of her face. “Where you been all day, missy? Out causin’ trouble?”

“I made friends with some boys down the road,” she replied, looking up at her father as he quirked an eyebrow.

“Boys, huh?” he asked, his tone playful. “You ain’t old enough to be hangin’ around any boys.”

“But daddy, they’re sweet,” she insisted, rounding her hazel eyes at him and poking out her bottom lip for good measure. Joel smiled and nodded, rubbing his hand across her shoulders.

“I’m just kiddin’, baby girl,” he assured. “What did y’all get up to?”

“We played cowboys on their farm,” she beamed. “I got to be the sheriff.”

“You know me and your daddy used to be cowboys?” Tommy said, leaning against the post of the porch.

“Well, I would’a caught you,” she said, tilting her chin up in confidence.

“Alright, sheriff, why don’t you go inside and wash off all this dirt before supper?” Joel ordered, patting her back as she begrudgingly obeyed her. “Cheer up, I’m makin’ your favorite.”

“Chicken soup?” she squealed again.

“You got it,” he nodded before waving at her to head into the house like he’d asked.

“If you’re gonna yell, yell,” Tommy sighed, taking a seat on the second step.

“I ain’t gonna yell,” Joel sat down with him. “But you can’t be goin’ around town showin’ off and spendin’ like that. We don’t need people pryin’ into our business and gettin’ the wrong idea.”

“It ain’t a crime to be a bounty hunter,” Tommy argued.

“Not when you’re workin’ for the law, but you and I both know we were about as far from the law as we could get,” Joel said. “Just don’t want people treatin’ Sarah bad because of what we did to make ends meet. That’s why we had to leave the last place, remember?”

“Yeah, I know,” Tommy nodded. “I just saw it and thought it would make droppin’ Sarah off at the schoolhouse easier on me, s’all.”

“Well, I ain’t gonna make you take it back,” Joel said, offering a soft smile, bumping his brother’s shoulder with his own. “Just…talk to me before you go out and buy somethin’ that pretty next time, alright? I might want one for myself.”

“Well, speaking’ of pretty,” Tommy nudged his chin forward in the direction of the gate, Joel’s eyes following his eyeline until he saw what he was so fixed on. Tan, freckled skin, a head of chocolate brown waves thrown up messily, a pair of bright green eyes and an equally bright smile heading up the dirt path to the porch.

“She here for you?” Joel whispered to his brother.

“I certainly hope so,” Tommy replied with a smile.

“Hi, y’all, sorry to interrupt,” the unfamiliar face greeted them as she reached the bottom of the steps, both men staring at her with a mixture of confusion and awe. “I’m Dorothea. My little brothers were playin’ with your sister earlier, and I thought I’d bring a pie over to welcome y’all to the town.”

“Sister?” Tommy asked, fixing a charming smile onto his face. “No sister here, but we’ll be glad to take that pie off your hands.”

“Oh,” she furrowed her brows in confusion. “I’m sorry, I guess I must’a—“

“You talkin’ about Sarah?” Joel spoke up, drawing her eyes to meet his.

“Yeah, I think that’s what her name was.”

“That’s my daughter,” he smiled.

“Oh!” Her eyes widened in shock. “I’m sorry, I thought—you look young, so I just thought—“

“No need to apologize,” he assured, standing up and unintentionally towering over her as he walked down the steps. “I had her young; I’m used to it by now.”

Dorothea smiled softly and nodded, her eyes lowering to the pie in her hands rather than at his dark, round eyes.

“Well, this is for y’all, then,” she said, holding the pie out for him to take.

“Thank you,” he accepted it and lifted the cloth covering the top, bringing the pie close to his nose. “Smells great.”

“It’s a family recipe,” she said. “I can give it to your wife if she’s around?”

“Oh—no,” Joel tensed, his smile faltering. “She, uh, she passed givin’ birth to Sarah.”

“Oh,” Dorothea’s eyes turned soft and sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright,” he assured, flickering his eyes over to his brother who remained watching their new friend with eager eyes. “We’re about to have supper, you could join us? Let us repay you for the pie?”

“Oh, I wish I could, but my mama’s makin’ biscuits and gravy tonight and she’d throw a fit if I stayed out past dark,” Dorothea said, offering him an apologetic smile.

“Well, you’re always welcome,” Joel shrugged. “Your brothers, too. I’m sure Sarah would love it if her new friends stopped by.”

“I’ll let ‘em know,” she smiled. “Well, I should be goin’.”

“You need a ride?” Tommy asked, standing up.

“Oh, no,” she giggled. “I like the walk, gives me a little time away from all the noise.”

“Alright,” Tommy smiled. “You said your name was Dorothy?”

“Dorothea,” Joel corrected.

“That’s right,” she chuckled. “And y’all are?”

“I’m Tommy, he’s Joel,” Tommy said.

“Well, Tommy, Joel,” she smiled as she turned her eyes from Tommy to meet Joel’s again. “It was nice meetin’ y’all. Enjoy that pie.”

“I’m sure we will,” Joel smiled. “Get home safe, now.”

“Everybody knows not to mess with me,” she smirked as she began backing her way towards the gate.

“That so?” he smirked.

“Yep,” she giggled. “Bye now!”

“Bye,” Tommy called, waving at her as she turned around and started down the road in the direction she came. “What a looker.”

“She wasn’t lookin’ at you,” Joel teased.

“What, you think she was lookin’ at you?”

“No,” he replied defensively as he started up the steps. to head into the house, Tommy trailing closely behind.

“You got a crush, old man?”

“Twenty-eight ain’t old,” Joel argued, setting the pie down on the dinner table.

“Older than me,” Tommy quipped. “Older than her.”

“Alright, well since you’re so young and spry, why don’t you go out back and fetch us some milk for supper, charmer?” Joel teased, grabbing the cloth from the pie and swatting it at his younger brother.

It was Sunday afternoon, Joel and Tommy finished with the week’s chores and labor, Sarah skipping down the road with them as they made their way to town to look around at the shops and stands.

Joel, as always, kept his pistol tucked into the holster on his belt, his eyes scanning his surroundings for any potential trouble while desperately hoping none found him.

Joel had lived a lot of life in his twenty-eight years. He started out as a ranch hand to his father, Tommy just old enough to form a sentence while his older brother was expected to go out and tend to the horse, sheep, and cows at five in the morning. School wasn’t a priority to his parents, but learning to take care of the ranch was, to them, as essential to living as breathing.

Joel was fifteen when his father passed from typhoid fever, his mother following shortly after getting caught in the middle of a shoot out in town, leaving him to not only take care of the ranch, but his eleven year old brother as well.

Two years later, Joel and Tommy got swept up in the bounty hunting lifestyle after seeing how much the sheriff was offering for an outlaw on a wanted poster. They bid their ranch goodbye, packed up what little they had, and rode off into the desert to start anew, not knowing a single thing about what was to come.

Though their endeavors started out lawful, a then-seventeen year old Tommy quickly grew bored of their meager earnings and convinced Joel to abandon the lawful bounty hunting in favor of working with outlaws, the two of them hunting out sheriffs and their own people instead.

This was how Joel met Sarah’s mother at the young age of twenty-one. She was ten years older than him, working in a bordello Tommy insisted on staying at for the night during one of their hunts. Joel was hesitant at first, but quickly found his footing once he spotted her across the room. She had dark skin, rich, brown eyes, and a figure like he’d never seen before. He was already hooked then, but once their visits grew more frequent, he realized it was more than just a drunken lust he felt for the woman. He loved her. And when she fell pregnant with his child, Joel took her down to the town church and married her before riding off again to go on his next hunt. He only saw her two more times before Sarah came, and then she was gone.

Joel tried to go back to his old life, but found it difficult to do what he needed to do with a baby in tow. The boys settled down in Utah for a while, but Tommy’s antics at the local saloon had them packing up and heading west to California. Tommy had some luck there panning for gold, but just as quickly as the last time, he got into a brawl and the three of them were forced back on the road. It went like this for a while, up until just a few months ago when they were talked out of moving out of their old family ranch by a wealthy man looking to buy it for a handsome sum, the money too appealing for Joel to decline.

That’s how they ended up here in the Middle of Nowhere, Texas.

Joel liked it here. It was quiet, there wasn’t any trouble, and everyone seemed to have an understanding that this place was for families, somewhere safe to keep your children in the midst of all this shooting and debauchery. Joel wanted to stay here, but there was a nagging voice every time he looked over at his reckless younger brother that told him it was only a matter of time before they’d have to pack it all up again and run off. He hoped this time, Tommy would learn his lesson.

“Daddy, can I go look at the flowers?” Sarah chimed as they reached the booming Main Street, her little finger pointing at a flower cart.

“Yeah, but don’t go runnin’ off too far,” he said, keeping a watchful eye on her as she skipped towards the daisies.

“I’m gonna go see about that wheelbarrow,” Tommy said, nudging his head in the direction of an old man’s roadside stand of junk.

“Anything that keeps you outta the saloon,” Joel said, his eyes still locked on his daughter as she chatted the ear off of the older woman selling flowers.

“Robert, you better stay out of there!”

Joel’s attention was turned in the direction of a faintly familiar voice calling down the street. There he spotted Dorothea, surrounded by five boys ranging from Sarah’s age to somewhere around her own. The eldest looking boy, Robert he assumed, waved her off as he continued ahead of them into the saloon and bordello, leaving her fuming as she tried to corral the three youngest to follow her while the second oldest followed in his brother’s footsteps.

“Dottie, look! It’s Sarah!” the youngest squealed, his finger pointing down the road at Sarah who was getting a flower pinned in her curls. “Can I go say hi?”

“Yeah, just stay where I can see ya,” she said, watching as all three boys ran off in Sarah’s direction.

Joel cleared his throat as he felt obligated to go over and say hello, but Dorothea spotted him first and gave him a polite nod from down the road before turning to head into the general store. A strange pang of disappointment hit him in the chest at her lack of interaction, but he quickly reminded himself that he didn’t want the responsibility of a friend. He had enough on his plate with his ranch, his daughter, and his brother.

“Daddy,” Sarah came strolling back over hand in hand with Dorothea’s youngest brother, both of them smiling cheekily. “This is my boyfriend, James.”

“Boyfriend, huh?” Joel gave the boy a playful once over and shook his head in feigned disapproval. “How about a boy friend?”

“Daddy,” she pouted and fixed a stern look on her face that looked every bit her mother.

“Alright, James, but I expect you to respect my daughter,” he said, playfully wagging his finger in the little boy’s face and poking his nose, earning a giggle.

“Yes, sir,” James smiled. “I think Sarah’s the love of my life.”

“Love of your life?” Joel asked, resting a hand on his hip. “You ain’t lived much life, son.”

“Six years of it,” he countered.

“Six years a long time to you?” Joel continued with a smile.

“Yeah. It’s my entire life,” the boy quipped, pulling a laugh out of Joel.

“I guess you’re right,” Joel chuckled. “Long as you treat her right, we ain’t gonna have a problem.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those your brothers?” Joel nudged his chin in the direction of the two slightly older boys, one of them chasing the other with a flower he’d plucked from the lady’s cart.

“Yes, sir,” James nodded. “Ed and Bo.”

“And the other two?”

“Robert and Paul,” James said. “But they’re mean.”

“Yeah? They mean to you?” James nodded. Joel smiled and squatted down to be eye level with him. “Let me ask ya somethin’. One day, you’re gonna be big enough to be mean right back to ‘em,” James nodded. “That somethin’ you’re looking forward to?”

“No,” James shook his head.

“No? Why not?”

“I don’t like bein’ mean,” James said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Good answer,” Joel smiled. “I don’t want my daughter with somebody mean.”

“Boys! Come help me with these groceries!” Dorothea called from the shop, her eyes flickering to Joel as he stood up and turned to look at her. “They ain’t botherin’ y’all, are they?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, tipping the brim of his cowboy hat at her.

“Lord almighty, she’s a fine lookin’ woman,” Tommy appeared next to Joel, earning a stern glare from his older brother.

“She’s off limits,” James said, his own face scrunching up. “My daddy said so.”

“Well, your daddy hasn’t met me yet,” Tommy smiled. “She got a boyfriend?”

“No,” James replied defensively. “And she don’t want one neither.”

“What about a friend?” Tommy persisted.

“I’m her friend,” he said, crossing his little arms over his chest.

“Did you get the wheelbarrow?” Joel asked, desperate to stop his brother’s back and forth.

“Yep,” Tommy nodded.

“Good, now go on and use it. We need fire wood,” Joel said, tipping his chin towards the hardware store. Tommy sighed and did as his brother commanded while Joel urged both Sarah and James off towards the general store to pick up their weekly groceries.

“Daddy, can we get some blueberries to make another pie?” Sarah asked, pointing ahead at a pint of blueberries sitting on the table in the middle of the store along with the rest of this week’s harvest.

“I didn’t make the pie, baby,” he said. “Don’t know what else we’ll need.”

“Y’all talkin’ about my pie?” Dorothea asked, offering a smile to Sarah as she walked over holding a basket of fruit in her hand while her younger brothers carried the rest of the haul.

“You made it?” Sarah asked with delight.

“Yes, ma’am, I did,” Dorothea nodded. “You want the recipe?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sarah smiled. “I’ll make my daddy teach me.”

“Is your daddy good at bakin’?” Dorothea chuckled, glancing over at Joel who watched her carefully.

“No,” Sarah frowned.

“No, he doesn’t look the part,” she smirked at him, watching as a subtle blush grew on his cheeks. “Well, maybe I could come and teach you since your daddy ain’t so good.”

“Daddy, can she?” Sarah asked, tugging on her fathers arm.

Joel looked down at his wide eyed daughter and felt affection bloom in his chest for her, immediately caving in to her request. “Sure, baby girl.”

“Alright, you want me to show you what you need?” Dorothea spoke to Joel, bringing his eyes back to hers.

“Yes, ma’am,” Joel nodded, gesturing at her to lead the way.

“Gonna need flour, y’all got that at home?” Joel nodded. “Butter?” Another nod. “How ‘bout milk?”

“We got our own cows,” he said.

“Looks like y’all ain’t gonna need much, then,” she smiled. “All’s left is some blueberries, a lemon, some sugar, and…I think that’s it.”

“You think?” Joel teased, quirking an eyebrow at her.

“I know,” she corrected herself with a smirk. “I’ll come by tomorrow afternoon, if that’s alright by y’all.”

“Sounds alright with me,” Joel smiled. “I’ll make sure Tommy ain’t around to bother ya.”

“Oh, you ain’t gotta worry about him. I think he’s kinda sweet…in his own special way,” she shrugged. Joel lifted his eyebrows in surprise at the jealousy that sparked inside him at the thought of Tommy and her together.

As if on cue, Tommy walked in, his eyes scanning the room until he spotted the three of them.

“Well if it ain’t Miss Dorothy,” he grinned.

“Dorothea,” James corrected from the counter as he scooped up the final sack of groceries.

“My apologies,” Tommy smirked. “Guess I’ll have to spend more time around ya. Get the name to stick.”

“Alright,” Joel rolled his eyes and patted Sarah on the shoulder, guiding her towards the counter to pay for their hail. “We’ll see ya tomorrow, then, Dorothea. Bring that James with ya if ya want. Word is him and Sarah are in love. I’d hate to come between that.”

Dorothea giggled and nodded. “That’d be a crime, now, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re comin’ by tomorrow?” Tommy asked, leaning against the counter.

“Yes, sir,” Dorothea nodded. “Showin’ your niece how to make my famous blueberry pie.”

“Got room for one more student?” he asked. “I’ve been meanin’ to learn how t’ bake.”

“Oh, have you now?” she giggled. “I suppose you can join us, long as you pay attention.”

“I’m gonna be payin’ attention, alright,” he smiled. “Have a good day, now, Dorothy.”

“Dorothe—“ She stopped herself from correcting him again once she realized he was now doing it on purpose, her head shaking as she smiled at him. “How ‘bout you just call me “Miss” from now on? Can’t get that wrong, can ya?”

“Ain’t no fun in that,” he smiled. “I’ll get it one ‘a these days.”

“I’m sure you will,” she rolled her eyes before looking to Joel. “See ya, Joel.”

Joel tipped his hat at her and watched her walk off back down the long road headed towards her ranch, her horde of brothers following closely behind.

“You gotta mess with her?” Joel asked Tommy as he pulled out a few notes and handed it to the clerk.

“Least she’s a nice woman,” Tommy reasoned. “Could be goin’ after one of my women at the bordello like you—“

“Watch it,” Joel warned seriously, no trace of amusement in his eyes as they flickered to an oblivious Sarah. “That mouth’s gonna get you in trouble, Tommy. One ‘a these days someone’s gonna come along and do somethin’ about it.”

“They already tried,” Tommy chuckled. “I’ll take my chances.”

Joel only shook his head as he led the three of them out of the store, Tommy’s hands busied by the wheelbarrow hauling lumber while Joel carried their bag of groceries and Sarah worked on the lollipop the cashier handed over to her.

“Dot, come down and help your mama with hangin’ clothes!” Dorothea’s mother, Jessa, called up the staircase of their quaint farmhouse, interrupting her journaling.

“Yes, mama!” she called back, closing her books before making her way downstairs to tug her boots on before entering the mid-morning heat. She joined her mother out in front of the lawn as she sat scrubbing the dirty laundry on her washing board, a few sheets already hung up on the line.

“Thank you, baby,” she said, wiping her brow. “It’s hot out today.”

“It’s been hot out every day,” Dorothea commented. “How’re the crops lookin’?”

“Your daddy don’t bother tellin’ me anymore,” she said. “Half of me wonders if we wouldn’t be better off packin’ up and movin’ west. I hear there’s still plenty gold.”

“Who ya gonna get to mine for it? Daddy’s back can’t take it, and your two eldest don’t seem to care ‘bout nothin’ except goin’ to the saloon.”

“Don’t you wish we had that luxury?” Jessa said with a smirk. “I know I’d like to be able to run off whenever I want and drink the night away.”

“I don’t care much for the drinkin’, but I would like to know what it feels like to do whatever I want whenever I wanna do it,” Dorothea replied. “Instead we gotta ask permission anytime we wanna leave the house. Makes ya sad if you think about it too much.”

“I’ll tell you somethin’,” Jessa locked eyes with her daughter. “You ever feel like sneakin’ off for a night—maybe go see a pretty boy—you can count on me t’keep your secret. Long as ya tell me, I’ll watch out for ya.”

“You gonna lie to daddy for me?” Dorothea giggled.

“Lord knows I’ve done worse things.”

Dorothea quirked an eyebrow at her mother, smirking in interest.

Jessa ignored her daughter’s curiosity. “So this mean there’s a boy?”

“No,” Dorothea shook her head. “Not yet, at least.”

“Come on, now,” Jessa smiled.

“James’ new friend, Sarah, has an uncle,” she shrugged. “He seems interested.”

“But you ain’t?”

“I don’t know, mama,” she blushed. “He’s fine and all, but…he ain’t really what I’m lookin’ for.”

“Why’s that?”

“He talks too much,” Dorothea replied, earning a hearty laugh from her mother.

“You’re just like me, ain’t ya?”

“Sarah’s dad, however—“

“Dad? How old is he?” Jessa furrowed his brows.

“He doesn’t look much older than me,” she replied. “But he’s quieter. Doesn’t talk unless he has to. And he was sweet with James,” she said. “Thought it was cute.”

“But he ain’t interested in you like the brother is?” Jessa asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said, grabbing the last piece of wet clothing from her mother’s hands and wringing it out before hanging it on the line. “Either way, I don’t foresee any sneakin’ out in my future.”

“A little sneakin’ out would do you some good,” Jessa argued. “You’re too well behaved for your own good.”

“Someone’s gotta be,” she smiled and nudged her head in the direction of the house. “Alright, I gotta go change.”

“Where you off to?”

“Helpin’ Sarah make a pie,” she said.

“Mmhm,” Jessa smirked. “Well tell the uncle and the daddy I said hello.”

“Sure, mama,” she smiled back knowingly before skipping off to the house.

“There she is,” Tommy chimed as Dorothea walked up the steps of the porch, a sweet tea in his hand as he leaned against the doorframe.

“Where’s my student?” Dorothea smirked, tilting her head at him.

“Right here,” he said, gesturing at himself. “Ready to learn.”

“I meant my promisin’ student,” she countered, bringing a grin to his face.

“She’s out back with her daddy,” he said, tipping his head back towards the house. “But we could get started without her.”

“I’m sure you’d like that,” she chuckled. “I’m gonna go find her.”

“I’ll be right here,” he drawled, watching her as she walked down the steps and rounded the corner of the house.

Out back, she was met with the sight of Sarah filling the pigs trough full of scraps while her father brushed the mane of a chestnut horse, his white shirt pulling taut across the breadth of his shoulders.

“Hey, y’all,” she announced herself, drawing both pairs of eyes to hers.

“Dorothea!” Sarah chimed, abandoning her work at the pig pen to come skipping over. “Time for pie?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she smiled, her eyes trailing from the little girl in front of her to her much larger father as he walked over, his blue jeans clinging to his legs as if they were painted on.

“Miss Dorothea,” he tipped his hat at her. “You come to take this trouble maker off my hands?”

“You causin’ trouble?” Dorothea asked, looking back to the six year old.

“Daddy’s lyin,” she grinned.

“So I got a troublemaker and a liar on my hands,” Dorothea smiled, looking back to Joel. “Ya gonna stay out here, or ya gonna join us inside?”

“Ain’t gonna be much help, I’m afraid,” he smiled.

“You can be our taste-tester,” she shrugged. “And maybe you can keep that brother of yours on a leash. He seems particularly determined today.”

“I apologize for his forwardness,” Joel spoke sincerely. “He thinks he’s smooth ‘cause every woman he’s ever talked to has been eager. He don’t realize it’s ‘cause he paid ‘em to be.”

Dorothea laughed, her brows lifting in shock at the racy nature of his joke.

“I’m sorry,” he said, realizing himself. “Forget I’m talkin’ to a lady.”

“Am I that homely?” she teased. “Maybe I’ll wear my best dress next time. Get Tommy to remember my name and you to remember you’re talkin’ to a woman.”

“Yeah, daddy,” Sarah scolded. “Where’s your manners?”

“I must’a lost ‘em,” he joked.

“Well, me and Dottie’ll help you find ‘em,” she sassed, grabbing Dorothea’s hand and dragging her along back to the house, Joel smiling to himself as he followed them.

“So, cows, a horse, pigs…looks like you’ve got yourself a ranch,” she said, looking behind her as Sarah continued tugging her along.

“Yep,” he agreed.

“You don’t talk much, do ya?”

“Try not to,” he said.

“Any reason?”

“Find people like me a little better when I keep my mouth shut,” he replied, earning another laugh.

“Someone must’a trained you right,” she joked. “Tommy on the other hand—“

“Y’all talkin’ ‘bout me?” Tommy spoke from the porch as the three of them ascended the steps. “Good things, I hope.”

“Hope is a dangerous thing,” Dorothea quipped, earning a chuckle from Joel, the sound drawing her eyes away from Tommy and over to him.

“I don’t get it,” Tommy said, smiling even though his brows were drawn together.

“Nevermind, let’s just get workin’,” Dorothea said, gesturing for him to lead the way.

“He ain’t too clever,” Joel leaned over Dorothea’s shoulder as they filtered inside, whispering to her, and she would’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so caught off guard by his proximity.

“You know anythin’ ‘bout makin’ a carrot cake? My mama used to make the best, and I haven’t found anythin’ quite as good since,” Tommy called from the kitchen as Dorothea remained frozen in the entryway, her eyes watching Joel as he squeezed past her to join his brother and daughter inside the small kitchen. “You hear me?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Dorothea cleared her head and composed herself as she walked in to join them. “Carrot cake, ya said? I don’t think I’ve ever made one.”

“Well, you had to have a flaw,” Tommy drawled.

“I’ve got a few,” she countered.

“Like what?”

“I’m very particular,” she replied.

“‘Bout what?”

“I like the quiet,” she said, smirking at him. “And I get real bossy.”

“I can shut up,” he said. “And I can follow orders.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Joel groaned, sitting down at their round dinner table.

“Alright, then, if you’re so good at shuttin’ up and followin’ orders, how ‘bout you go sit down and stay quiet while me and Sarah get to work.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy grinned, walking over to the table by the window to sit with his brother while Dorothea and Sarah got to work. “She likes me.”

“She hates you,” Joel corrected.

“What d’you know about women, huh? When’s the last time you talked to somethin’ as pretty as that?”

“Just a few minutes ago in the yard,” he said, lifting an eyebrow to signal his victory.

“You think she likes talkin’ to you anymore than me?” Tommy asked with a smug smile. “I can’t imagine how crazy someone’d have to be to find you interestin’. All you do is take care ‘a the ranch and complain.”

“I didn’t say she liked talkin’ t’me,” Joel shrugged. “Just that we talked.”

“Yeah, well, leave the talkin’ to me,” Tommy said. “I’ll have me a wife come winter, you’ll see.”

“She ain’t gonna marry you,” Joel chuckled.

“Why not?”

“You ain’t committed to nothin’ but causin’ trouble,” he said. “No amount ‘a pretty’s gonna change ya that quick.”

“Well,” Dorothea smiled across the table at Joel as he hauled a bite of her and Sarah’s creation into his mouth, Tommy long gone and out at the saloon while Sarah laid in the living room fast asleep from two thick slices of pie. “Any good?”

“Ya know it’s good,” he said, flickering his eyes at her before dropping them back to his plate.

“Is it always like pullin’ teeth with you?” Joel furrowed his brows as he looked at her again. “Givin’ a sincere compliment?”

“It was sincere,” he said.

“Guess I’m expectin’ somethin’ more like Tommy’s reaction.”

“What, fallin’ to my knees?” he joked, cracking a half smirk. “My knees are busted. I’ll have to praise you from my seat.”

“You and him are so different,” she commented, watching him as he ate. “He’s…wild. Too wild. Reminds me of my two brothers.”

“The ones who went into that…establishment?” he asked, wiping his mouth on a scrap of cloth he’d fashioned into a napkin.

“Yeah, them two,” she nodded. “You ever…been to one ‘em?”

Joel froze a bit, his hand pausing as he lifted a glass of milk to his mouth for a sip. “You askin’ me—“

“I just wanna know what they’re like,” she shrugged. “What they do.”

“You’re better off not knowin’.”

“Well, the men always seem to leave happy,” she said.

“They sure do,” he blushed and brought his cup the rest of the way to his lips, taking a swig before setting it down. “But I ain’t completely sure if that’s somethin’ you need’a know about.”

“Why is it that you boys get’a have all this fun and us girls are supposed to stay home and bake pies, sit and wonder what y’all are doin? What if I wanted to go into a bordello?”

“I ain’t sure it’s they’d know what t’do with ya,” he chuckled.

“Is it—are they…makin’ love?” she whispered the last line, causing Joel to choke on his bite, his fist pounding against his chest to clear it.

“I—“ He shook his head, lost for what to say. “I don’t know that I’d call it that.”

“But they are…sleepin’ together?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “But they ain’t doin’ no sleepin’.”

“And that’s where Tommy ran off to?”

Joel hesitated for a moment but nodded.

“Well, then I know for certain I don’t want him,” she said, looking at her plate.

“You don’t like…those kinda men?” he asked, recalling his own past.

“I don’t like men who get around,” she clarified. “If a man wants me, I better be the only one. But so far, I haven’t met a man willin’ to hang up his hat.”

“They’ll grow outta it,” he said.

“Did you?” she asked, knocking his boot under the table with hers.

“I had my day,” he said, locking eyes with her. “Sarah’s mom—she, uh—I met her in one of those…places.”

“But you married her.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Never liked two-timin’.”

“Well, there’s still hope to be had, then,” she smiled. “Just hope I’m still young and pretty by the time these boys decide t’grow up.”

“How old are you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

“I’ll be twenty-five on Christmas,” she said.

“Christmas, huh?”

“Yeah, makes it easy on my mama and daddy,” she joked. “What about you?”

“Twenty-eight,” he replied. “Twenty-nine in September.”

“Birthday just passed, then,” she said. “I’ll have t’bake you a belated birthday cake.”

“You tryin’ to win me over with food?” he flirted, just to test the waters.

“I didn’t know I was tryin’ to win you over,” she smiled.

“I wouldn’t mind if you did.”

“Your brother would,” she countered.

“Yeah,” he shrugged.

Dorothea sat there watching him with a smile, searching his eyes for any sign of a cruel joke being played on her but found none. Even still, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do in this sort of situation. She’d been flirted with for half her life, but was never interested enough to flirt back. Until now.

“I guess I should be goin’ off,” she said, swallowing her feelings for the man in front of her out of sheer fear of falling flat on her face.

“You gonna get home alright?” he asked, standing up when she stood to carry her plate to the sink. “Could take the horse.”

“No, I’m alright,” she assured with a smile, turning around to find Joel right in front of her, his chin tipped downwards as she looked up into his molasses brown eyes. Though she remained breathless, she couldn’t help but let out an airy chuckle as she lifted her hand to press it against the firm wall of his chest. She didn’t push him away, she simply rested it over his heartbeat to feel for a similar rhythm to her own. “You’re awfully close.”

“Would’ya like me to step back?” he asked, his eyes darting across her features, admiring the curve of her button nose.

“No,” she replied, what was supposed to be playful turning into a whisper as she watched tongue peek out and swipe over his bottom lip. She couldn’t help herself but to want to trace the line, too, her hand raising to rest over his bearded jaw while her thumb ghosted across the bow of his lip. “Never kissed anybody before, y’ know that?”

“S’easier than you’d think,” he whispered back, leaning down to slowly fill the gap between their lips, Dorothea’s eyes fluttering shut as she splayed her hand over his cheek while the other lifted to bury her fingers in his curls.

Joel hummed into the kiss as his lips landed against the pillowy softness of her pout, his chest pressing to hers as he pressed her into the counter behind her, his hands gripping the edge of the rustic wood.

Dorothea’s brows laced together as she tried to keep her head above water in this sea of him. He tasted like the pie she spent all afternoon baking and a little bit of whiskey, the warmth of both heating her skin up as she melted into him.

“Daddy,” Sarah called from the other room, her tiny voice thick with sleep. Joel pulled back first, leaving Dorothea to chase his lips with her eyes still shut. He smiled at the sight and leaned forward to kiss her forehead, pulling her out of her haze.

“I gotta go take her t’bed,” he whispered, his voice raspy in her ear as his lips came to rest there. “Wait for me.”

Dorothea couldn’t speak, her olive colored cheeks turning a shade of red as she watched him walk back and out of the room, his voice soft as he spoke to his daughter, scooping her up in his arms and carrying her down the hall

She stood there resting against the counter, her hand resting on her heated cheeks, smiling at the wood beneath her feet.

Was this what it felt like to want somebody? Did it always feel this good? A blood rush to the head?

Joel found his way back into the living room a few minutes later, finding her in that same spot, still spinning over his touch.

“I…hope that was alright,” he said, seemingly catching her by surprise, her eyes jumping away from the floor to meet his. “I hope I didn’t…assume—“

“I think ya did, just a little bit, but that’s alright,” she smiled, walking over to meet him in the middle of the room, her hands sliding over his chest to loop around his neck. “You assumed right.”

“Tommy ain’t gonna like this,” Joel warned, resting his hands on the small of her back.

“He doesn’t got any claim over me,” she replied, her eyes flickering back to his mouth. “Y’know, your lips are softer than they look.”

“That supposed t’be a compliment?” he smiled and she nodded. “Well, thank ya, ma’am.”

“I like when you call me that,” she grinned. “When you use those southern manners.”

“Yeah?” he grinned back, leaning down to brush his lips over hers. “You like when I’m quiet and polite?”

She laughed softly and nodded, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. “Like that you know when to talk and when to shut up.”

“Then I’ll shut up now,” he said, smiling into the kiss as he squeezed her closer, his tongue swiping across her bottom lip before grazing the tip of her tongue. Dorothea moaned into the kiss, the sound causing Joel to short circuit and pull away, his forehead resting against hers. “You gotta go home.”

“Yeah,” she nodded, still breathless.

“Come see me tomorrow, if you got the time,” he said, pulling back to comb his hand through her brown waves as they hung loosely down her shoulder and back.

“I’ll see if I can sneak off,” she grinned, stepping back from his embrace to walk out the front door to his porch.

“I’ll see ya,” she said, biting her lip as she turned on her heel to walk down the steps of his porch.

“Bye, Dorothea,” he smiled to himself, tucking his hands in his pockets and leaning against the doorframe as he watched her frame get tinier and tinier as she walked down the long, dirt road until she disappeared out of view, taking the sunshine with her.

[hooked-on-elvis]

Don't know how EP managed to keep his cool during the bordello scene — I'm not even talking about him with Susan Henning, just these many ladies wearing almost nothing and touching him like this. Considering it must have been needed a few takes to make this scene right, it must have been torture trying to keep his cool, to a guy like him. Yet, on the final cut, Elvis looks all together, in control — while on the other hand, wearing his black leather suit, while singing live onstage, at some point he just... messed up his pants. Have you read/heard the story, right? Yeah... that naughty story! 🤭 That was hot! Embarrassing but mostly hot AF. I don't even know how he let people see that pair of pants, I wouldn't. LOL! — Talking about this, my mind went to the "Girls! Girls! Girls!" "naughty" scene, which I still try to get how the heck Elvis got himself all "happy" just by dancing. He was "just a red blooded boy" indeed!

Anyway... I keep imagining the thoughts running through his mind during those sexy scenes - also the not-sexy-ones but the ones that got his blood flowing downwards, somehow. Outside he was/is pretty intriguing already, a fascinating guy... his looks and personality... but his mind! I kinda envy the Almighty himself just for being able to know what Elvis was thinking the whole time. Elvis' mind would be my favorite place to take a peek, I would live inside that pretty little head of his.

[murderblade]

took a hiatus from tumblr and went through a horrifying werewolf transformation into a lifestyler or something smh

earmuffs: angeni pretty

skirt & cape set: metamorphose temps de fille

otks: the black ribbon

shoes: bordello

[lokisgoodgirl]

Hot & Bothered [Avenger!Loki x Fem.Reader]

Part of the Hostile F*cks Collection A Link to my Masterlist is HERE Summary: (13) A slutty caftan threatens to break your resolve. Warnings: 18+. Minors DNI. Smuttish. Language. "Friends"w/ benefits. (w/c 4.6k)

Since the mission where Loki revealed he could see into your mind, you had stayed a rooms width from him at all times. You had no idea if it would make a difference. You hadn’t stuck around long enough to find out. But it made you feel better.

At least, that was what you told yourself.

You would admit that a month without Loki in your bed felt like twelve. But if the asshat did have the audacity to leer into your thoughts- all he would see is simmering rage. It made you feel better, knowing that. At least, that’s what you told yourself.

Steve’s chevy drew carefully into a marked bay to the excited squeals of Wanda and Nat sandwiching you in the back seat. “Now ladies don’t get too excited..." Steve drawled. "Let’s all disembark in an orderly fashion.” He gently pulled up the handbrake, giving it an overcautious tug. “It’s the beach, not a bordello. Most accidents happen twenty feet from your destination and carelessness...costs lives.” He glanced over his shoulder, cocking an eyebrow judgementally at the three of you jostling in the seats like rowdy children. You pursed your lips to stifle a laugh. Only Rogers could make a day out at the beach with three half naked women in the back of his open top car into a lesson in health and safety. “Yes, Sir.” Wanda said reverently, as you and Nat begin to shake with silent laughter. Steve frowned, his next remark interrupted by the growling roar of an approaching engine. A green Jaguar swung into the bay beside the chevy screeching to a halt against the tarmac with a furious skid. Steve’s frown deepened. “Remind me who taught Laufeyson to drive, again?” You rolled your eyes, avoiding the sight that was about to present itself. “May we disembark now?” you sniped, trying to stay the urgency in your voice. “Yes Ma’am.” he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the doors of the Jag opening in sync. The men inside unfurled from the car one by one like movie stars. Thor straightened first from the passenger door, flicking his blonde hair back over bare, bronzed skin. He swung a gym bag with a towel hanging out over one engorged shoulder, throwing Nat a subtle wink as he turned and slammed the door shut. You could have sworn he was sticking his ass out. Wilson tipped you and the girls a nod, sliding a pair of sunglasses on as he turned appraisingly towards the beach. “Got out usual spot cordoned off?” he said solemnly. Steve nodded, as Wanda piped up. “I’ve still to enchant the barriers. but they’re aware.” Sam nodded, as your eyes wandered to Loki at the other side of the Jaguar. He ascended from the driver’s seat like an aftershave advert, running a hand through loose, glossy hair. The trademark black suit he had chosen was incredibly out of place. But what else would Loki Laufeyson wear at the the beach? you thought abrasively, realising too late that you were staring. Even in profile, he was devastatingly handsome. His arrogance set in a glacial expression as he observed the beckoning flats and dunes with distaste. The god screwed up his eyes towards the sun, brow furrowed before a theatrical snap of his fingers made the driver door swung shut unaided with a muffled slap. “How do we look, Thor?” Wanda cooed, standing and placing her hands on her hips. Red hair fell around her shoulders, trailing down to the curve of her bikini-clad cleavage. “Both you and Romanoff look incandescently buxom this fine day. A delight for the eyes and the imagination.” he growled, leaning a ham-sized forearm on the roof of the Jag. Wilson smacked him in the stomach.

“What about her?” Nat scoffed, waggling a thumb in your direction. Thor flushed, readjusting the bag resting on his shoulder as his eyes searched frantically for something to focus on. “Come, Wilson, Banner...and Lang, do not forget the ardent spirits!" he shouted as he jostled away, shaking his rounded ass with every step. “We must secure a prime location.” he boomed, gesturing dramatically ahead to the empty stretch of beach far too loudly to be anything less than suspicious. You rolled your eyes as the men shuffled away, bickering. “What was that about?” Nat murmured at your back as the three of you filed out of the chevy. “It’s a long story, but suffice to say its some Asgardian bullshit.” you scoffed. “So you and Loki are still...-” she started, before you cut her off. “Mortal enemies? Yah.” you snapped bluntly. Nat chuckled. “Maybe you guys are too similar.” she said, sliding on her sunglasses as Wanda raced ahead, palms glowing red. “He’s a lying, arrogant arsehole and I am nothing like him.” you mumbled, rummaging in your bag as sand sank into your flip-flops. “He’s always been those things, what changed?” Nat probed. You could tell she had her interrogation-mode on, and this was a fight you would lose. With her, you always did. You sighed. “He can-” “Agent, can I have a word?” Steve called politely behind you. Nat gave you a nod, walking on as you hovered for the captain to catch up. He jogged across the sand in a pair of salmon coloured chino shorts, every inch the frat boy who never was. Placing his hands on his hips, he came to a stop. “It’s not gone unnoticed that things have cooled between you and Laufeyson again.” He arched a brow, blue eyes full of condescending concern. “Spats like this can really upset the ol’ team spirit, you know?” You pressed your lips together, inhaling through your nose. Steve continued, unawares. “I know he’s not the easiest but...just make an effort to be pals again. He might surprise you.” “Duly noted.” you said, forcing a smile. You spun away, throwing your eyes to the sky in a silent scream. The rest of the crew had set up camp near the middle of the stretch of beach reserved for the team thanks to Tony’s coastguard connections. You walked on for another minute, flapping your towel out and throwing your bag down. A sigh rose in the thick, hot air as you felt the warmth shifting beneath your ass. Reaching for your book, a long shadow fell over the golden sand spread before you. “Agent.” You closed your eyes, willing death to take you swiftly. “Go away.” you said through gritted teeth, shoving your sunglasses on and opening your book without looking up. The yellow, tea stained pages lay flat against your crossed legs, hunched over to prevent curiosity ruining the drama of your resistance. All you could see out the corner of your eye were a pair of ridiculously toned, naked calves. You swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. “Impossible, I’m afraid. I have a direct order from the boss to ‘make nice’ with you.” he quipped. You flinched as a dark green beach towel manifested, stretched neatly on the sand next to yours. “I informed him that I am always nice but apparently there are limits to the naivety of Captain Rogers. Who knew.”

You tried to focus on the words in front of you, typeface blurring as Loki’s pale body barged into your peripherary. Please don’t be wearing the skimpy, tight trunks, you thought; cursing the growing heat between your legs. It’s just the sand. It’s just the warm sand.

So, how have you been, darling?” he drawled innocently, an undertone of sarcasm tainting practised sincerity. “Fuck you, Loki.” you snarled, reading the same line of text for the sixth time. “Why don’t you just dig around in my head and find out?” Loki laughed softly. “You’re missing me, that much is obvious.” he purred. “The sexual frustration is tangible, Agent.” You inhaled sharply, head snapping to the side. All the insults and barbs on the tip of your tongue melted at the sight of him. Of course he’s wearing the fucking tight trunks, Jesus Christ, you thought; fighting to maintain stoicism. And what is that, a fucking negligee? The god’s impossibly long legs were stretched out over the edge of the towel, ankles crossed and resting on the sand. The fine hairs on his calves caught the sunlight, running up to his achingly thick thigh muscles which flexed as he adjusted his hips. Some kind of slutty caftan was wrapped around him, hanging open whoreishly around his thick, muscled torso. Luxurious sides of the garment hung to the flawless build of his body, the edges spreading out at those toned hips. The hue of his skin was visible through the cover-up, expensive silk-chiffon shimmering lightly in the afternoon rays. Gold embroidery laced the edging, the hem shifting seductively up his wide femurs as he settled back without a care in the world. The fateful pair of swim shorts clung to his upper-thighs, material cutting every-so-slightly into taut muscle. Low rise nylon skimmed the base of his Adonis belt, deep grooves of definition rolling upward to the abdomen you still felt pressing the breath from your body atop you in your dreams. Loki snickered, reclining back on his elbows. Clearly, he wasn’t planning on going anywhere. “For someone who is so appalled by the very idea of my revelation, you certainly are resistant to discovering the solution. And there is a solution, Agent.” “Does it involved you monologuing?” you hissed under your breath as Steve sauntered past towards the larger group, subtley side-eyeing you both. You flashed a strained smile in his direction, continuing through gritted teeth. “Because I don’t think I have sufficient will to live to spare.” Loki lay back against the towel, a pair of classic Ray Bans manifesting over his eyes. He raised his arms, slotting them casually behind his head as he tilted his chin towards to the sun. “In my experience, a monologue vastly improves the quality of any conversation, Agent.” You frowned. “But no one else can get a word in.” you snapped blankly. “Precisely.” he smirked. There was a pause. “That caftan looks stupid.” you sniffed, petulantly. Loki said nothing, the ghost of a smile flickering at his dimples. Your reluctant stare ran over the bulge of his biceps, carved and ferocious beneath the feminine allure of the chiffon. A flank of loose black hair haloed his head, spilling over those broad shoulders and spreading in loose waves against his collarbone. The muscles there flexed as he adjusted himself, arching his back before settling into position. The edges of the sensual robe fell to the sides of his thick trunk, the sight of his defined obliques hitting you like a truck.

You looked back to your book quickly as he raised his head, interest piqued by a high pitched noise over by Wanda’s forcefield.

“Oh look, Agent. Your fans are here.” he drawled, gesturing lazily to the side. Your eyes flew up, immediately seeing twenty hysterical looking women shamelessly trying to bypass the security barricade down the beach. Three of them had their tits out, t-shirts held high in your direction. “I think they’re for you, actually.” you replied coldly, returning to your novel. He lowered his sunglasses, giving a polite wave. “Oh, so they are. My mistake.” he quipped, lying back down with a telltale smirk curling his lip. A minute passed in awkward silence. “Are you really just going to lie there?” you said, irritation seeping through the words as you re-read the same line over and over. “Are you really going to pretend to read that book and summon most tedious images you can muster to avoid my mildly telepathic endeavours?” he countered. You slammed the book closed, twisting towards him as he continued. “Darling, I’m delighted to inform you that you aren’t interesting enough to ignite the phenomenon most of the time.” Your jaw clenched, a growl building as you glared at him through your sunglasses with a futile waste of a death-stare. “Are you alright Agent? You seem perturbed.” he said with mock-innocence, offering a concerned tilt of his head.

“I’m fine.” you replied, a little higher pitched than you’d intended. “It’s your brother whose lost it.” Loki clucked, letting his head fall back with an amused sigh. Tendrils of hair nestled between his shoulder-blades, the fairness of his luminescent skin making your eyes water with reluctant desire. “It makes no difference if you are mine physically. Between he and I, you belong to me.” “Uh huh.” you grunted, feeling your heart beat faster. Disinterest. Hold it together, idiot. You cleared your throat. “What if I told you I was madly in love with your brother and would positively die without him?” The two of you looked up, just at the moment a large inflatable ball smacked Thor in the mouth with a loud slap. He stood dazed for a moment, before his fists clenched. “Damn this spherical assassin.” he roared. "Get thee from my sight!" He attempted to kick it away, and missed. Loki fought to retain his composure. “Well firstly, I would have you medically assessed.” he smirked, before melting to a frown. His voice deepened, regal gravitas seeping through. “In truth he would be forced to decline or face the eternal judgement of the Asgardian Elderbook. I can assure you that it is not an experience he wishes to repeat.” You let out a puff of air, scoffing heartily. “So he’s broken your Most Assyoor-red Oath before.” you mocked. “Nothing stopping him doing it again, clearly its a slap on the wrist.”

Loki chuckled, rolling his neck in a semi circle and letting out a low, sensual groan as something clicked. “My brother lives in abject terror that any attention towards you may be construed as an attempt to undermine the Oath’s hold.” he murmured casually, pausing for effect. “In truth, he had his manly appendage removed from his form for a millennia the last time he forswore the Oath of Most Ass-ure-red Recompense.” the god hummed, pointing his toes and digging them into the sand. “I was there for the enchantment. It was quite something. Even for a god, a millennia is not an insubstantial amount of-” “Wait, he didn’t have a cock for like a thousand years?” you gasped, scouring around to make sure no one was in earshot. Loki shrugged. “Indeed. As smooth as Carrara marble. I may have pulled a few strings as I am known to do, Agent. In the end he only served six hundred.” “Explains why he’s such a relentless pervert.” you mumbled, catching sight of Thor jogging along the shoreline with Wanda hoisted over his shoulders. “Quite.” Loki said solemnly. “But the boon was that I gained his Oath by coming to his aid...eventually-” “-which you wasted on me.” you finished bitterly, concentrating on Wanda screeching with hysterical laughter as Thor threw her in the air like a doll. A wave of envy surged in your belly. If only Loki wasn’t such a wanker, you thought. Your unwelcome companion sat up on the beach-towel, the crunch of his sickeningly defined abs visible in your periphery. He leant his face over your shoulder, the heat from his skin so close to yours feeling warmer than the pulsing sun. “You say wasted, I say...invested, Agent.” You swallowed, trying to think of anything in this moment other than Loki flipping you over on the sand and grinding his solid torso against your keening body. Shit, you thought; as the mental image of his sandy hair flipping over those achingly hot shoulders filled your mind. Your thighs squeezing around his hips as he dragged himself against your own. His fingers curling around the edge of the towel as he fell apart inside your hot cun- “The ‘Offs are staring.” Loki sneered, nodding towards a conspiratorial looking Nat and Wanda hunched together casting unsubtle glances in your direction. Lang broke out the tequila already, you thought with a grimace. A coy smile pressed against Loki’s dimples as he watched your cheeks flush. “They’re just impressed I’ve not choked you yet.” you said, aimlessly turning the page of your book while you feigned disinterest. “Ah.” Loki breathed, resting back on his elbows again. “And yet you know very well that I am partial to a little erotic asphyxiation, Agent. I’d be happy to be on the receiving end for once.” You let out a ragged sigh, clenching wetly beneath your bikini bottoms. Wayward grains of sand stuck to your inner thighs, a mix of anxious sweat and arousal combining under the lightest of flirtatious interrogation. You snapped the book closed, placing it pointedly over your crotch. Like I'm hiding a fucking boner. “I’m surprised you told them of our dalliances, actually.” Loki continued, un-phased. “Considering how absolutely loathsome you find it all.” he purred, drawing his muscled knees upwards, feet flat against the towel. The perfect position to straddle him, you thought; gaze lingering on the mouth-watering bulge protruding from the tight trunks. “It was a slow news day.” you muttered, shaded eyes running over the landscape of his hips, up the valley of rippling abs.

How you wanted to feel him harden through the twin, thin nylon strips of your swimsuits. Feel his meaty erection inflating against your messy, hot slit begging to be filled. How you would rub against it; the flushed, swollen nerves that missed his every moan, his every lick, every thrum of his talented fingers.

Loki’s sharp jawline was pointed to the sky, the sweep of his cheekbones accentuated by dark wayfarers that concealed any indication of interest. Silence, at last. There was a pause. “I wouldn’t recommend fucking on sand, darling.” Loki murmured casually, without moving his head. “Even magic cannot remove every grain from one’s nethers.” Without thinking, you smacked his thigh with your book, making him flinch. “Ow.” he growled, immediately springing to his knees, looming above you. Curls fell back in a black curtain behind his ears as he slid the Ray Bans into his hair. Those smouldering eyes bore into yours, flashing menacingly beneath a fluttering fan of dark lashes. “Be careful, Agent." he purred darkly. "That was dangerously close to flirting.” You shivered. “You wouldn’t want to give me the wrong idea, would you?” he growled, cupping the side of your neck with one sand dusted hand. His thumb rubbed the angle of your jaw once. Twice. “Stop...reading...my..mind, asshole.” you enunciated slowly through gritted teeth. The line of your vision which had begun at his chest, rose inch by inch to meet his. “Would that I could, Agent.” he murmured, as you heard the sound of muffled footsteps approaching at a run. “But you see...that depends on you. And you won’t hear it.” Loki’s brows slanted thoughtfully, as time ran out. “What happened? You guys...cool?” Wilson shouted warily, every thunder of his long legs on the sand beside Nat making your stomach twist as you jumped to your feet. “Fine.” you said bluntly, seeing Rogers flushed face jogging close behind them as you began dusting sand from your legs. “Who fancies a swim?” you said flatly, looking between Wilson and Natasha. “What an inspired idea.” Loki said, gracefully rising to his feet. With a tilt of his head, the sand which had worked its way beneath his fine body hair; the golden grains which had nestled into his curls, all fell in magnetic synchronicity with a gentle hiss to the towel. You rolled your eyes. “Come on.” you grumbled, yanking Nat behind you towards the ocean. Trying to keep your attention on the shoreline despite the hum of conversation behind, Natasha was wise enough not to ask questions. The larger group drew closer, the bottle of liquor in Scott’s hand glinting as he teetered on his feet. You stopped beside him, refusing his offer of the hooch. Steve and Sam stripped their t-shirts, throwing them on a growing pile of discarded clothing. “Is Laufeyson wearing lingerie?” Scott hissed loudly to Wilson. Sam scrunched his face, a theatrical grimace stretched across his features as he turned with an incredulous shake of his head. “It’s called style, Lang. I wouldn’t expect one so chronically under-endowed as you to appreciate that.” Loki drawled, making a show of drawing back the chiffon and placing his hands on his cut hips. “It is kind of excessive.” Banner chimed with a hint of jealousy. You watched every stare lower to the bulge in his tight swimwear on full display. Scott’s glazed eyes widened as he swayed gently, carefully lifting a finger to point directly at it.

“Now that, is excessive. Am I right, fellas?” he slurred, jovially elbowing an increasingly beleaguered looking Wilson in the chest.

Your eyes combed up Loki’s long legs, each hot slice of muscle flashing into view as he shifted his stance. His fingertips dug into the long lines of his hips, haughtily observing his would-be critics. Always needing a reaction, you sneered; coveting every inch of tantalisingly forbidden skin. You licked your lips, biting the bottom one as Loki’s abdominals clenched. The caftan fluttered in the breeze, grazing the backs of his knees as he stood silently, absorbing their reluctant admiration. How his thighs were so unnaturally carved you would never understand. Your own squeezed together, remembering the force of which the flat of his femur would slam against the back of your leg as he mounted you like a demon. The sound of skin slapping, rasping groans becoming louder as he found his release in you. As he found himself. Thor’s voice broke your daze, blinking as you realised that you too, had succumbed to the inconveniently hypnotic draw of Loki’s crotch. “Can we disperse with the talk of my brother’s various accoutrements and protrusions?” Thor muttered, pulling at his own shorts. “I have it on good authority that beneath those bathing pants he possesses nothing special.” Loki whipped round, the caftan swirling dramatically. “Careful brother. For one in such a tenuous position, I would not recommend you become judgemental on the manhoods of others.” he sneered, teeth bared. “Need I elaborate?” Thor swallowed, his cheeks paling as you bit your lip, trying not to laugh. “Alrighty.” Steve clapped his hands awkwardly, before ushering the stunned looking group closer to the sea. “Everybody in the water. Time to get wet, come now...let’s go. Time to cool off.” The splashes of half a dozen muscle-laden bodies sounded around you as you waded forward alone, welcoming the crisp coolness of the sea rising against your thighs. Thor ran past, knees high before diving head first into the surf. The resulting wave hit you in the chest, making you gasp. Flecks of salty water stuck to your lips, licked away thoughtlessly as the sea level grew deeper. You squatted, letting yourself begin to float, breathing deeply. “I hate to mention it…” You grimaced towards the horizon as Steve’s saccharine tone floated over your shoulder. “...but about that little snaffoo row-de-tow...I hope that I can still count on you to give it the ol’ college try with you-know-who.” “It’s complicated Steve.” you said through gritted teeth, kicking your feet forward and floating on your back. He looked down at you sceptically, his blonde hair blindingly bright in the direct sunlight. Like an angel, you thought. An innocent, irritating angel. “I’m no ninny." Steve scoffed with uncharacteristic bite. "I have my suspicions you and Laufeyson share more than just the occasional ride, if you know what I mean.” he hissed, scanning for eavesdroppers. His cheeks flushed. "The motorcycles, I meant the...listen- pull it together. There are lives at stake.” You snorted defiantly. “The only life at stake is Laufeyson’s if he doesn’t-” “-If he doesn’t what, Agent?”

You floundered, face submerged in water before you spluttered to the surface. The seabed grazed your toes as you found yourself upright again, wiping salt water from your eyes with the back of your hand. Steve looked between you with one brow arched, his steely glare leaving you under no doubt to his feelings on the matter. Loki descended deeper into the gently lapping waves, water parting around his muscled knees as he sashayed elegantly into the chill without a flinch. The caftan billowed around his hips, ballooning backwards in the breeze with a regal sway. He shrugged the fabric from his shoulders, a static of erotically charged electricity making it cling to his skin as you watched it inch slowly down. When the teasing fold of material fell past his biceps, he whipped it off in one well-placed swoop of his hand before the lower hem had a chance to touch water. “Take it offfff...wooo-ooo!” Scott yelled animatedly, before Wanda splashed him in the face. “S-spring b-break!” he choked between splutters, fists raised to the sky. You couldn’t take your eyes off Loki, your chin dipping to your chest as he drew closer. He threw the chiffon cover-up high into the air with a flourish, where it spread like a wild, black bird; fluttering in a spasm before vanishing into nothing. Scott ooo’ed. At least it didn’t burst into flames this time, you thought sourly, remembering your red dress he reduced to tatters with his teeth and hands. He must save that for other peoples clothes. Splashes of seawater dripped from Loki’s lower stomach over his hips, the veins of his forearms standing erect as he rolled his shoulders with a casual sigh. Trying to keep your face neutral was a mammoth task, as your eyes crawled down his solid chest to his swaggering hips in those tight little trunks. You needed fucked. Badly. But not by- You sucked in your cheeks, biting hard to stop the thought in its tracks as he drew closer. Water stilled around Loki's naval as he came to a stop, forming a triangle with you and a grim-faced Rogers. “I’m sure what my colleague was trying to ineloquently convey, was that we were simply jesting.” Loki hummed politely, dipping his hands in the water and running them past his temples. Dry tendrils hung temptingly over the ropes of muscle by his collarbone, the rogue smattering of moisture on his cheekbones making him glisten in the sun. The god cocked an eyebrow, tilting his chin down and casting a teasing glance up at a pink-faced Steve. “You needn’t be so serious all the time, Rogers.” Loki smirked at the boss while you clenched desperately beneath the merciful cover of nature. “Do you concur, Agent?” he purred, winking imperceptibly as Steve cleared his throat. You had to admit, under the circumstances, it was the lesser of two evils. “Right. Yeah, sorry Steve” you sighed reluctantly. “I was just being…-” “-Facetious.” Loki finished. “She enjoys goading me, Rogers. It really is rather annoying. But she makes up for it in other ways, don’t you Agent?” he said innocently. There was an expectant pause. Steve's eyes narrowed, as you suddenly wished a freak riptide would carry you far away from these idiots. Loki cleared his throat, stifling a laugh. “Being a good student during my lessons, talking me up to shareholders...the beautiful Amanda, for instance and so on.” He waved a hand limply as he talked, the casual condescension making your stomach clench.

Fuck, he’s so fucking hot when he’s a dickhead; you chided. Why? Why, God, why am I like this?

Steve’s eyes pin-balled between the two of you. He folded his arms, the heated flush of his reddening skin looking comical beside Loki’s uniform creamy perfection. “I don’t want a sniff of trouble out of you for the rest of the day.” he said haughtily, narrowing his gaze towards Loki. “And I have a job for the two of you, since you’re pals again.” Lines appeared in Loki’s forehead as he sank chest deep into the water, dipping his head back. He emerged seconds later like a fucking tease; his hair sodden in a raven slick. Swathes of water dripped over his shoulders, rolling down the crevices between landscaped abs. His biceps bulged as he raised his arms, raking the wet mass of hair back from his angular face. “A job, on our day off. How thoughtful.” he sneered. Steve rolled his eyes, tutting. “We need more water from the snack-hut. It’s closed today but Tony had a copy of the keys. It’s about half a mile up the beach.” he said cheerfully. Sensing your reluctance, Rogers eyes grew bright with wholesome excitement. “And hey, y'all could even grab an ice cream for the walk back.” “Do you hear that, Agent?” Loki drawled sarcastically, mimicking Steve’s enthusiasm. “Ice-cream.” Steve flicked his hand, a set of keys landing in your palm which shot up from the water. He turned silently, beginning to wade over to the main group currently occupied with stopping Lang snorkelling with a straw up one nostril. You watched him depart with a fluttering in your stomach, feeling gentle ripples splash further up your waist as Loki approached like a panther stalking wounded prey. Like you knew he would. His hands slid around your hips beneath the water, pulling you gently back with an inaudible thump against his crotch. You could feel the heat of his breath against your wet hair, fat droplets of salt water dripping from his forehead to your cheek as he hovered. “Tell me to stop, Agent...” he murmured warily, fingertips tightening around your hipbones. There was something new in his voice. Thick, and hypnotic. Sweet, almost. Sincerity? You shook the thought away. Your eyes fluttered closed, marinating in the feeling of his solid chest pressed against your back. The moist sheen of your bodies sticking together reminded you of ill-advised, sweaty, animalistic, magnificent sex. And him. God, how you craved him. If he wasn't such a- Loki’s fingertips toyed with the waistband of your bottoms, grazing inside just enough to scratch the edges of your pubic hair. He moaned softly as your ass circled against his hips, firm biceps tensing around your shoulders like a venus flytrap as his deep baritone trembled. You could feel the delicate skin of his lips millimetres from your cheek, testing the precipice of your resistance. “Let’s get this over with.” you sighed defiantly, brushing his hands away. You raised a finger, jingling the keys to make your point. “Everyone’s thirsty.” A smile tugged at Loki's lips as he watched you rise from the water towards the shore, the curve of your ass making his neglected cock twitch within the tight swim shorts. “Some more than others, I suspect.” he said quietly, tilting his head.

To be continued in Hot & Bothered: Snack Shack Part of the Hostile F*cks Collection

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[spilladabalia]

Black Bordello - The Garden Of Earthly Delights

[alienelvisobsession]

Things Elvis and Prince Eric have in common

1. The obvious. They looked like this for a starter: gorgeous head of black hair, baby blue eyes, beautiful smile. They were sensitive, charming men who brightened up the day of whoever happened to be with them. Oh, and they were both royalty in a sense.

2. They both liked deep V on their shirt. Thanks @xanatenshi for pointing this out first.

3. And at least once in their life they wore a uniform with epaulettes that looked extremely good on them and it still makes girls swoon.

4. They both liked doggos, especially big ones.

5. Now follow me.

“The Little Mermaid” is a Scandinavian fairy tale about a redhead who falls desperately in love with a prince from another realm, but there are obstacles in front of her that are forcing the prince to marry another woman. Does it sound familiar?

Too bad it ended up differently for Elvis, like it did in his movies. Gotta find proof of you-know-who’s witching powers now… (I’m just joking, of course 😂)

6. And because Elvis wasn’t monogamous, there was another Scandinavian mermaid he kinda fell in love with, on the set of “Live a Little, Love a Little” in 1968. Thanks @moonchild-daniella for letting me know that Susan Henning is also half Swedish. Look how she’s trying to steal him from Ariel, or whoever the Tagesdame who kept him up all night was at the time.

This is the girl from the famous bordello scene from the Comeback Special, with whom Elvis had an affair, if you didn’t know.

BONUS: Prince Eric on pills 🫣😂

I’m seeing myself out. Bye.

[madhatterbri]

Bordello | Hangman A.P.

Summary: Hangman goes to see his favorite prostitute at his favorite brothel. @plentyoffandoms

Author's Note: Pure fiction. Enjoy. 18+. More of my Hangman Adam Page fics can found here.

@theworldofotps your man has a really happy ending now 😂😂

Hangman Adam Page pulled on his horse's reins. The horse stopped behind Madam Toni's Lovely Lasses. A simple building from the outside but a plethora of pleasures awaited inside. He could hear the lively activities inside once the back door opened. A man came out and grabbed the reins. Adam slid off the horse and tied a black bandana over his nose and mouth to cover his identity. Once he was ready, he stepped inside.

He was first hit with a cloud of cigarette smoke. The bandana was barely able to help him breathe. He walked down ahallway to a secret staircase. From the sound of it, Madam Toni must have allowed the party to start early this Friday evening. Men and women alike were laughing loudly and cheering. As much as he missed being able to mingle with his friends inside the saloon, he loved the special treatment he was offered here.

He made his way up the staircase to see the famous Madam Toni. She leaned against the railing watching the party from above. Her eyes locked on him.

"Welcome home, Hangman. I am sure she will be happy to see you." Adam simply nodded and continued towards her room.

You sighed while sitting at your desk staring at your reflection. Your hair hung loosely as you ran your fingers through the strands. Thoughts filled your mind as you thought of the Hangman. How you would give anything for him to be here tonight. The door to your bedroom suddenly opened. Only one man was allowed in your room. The Hangman.

The Hangman locked the door behind him. He placed his cowboy hat and vest on the table by the door. His light eyes never left you. His eyes lit up seeing the lace Victorian nightgown on you. The one he brought back for you.

"I am sorry I am not properly ready for you. I thought you would be going to be gone for much longer," you apologized. The Hangman took a liking to you the first night you met. You always tried to ensure he was happy with you.

"You are wearing what I got you," he pointed out. His cowboy boots echo in your room. Each thud of his boots makes your heart pound quicker. You watch his reflection in the mirror as he stands behind you. His hands move your hair back as his fingers caress your soft skin. You lean your cheeks into his touch.

"I've missed you," he confessed and lowered his bandana to around his neck. He buried his face in your hair leaving soft kisses. He took a step back as you stood up from your chair to face him. His eyes took in your figure through the sheer nightgown. The nightgown did not leave much to the imagination. "But what am I going to do with you?"

His lips once again found their way to your flesh. They hungrily kissed your shoulders before trailing to your neck. You gasped at his actions yet exposed more of your neck to him. Your dress bunched around your waist as he sat you on your desk. Your legs wrapped around his waist.

"Adam," you moaned feeling the friction of his rough pants between your legs. He smirked seeing you start to grind your hips into his pants. A series of pants and whimpers filled the room. Your eyes closed as he allowed you to make a mess of his pants. He removed your dress leaving you naked before his hungry eyes.

"Hands behind your back, darling," he ordered. You followed his instructions. He untied the bandana from around his neck and walked to your side. The sudden loss of friction left you a longing mess. He tied your wrists together. He pulled against the bandana ensuring you couldn't escape. Your eyes traveled to his pants.

"Adam, I, your pants," you blushed seeing the stain from you on them. He didn't bother looking at them. Your lewd actions already causing his pants to feel a little too tight. He used your distraction for his gain.

The Hangman dropped to his knees and moved your legs over his shoulders. He leaned down and slowly licked your slit from bottom to top. The tip of his tongue teasing your clit. You brought your head back and balled your fists. Your nails pressed into the palms of your hands. He repeated his action several times reveling in your anguish. His eyes met yours once more as if planning his next mode of attack.

In the blink of an eye, his thumb rubbed against your bundle of nerves. Oh, you breathed as his rough, calloused finger provided the friction you missed once more. You moved your hips towards his touch. He slid his finger inside of you and curled up. Your juices soaking his finger.

"Adam," you whimpered while struggling against your binds. He worked you up adding more fingers and using various speeds to make you melt for him and you did. A thin layer of sweat covered your face. Your skin was flushed from his work on your body and all you could do was take it. "I need you,"

He stopped upon hearing your admission. People often needed his services but you were different. Hearing that you needed him made him almost feral. He bit back a curse and removed his fingers from inside of you. The lewd sound of his fingers expelling from your wetness caused you to blush further. This man could absolutely ruin you.

He stood up and lowered his pants. He didn't bother removing his shirt. More battle scars marred his chest and back. The Hangman never wanted you to worry about him. He positioned your legs around his waist and entered you slowly. The way your body gripped him was almost like it was trying to milk him. He took several deep breaths to steady himself before gripping the back of your knees. He used them as leverage as he started to pick up his rhythm. The desk smacked against the wall with each thrust.

"S-so cl-close," you stuttered. You weren't sure if it was from him or if your mind was lost in pleasure. He continued his movements enjoying seeing you reaching your high. Your toes curled and with one last scream of his name, you came undone. The Hangman didn't last much longer before finishing inside of you. He thrusted inside of you a few more times before pulling out. He tucked himself back in his pants.

"You are going to be the death of me," he promised and kissed your shoulder. Adam reached around and untied the bandana. You moved your hands in front of you and moved them in circles to alleviate the pain in your wrists. He grabbed them and placed soft kisses on them. "Always so good for me. My little flower,"

Your heart swelled in pride at his compliment. Once he was done kissing you he picked you up bridal style from the desk and placed you on your bed. He moved a blanket over you to cover your body. Adam walked to the other side and lay next to you. His arms wrapped around your frame and pulled you close to him. You stared at his chest while he rubbed your forehead and hair. Every so often he would place kisses on your face. Your eyes felt heavy and soon you fell into a dream-filled sleep.

[smallgodseries]

[image description: A stunning Black woman with a large afro, a short red dress, retro wedge heels, a tattooed on her right shoulder and a pair of earrings in the shape of a rifle sight. Other sights appear all around her as she kneels in front of the Earth, holding a smoking pistol with a ridiculously long barrel. Text reads, “57, Nefertiti Smith, Travel Agent .006 ~ The Small God of Seeing the Sights”]

• • • • • •

Velvet curtains cover the windows.  Velvet tapestries drape the walls. The overall result is like walking into a bordello, or the heart of a teddy bear the size of a Titan.  It’s easy enough to imagine this opulent space, dripping as it is with crystal chandeliers and golden gilt, as a playground for children too large to be contained by any structure sized for humanoid bipeds.

The idea that all intelligent life must follow the basic blueprint of Earth is quaint and so outdated as to have become antiquated, and most people with any sense of adventure have long since abandoned it.  Those who haven’t are likely to find themselves swallowed by the sapient slimes of Rigel IV, who don’t much care for being so casually dismissed.  Have your right to sapience challenged one time too many, learn the delights of human flesh, as Professor Winchell always used to say.  Or not.  Some species never turn to man-eating, and choose instead to block humanity’s expansions into greater space.  They have no time for small-minded bigots, they say, and no one who’s met many humans can really argue with them.

But people who’ve me the right humans can sometimes make a decent case for allowing them to expand.

She steps into the club like she owns the place, like the party has been waiting for her arrival before truly getting started.  She doesn’t walk; she dances, every step a perfect extension of the one before.  Her dress is a shade of red subtly different from the curtains.  It should clash.  Instead, it makes her look all the more valuable, against a backdrop of suddenly cheapened velvet.  Her heels are tall; so is her hair.  She is the best of what humanity has to offer, and if far too few of her admirers understand her divinity, that’s fine.  She knows she’s a goddess.  She’s the only one who matters here.

Belly up to the bar, Nefertiti Smith flags down a server, a smile on her gilded lips.  “Tell Dave I’m here,” she instructs.

There’s always a Dave.  Boston to Betelgeuse, there’s always a Dave.  And he always knows her, and he’s always happy when she arrives.

Tourists are good for business, after all.

• • • • • •

Artist Lee Moyer (Trident of Aurelia, 13th Age) and author Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children, October Daye & InCryptid series) sincerely appreciate you, whether or not you're a Dave.

[chillimonia]

Bordello black and white

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/29/2023

my ENTIRE SUMMER has been either worrying about moving or actually moving. ALL OF IT. however an incredibly hot butch milf on the gay community bulletin board/dating app lex has finally answered my piteous call for gun safety classes with an invitation to her private range. unfortunately she is a landlord who owns a VERY large apartment complex. houston is a land of contrasts

listening

more joywave! one of my favorite bands bc they are best listened to in full album format, and i did a fuck of a lot of driving this weekend. little lies you’re told has an opening like a big machine warming up while you are in a control room way high up on a gantry somewhere. spotify

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reading (2x bonus round)

All The Trimmings by Tesni Morgan (published 2001 in the UK) is a gift from @believerindaydreams. it is “erotic fiction written by women for women” (debatable) and “the publishers recommend that this book should be sold only to adults”. also, “Black Lace novels contain sexual fantasies. In real life, make sure you practise safe sex.” idk i’ve ever seen that kind of notation on an american novel before? fascinating precursor to the saccharine little “stay safe kids” ao3 authors notes

i do find the premise genuinely fun and compelling— two divorced milfs opening a hotel/bordello with historically themed rooms. i have had to look up a lot of british purple prose and i refuse to believe anyone says “rogering” in real life.

im being edged with glimmerings of bisexuality. every time one of the milfs gets turned on and goes out roaming to distract herself from being turned on, i go “oh?” like at a pokemon go egg, but so far all the dalliances and encounters have been dudes.

had a very strange experience with cormac mccarthy's blood meridian. i don’t normally interrogate whether or not i am the intended audience for a work except when it’s literally made for children, bc i as a modern bisexual woman am the intended audience for vanishingly few works. for example, many entire genres (westerns) are very challenging to enjoy.

a western has never made me go "wait so why DO i like westerns at all" so hard. like, what AM i doing here in this genre that is often deeply fucking uncomfortable to consume as a woman, and where the most foundational american and european works of the genre often uncritically embrace the worst parts of the american mythos in the most violent way possible? i do believe critics when they say mccarthy is not embracing violence for the sake of, and in fact has something to say with his revisionist western, but my god is it hard to wade through. anyway, dad media will not fuck me and i still have only a tenuous grasp on why i try so hard to glean enjoyment from it.

i know what mccarthy is trying to do and the overall tone of “weird old maybe-uncle” spinning a yarn to a big group of you and your cousins around a fire somewhere is pretty effective. unfortunately I have less tolerance for mccarthy’s style now than when I read The Road thirteen years ago in high school. i was immediately super invested in The Road’s single dad and how he and his kid were surviving, which does not need a lot of interiority.

blood meridian also has very little interiority. the first five chapters are a teen falling in and out of various fights. i was not, and am still not invested. if im reading A Man Goes On A Journey western (as opposed to A Stranger Comes to Town western) i would like to know two or three things about the man, especially if it seems to be angling at a bildungsroman. i don't typically care for third-person objective narration when it is this closely focused on one guy, and i really don't care for loving descriptions of maggots. comforting to know a lot of critics were also squicked out by this book. so it goes.

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watching

finished watching s1 of spy x family! a Legally Not West German spy in Legally Not East Berlin has to go into deep cover and pose as a family man in order to gain access to Legally Not Erich Honecker, because the only social events Legally Not Erich Honecker goes to are the ones at his son's elite prep school.

this man FLINGS himself into being the absolute best husband and father possible. for the mission, of course.

i found the first few episodes the best, which is generally the opposite of my normal anime experience. i think it does a really good job of balancing high-octane spy hijinks and chases and explosions with very domestic concerns (he PROPOSES. with a THE RING OFF A HAND GRENADE. AFTER THROWING IT), and once you're really hooked on these characters it turns into a bit of a curtainfic. curtainanime? i had fun with all of it and anxiously await season two, but the actual applied spycraft does drop off significantly as the series goes on.

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playing

we're going to continue with out of context genshin screencaps for the duration. the watery land of fontaine has a neat smorgsabord of visual style-- freshwater but also saltwater but also the aquarium section at petsmart.

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making

unpacking mostly. acquired this coffee table and its mother. needs a very deep cleaning and some touchups but is intact. the individual tables are a bit large for like individual party drinks tables but all six together are QUITE large. four tigether would be a comfortable coffee table size for many apartments imo but! bc everything truly is bigger in Texas including my apartment it works for right now. for the first time in my life i am considering a sectional sofa bc the living/dining room is that dang big.