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couldawouldashoulda50 · 6 months

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Toi et Moi

A/N - Happy Birthday yesterday @leafs-lover - this is my fic for your birthday celebration. It’s waaaay longer than I had planned (11+k words) but I wanted to try and get some previous ideas pulled together into one fic. This still falls under William Nylander and the reader who is a global super-star in her own right.

I’m sorry - I can only write about Willy Styles for now but I’m starting to have some thirsty thoughts about a handful of other players; I plan to keep broadening my horizons 🙂

I hope you like this regardless.

Warnings: 18+ content, general smut (p in v, oral m receiving), swearing, pregnant reader feeling insecure, discussions of jealousy

November, 2023 - Stockholm

“Fuck….William…” you pant. “Oh…my…god…. – oh no…shit - what time is it?”

“We’re good - we got time” William grunts as he continues to buck his hips, pounding his cock deep into you. “Fuck Y/N….you feel too fuckin’ good”.

You and William finally had a couple of hours to spend alone together after days of him being in the spotlight during the Leafs visit to Stockholm for the NHL Global Series. With the first game against Detroit behind them, William had once again been thrust into the eye of the media hurricane that ensued after his 3 point showing. His goal and two assists helped the Leafs win a come from behind game which only helped to bolster the overall frenzy over William’s (and the other Swedish members from the 4 teams) return to Sweden.

While William, the team, and the WAGs that came along on the trip stayed at a luxury hotel in the city, you opted to stay at the apartment where you and William now consider “home-base” during the off-season; it was the safest bet for you to remain away from the cameras that were all but guaranteed to be following William this week. The apartment is, by far, one of the happiest places on earth for you and you had been looking forward to coming back to it, albeit a a different time of year. The times that William and you have spent together in this space are nothing short of perfection and the present moment, with William underneath you, was certainly no exception.

William’s hands move skilfully around your body as your hips rock back and forth, grinding and forcing his cock deeply inside of you. You catch William watching you; his expression is a mix of deep desire and ultimate pleasure and he smiles at you when your eyes lock on each other.

“Fuck, William….” you sigh as the corners of your lips form a tiny smirk, followed by a full grin. Your mouth drops open as the tip of his cock, coupled with his thick girth, hits the perfect spot while stretching you just right; your walls respond by gripping his cock even tighter. You can feel a fresh release of slickness seep from your core and a distinct groan comes from William as thrusts become faster and harder.

He sits up and kisses you madly; in doing so, you slide further down taking his entire length inside of you. A jolt of pleasure shoots up through your body and you can’t help but to tightly grab a fistful of William’s hair as you bury your face in the crook of his neck. It feels like you - your whole body is dangling from a cliff and you grasp at his body like he’s your only saviour.

What William doesn’t say with words during these moments, he more than makes up for it with a symphony of the most sensual and erotic sounds. Normally every grunt, moan and growl that’s forced through his gritted teeth shows you what you do to him and you, in turn, close your eyes and allow yourself to completely melt into him.

In this moment however, thoughts in your mind begin to converge between feeling the ultimate pleasure with the love of your life and uncertainty that swirls in your mind with William’s new heights with his celebrity.

You desperately try to stay in the moment with William as he sucks on your earlobe, sending another high-voltage shock through your body.

You press your forehead against his jawline and graze your lips against the base of his muscular neck, mouthing the words “I love you” over and over against his skin. You taste the delicious salt of his skin as you leave open mouthed kisses along his shoulder blades and over his collar bone.

William’s strong arms have you fully enveloped, pulling you into him even closer, he pumps his cock upwards into you. The slapping sound of William driving into you grows even louder, echoing alongside your strained cries throughout the entire apartment. Your ass, tits and thighs give way to the ripple effect of each powerful thrust; your body’s reflection in a nearby full length mirror is on full display and it catches William’s gaze. He watches you in the mirror as you ride and grind his cock with such fervent passion that he loses complete control and erupts deep within you, grunting and groaning with each twitch from the after effects of his orgasm. He holds you in place for a moment, and once his lips find yours again, he kisses you deeply, releasing a long moan into your mouth as his hands glide effortlessly over your glistening skin.

“Shit, I came before you didn’t I?” he said, huffing breathlessly, his lips still pressed against yours. His hands move up to your face, brushing some of your sweaty tendrils away from your face.

He looks at you and smiles; his thumbs lightly stroke the delicate skin on either side of your mouth.

“You’re so fucking unbelievably beautiful…”

You bashfully smile, looking down from his gaze…your eyes landing on the shine of his thick chain around his broad neck. “So are you,” you said softly.

You can feel William’s cock softening, still inside of you. His seed begins to drip from your entrance but he remains holding you in place on top of his lap.

“You ok? I know we don’t have a ton of time right now to take care of you… but you know I’ll make this up to you, right?” William said gently.

“Mmmm-hmmm…you know you give me multiple orgasms regularly…I think I can let this one go” you said jokingly, followed by a soft kiss on his mouth.

“But are you doing ok? I know been a fucking circus since I got here…and I know I’m kind of being pulled in all different directions - ”

“William” you gently interrupt him, cupping his face and smiling. “This is such a huge moment for you…for every Swede on all the teams. I’m just so fucking proud of you, I could almost burst. And to watch your family get to see what you do…live…at home in Sweden - it’s fucking amazing. This is a once in a lifetime thing, and I want you to take in as much as you can. Trust me, I’ve loved watching every single moment of what’s happened here.”

William kisses you again, and helps you slide off his lap, murmuring words of love to you. He helps you onto your side, his arms wrap around you and you nestle your face into his chest.

“I sort of wish our relationship was more out in the open now though - I feel bad that you’re always sort of in the background and not out taking pictures with me” William confessed.

Since you and William officially began dating, both of your ultra-private tendencies kicked into high gear. It’s not always been easy; when William is asked about any part of his personal life, he averts spilling any details except for a few crumbs about Pablo and Banksy, friends and family. You have done the same during interviews and have become a master at giving answers with no real details associated with them. It’s worked well for the most part, allowing your relationship to flourish without being under a microscope. You were able to date, move in together, become engaged, get pregnant and married without a whiff to anyone that didn’t respect your right to privacy. Up to this point, neither of you seemed to be in a rush to make your joint lives public; you both lived by the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and it has led to a happy and harmonious life so far.

Until now, that is.

Prior to arriving in Sweden, you thought long and hard about remaining in the background during the week, despite being involved in some of the more publicized events that would occur during the week. You were one of the primary investors in the “Börje” docuseries that was premiering early in the week, however, you opted to be dropped off at the back entrance of the theatre, while William, his teammates and his family took pictures together in the front. It was during these photo ops that William began to feel very strongly that no matter the recourse with the media and the public, he wanted you next to him.

You had also begun to wish you hadn’t covered-up and protected your relationship as much as you had now. One of the biggest moments of his life, and you, his wife, pregnant with your first child, was nowhere to be seen, at least not in the pictures. You had desperately wanted the attention to remain on the teams at the Global Series, but it now seemed with the sacrifice of your own making, it appeared like you did not exist in his life at all. You had always thought it was not the “outside world’s” business to know about the details of your personal life but now, to be able to stand with William as part of his world, meant more than keeping everything under wraps.

The nights were even lonelier, leaving William at the hotel and you returning to the apartment without him. While you were exhausted most of the time, too many thoughts derived from some of your deepest insecurities started to bounce around in your mind, keeping you awake for far too long.

The pregnancy lately only exacerbated those insecurities. Prior to leaving for Sweden, you had driven William to one of his last practices and hung out with some of the staff while the team was on the ice.

While at the rink, you relaxed as you waited leaning back in your chair with your feet up on another, Mitch came into the lounge afterward bellowing a “whoa! Big Momma’s in the house! Tone - hey - …c’mere for a sec.”

Auston enters the room giving you his normal shit-eating grin.

“Doesn’t she look bigger than yesterday?”

You look at Mitch, your mouth slightly agape, trying to process what in the tom-fuck he’s got going on in his brain, only able to shake your head at the comment.

Auston tries to stifle a chuckle and turns to Mitch “She looks like she’s gonna fuckin kick your ass dude”.

“What? Well - maybe not bigger…more like thicker…”

Mitch’s comment wouldn’t have bothered you so much if, let’s say, you hadn’t sat in the corner of your massive walk-in closet, hating how you looked in every single item of clothing (that still fit) the night before.

“That’s essentially the same thing as being bigger - Jesus Mitch” you chuckle.

“You still look good though….look, I was just saying the baby’s getting bigger…” Mitch trails off, trying not to sound too defensive.

You get up from the chair. “Awh, Mitchy…it’s all good. Big Momma still loves you” you said, patting him on the shoulder before walking out of the room. You overhear Auston chuckling at Mitch saying “you’re such an idiot”.

You see Max (Domi) and give him a quick hug before heading into the washroom for some solitude. It was these little moments in time - the little innocuous comments that weren't meant to be hurtful but just came out wrong - that badly skewed your perception of yourself when you allowed them to. Being a performer, with all of its perks - it had dented your self-esteem in ways that you yourself are still trying to comprehend, even after all of these years.

Now that you are in Sweden, you’re acutely aware that there are an impossible number of beautiful women (yes - a Shoresey reference) just in Stockholm alone, and have yourself convinced that 99.9% of them want your husband. The way that your mind played out the scenario is that William might want a little taste on the side too.

“Y/N? Did I lose you or something” William chuckles.

You look up at him and all of his handsome features and suddenly, you feel a pin-prick feeling from your eyes as a tear threatens to fall from the corner.

You hesitated saying anything for a few moments but quickly realized your emotions were getting the better of you. “Fuck…we don’t have time for this” you quietly said, trying to discreetly wipe your eyes.

“It’s ok - we’ve got time…out with it, what’s going on?”

You mentally joke that William has said ‘we got time’ already when he was balls deep in you so your radar is now up…he probably has no idea at all.

You paused a bit longer, gathering your thoughts together.

“I don’t know…I’ve got all of this stupid shit running through my head lately. I’m trying to get a hold of it but it’s really kind of fucking with me”.

You try and not let out a sob and try to stop the tears.

“Try not to judge me for thinking this….every time that I see a beautiful girl within 100 feet of you, I think you’re going to ditch me and run off with her….and given we're here, in the fucking land of the beautiful people…I just can’t get a grip….it’s driving me mental…”, you said, a tiny smile forms through your tears.

William chuckled lightly.

“Please don’t get me wrong - I do love to see all the attention, all the recognition - all the outpouring of love for you this week. All those times your character was completely ripped apart in the media coming out of Toronto…it made my blood boil. I always thought ‘if those people only knew…if they could really see you - how gifted of a player you are, how hard you work, and how good of a person you are…they’d just shut the fuck up’. But now….I don’t know…I guess now that everyone else has caught up to what your people already knew…and I hate myself a little for saying this but everything seems like it’s completely different now. I’m feeling so uneasy about all of this…like maybe you’re going to want to be single again…maybe go on a bit of a sex bender, have a different taste of the week…something like that.”

As long as William had known you, he had always been perplexed about the level of self-doubt you had, but seldom revealed. He could never quite figure out where it all stemmed from. You were exceptionally talented, hugely successful, extremely intelligent, and had a heart as deep as an ocean. You were amazing to your family and friends. William often mused that he has never been loved so passionately by a partner, nor had someone that was so openly devoted to him.

All of this, and you were a total knock-out; an absolutely stunning beauty. William would sometimes lie there quietly as you slept and just watch you breathe. He tried not to disturb you but as always, he would give into the urge to glide his hand over and around your stomach; his fingers lightly and slowly trailing past your belly-button, and ever so delicately, his middle finger would touch the top of your slit. His tongue would create a glossy trail along the curve of your breast and would move eagerly to your pointed nipple, lapping and swirling around the peak until he heard the moans escape from your mouth.

It’s through these moments, touching you - the constant urge of knowing he had to have you, when William hoped you could feel how deep his love for you is. Spending countless hours, with him talking into your forehead and you into his chest (simply because neither of you were willing to break free from your embrace) he felt you letting your guard down and any doubts kicking around in your head would dissolve.

Tears were beginning to fall steadily, saturating William’s chest. You hated these moments when you were feeling so vulnerable, especially about William.

You continued, speaking softly. “It’s all the changes that are going to happen once Little One arrives. Just picture it…after the baby’s born….how are you going to feel when you get home from a long road trip and I’m a grumpy mess and the baby’s crying and the dogs are barking, and there’s no food in the house and there’s just shit…everywhere. This is what greets you when you walk in? What happens if this…your new home life…drives you to feeling like you want to get out…escape back to your single life…and the first thing you end up doing is diving between some model’s thighs who slipped into your DM’s…”, you lament.

You finally say “It’s just…with all of this" rubbing the roundness of your belly, “I just don't want to do any of this without you…and I’m having trouble shaking these thoughts,” your voice sounding small, filled with anguish.

William pulled you in even closer, your head rising and falling on his chest with each breath he took. The wetness from your tears had pooled, trapped between your cheek and William’s chest. You lift your head, wiping his chest off with your hand and softly pressed kisses along his skin before burying your face back into his body.

“Look Y/N, I get it. I totally do. I maybe never said it but I sometimes feel sorta the same thing. Like, when we were at Lollapalooza, you were up there on stage with all these rock star guys just killin’ it. I could see the way the guys looked at you, like they were in awe of you. Like they worshipped you in a way. I admit it, I got jealous. Like really fucking jealous. I didn’t know the bands or the songs - fuck, even Linus and Sandy were singing along - I guess I felt like a bit of an idiot. Like maybe you deserved a lot better than me”. William plants a long kiss on the top of your head.

William continued; “I know this stuff scares you and you’re spinning all of these worst case scenarios…do you really believe I’m just going to walk away from you, from our baby, from this life just to fuck other pretty girls? And I know you’re going to say that it happens all the time…and yeah, it does. But there’s also couples that are perfect for one another. I think that’s you and me.”

William lifts your left hand so it’s within your view. He thumbs your engagement ring that is nestled alongside your wedding band.

“Toi et Moi…” William said, bringing your hand to his lips. The duality of the reference makes your heart melt; for you, it not only alludes to the two-stone design of the ring, but the memory those three words hold.

*flashback to July, 2022*

William had first seen the Toi et Moi design vacationing with you and his family in Saint Tropez in the off-season the year prior. The trip itself was one of the gifts you have given him for his 26th birthday; a trip anywhere he wanted with whomever he wanted. Once the shock of your generous gift wore off, he barely needed to even think about it; William chose the French Riviera with the most important people in his life.

A few days into the vacation, parents Camilla and Michael departed for a day alone at the beach, followed by a trip to the open air market. William and Alex had ventured into town while you and the sister contingent of his family stayed back at your villa, relaxing in the sun by the pool.

The brothers meandered through the streets amongst the many tourists that flocked to the stunning French coastline during the summer. The trip had been the perfect antidote for Alex; he had recently broken up with his girlfriend and had been testy and grouchy ever since. Alex was in his element now, being surrounded by beautiful girls in short summer dresses, and he embraced his singledom wholeheartedly. William ribbed his brother incessantly as Alex was constantly swivelling his head around to survey each girl as they passed by. They continued on to the shops and cafes that dotted the waterfront, chatting about nothing but laughing at everything.

They stopped at Cafe de Paris which had a street level patio with an amazing view of the port. The deep blue sky was completely cloudless and save for all the yachts in the harbour, it was hard to distinguish where the water ended and the sky began.

Once seated under the outdoor canopy, Alex removes his sunglasses and soaks in the view.

“Fuuuuuck….look at this. This…is pretty incredible, no?”

“Yeah, this whole trip has been amazing. Y/N was a little nervous about going on her first Nylander family vacation but I think it’s going pretty good”, William said while taking in the view.

“I still can’t believe she gave you a trip…a trip for your entire family…just for your birthday. Fuck dude…it’s not even a ‘big’ birthday”, Alex teases. “Man, I don’t know what you must do to her….”

William laughs his trademark laugh.

“Scratch that. I know what you do to her…I’ve heard you two going at it more than once”, Alex said, dripping with sarcasm and rolling his eyes.

“Bit bitter, eh?” William chuckles at his brother’s sour expression.

“Fuck, c’mon man….” Alex said, leaning back in his seat. “It’s hard not to be a little envious….your girlfriend - she’s famous as fuck, stunning as fuck, rich as fuck. You’re pretty fucking greedy….you know that?” Alex backhands William’s upper arm.

William laughs even harder.

“She’s also kind as fuck, funny as fuck, talented as fuck, and smart as fuck too…she picked me after all. It’s the Nylander charm….”, William goads him on, as he backhands Alex’s arm in return. “Maybe you should try it some time….”

“Low blow fucker… I’ve heard enough out of you” Alex deadpans, followed by a smirk.

The banter dissipates as they both peruse the drink menu.

“Ohhhhh yeah….Porn Star Martini” William chuckles.

“Yeah…it figures you’d go for that, pornstar…seems fitting” Alex said sardonically, his lips curling into a smile afterward.

“You might want to think about ordering a couple - maybe you need to up your game a little with the laaa-dies”, William said, tongue in cheek.

“Oh my God William - fuuuuuck off….” Alex said, shaking his head.

The server arrives at their table and William orders the drinks for both he and Alex. The men had decided on a lunch full of rich French fare; Baked Mussels, Croque-Monsieur and Beef Tartar.

The Martinis are going down pretty easy so Alex tells the server to keep them coming. They have nowhere specific to be, at least not for the next few hours, so they settle in for a relaxed afternoon. The conversation is typical; they trade notes on their sister’s boyfriends (potential or otherwise), gossip about mutual friends and their ongoing sagas, family drama, and about what the next hockey season may bring. They continue to people-watch - mostly girls (William’s not really looking - not that much anyway - just helping his brother out) that are out shopping or out sunbathing on the yachts that are moored at the marina.

After lunch and a few too many beverages, Alex and William decide to move on, needing a walk to sober them up a little. They take their time strolling along Rue François Sibilli and window-shop the luxury boutiques to see if there’s anything intriguing to buy.

As they continue to wind their way along the narrow streets, William’s phone buzzes with a notification - a text from his sister, Stephanie. A picture of you and William’s parents appears, standing around the island of the gourmet kitchen in the villa. You and Michael appear to be prepping food, and Camilla is standing and watching; all of you seem to be mid-laugh. There are half-full wine glasses near each of you.

William is entranced by the photo, his heart feels like it could burst with happiness.

William turns to Alex and shows Alex the picture that Stephanie sent. Alex smiles faintly saying “Awh…great picture”. Alex leans in closer and reads Stephanie’s text [in Swedish] “I hope you marry her so we can keep her. Or we can just vote Alex off the island and she take his spot”

“Real fucking nice - she’s getting chucked in the pool for that one”, Alex’s slight irritation showing. William had missed seeing the text, and giggled once he read it. He felt a little bad for Alex, but he laughed at the expression on his face anyway.

“I was going to do this after we all got home after our trips but…I think I want to get Y/N something now from the family to say thank-you to her”.

“Yeah - good idea…..what would she be into - what do you think she’d like?” Alex asked.

“That’s the problem. I could show up with an old t-shirt of mine wrapped in a paper bag and she’d be over the moon….”, William said. “Well, maybe not that as a thank you for spending thousands of dollars on our family but you know what I mean…she’s seriously like that though”, William confided. “I don’t know…I want to get her something that’s really special…something that will always make her remember her first vacation with me…with all of us”.

“Ha - you are so fucking whipped….” Alex said jokingly as William shot him a warning glance

Alex put up his hands in defence “Don’t get all pissy - I was going to say that she really is awesome...Mom, Dad, the rest of the family - including me…before I get voted off, that is - she seems to fit right in. You’re lucky….considering what everyone thought about my last girlfriend, I can tell you that it REALLY fucking sucks to have Mom and Dad disapprove, let alone anyone else in the family.”

Alex nods in the direction of a jewellery store. “Get her some jewellery. Fuck, you cannot go wrong with that”, Alex said.

They enter the small but elegant boutique, and are greeted by a stylish and attractive young woman. Her smile widens at the gorgeous Swedes, unintentionally blushing when they return the smile.

In a demure voice, with a hint of seduction and a distinct French accent, she asks if the men speak English. They respond yes, and just to catch her attention, Alex adds “Oui” after he responds. It was a small gesture but it worked…Alex had no trouble getting her to focus on him. Alex sees from her name tag that her name is Eloise and commits it to his memory.

“What can I help the gentlemen with today?” Eloise asks sweetly.

“Bonjour, Eloise…that’s such a beautiful name” Alex said, appearing more smitten by the second. “My - my brother’s looking for a gift for his girlfriend”.

Eloise looks at William, and a wide smile appears on her face “You are brothers - ah oui, I can see it now!” she giggles.

The group chuckles and Eloise smiles at Alex “Je m’excuse…excuse me - un moment” she turns as she heads through a door leading into the backroom of the store. The brothers begin to look at the brilliant pieces though the display cases while they hear Eloise faintly talking to someone else in French.

Eloise reappears with another woman, more mature in years than Eloise but equally as beautiful. Eloise introduces the other associate as Juliette and explains Juliette will be assisting William, while Eloise helps Alex. It was obvious it was a ploy for Eloise’s attention to remain solely on Alex, and Alex did not mind one bit.

Juliette motions for William to take a seat in one of the plush chairs in front of a glass display case. She introduces herself and William does the same. The two make small talk which flows easily. Eventually the pair shoot a glance toward Eloise and Alex and jointly chuckle. On the surface, Alex and Eloise appeared to just be looking at different selections of jewellery but their body language told a completely different story. You could see the temperature rising between them every time they shared a mere glance at one another.

Juliette turns back to William and begins to ask questions about what he’s looking for.

“Eloise tells me you are looking for a gift for your girlfriend…how very lovely,” Juliette gently said, smiling. “Is it a gift for a special occasion? Birthday? Anniversaire - oh, quel est le mot…your Anniversary?”

“It’s meant to be a thank you from me and my family. She gave us all a trip here to Saint Tropez and I wanted to give her something special to show how much this meant to me…and well, to my family too.” William explains.

“Mon Dieu, that’s wonderful…” Juliette smiled brightly. “Bien sur, of course…I will help you choose something perfect for your love. Can you tell me a little more about what she might like? Diamonds or Gemstones? Colour of Gold? Things like that.”

“I’m actually more into jewellery than she is, I think. I’m really into David Yurman and have been since my Mom gave my brother and I these chains when we were little. So - um, I’m a little more flashy when it comes to jewellery than her” William smiles. “When I have seen her wear something for a long period of time, it’s mostly because it has a sentimental meaning behind it.”

“Have you been together for a long time?” Juliette asks.

William thinks for a moment. “Well, we’ve really only been an ‘official’ couple since last fall, but we’ve known each other since 2016. It took us a really, really long time to finally be able to be together. It’s a long story.” William said with a grin. “She’s a pretty amazing girl”.

Juliette smiles at William. She can hear it in his voice that he is very much in love.

“I’m so happy to hear that…I can hear how much you care for her.” Juliette said warmly.

William glances at Eloise and Alex for a moment and laughs to himself at the sight of them; flirting is in full swing between the two with doe eyes being exchanged. He thinks that’s exactly how you and him look at each other, with the big difference being that he wants you for his forever, not for just a “perfect for right now”.

Having already discussed a budget (which William wasn’t interested in setting any kind of dollar limit), Juliette begins to bring pieces from various collections for William to view. She lays the velvet boards out in front of him and smiles to herself when she sees his eyes grow wide and bright at the options presented.

“Oh…wow…this one is interesting. There’s something really unique about it…” William’s eyes dance as he looks intently at the details of the diamond necklace laid before him.

“Ah oui - yes, that necklace is a very special piece and is part of the ‘Toi et Moi’ collection, meaning ‘You and Me’ en anglais..in English. The design has historical importance, especially here in France. In the 18th century, Napoleon presented Josephine with the very first ‘Toi et Moi’ ring, which we have in various styles in another case over there. As with this necklace, two lovers are represented by each diamond, and the design, the stones being set together as they are here, represents the two loves meeting,” Juliette explains. “Toi et Moi - You and Me….it’s very romantic, no?”

“It’s perfect” William said, running his fingers over the white gold setting and along each of the diamonds. “I know she’ll love it….the history of it even….she’s even fluent in French, so the whole France/Napoleon connection is awesome.”

“Oh, ma coeur, a girl after my own heart…that is lovely! A very strong and loving connection, that is what I see you two have, so this necklace is the essence of you both.”

Juliette couldn’t help it but William had already endeared himself to her. She could feel his utter devotion to you, and it resonated with Juliette deeply. She had found the very same thing with her late husband and to see William speak about you so adoringly, her heart felt full knowing that kind of pure love still existed.

“I will definitely take the necklace, and I see there’s a bracelet too….I’d like both please.”

William looked toward the other display case. “Can you show me a Toi et Moi ring?” he asked.

William's heart momentarily raced at the thought of looking at a ring for you, let alone an engagement ring…although, he knew it wasn’t the right time to propose to you, not just yet. It wasn’t because he was unsure about wanting to be with you; he wanted the two of you to experience more of day to day life together and hopefully move in together for the coming season.

Juliette brought a small selection of the rings to William and explained how the rings could be completely customized.

Eloise looked over at Juliette as she handed one of the rings to William to inspect.

“Ohhh! Alex…ton frѐre…is he looking at engagement rings?” Eloise gasped lightly with a wide grin.

Alex’s eyes darted toward William as he stood there holding the ring between his thumb and index finger.

“William…wait, are you serious?” Alex said, his serious tone apparent.

“Don’t freak out, I was just looking. The design of the ring is crazy…it’s perfect. After everything we went through, I don’t think there’s any other ring that comes close to actually being ‘us’... this one definitely does. When it’s time, I think this is what I want to give to her”,

“Phew…ok. Yeah - it’s really beautiful.” Alex looks back towards Eloise, relief washing over his face. Eloise giggles at Alex’s expression and they resume with their flirtations which are more apparent now.

Juliette and William chat while she places the pieces in the individual velvet boxes which William requested. The bracelet, he decides, will be from the family but the necklace, he’s planning on giving that to you separately when you’re alone later on that evening. He’s fairly certain that it’s all you’ll be wearing once he places it around your neck, and he can feel himself harden slightly with the thought.

Once he settles the invoice, William and Juliette exchange a quick embrace and warmly bid their thank you’s and goodbyes. Juliette quietly reminded William that if you and he ever find themselves back in Saint Tropez next summer to come and visit her, she would be so thrilled to meet you.

Alex, having already snagged Eloise’s number, flashes her a brilliant smile and quietly said “Call you later” followed by a wink. Eloise’s cheeks are flushed with a red hue - a knowing smile formed on her lips, followed by “à bientôt, Alex”.

The men departed the store, both grinning like two idiots, totally in love - or lust depending on the brother. If they had managed to sober up at all after lunch, you couldn’t really tell at this point…both seemed to be almost reeling, beaming with their own individual images in their minds of what the coming evening might hold.

William takes in some of the scenery on the way back to Villa Margarido. The cab ride thankfully is quick as a nervous-excitement begins to build in William’s stomach. He has given you gifts before, but this set - these specific pieces - mean something so much more. It’s undeniable now, he knows what he wants his future with you to look like.

The driver was pleasant and friendly, and given the kind of afternoon the brothers had, they tipped him generously - excessively even. The driver thanked them profusely, secretly hoping to have them as repeat clients. William and Alex’s mood continued to elevate as they breezed through the glass front entrance doors, stopping only for William to tuck his purchases away, and they made their way towards the lively conversations taking place on the large poolside terrace.

Despite the dinner hour approaching, the hot July sun still hangs in the cloudless, azure skies and is nowhere close to setting. Light permeates every square inch of one of the spacious, white living rooms embellished with red accents throughout, which bordered the expansive and modern kitchen. The private chef that was included for the duration of the week, Marco, greets Alex and William with fist bumps and animated repartee. You had all established with Marco when you arrived that you wanted him to feel like an extended member of the family, which seemed to suit Marco’s personality just fine.

William peered over the island to see the multiple creations that Marco had in store for tonight’s multi-course dinner. Hunger pangs hit William suddenly, and he sneaks a piece of grilled homemade focaccia with cherry tomato and fresh burrata. Marco catches him in the act and with a strong Italian accent, he tells William his hockey career will be over if he does it again. Marco erupts in laughter, as does William while complimenting the chef with his mouth full. They leave the chef to continue with his prep work and make their way out to the large, light stone terrace.

William spots you sitting beside Camilla and Michael; Camilla is stretched out on a lounge chair and Michael sits at the end on the same chair, tenderly rubbing her calves and feet. The three sisters are wading in the pool as they discuss the scandals of late in the competitive world of women’s tennis and within their respective circle of friends. You seemingly had just gotten out of the pool, your toned and tanned body still had water beading on your chest and arms as it dripped down from your long, slicked back hair.

Two thoughts converged in William’s mind; the first thought being that nothing could make him happier than seeing you relaxing with his parents and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company, and the second thought, he wished you two were alone so he could throw you over his shoulder, stretch you out on the nearest comfortable surface and go completely feral on you. ‘Fuck’ William thought to himself as he scanned your features, willing the uprising in his shorts to calm down.

Everyone’s attention redirects to Alex and William’s arrival, the conversations now switch to greetings. The men walk around the pool’s edge towards you and his parents and the questions start flying about how their day was. The three sisters wade to the opposite edge of the pool, propping their elbows up on the warm stone to allow them to participate in the conversation.

Alex spots Stephanie; he discreetly dips his foot into the pool and in one swift motion, he flicks water in her face. Before she can complain, Alex cuts her off with a low “vote me off the island…you’ll go before me there, sunshine”.

The two other girls in the pool splash water back at Alex, missing him by a mile. He sets down his things on a table close by while greeting you and his parents. Giggles and laughter erupt when Alex suddenly rips his shirt off and with shorts and flip flops on still, does a cannonball into the water and promptly bombards Stephanie with the miniature tsunami that the jump, and his frame, generated.

Whoops and hollers echo all around and even Marco came out from the kitchen onto the upper balcony to chime in when he heard the commotion. You laughed and applauded at the sibling chaos, and finally afterward, you were able to cast your eyes on your beloved man. Your gaze meets Williams, followed by wide grins and soft hellos. Your heart already racing, William leans over and kisses you gently. He tastes so exquisite that you are desperate to slide your tongue against his, but not with his parents and siblings as an audience. You cradle his face with one hand, and quietly ask, while his face is still close to yours, if he had a good day. “Very, very good” was William’s response as leaned in for one more kiss. You place a dry towel for him to sit down on the lounge chair with you, and as he sits, you and Camilla resume chatting. William began telling the three of you about the super yachts that he saw at the port, where they went for lunch and what they had, and how girl crazy Alex seems to be here. Camilla and Michael look at each other with a knowing smile and then chuckle at William.

He was just about to mention Alex meeting Eloise but he stopped himself, not wanting to give away the location of where they met her. You saw him stifle himself but you quickly looked past it as he continued to answer more questions about his day.

Marco reappears on the upper deck and in his booming voice announces that dinner will begin in an hour. The group all shout thank-you’s back and Marco bows down in an exaggerated, grandiose manner.

You finish your water and the remainder of your cocktail while the surrounding conversations begin to wind down. Having multiple layers of sunscreen baked onto your skin throughout the day, you’re looking forward to a warm shower, preferably not alone, before dinner is served.

You excuse yourself, being the first to retreat to your room. William helps you gather a few things and explains that he needs to talk with his parents for a couple of minutes and he’ll be in soon. You kiss him softly on the cheek and affectionately tell the group you will see them at dinner as you depart.

You enter the villa and see Marco working away in the kitchen like a conductor in front of an orchestra. The aroma of the various dishes that everyone will be enjoying this evening fills the air, and with wide eyes, you simply say “Oh my gosh, Braaaavo Marco” praising him and his incredible talents as a chef. As you walk by the floor to ceiling windows that look out over the pool and terrace, you see the Nylander family gathered around William while he speaks. It’s none of your business but there’s something…it’s not quite suspicious or unsettling…but whatever intuition you’ve been bestowed is giving you a funny feeling in your stomach that the discussion might very well be about you.

You softly pad across the bedroom while thoughts swirl around in your mind, wondering what Wiliam was talking about with his family. 'It’s none of your business' you tell yourself as you undress and step into the walk-in shower in the ensuite of your bedroom.

You turn on the shower, the rainfall shower head envelops you in streams of warm water. Exhaling deeply, you lean your head back as the water gently pulsates against your face. You slick back your long curly hair which is now stretched out and hangs low, touching the cheeks of your ass.

You hear William enter the bedroom and shortly thereafter, he appears at the ensuite door wearing just his shorts. He watches you with keen interest, a small grin appears on his face once you spot him.

You gather your ample breasts in your hands, not really doing much to cover them, looking at him with a look of faux sheepishness on your face.

“Um, excuse me….have we met?” you look at him with a slight grin.

“Oh…we’ve met…” William said cheekily. He removes his shorts, his cock already appearing rigid. He steps into the shower and his hands waste no time encircling your waist, landing on your round ass, pulling you into him.

“You sure?” you say, teasingly.

Your hands release your breasts, your nipples hard and protruding against William’s chest. You glide your fingertips down from his shoulders, along his biceps, around to his lower back, finally settling your hands on his muscular backside. You scan his face as you gently sway your hips so the area above the slit of your pussy comes into contact with his penis. Your flesh brushes against the tip of his cock and incites a low groan from his mouth. You feel the growing pressure of his erection against you and instinctively, you bite your lower lip as your own pressure intensifies between your thighs.

Your eyes are fixed on his mouth, the natural and sensual curves of his lips beg for a slow and passionate kiss. William lowers his head, your mouths almost connecting, breathing each other in before succumbing to your primal urges. Your kiss is deep and passionate, the longing you’ve had for William all day is now being unleashed and is completely untamed. Hands begin to feverishly grasp at each other as the water streams over your interlaced bodies. The taste of William’s mouth further ignites your already desperate need to devour all of him.

It’s the second time today William felt intoxicated. God, he needed you so badly. The way your body felt pressed against his drove him wild; it always has. The moans that escaped your lips alongside your murmurs in his ear of loving, wanting and needing him so much, nearly put him off balance.

You break from the kiss, your mouth descending down his body, leaving a trail of licks and kisses from his jawline, down over his neck, across his collarbones, and down toward his torso. You worked your way further down his body, turning him around so the water from the shower is hitting his back. You are on your knees now, his fully erect dick right in your line of sight, ready for the taking.

“It looks like Wild Bill is happy to see me,” you purr as your lips ghost the tip of his cock. Nicknames weren’t necessarily your thing, but one night in his bed, early on in your sex-plorations with William, the name ‘Wild Bill’ rolled off your tongue in reference to his cock after he had made you cum so hard that you thought you might pass out.

You looked up at Williiam as he mutters “Fuck” , leaning his head back under the steady stream of water, his cock now throbbing with the anticipation of your next move.

Torturously slow, you gently take the tip of his dick in your mouth. As the taste of William’s pre-cum hits your tongue, the nerve-endings throughout your pussy are electrified. Streams of water continue to flow down his body, weaving paths along the protruding veins of his thick member.

You run your hands up the back of his calves and then further up to his muscular thighs. You’re in complete awe of his body as you caress the intricate designs of his muscle mass in his legs, his ass and that fucking perfect “V” on his lower torso. As your hands continue to walk over his lower body, your long tongue continues to lap and stroke the head of his cock, encouraging more of the pearlized fluid to seep from the tip.

William was starting to lose control. You heard a strained moan and could feel the muscles in his body tighten and compress. Your right hand firmly grips him around the girth of his beautiful thick cock and you guide it into your mouth. Your tongue naturally moves along the underside of his shaft, and you accept his full length into your mouth again and again. Your hand stroking and manipulating his shaft and balls compliment the expert work done by your mouth. William clenches his jaw while a series of indiscernible words, possibly in Swedish, pour out of his mouth.

“Jesus….fucking….Christ…Y/N…fuuuuck” WIlliam stammers as he begins to buck his hips to a faster rhythm. More and more, you taste his arousal on your tongue. You raise your body up slightly while remaining on your knees, your mouth never leaving his member. The slight change in angle as you continue to work his manhood is marked by a long agonizing growl from his mouth. One of William’s hands clutches a mass of your wet hair while the other hand presses against the marble wall of the shower for stability. William’s thighs begin to twitch and his hips continue to pump his cock into your mouth in rapid, shallow movements.

“Shit, Y/N - I’m cumming!” William bellows as he grabs the back of your head and fully erupts into your mouth; you allow the thick streams of his cum to slide down your throat. Your hands are splayed on his hips, your fingertips press into his flesh as the involuntary jerking motions from his powerful orgasm subsides. You gently grab the base of his penis to hold it steady as you slowly withdraw him from your mouth. You hold the weight of his cock gingerly in your hand as you gaze up at him, smiling innocently. His soaking wet hair has fallen forward as his head hangs, his chin towards his chest, allowing the water to hit the back of his neck. His breathing is almost back to normal as he opens his eyes and sees you still kneeling in front of him.

William extends his hands to you, interlacing your fingers with his, giving you some extra leverage as you stand up. He wraps his strong arms around you and angles his head into the crook of your neck, the warm water creating a steam bath of sorts.

“You’re incredible, Y/N” William said as he grazes his lips along your neck, up toward your ear.

Knowing you were left without any kind of release for yourself, William tells you how he’s got something special planned for you later on this evening. Despite the warmth of the shower, his low voice purring in your ear sends a shiver down your spine, your clit now aching for his attention. You kiss him, moaning softly as your tongues connect while your hands continue to follow the expanse of each other’s bodies.

Sensing Wild Bill is getting aroused again, as well as yourself, you affectionately remind William that dinner’s going to be ready soon, and you don’t want to advertise to everyone what you two have been up to by arriving to the table late.

“We could skip dinner,” William said, raising an eyebrow as he hands you the shampoo for your hair.

“Mmmmm….I know it’d be totally worth it, but I’m fucking starving now…did you see what Marco made?” you smiled.

“I swiped one of those burrata things…it was pretty fucking good” William said before he’s immerses himself back under the shower head to rinse.

You stood there for a moment, finally responding with “You’re lucky he didn’t break one of your fingers for doing that you know” you quip.

William decided not to mention the (empty) threat Marco made about ending his hockey career after he lifted one of his creations. In true Willy Styles form, William simply responded “Nah…he loves me”. A wide grin appears on your face as you shake your head. You don’t say anything else; you’ve known William long enough to know when he’s harmlessly stretching the truth.

You and William quickly finish showering, both of you stealing little kisses and touches while chatting about various moments throughout the day.

You were trying to decide on something fairly simple to wear when William motions toward a white off-the-shoulder shirt, suggesting for you to ‘show off your tan’. You grab the shirt and match it with a long and flowy white cotton skirt accented with lace embroidery and some simple low-heeled cross-tie sandals. You tie your long locks into a low, loose bun at the nape of your neck, allowing some tendrils of hair to fall, framing your face. William looks amazing as usual in just a nice t-shirt and shorts. You curl your toes when he comes up behind you as you open the door to exit your bedroom, the scent of his cologne literally making you weak in the knees.

“Jeeeesus, William” you say, turning to face him. You start nuzzling his neck and you wrap your arm around his waist, pulling yourself towards him. “Actually, maybe we could skip dinner, or just have it delivered outside here…I can give you more oral pleasure, monsieur William…” you say with a heavy French accent. You smile mischievously while William rubs his hand over his face, and follows by a barely audible “fuck me…”. The two of you take a deep breath, intertwine your fingers and head out to the outdoor dining area, miraculously right on time.

Everyone, including Marco, are seated at the table; the soft lightning further deepens the sun-kissed skin tones of the smiling faces that greet you and William.

The dinner conversations, as they always are at a Nylander gathering, are lively and animated and full of laughter. You and Marco being the only non-relatives sitting at the table revelled in their family dynamic and ate up their stories as voraciously as the divine food.

At the end of the multiple course dinner, you could hear the collective sigh of pure contentment and satisfaction from the group. You stood up and raised your glass, proposing a toast. The wine had hit you a little more than expected but your words of praise and admiration for Marco and the Nylanders were heart-felt and the expressions on the faces of your audience simply beamed. You sat back in your chair and William leaned in close and kissed you by your ear, sending tingles up your spine. He reached one arm around your waist and pulled you in closer. ‘Ha..he’s tipsy…he’s gonna be such slut tonight in bed’ you thought, chuckling to yourself.

“What’s so funny?” William softly mumbles in your ear.

You shake your head, stifling a grin that eventually breaks wide open. “I’m just happy,” you said quietly.

Before William could respond, Michael rose from his chair.

He raises his glass, eloquently giving accolades to Marco and welcoming him into the Nylander family. The group cheers and glasses clink together; everyone takes a generous sip of their drinks.

“Now, Y/N. I am truly speechless when I think of your generosity. Throughout these past months, when William tells me of all the amazing things you think of doing for him, for his team, for anyone it seems, I am truly awestruck. Camilla and I, the girls, and Alex are so happy that you and William found each other again. I can see it every time you’re around each other…it’s so apparent how much love you share, how much love is felt between you…I know it because that’s how I feel about Camilla. I recognize it when I see the way you look at each other.”

You try to swallow but the lump in your throat is working against you.

“To say thank you, we have a gift which I hope shows you how much we truly appreciate what you’ve done for our family”.

You hadn’t noticed Marco leave the table; as he returned to the patio, he handed Michael a longer, rectangular velvet box. Michael approaches you and places the gift in your hands. You hear murmurs around the table in anticipation of the gift’s unveiling.

As gently pry the box open, the sparkle of what looks like a billion diamonds dance in your line of sight. Your cheeks are flushed and you let out an audible gasp as you look at the exquisite bracelet before you.

William takes the box from your hand and gingerly places it around your wrist, followed by a long but tasteful kiss.

“I’m just overwhelmed,” you shook your head, fighting back tears. “I don’t have the words…I can’t think of the perfect words right now - this is so unbelievably breathtaking. Thank you all so much”.

“To Y/N!” Marco cheers.

“To Y/N!” the Nylanders toast in unison.

Hugs ensue and the ladies surround you to get a closer look at the expensive bracelet.

More wine is poured and eventually, everyone begins to clear the table to make room for the dessert tasting menu Marco has prepared.

‘No other night has ever felt this enchanting’ you mused, soaking in the warmth of the evening sea breeze and the loving atmosphere that surrounds you.

You can feel William’s gaze and as you turn to face him, he tenderly holds your wrist, angling the position so the lighting hits all the stones at once.

You lean into him, kissing along his jawline up to his ear. “It’s gorgeous, William…”

“Do you wanna take Pablo for a walk? We can just take him around the property…I’m stuffed so I’m not sure I could go any further anyway” William said, tapping his abdomen.

“Let me go change my shoes - be right back”. Feeling a little buzzed from the wine, you slowly pull his body toward you and kiss him seductively and sensually, your tongue searching for his. Your hands slide up his toned chest and with that simple movement, you start to feel that ever familiar sensation between your thighs as that touch conjures up images of him being inside of you.

“Jesus - can you guys just not? I’m in blue-ball hell and then I have to sit next to my big brother as he eye-fucks his girlfriend all night. I was trying to enjoy my dinner for fuck sakes.” Alex said as he poured another glass of wine.

You give Alex an apologetic look; you know it’s been a bit bumpy for him lately. You walk over to him and give him a little side-hug squeeze. Alex draped his arm over your shoulder; a wide grin full of mischief forms on his face. “You know, Y/N…you could just trade him in for the more handsome and younger model…”

Camilla swats her second born lightly on his arm as she comes up behind him to grab her glass of wine. She jokingly scolds him in Swedish, followed by a quick kiss on the cheek and grabs your hand, rescuing you from the conversation. You stand chatting with Camilla, finishing off the last remnants of wine from your own glass. You turn to see the brothers clowning around jostling into one another yanking at each other’s shirts. With every movement, their muscular legs, arms and backs are on full display; you shake your head as you excuse yourself and head inside to freshen up. Glancing back at the boys still horsing around, you laugh to yourself thinking ‘this family is too fucking perfect’.

You return a few minutes later and greet Pablo with a couple of his favourite dog treats. The mere mention of the word ‘walk’ has Pablo running and jumping around in anticipation.

“You ready? OK….break!” giving Pablo the familiar command that he can run around as fast as he can go. You step shoeless into the lush and manicured grass that surrounds the terrace; the heat of the day has now dissipated and you welcome the coolness from the earth against the bottom of your feet. You stand there for a moment watching Pablo as he darts about and a wide smile adorns your face with the adoration you have for him.

The sun is beginning to set; the once bright, giant orb now resembles a fireball blazing deep orange hues as it recedes into the horizon. William stands beside you taking in the mesmerizing view. You begin to walk together; your fingers loosely intertwined as you meander around the property. You and William often share quiet, serene moments where just being in each other’s presence fills you both with such bliss. More often than not, those tranquil moments when it's the two of you together eventually give way to fits of giggles and lively storytelling.

William leads you to a long and wide bench covered by pergola; sheer white curtains surround the loveseat and large, soft cream-coloured pillows line the back rest. Pablo is in full zoomie-mode as he jumps up on the bench and leaps off again, running in figure-8 patterns on the lawn.

William sits down and slides himself back so his muscular legs extend to the full length of the bench. You see him lift his hips to pull an object from his back pocket, presumably his phone. It’s odd that he slips the object between the pillow and the side of his leg, but in all honesty, you’re not focusing on that as he motions for you to straddle him. The bench is wide enough that you have no trouble comfortably positioning yourself as he desired; the pressure in your core is rising, as is William’s cock as you gently lower yourself onto him. You can feel a very distinct bulge at your scantily clad entrance and you arch your back, pressing your need against his erection. Although the curtains have numerous layers of gauze fabric, it does little for true privacy as it wouldn’t take long for anyone that happened to walk by to know what business you two are up to.

Your lips lock together; kissing though giddy smiles as hands wander over each of your bodies.

“I’ve got something for you too - a gift” William murmurs in your ear.

“Mmmm - really? I can feel it” you said softly, your lips ghosting his neck.

You can feel William smile. “Yeah…not just that though….something else”.

You sit up more, still straddling him, as William reaches between the cushions and pulls out another long, velvet box.

Your eyes grow wide and your cheeks flush with the sudden rush of emotion.

He opens the box for you and the sight of the necklace has you covering your mouth from the overall surprise of the gift.

“William….this is too much….it’s absolutely stunning…” you gasp, your eyes still wide as they scan William’s smiling face.

You feel patches of heat radiating through your face and neck; between the wine and the presentation of this exquisite gift, you hope your deep tan covers the blotches that usually decorate your neck under circumstances like these.

“You like it, right? The design caught my eye….and there’s a history to it that made me think of you and me. That’s what the design is called - Toi et Moi”, William explains, his smile growing wider with each second.

Tears well in your eyes. It had definitely been a long and winding road for your and William to get to this very moment.

“Oh my god - William….seriously….it’s exquisite - stunning – gorgeous… I- I honestly can’t find the perfect word - I am seriously overwhelmed here” you said just above a whisper.

You lean over and kiss him gently at first, but the magnitude of his gift has you almost feeling breathless as your kisses deepen.

“Let me put it on you” William smiled softly, breaking from the kiss.

You slide off of him and turn so your back is facing him. You gather your hair in your hands and lift it to not allow the necklace to tangle in your long curls.

“Beautiful” William said in a low tone; he’s directly behind you; his breath tickles the sensitive area along your slender neck. You reach behind so your hands lightly glide alongside his body.

He places the necklace on your neck, laying it gently across your skin and closes the clasp.

Your hand instinctively goes to your neck; you fingers lightly graze the perfectly cut diamonds. You turn around and look at William; you’re certain you might very levitate right then and there and just float away.

“I might be able to come up with something better than a simple thank-you a little later - my brain is overloaded in the most amazing way right now though. Thank you, William…aside from you, this is the most amazingly gorgeous thing I have ever seen….and the bracelet - my god, I am completely stunned by all of this”.

“I just wanted to make sure you know how much you - everything you do - how much it means to me. I’ll never be able to think of all the ways, like - all the different things, the kindness that is just there in you…fuck, everything you do just blows me away.”

William knows he’s not great with words and sometimes he struggles with expressing exactly what he feels but all he can do is try, and hope that you know that he’s yours, totally and completely.

The sun has almost completely dipped out of sight; there are streaks of orange and red that help illuminate the incoming clouds in shades of purple. The tall coniferous trees that line the property are all but cloaked in black, contrasted by the subtle lights that dot the various pathways.

After the long, luscious kisses and loving embraces have paused (at least for the moment), the two of you walk slowly back to the villa, even more in love than when you left. You enter through the already open doors off of the terrace. The family have gathered in the large living room and as usual, they are laughing with hints of that unique and wonderful Nylander laugh, at a story that Michael is telling Marco about playing hockey. It’s not that the story was necessarily comedical: Michael was animatedly explaining one of his most serious injuries, a broken neck of all things. The laughter was at Marco’s expense with his heightened levels of shock and horror at Michael’s very descriptive recollection of the trauma.

Alex appears from the hallway that leads to the bedrooms, freshly showered and looking devastatingly handsome. There’s a collective “Oooooo” as he strides past the group and he smiles and shakes his head in response. You catch the scent of his cologne as he walks past you and lean into your man standing next to you and inhale his own tantalizing fragrance.

Alex is on his way to meet Eloise and as he runs out the door, he hollers back to the family to not wait up for him. It’s a clear indication what he has in store once he meets Eloise tonight.

The rest of the family is following Marco to a music festival in town. Marco implores that you and William join them this evening but William, seeing a rare opportunity to have the villa to yourselves, politely declines.

Camilla catches a glimpse of your new piece of jewellery and her eyes light up with a mix of love for her son, and admiration for you. She hugs you both and quietly says “I’ll distract Marco and the others, you both just go hide until we leave”. She gives you a knowing smile and glides over to the kitchen, and calls Marco and the others over for a quick shot of Sambuca before they depart for the evening.

You both stealthily walk past the family and head into your bedroom, closing the door quietly behind you. Almost if on cue, you overhear Camilla saying you and William were exhausted and have already gone to bed. She wasn’t entirely fibbing….you and William had gone to bed, just not to rest.

You and William made full use of the empty villa, testing the acoustics in various places until you both finally collapsed from “exhaustion”.

#william nylander #toronto maple leafs #nhl imagine #sweden #hockey fic #willy styles #nhl fanfiction #alex nylander #nylander x reader #nylander #leafs #michael nylander

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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Skaven — Flowers of Flesh and Blood (Carbonized Records)

Flowers of Flesh and Blood by Skaven

Likely it was inevitable that some enterprising label would reissue the only record Skaven put out under its own name. During its intermittent existence, the crust band released a couple splits with heavyweights Dystopia and Stormcrow, and the long shadows cast by those bands have kept the splits in underground circulation. Flowers of Flesh and Blood, originally released in 1996 by brief-lived Misanthropic Records, has some additional historical utility. It sounds so very much like a record of its times and its scene: check out the semi-ironized, semi-serious samples from sources like Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) (“Severed” starts with the Torrance family’s Donner Party conversation, if you’re interested); the band name filched from Warhammer’s world of steampunk geekery; the greasy, fusty odor of dense packs of white dudes with long dreads and lots of stick-n-poke tats. 924 Gilman, here we come.

But listen more closely. Skaven has its idiosyncrasies, its own intrinsic oddness. The band incorporated two basses, Michael Matusio’s standard four-string axe and Shane O’Gallagher’s five-string instrument. O’Gallagher adds something like a second, downhill-rushing lead to the opening minutes of the title track. The doubled-up bottom end imbues Skaven’s sound with a disposition toward something like groove, which you can hear reverberating through subsequent recordings like Nux Vomica’s “Choked at the Roots.” Skaven’s sonic profile also flirts with deathrock’s more goth-oriented melodramatics. Check out the opening riff of “The Swarm,” and then its brief, melodic bridge; it sounds something like Only Theater of Pain-period Christian Death attempting to cover Amebix’s “No Gods No Masters.” But tougher, and better.

As those comparisons suggests, Flowers of Flesh and Blood is deep-catalog stuff, likely of principal interest to folks with outsized investments in the Bay Area heavy music scene. It captures a moment when weirdo bands (see Depressor’s stuff) were listening to lots of Swedish death metal and pushing the boundaries of the region’s distinctive stenchcore sound. Play it loud, and Skaven’s EP will put you in the mind of rodent-infested squats, room temperature 40-ouncers of malt liquor, clutches of kids debating the best train to hop if you need to get to Portland on the double-quick. Hey, hold on — where’d the dog go?

Jonathan Shaw

#skaven #flowers of flesh and blood #carbonized #jonathan shaw #albumreview #dusted magazine #punk #crust punk

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grittyreadsfic · 3 years

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hello my friends, one singular person asked for this weeks ago so i’m here with my most unhinged rec list yet: tk and nolan.

now, this one was hard to reign in, so i really didn’t. this pairing had maybe 230 fics in the tag when i first started reading hockey fic, and it’s now over 900, and i’ve read far too many of them, and that makes it so hard to parse it down. so i just...didn't!

so with that said, please enjoy so you want to get into tknp: a beginners guide to a classic case of idiots to lovers

i told myself that i couldn’t rec an author’s entire body of work but then i remembered this is my blog and i do what i want, so i did some consolidating. here’s a list of the quintessential authors for this pairing, you can start at any of their profiles and pick any of their fics at random, and it’ll be one of the best ones for the pairing, hands down.

therainbowsedge: i’d start with the summer camp fic, or the sex toys one, as both beautifully capture the true idiots to lovers nature of this pairing, but just top tier writing all around

manybumblebees: the wedding fic is so tender and port stanley is a classic, but literally pick any single fic and you’ll have a perfect tknp fic. i’m not kidding

jamesvanriemsdick: their tknp fics in their series are some of the hidden gems of this pairing (the tk heartbeat fic makes me LOSE it) but the delaware fic or the seattle fic…..there’s really something for every mood

catchascatchcan: start with era of gods because i could write literal essays on how it’s some of the best fantasy worldbuilding i’ve ever read, but then just read everything else on their account, including non tknp fics. you won’t regret it

hackysack: ao3 user hackysack has written one of two timeloop fics that i absolutely adore, and i thought about just calling that one out in particular, but all of their work deserves the attention

canary: nothing to prove was the first tknp fic i ever read and i was immediately hooked. all of their fics are a good starting place for the pairing, and just really give you a feeling for the pairing

and now, for the fic recs!

to be, despite it all by smudgedfreckles

summary: or, nolan patrick’s gender thesis, by travis konecny.

why i love it: there’s not a lot ofo nonbinary characters in media, even in fic, but this fic’s treatment of nolan and their path to figuring out their gender just feels so real and made me feel so seen. tk’s characterization is also just top notch, and it’s just a super sweet story about two people who love each other

last ones standing by makeit_takeit

summary: If you’re committed to finding your future spouse, reads the last line of the ad, and are ready to look at yourself and your love life in a whole new way, apply now.

At the bottom of the ad there’s a link, and Travis finds his finger hovering over the screen, lip still caught between his teeth.

“I mean,” he says very reasonably, speaking out loud to his empty apartment like some sort of possibly-crazy person, “just applying doesn’t mean anything. Maybe I just fill it out, and see what happens. It’s not like I’m really gonna get picked to be on TV, come on.”

He snorts out loud, just to show his apartment he hasn’t lost his grip on reality or anything; he fully understands how ludicrous that would be.

Then he clicks the link anyway, because yolo or whatever.

why i love it: what part of a married at first sight fic doesn’t make you want to immediately dive right in? the concept is fun, the execution is absolutely flawless, and it captures their dynamic so well while letting it develop naturally

motivation by connectknee

summary: Kevin knows when to back off, the article said. He knows just when to shut up and leave Patty alone, something Travis has never known how to do.

why i love it: the thing i love about this pairing is that tk is loud and in your face, and nolan’s more reserved, a little quieter, a little harder to read. this fic does a really great job of exploring how tk could feel like maybe he’s just a bit too much and is one of my favorites in terms of miscommunication

a tenderness grows by rusesdeguerre

summary: Nolan wouldn’t say that landing a job as the Philadelphia Flyers’ psychotic and probably clinically insane mascot was a childhood dream of his. Maybe tangentially: playing pond hockey in –30°C weather and pretending to be Sidney Crosby is practically a rite of passage when you grow up in Manitoba. That, and experiencing the distinct displeasure that is thousands of mosquitoes sucking your blood out when your father drags you on a father-son camping trip into the backwoods of the northern Canadian Prairies.

why i love it: this was the first fic i recced on this blog, and i stand by that decision. a fic where nolan is not only not a hockey player, but is in fact the person in the gritty suit? absolutely perfect, and so charming from start to finish

meet me at my window by springsteen

summary: Travis has lived in Philadelphia for a few years now, long enough to know there isn’t a major city in America where superheroes don’t destroy an entire city block trying to save humanity or whatever. He can deal with all the super-shit, but Travis did not sign up for getting woken up from a deep sleep because some fucker’s trying to break in through his window.

(5 times the super-villain known as "The Cat" breaks into Travis's apartment, plus 1 time Travis invites him in.)

why i love it: there’s a lot of things to love here, but the concept is just absolutely one of my all time favorite aus ever. it’s fun and charming and the perfect glimpse into a world where heroes and villains exist, and what it’s like just to be a run of the mill kind of guy existing in it. tk and nolan’s back and forth in this make it so engaging, and it’s such a top tier fic

body’s in trouble by cloudsandpassingevents

summary: “Oh, sorry,” someone says. “Didn’t know anyone else was here.”

Nolan freezes, then turns around very slowly. When he looks up, Nicklas fucking Backstrom is standing behind him in a hoodie and baggy sweats, holding the biggest bag of Swedish Fish Nolan’s ever seen in his life in one hand.

“Uh,” Nolan says around the pop tart between his teeth. “Yeah.”

What the fuck, his brain helpfully supplies.

why i love it: from nolan’s inner voice, to the way the author explores all the dynamics within the team, to the way they write the unexpected but actually, it kind of makes sense friendship between nolan and backstrom, is just absolutely fantastic. there’s a lot of moments that circle back and build on each other in a way that really just makes it super compelling

rhizomatic foundations by lighthousetowers

summary: Twenty days after he moves in with Kevin Hayes, twenty days – three months, five months, depending on how you look at it – after not talking to TK, TK shows up at the front door with a plant the size of a basketball in his hands.

TK grins. "Patty, meet Reginald." He lifts up the plant. "Reggie, meet Patty. He's going to be your new - caretaker."

"What the fuck," says Nolan, not moving a single muscle.

Or: That Nolan can hear the plant talk might as well just happen.

why i love it: this is probably my favorite magical realism fic just about ever. it’s fun and charming and a little weird, but in the best possible way. there’s such a wonderful narrative in it, and lighthousetowers always has such beautiful writing, and it really shines in this one. the dialogue and nolan’s characterization are also part of what set it apart for me as one of the best tknp fics

in the dark of any town by mengetpegged

summary: If the voice has an accent at all, it’s a flat prairie Canadian, with none of G’s French-Canadian softness at the edges. But mostly, the accent is just ‘pissed off,’ which TK believes is a default setting for ghosts.

“Who are you?” TK asks, and he doesn’t like how strained his voice sounds, doesn’t like the tinge of anxiety tinting the rise of his question. He tries to regulate his breaths—in through his nose, hold, out through his mouth—but it feels like he’s not getting enough oxygen, which makes him panic even more.

“Someone with a fucking migraine, dickhead,” the voice says. “So keep the lights off and shut the hell up.”

(or: Nolan Patrick, Hotel X Ghost)

why i love it: i’m usually not super into ghost fics, both the spooky kind and the nonspooky kind, but this one is a rare exception. it’s charming and fun and tender and it’s got some of, in my opinion, the best characterization of tk and nolan in any fic. the way the author writes their dynamic and their dialogue is just unmatched

lets_make_this_moment_a_crime.mp3 by honeydripping

summary: Travis meets Nolan at a Midtown show in 2002 when he punches Nolan in the face. He can’t help it, “Like A Movie” just goes off.

But he does feel guilty about it.

TK and Patty work at a bakery together. They go to punk shows to pass the time.

why i love it: idk if anyone asked for an early 2000s emo/punk/alt au but wow! i sure am glad it exists! really the vibes of this fic, as silly as that sounds, are absolutely unmatched. i love the structure with the music, the development of their relationship, and just everything about how the author wrote the setting (there’s this whole thing with tattoos in it that makes me feel absolutely insane)

you’re ripped at every edge by you’re a masterpiece by conformityissuicide

summary: “Ugh, look, this yoga teacher has it out for me, man. And I can’t go back there without at least having some of the basics down. I’ve got to win this battle.”

“Yoga isn’t really something you win at,” Hartsy starts.

Travis cuts him off, “You can win at anything if you try hard enough.”

+++

OR that time Nolan's a grumpy yoga teacher and Travis realizes he wants to bone him and prove him wrong about Travis' non-existent yoga abilities.

why i love it: listen, if you want tknp, at least one of them has to be an idiot, and this tk absolutely captures the obliviousness i love to see in him in fic. it’s such a great characterization of them both and such a great concept (and even better execution)

you form a terror pack (and i’m aware of that) by dalmatienne

summary: “Can I help you?” TK snarks, both eyebrows hiked up in a way that has earned her many elbow checks to the ribs.

The chick looks down her nose, long thick eyelashes fluttering. Red-bitten lips part to blow a florid pink bubble and TK can smell the chemical sweetness when it pops.

“Yeah,” she says in this monotonous voice that seems almost at odds with her bubble gum and neon skates. She jams her stopper into TK’s thigh again, literally inches away from where it’d really hurt. “Tie ‘em.”

why i love it: to be honest, i generally don’t read rule 63 within hrpf, but this one is just absolutely knocks it out of the park. the concept (i fuckin’ love roller derby), the characterization of nolan, the pacing, the rituals, the tone of the entire fic, it’s just all around a perfect read from start to finish

thrills and grills by bitter_leaf

summary: Travis can’t even begin to wonder what he did in a previous life to incur the wrath of this fucking cook. Travis thinks he’s a nice person, doesn’t conduct himself in any way that could be considered particularly dickish, and unless this guy has some sort of issue with hockey bros or people from the boonies, he’s not sure how he started shit without even knowing.

Patty has a vendetta. Travis just wants to eat his eggs in peace.

why i love it: honestly this is the enemies to lovers fic i’ve been waiting for. i remember seeing the reddit post when it first went viral and thinking it would make such a great fic premise, so stumbling across this one was just so wonderful. super engaging and fun and so hilarious to read!

nothing but room for you by fightingfuries

summary: When his agent tells him he’s going to be traded to the Devils, Nolan isn't sure how he feels about it. Might be easier if he was going somewhere farther away, like California or fucking Florida. Somewhere sun-soaked and foreign. Someplace so different from Philadelphia that he can forget he ever played for the Flyers, forget everything that happened there.

Or Nolan fucks up, gets traded, gets his shit together and falls in love. Not necessarily in that order.

why i love it: i cannot stress to you how much i love trade fics, and this one is one of my absolute favorites. the trade to the devils-so close to philly, still, but there’s more to distance than physical miles-was such an excellent choice and the split timeline adds so much to the narrative, and the emotions are real and messy and complicated in the best way

a couple of runaways (i’m glad you stayed) by overturnedgoal

summary: The person in the video he’s watching is super annoying. Some obnoxious holier than thou granola type who keeps talking about their environmental impact as if they aren’t driving a gas guzzler around, but the basic idea of living in a van, driving around wherever, camping all the time, just going hiking and swimming and seeing the whole country? It sounds pretty dope, honestly.

why i love it: i like to watch tours and conversions of vans/buses into tiny homes as a self soothing method, and this fic has the same impact that watching those do. it’s such a fun concept, and it’s so fuckin’ soft, and the dialouge between tk and nolan is just *chef’s kiss*

all candor and style in the crook of your smile by p3trichor

summary: It’s a photo of Nolan on his knees with someones’ fingers in his mouth, lips slick with spit. Travis flicks by it almost too fast and he’s only got seconds to decide if he wants to screenshot it, if he wants to just give up the ghost right then and there. Except Travis’s phone freezes momentarily and then the group refreshes, sidcros87, Bert59 and 14 others took a screenshot!

It’s gone before Travis even has time to process it and he already wasted his replay of the day on a stupid video of a stupid fish that Hayes caught.

Can you send me that screenshot Travis texts Bertuzzi before he can overthink it, his dick already stirring in his sweats. Tuzzi sends back the cry-laughing emoji and then the screenshot before Travis can be too annoyed at him.

Or, Nolan is being weird about Travis's break-up and TK is maybe not straight.

why i love it: i genuinely don’t think i have words for the amount i love this fic. it took me forever to actually read, but it’s absolutely one of my favorite fics, and it’s an absolutely riot to read. carter’s meddling and the presence of tyler bertuzzi both make it extra fun, in my humble opinion

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kileyrose-2003 · 3 years

Text

Tina’s Tuesday Night Mini Fic Pt. 1

Word count: Who cares? Lol

A/N: Hi lovelies! I am back!! First thing, I know. You're probably saying Kiley, wtf? It's not Tuesday. I know. Life happened. I've had a busy past few days and a final today. Anyways, this was something I did with @merci-bitch when the U.S originally went on lockdown. It was a fun way to keep me busy and get my mind off of stuff. We both decided to restart this about a week ago. So, I dedicate this to my dear friend Tina. Love you hun and hope you enjoy this! And please, if you haven't been to her blog to read any of her work, go do so. She works so hard on what she writes and is amazing.

Pt. 2 will be coming next week

To everyone waiting on fics: I'll get there. Eventually. And I'm not going into reasoning. But anyways, love you all and I hope you have a great day!

"...This is the greatest show!" You slammed your hands down on the piano keys and breathed in sharply. "God damn it, Jenny!"

"What?" You let a groan and handed her the sheet music. "Look there at that line there. Do you see that note?”

“I can see, can’t I?” Her bright green eyes lost their cool shade of arrogance when she seen how pissed you look. "Not F!” You pointed to the paper in her hand. “D! You hear that note there?" You pressed down on the key repeatedly. "D!"

"Sorry." The red head smiled at you impishly. "No, you're not. This is the fifth time we've done this and yet you still insist on doing this your own way." She sat next to you on the piano bench and gave your shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Well, I think the change makes it sound better.”

“Phineas liked it better this way,” you seethed through gritted teeth. “But what does he know of art?” You could feel your face slowing turning a distinct shade of cherry red and you bit down on your tongue.

"He must of known something with how much you tried to get in his pants," you mused to yourself.

You rolled your eyes. You loved Jenny to death but how you couldn't stand her at times. You tried and tried so desperately to get along with her and compromise when she was like this but no matter what you did, she was stubborn and so..cold at times.

Sure, Jenny was a bit of a snob but she was a genius when it came to music and you respected that. She was what inspired you to take up music in the first place.

Your childhood was far from easy. Before you even joined the circus, you were bounced all over the place. You never belonged anywhere. From the deteriorating cottage in a small, seaside village in Sweden to the cramped one bedroom apartment in London that no one would dare walk past at night. Your father was no where to be seen and your mother was an actress, always struggling to meet ends meet. She was never home, but that wasn't always a bad thing. That meant you got to explore.

That was how you got to hearJenny sing for the first time. Hiding out in the musty attic of an old Swedish theatre. Even before she hit extreme levels of fame, her voice was like a siren's call. Drawing you in further and further in. It still was in a way. She was so beautiful and even as much as she pissed you off, you loved watching her sing. Like the time at the palace. She was eye candy in that dress, the way it hugged her hips and how the bust showed the slightest bit of clevage when you looked at her at just the right angle-

"Stop it, Y/n!" You told yourself. "She's not interested in you."

Or was she? The way she looked at you when you spoke to Phineas was always with such contempt or such jealousy. You could never understand why though. It was her who tried to steal Phineas away. Not you. He was a close friend who gave you a chance when you had nothing and you never so much as even thought of eyeing him in such a manner. Phineas clearly wasn't interested in her or any other woman but his wife. He pushed her away numerous times. Jenny had no reason to be jealous of you. Yet, she was.

‘But it is of me or others though?"

One could never be sure with Jenny. Sure, there was a bit of a rivalry between the two of you when it came to music. But she was your friend. 'Very clingy for just a friend,' you noted.

'That's normal though, isn't it?'

Maybe you were just over thinking things. Besides, the relationship between the two of you seemed to be getting better lately. Ever since the scandal went public, it seemed the two of you were spending more and more time together.

You were the only one who listened to her side of the story, held her when she cried, made sure she wasn't drinking her emotions away, and tried to help her through it. Even as much as she pissed you off. You warned her in the first place not to seek out Phineas but despite the nasty arguments, the constant bickering she became your friend. Maybe even your best friend. Which you got alot of shit for.

Nobody liked Jenny and you were starting to get the feeling you weren't so popular anymore either. Everyone thought after the affair went public, the two of you would of left. Her name as well as yours, was slandered all over the paper simply because you associated with her. You had been called it all. The ring leader, the mastermind, the mistress to the two.

But neither of you resigned. Yet. Part of you wondered how long it would be until either would receive letters of negotiations to end your contract. But either way, you knew Jenny wasn't leaving without you. She promised you that.

'So maybe she does like me.'

Then that small voice came in the back of your head. 'Or maybe you just want her to like you back.'

Either way, you couldn't let that haunt your conscience for now. Even as much as you'd like to visualize a future with her, it wouldn't work. You could feel the heat pooling into your cheeks as you came back to reality and bit down on your lip. Jenny's hand was lingering up and down your back, rhythmically making shapes with the tips of her fingers. Damn her and her touch! You shouldn't be feeling this way.

"Are you okay?" You shook your head and covered your face with your hands, trying not focus on all the pain you felt inside. "No. No, I’m not."

You felt tears burning in the sides of your eyes. "This isn’t working!” Jenny furrowed her brow and tried to move your hands away from your face. “What do you mean?” She was trying to be gentle even though you could tell from the look in her eyes she had no clue what to do.

“This..all of this!” You ripped the sheet music out of her hand and flung it on top of the piano. “Something's got to give,"

She rolled her eyes as if she seen it all before and stood up, walking hastily over to the ice bucket. "Do you not have what you want?" She opened up a bottle of red wine. "Fame? Recogniton?"

"It's not enough and I don't know if I even have any of that anymore." Jenny eyed you as she poured the liquor heavily into both glasses. "I'm not liked here, Jenny."

She handed you your glass and sat down next to you. You eagerly took a sip of the wine, just wanting to forget everything for a little while. "That's not true. I like you." She leaned in closer to you.

You cracked a small grin filled with cynicism. Maybe even a little bit of hostility. Never had you felt so much love and hate towards someone at the same time. "We could both leave." Jenny's voice pulled you out of your head.

"And go where?"

"Back to Sweden with me for the time being." You noticed the intensity in Jenny's eyes growing and she reached out and grabbed your hand. You could feel her nimble gently squeezing into the palm of your hand. "You know I care for you, Y/n."

"Do you?" You tried your hardest not to sound sarcastic, you were still a little mad at her. But god! How close she was to you. You could smell her expensive perfume, see the slight hint of a shimmer radiating off of her lips. "You're fiery and you don't take my shit."

This couldn't be real. You had to be dreaming. "Jenny, this...there's a possibility this couldn't work." You tried to scoot away from her, a little intimidated by the proximity between the two of you.

"We can try to make it work."

"How?" You eyed her skeptically. "Let me take you out. Let me show you I can make this work." You furrowed your eyebrows. "Why? Need a new fling after Phineas?" You teased.

Jenny wasn't amused by that all. If anything she was pissed but she smiled anyways. Seeming to stoop down to your level with a smile that was sickly sweet. "More like a date."

"And why should I do this with you?" She let go of your hand and placed it on your thigh. "Because I probably understand you alot more than you think." As you looked into Jenny's eyes, you found some level of sincerity mixed into those deep lustful orbs. You wanted to trust her so badly.

"What do I have to lose?" You thought.

Everything. Everything to lose.

"Fine." You gave in, despise everything in your mind screaming not too. "But you have one shot and one shot only."

Jenny nodded and leaned forward to place a gentle kiss on your cheek. "And it won't take me more than once to impress. After all, I already made your career." You felt the hair on your arms stand straight up as her hands lingered on you, gently squeezing your hips.

"I'll see you tomorrow at 6. Sharp."

"Yeah," you watched as Jenny walked away, her hair flowing behind her like a beautiful sheath.

You felt a pit growing in the depths of your stomach. What the hell had you gotten yourself into?

#jenny lind x reader #Jenny Lind #the greatest showman #imagine #rebecca ferguson

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puckinghell · 4 years

Text

All Over You | Elias Pettersson

Summary: Elias had his chance with you, and he messed it up. But the idea that you might be over him? That’s more than he can handle. Words: 3.8k Note: I wrote this in a drunken haze of sleep deprived creativity brought on by a country song. Please ignore any errors, I couldn’t be bothered to proofread.

---

Elias’ eyes are following you across the room.

The beer in his hands is still full and lukewarm, by now. He hadn’t really even wanted it, but Brock had pressed it into his hands.

“Get that scowl off your face, bud,” he’d grinned, and then scurried off. Maybe he’d noticed that his typical, happy go lucky Brock demeanor was too much for Elias to deal with tonight.

This bar, the bar that his teammates dragged him to, is the same place you and him used to go all the time. He likes the lowkey vibe, the fact that there rarely seemed to be any hockey fans there - or at least none that would disturb him - and you like the music that gets played there and the fact that they have your favorite cider brand.

You were never much of a beer fan, and Elias watches with heavy eyes as you take a sip of your cider, now, and laugh at something the guy says.

Something ugly curls in the pit of his stomach.

The thing is, Elias knows he has no right to be jealous right now, but as he watches you laugh and talk to this random guy, jealousy is definitely what he’s feeling.

He spotted you the moment he walked in. You were already at the bar, and Elias made sure to stick himself in a corner, not going anywhere near you.

He thinks it worked; it doesn’t seem like you’ve seen him, yet, and he’s planning on keeping it that way.

He lost the right to your attention.

It’s Bo, unsurprisingly, that sits down next to Elias. He puts a glass of coke on the table.

“Go home,” he says softly. There’s a tinge of worry in his voice, and Elias hates it, because he knows he doesn’t deserve to be worried about. But Bo has grown into his captain role beautifully, so Elias should’ve expected him to notice.

“I’m fine here,” he says, but his voice sounds flat. He tries again. “It’s just, you know...”

“Y/N is here,” Bo finishes for him. “And you don’t want her to see you.” Elias supposes he’s easier to read than he thought. That, or Bo knows him better than he thought.

“I don’t want to see her, with him, either.” Elias grits his teeth. It’s not the kind of truth he would normally blurt out like that; normally it’s only Brock and Quinn that he confides in like that.

Brock because he makes everything seem less catastrophic with his everlasting optimism and his easy grin, and Quinn because he usually doesn’t really say anything at all, except maybe “sucks, bro” and sometimes that’s nice to hear, because some things really do suck.

But Bo is here, and Elias is not in the best place, so the words just kinda tumble out.

“It’s funny, how these things happen,” he says. “Joke’s on me, I guess.”

“Nobody is laughing, Petey.” Bo gives him a sympathetic look. “You look like you want to punch something, and it’s scaring Tuna.”

Elias dares to look away from your figure, for one second, to find Jake. Jake is staring back at him with big eyes, but averts his gaze when Elias catches him looking.

He sighs. “I don’t hate her, you know.”

“I didn’t think you did.” Bo’s statement is bland but full of all the things he’s not saying. Elias has a distinct feeling Bo knows exactly what Elias hates.

Hates that he’s basically a stranger to you, now, that he can’t go up to you and wrap his arms around your waist, that he can’t say something to make you laugh. He hates that you’re dancing with him, with that guy, and not with Elias.

He never liked dancing, but he usually let you drag him along anyway, just to see the way your face would light up when he did.

“You could go over there,” Bo tries, carefully. “Say hi.”

I wouldn’t survive the look of disdain in her eyes, is what Elias thinks.

“I don’t wanna make it weird for her,” is what he says.

“Why would it be weird?”

Elias laughs, but it’s bitter, with not even a hint of humor in his eyes. He takes a swig of the coke, then slams it down on the table hard enough that a little bit slushes over the edge. The bubbles pop once they hit the wood.

“Because I might say something I regret.”

“Like?” Bo prompts.

Like I miss you. I’m sorry. I wish I’d never left.

“I’m gonna go home,” Elias says, and he doesn’t wait to see the look of pity on Bo’s face before storming out of the bar and ordering an Uber.

He also doesn’t see you watching him leave.

6 weeks earlier, you’d been sitting on a chair on Elias’ balcony, a blanket over your legs and a glass of wine in your hands.

It was late enough at night that the streets of Vancouver had gone quiet, and Elias’ eyes were half closed as he leaned his head against the wall.

It was peaceful, everything about it. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable; you’d just spent the night with Jake and his girlfriend, so you both needed some quiet.

It wasn’t warm, per se, not this time of year, but you always loved the fresh air and it wasn’t too cold either.

Elias’ cheeks were red from the fresh outside air, and he seemed perfectly content, like that.

It wasn’t the first time you looked at your best friend a different way, but you couldn’t remember it ever being this intense before. Like, you looked at him sometimes and thought; wow, he’s really hot, or, wow, he always makes me laugh, or even wow, I want to kiss him right now.

But up until that night, you’d never thought: wow, I love him.

Strangely enough, the thought didn’t scare you as much as it, in hindsight, definitely should’ve. Maybe because you’d known Elias for almost a year, and you liked to believe you knew him quite well.

There had been moments, you thought, where you could’ve sworn he felt it too. That undeniable, invisible cord between you, pulling you towards each other. The way the air got charged with something, when your eyes met.

It sounded cliche, you knew that, but in some ways you thought you’d always known it would end up like this.

Which is why it was such a shock that it ended the way it did.

You can barely remember, now, how exactly it happened. You think your mind blocked out the memory, somewhere between crying your eyes out into your pillow and crying your eyes out on the phone to your sister. Some kind of protective mechanism, probably.

You remember something, though. You don’t think you’re ever going to be able to forget the look on Elias’ face, when you told him you loved him as more than a friend.

No neurologic protective power big enough in the world to get that memory out of your mind.

He’d looked... Shocked, kinda. Like he’d never thought of you that way. But there had been something else there. Something that hit you way harder, hurt so much more.

Disbelief.

How could you dare to love him.

Not to get you wrong; you know Elias isn’t arrogant. He doesn’t think he’s the Canucks’ savior, he doesn’t belief he’s better than anyone. You’ve not been able to put your finger on why he looked like that, although not for lack of trying - you’ve lost nights and nights of sleep over it, but still, you don’t understand.

He looked shocked, upset, and he looked unhappy.

And that’s something you don’t think you’re ever going to get over.

He left, after that, ran away from the balcony like the devil himself was chasing him, hid in his bedroom, and then you never heard from him again.

No texts, no calls, no house visits. Not even an Instagram DM saying, “hey there, it was fun to be friends until you decided to be a creep, see ya never".

Nothing.

And you’d been too ashamed to reach out, so that meant there had just been silence.

Before this, you never thought silence could be quite this loud.

Elias can’t sleep.

That shouldn’t be surprising, after tonight. His body is still reeled up with adrenaline.

He would never fight the guy you were with, cause he could see that he made you happy, and there’s not a scenario in which he would choose to ruin that for you.

But God, would he have loved to just. Do something. Make him disappear, and preferably, put his own body in that place.

The place of the guy that makes you happy.

Tonight just really drove the point home that you’re over him. Elias had his chance, messed it up, and you moved on. He can’t blame you for that, he just wishes he could do the same.

He doesn’t think he’s ever going to be over you.

The thing is, when you told Elias you loved him, he was mostly just in shock. You’d been one of his closest friends, and he would trust you with his life. He told you everything and he knew you did the same.

He knew he loved making you laugh, he loved being there for you when you needed something, he loved talking to you so much he stayed up all night even after a game, he loved seeing you in his jersey, he loved...

He loved being around you.

He just hadn’t really noticed he had started to love you.

When you said it, he hadn’t known what to say. A thousand words had entered his brain and then left within a split second. None of them seemed to make it to his mouth; not in English, not in Swedish, not in any language.

He remembers the way your face fell, and you turned your gaze to the ground. How you’d looked so uncomfortable, so upset.

He thought the best thing to do would be to leave, until he got himself together enough to speak to you, to make actual words and force them out of his throat.

He hid in his bedroom, paced around in circles for ten minutes; all that time, it was like he was looking through a kaleidoscope of memories, of you and him.

He knew, when he left that room, that he loved you too, and he was planning on telling you that.

But you were gone.

He didn’t know, and doesn’t know, still, whether you left because he reacted like a jerk and didn’t say anything, or because you changed your mind.

He waited, for you to call, or text him. To call him out or to act like nothing ever happened.

You didn’t call.

And he didn’t call, either, figured it wasn’t welcome. Still wasn’t even really sure what to say, maybe. He didn’t call, but every time he didn’t, he almost did, and now he’s sitting on his couch staring at his phone and wondering if that guy that made you smile and laugh in the bar calls you every day.

He feels sick to his stomach, and he didn’t even drink anything.

At 3am at night, Elias really isn’t expecting a knock on his door, but when there is one, he figures it’s Brock, or Jake, maybe even Quinn, who got drunk and got lost.

It wouldn’t be the first time Brock showed up at his door drunk because he was lonely and wanted to cuddle.

At 3am at night - and really any time - Elias would not expect a knock on his door and upon opening it, to be faced with you.

“How dare you,” you snarl, pushing past him without giving him a chance to say anything.

Elias raises an eyebrow; he would ask you what you’re doing here, but that feels too normal; like the type of thing he would ask before you were no longer friends.

“I saw you, you know,” you continue. You’re not yelling, but it’s a close thing; Elias hears the anger in your voice, can’t quite decide whether he’s happy you’re talking to him or unhappy because you’re looking at him the same way one might look at a dead snail.

“Saw me?” he repeats, a little dumbly.

“At the bar, Elias!” You step away from him, throw your hands up in the air. “I fucking saw you at the bar! And if I hadn’t seen you, I would’ve seen all of your other teammates! 10 hockey players don’t walk into a bar unnoticed, you idiot. So what am I supposed to do?”

A silence falls, like you’re actually expecting Elias to answer that.

He would, he would do anything you wanted him to, but he has no idea what you’re wanting to hear.

“What are you doing with what?” he tries, carefully.

You laugh, but it’s clear that you don’t find anything funny. “What am I supposed to do when we see each other in public? Am I ignoring you? Saying hi and moving on? Running away?” You pause. “Or is running away something only you are allowed to do?”

“That’s not fair,” Elias says, a little quietly. It probably is fair, but it still stings. “I left to make it better for you. I didn’t want to ruin your night. Besides,” he adds, and now he sounds a little resentful, “you were all over that guy, and I didn’t wanna watch.”

“All over that guy?” you repeat incredulous. “I wasn’t all over anything, Elias, I’m not even over you!”

The words that Elias was meaning to say die on his lips, and suddenly there’s a distinct ringing sound in his ears, like he just took a puck to the head.

Did you just say...

“All over... me?” he says softly, and something in your demeanor shifts at the quietness of his voice; the tension leaves your body and all your willingness to fight is just gone, sucked out of you like someone switched a light switch.

You sink down onto his couch and put your head in your hands.

“Fuck,” you breathe out. “I didn’t come here to say that.”

I’m not usually this pathetic, is what you mean, but you don’t say that, because the truth is, you usually are this pathetic, at least when it comes to Elias.

“What did you come here for?” Elias asks. The words could sound harsh, but they don’t. It’s only genuine curiosity that you hear in his voice.

Maybe, if you were being honest to yourself, you would even hear something like hope. But you wouldn’t dare believe that.

“I don’t even know,” you tell him, and it’s the truth. “I just, my friend took me to that bar because she said I had to get over you at some point, and that guy was kinda nice and he reminded me of you because he has the same dry humor, and then I saw you and I thought...” You pause. “I thought I was dreaming.”

You feel the couch dip under Elias’ weight as he sits down. He’s not sitting close enough that you can feel him, but somehow you can still feel his presence.

Something settles, within your stomach. Something that hasn’t been settled since that night on his balcony.

“But then you ran away like you couldn’t stand the sight of me, and it hurts, Elias, it hurts to know you feel like that, and suddenly I got so mad and...”

You cut yourself off.

This is not the time, or the place, to put yourself through this, to lay it all out in the open like this. After all, Elias has made it clear he doesn’t want this from you, and you should accept that.

If you want even an ounce of dignity intact, you need to leave now, lick your wounds in peace, and get the fuck over it.

All over it.

You stand up.

“Nevermind,” you tell him. “I’m sorry for coming here.”

But before you can take a step towards the front door, to leave and never come back, Elias’ hand catches your wrist, slender fingers wrapped around you so tightly it nearly hurts.

It doesn’t, really. Not in comparison to how much your soul is hurting.

“Elias,” you say, and you’re pleading, now, “please don’t.”

It’s not a full sentence, but you think it covers the bases: please don’t make me say it, please don’t let me embarrass myself like this, please don’t break my heart again.

Please don’t let me go.

“I’m sorry,” Elias says, and his voice is a little gruff, like it’s hard for him to speak. “I’m so sorry I left. Today, and last time. I know I don’t deserve it, but please... don’t leave.”

You inhale sharply; these are words you hoped, but never expected to hear, and now that you’re hearing them, you don’t really know what to do with them.

“Let me just say some things,” Elias continues, soft and careful, like he’s trying not to spook you. “Just sit, listen to me, and then if you want, you can leave and I’ll never bother you again.”

That’s, like, kinda the opposite of what you want, but you suppose you never really had a chance. Because you look back at Elias and his blue eyes are honest and pleading, so you nod curtly and sit back down on the couch.

You sit on the opposite end to Elias, and his hand falls away from your wrist, ends up on his own knee.

Elias is looking at you intently, his blue eyes bright and focused. Under his gaze, it seems a little harder to breathe.

You don’t know what you’re expecting him to say, but it’s not what comes out of his mouth next.

“You’re my best friend.”

His voice is quiet, but firm.

You frown. “Brock is your best friend.”

Elias smiles a little sadly. He twists the string of his hoodie around his finger, then lets it fall again.

It’s a sure tell that he’s nervous, which really sucks to notice, because you don’t think Elias has ever been nervous around you before.

“Maybe,” he says, “but so are you. In a different way, I think.” He pauses. “I didn’t realize that before. That it’s different with you.”

“Elias, you’re not making a lot of sense right now,” you tell him, confused, and the sigh that escapes his lips is heavy.

“I know,” he says, frustration lacing his voice, “I’m not good at talking. I don’t know... what to say, how to say. That’s why I didn’t say anything, that night.”

He doesn’t have to explain which night he’s talking about.

You feel your cheeks flush at the mention of that night, and avert your gaze to stare at your hands, that are linked together laying limply in your lap.

“Y/N,” Elias says softly, and there’s something vulnerable in his voice, “our friendship is different because yes, you’re one of my best friends, but that isn’t all I feel for you.”

You risk it; you look up at him, and his eyes are big and sad when they lock with yours.

“I didn’t realize it, when you said...” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but he doesn’t have to. You know what he means. “I didn’t realize it until I thought about it and suddenly it all made so much sense, it was all so clear... But then I came out and you were gone and I worried you changed your mind.”

He inhales, then very slowly, oh so carefully, reaches out and puts one hand on yours, his hand warm and soft.

You don’t really know what to say; you think Elias is trying to tell you he has feelings for you too, but after last time, you’re too scared to make any assumptions without him literally spelling it out for you.

There’s something circling in your mind, one thought that means nothing else really matters.

“You left.”

The silence is almost deafening, but you don’t fill it. You can see the wheels turning in Elias’ head, can see the shame on his face.

“I’m really, really sorry,” he says, finally. “I think I freaked out. Like I said, I didn’t really realize what we had... Until I didn’t have you any more.” He sighs again. His fingers have tightened around yours, but you don’t know if he means to do it, or if it’s something subconscious, trying to keep you close to him.

“These past weeks have really sucked,” he continues. “I thought you were over me, and I didn’t know what to do.” He smiles a bit wryly. “Words are not my strong point.”

Your heart is beating in your chest, so loudly you can almost feel it in your ears. You think if Elias is quiet for a while, he might be able to hear it, too.

There’s really no way you could misinterpret this, probably. But you’re not gonna be the one to make the first move.

That didn’t work out so well for you last time.

Instead, you ask; “Show me?”

Something flashes across Elias’ face, something heated and determined, and then suddenly he’s close enough that you can feel his body heat radiating off him.

His lips are soft at first, almost hesitant, but when he notices you’re not pulling away, Elias’ kisses you more intently, swipes his tongue across your bottom lip and moves his hands to your hips, tugging softly.

You let him pull you against him. You don’t think you really ever had a chance to say no.

The kiss makes you dizzy, but there’s still a voice nagging at you, somewhere in the back of your brain. And when Elias pulls back from you long enough to breathe, the thought somehow makes its way out of your mouth.

“Please don’t do this if you’re gonna run away again.” Your intake of breath is a little shaky. “I’m never going to get over you after this.”

Elias laughs, and for the first time, it’s a genuine laugh, one that lights up something inside of you.

“I don’t want you to get over me,” he mumbles against your lips. “I was an idiot for giving you the chance to do that once. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

His hands move to your back, caressing the skin there.

“I love you,” he says, easily as ever. “I love you, and I’m never going to run away anywhere except if it’s after you.”

You don’t think you could smile any wider if you tried.

“I love you, too,” you say. The words feel a bit foreign on your lips, after six weeks of telling yourself to not think them.

“Thank God,” Elias breathes, and then he’s kissing you again, and his hands seem to be everywhere at once, touching your skin and your face and your hair.

His hands are all over you, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

#elias pettersson #vancouver canucks #nhl fic #nhl imagine #nhl one shot #elias pettersson imagine

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unibrowzz · 3 years

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Mod (finally) reviews all 67 winners of the Eurovision Song Contest Part VII (FINALE)- The 2010s

And we’re on the home stretch! Just 10 songs left now.

The 2010s stands as the only decade I watched live and the only decade I haven’t yet rewatched, mainly because I have no interest to. I’ve already seen the contest anyway, if a song didn’t stick with me then, it probably won’t now.

Also prepare for some hotter than usual takes, mostly down to the 10s contests being the most well known due to recency bias. I can say whatever the Hell I want about older contests and what songs I despise from there, but one non-positive comment about Euphoria and suddenly about five butthurt anons appear in my inbox telling me why I’m wrong.

But without further ado, let’s finish these off!

2010: Satellite

Country: Germany

Artist: Lena Meyer-Landrut

Language: English

Thoughts: I used to defend this song a lot, for some reason. I used to get super defensive when people dismissed it as a cheap lazy pop song that shouldn’t have won over (insert song here, but let’s be real here, 99% of the time it’s Turkey's equally cheap lazy emo rock song) and that it robbed so many better entries, blah blah, you know the drill. And I think it’s because it was the first winner I saw as I started properly watching in 2010, so I didn’t want to shit all over the winner that introduced me to the contest. Or maybe it’s that it makes me really nostalgic, or something to that effect. But, dear God, why did I? It’s so… not worth it. I appreciate it for being a much less instrumental-heavy winner, with its skippy, snappy beat and bouncing vocals which sound closer to plain talking than actual singing, but… How many times were the lyrics ran through GoogleTranslate before they were finalised? What’s with the janky, overexaggerated fake-English accent? Why does the singer look embarrassed to be a part of this? Why was this written? And how the FUCK did it win? It’s so weird and awkward to listen to. It’s the song equivalent of trying to make small talk with that one classmate you never talk to because they’re shy and boring. It’s like listening to an old person laugh half-heartedly at their not-that-funny old person joke. It’s canned laughter in a mediocre sitcom. It’s just an awkward, painful to listen to song that’s made all the more painful by the fact that Germany has sent much better songs that easily could have replaced this as their one post-reunification winner.

Was this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what was? Spain- Daniel Diges- “Algo Pequeñito”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 60th

2011: Running Scared

Country: Azerbaijan

Artist: Ell and Niki

Language: English

Thoughts: Look, this one isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. Doesn’t mean it’s good, or that I find it particularly good, but the worst winner of all time? Goodness no, it doesn't even come remotely close. What we have here is a mildly pleasant ballad duet song with a distinctive sad-boyband vibe. Like you can definitely hear the “X-Factor winner’s first cover song” energy just radiating off it from the first few lines. I suppose you could argue that that does make it feel a bit clinical and like it’s trying too hard to be a big hit, but come on, it’s not like this is the first winner like that. The singing is alright; better than half the singing that won in the 2000s anyway, and the male singer especially has a nice voice. The lyrics aren’t exactly poetry, sure, but again, other winners have terrible lyrics as well and don’t receive nearly as much hate as this one does. And… that’s it. Why all the hate? No idea, but I can only assume the people who declare this song to be the worst winner ever haven’t heard anything that won before 2010.

Was this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what was? Denmark- A Friend in London- “New Tomorrow”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 42nd

2012: Euphoria

Country: Sweden

Artist: Loreen

Language: English

Thoughts: Ugh. Listen. This is not a bad song. It’s decent, middle of the table, listenable, marketable, well sung, well performed, well shot. I must stress, this is not a bad song. But the best Eurovision song of all time? Absolutely not. Euphoria is one of the few winners I would describe as “overrated”, and that isn’t a term I use lightly (since it’s overused as Hell), because frankly, I don’t see what people see in this song. Hell, I forgot it completely until the 2012 voting, and further still until mid 2013 when a friend said he liked it. This song left that little of an impression on me that I completely forgot everything about it for a solid year. And considering how many fans regard this to be one of the best, if not the best song to ever come out of the contest... that baffles me, I just can’t wrap my head around why so many people hold this song up on a pedestal and worship it like it was dropped from the hands of God himself. And I'm not sure if it's because this just isn't a genre I care about, or if it's because this was WAY back when I was a casual fan who didn't follow any of the songs or artists so didn't know who'd be the favourite going in like I do now, and therefore didn’t know to keep an ear out for this one. Or maybe you have to be piss drunk and at a nightclub to really feel the impact of this song. This song triggers absolutely no response from me other than “Oh, a Eurovision song”. I feel no emotion towards it aside from complete indifference. I can’t deny that this song made an impact, it just… didn’t make an impact on me.

Is this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what is? Spain- Pastora Soler- “Quedate Conmigo”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 40th

2013: Only Teardrops

Country: Denmark

Artist: Emmelie de Forest

Language: English

Thoughts: Let me ask you a question: What do you get when you sandwich an otherwise decent pop song between two of the most iconic and recognizable winners of the decade? You get this. Only Teardrops is a weird, weird winner to me. On one hand, the fandom acts like it might as well not exist, you go straight from Euphoria to Rise Like a Phoenix, who cares about that filler song which came between them. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who really like it, yet all of them are either very casual fans or not fans at all. So this makes me feel like this song’s main weakness is that it’s too mainstream, at least for Eurovision fans. What are my thoughts? It depends. For one, I enjoy this song a LOT more than Euphoria; I always have done and I’m not ashamed or afraid to admit that. I find this song has a lot more personal appeal, particularly a much bigger finale in my opinion, and being surrounded by people who like this song has admittedly kept me fond of it. BUT, I still wouldn’t necessarily call it a favourite of mine. Maybe a favourite of the 2010s, but not overall. At the end of the day, it’s a little too generic, a little too normal, a little too like every other song you’d hear on the radio. It’s not really a song I find myself coming back to again and again and loving every time, it’s the song I stick on to shut my family up when they want to listen to Eurovision music and I’m too shy to show them the songs I actually really like. It's just a decent song that's unfortunate enough to be stuck in between two more iconic winners, doomed to be little more than the answer in a pub quiz question. And even though I do prefer this one to some of those icons, and don’t really have anything else to say about it, it’s just enjoyable yet kind of bland.

Is this my personal winner for this year? This or Iceland

If no, what is? Iceland- Eyþór Gunnlaugsson- “Ég á Líf”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 16th

2014: Rise Like a Phoenix

Country: Austria

Artist: Conchita Wurst

Language: English

Thoughts: Ah yes, the man who made the entire continent of Europe collectively forget what a drag queen is. What a shitshow that night was. But I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to rate/say some things about the song, and honestly? This is arguably the most vocally impressive winner from the 2010s. Seriously, there’s nothing I can fault here; this guy’s got some serious pipes. Every time I go back to it I just end up blown away by how powerful and raw this song is. And obviously good vocals alone can’t carry a song forever, otherwise I would’ve had nicer things to say about the early 70s and mid 90s, but with this song the vocals go hand-in-hand with the gimmick. Without the powerful vocals this would just be a knockoff Bond theme sung by a drag queen with a beard, like it’d just be another sensationalist gimmick song to throw onto the pile with all the other gimmick songs. But with the good singing, this has the distinction that it’s a gimmick entry that still had every right to win because the singer was actually competent. Also unlike the 70s winners this one actually has strong emotions tied to it rather than it just being a bunch of pretty French words, so there’s that.

Is this my personal winner for this year? This or the Netherlands tbh

If no, what is? N/A

Personal ranking (out of 67): 17th

2015: Heroes

Country: Sweden

Artist: Måns Zelmerlöw

Language: English

Thoughts: Fun fact: I was so bitter this won that I stormed off before the voting was done and cried in my room over it. I hated everything about this song: I hated how Sweden won just three years after their last win, I hated how the staging was just BEGGING people to vote for it, and I ESPECIALLY hated how it beat out the televote favourite because the juries were too busy wanking off to this one to care about anything else. I just despised everything about this song, and it turned me into an obnoxious jury-hater for a solid year. And yes, I'm extremely embarrassed of all that because honestly this song is fantastic. I would go as far to say it's my favourite Swedish winner, maybe not one of my favourite Swedish entries but definitely my favourite winner of theirs. Everything about this is just so appealing to me, from the brooding intro and vocals, to the lyrics, to the staging, my GOD the staging! It’s one of the best performances of the contest to date; It's impressive without being tacky or try-hard, he interacts with his background, and that little doodle boy character he’s created is adorable. I just love this performance, it’s so mesmerising.

Was this my personal winner for this year? Not then, is now

If no, what was? Then? Serbia- Bojana Stamenov- “Beauty Never Lies”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 11th

2016: 1944

Country: Ukraine

Artist: Jamala

Language: English, some Crimean words

Thoughts: I mean… it’s good until she starts singing. Now I am by all means not an advocate for bringing back the old language rule, but songs like this sure as Hell make me one. This should have been left entirely in Crimean. Simple as that. The English lyrics are bloody awful, no way to sugarcoat it, and absolutely annihilate the potential this song is otherwise seething with, because the instrumental to this song is fantastic and the chorus and climax give me goosebumps. The performance at the contest was chilling as well; a perfect blend of both simple yet flashy staging to set up a really uneasy atmosphere that compliments the song perfectly but, God, the lyrics are bad, man, especially for such a serious song about a personal topic. That said, it's still the only song in the 2016 top 3 that seemed winner-worthy, unlike Australia's obvious Jurybait and Russia's obvious Telebait. So… it has that.

Was this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what was? France- Amir Haddad- “J’ai Cherché”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 57th

2017: Amar Pelos Dois

Country: Portugal

Artist: Salvador Sobral

Language: Portuguese (Translation: “Both of us”)

Thoughts: I still question why it took Portugal until 20-fucking-17 to even reach the top five, but that's a rant for another day. Not that this is a rant, far from it. Anybody who knows me knows that I love this song after all, and that it’s one of the few winners I remain rather defensive of, though that’s mostly down to the amount of hate this song and its singer receive. I will defend Sal and his hot takes on pop music until I die. Now I’ll admit, this song surprised me in more ways than one. Namely by actually winning the televote; given how this song has split opinions clean down the board as to whether it’s spine-tinglingly beautiful or soul-crushingly boring, I was expecting it to come mid-table in the televote whilst some other country swiped first. Yet somehow it managed to stomp the televote just as hard as it stomped the jury vote. I guess I wasn’t the only person this struck a chord with after all. Also, I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a perfect dance song? Like it’s great for ballroom, or contemporary. It’s so dreamy and flowy, and I usually HATE dreamy flowy songs, yet this one just resonates with me for some reason and I’m not sure why.

Is this my personal winner for this year? Yes

If no, what is? N/A

Personal ranking (out of 67): 4th

2018: Toy

Country: Israel

Artist: Netta Barzilai

Language: English, some chicken noises, cringe

Thoughts: And here we have another case for bringing back the language rule, because if this song had a Hebrew version I would 100% listen to it more often. When I heard Israel was sending an, ahem, "feminist anthem" about the #MeToo trend on twitter, my first reaction was "ew". When I heard it was the favourite to win, my reaction was also "ew". And when I heard the song for the first time? "Hm, not as bad as I thought." And also "ew". This song is just embarrassing. I’m embarrassed listening to it, I’m embarrassed watching it, and I’m embarrassed when someone mentions it when I’m trying to convince them Eurovision actually has good music. You can just tell from the first few lines that it was written by middle aged men trying to shill themselves out to gullible young women who think listening to a song by some Israeli DJ “empowers” them. And let’s be honest here: “empowering” is just media speak for “shit”. The only thing stopping me from putting it at the VERY bottom is the instrumental and performance because without the cringy lyrics you’re left with a pretty good club song, and I swear to God Netta Barzilai could sell herself sneezing for 3 minutes. If “Toy” had been entirely in Hebrew I would’ve given it a pass, and maybe a cheeky vote or two. But, alas, that was not to be.

Was this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what was? Italy- Ermal Meta & Fabrizio Moro- “Non mi Avete fatto Niente”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 64th

2019: Arcade

Country: The Netherlands

Artist: Duncan Laurence

Language: English

Thoughts: You know, in my 9 or so years watching the contest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt genuinely ecstatic watching a song win. Most of the time I either feel neutral (most of them) or a more general, content kind of happy (2014 and 2017). Like I’ve never let out a shout of joy and slid on my knees across my living room floor in sheer, blind happiness. But that’s what I did with “Arcade”. I’m not really sure why that is because, I must confess, it wasn’t my personal winner of the night, and, looking back, I preferred other songs, but… God, I just can’t explain how overwhelmingly happy I was when this song won. I’m not sure if it’s because I was alone or if I was rooting for this deep down (or if it’s because it was between this song or fuckin’ Sweden again). But that’s by the by. How’s the song? Honestly? Really good. One of my favourites of this decade, if I’m honest. It’s the kind of song that’s grown on me a lot since the night of the contest; even though it wasn’t my favourite song from 2019, I’m not mad at all at it winning.

Is this my personal winner for this year? Honestly I had about 10

If no, what is? I could list them if you want

Personal ranking (out of 67): 6th

#AND IT IS DONE #eurovision #mod's winner reviews #esc winners #finally glad to get these done lmao these were so tedious to format

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consumedkings-archive · 4 years

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ancient names, iv

A John Seed/Original Female Character Fanfic

Ancient Names, pt iv: game of survival

Masterlink Post

Word Count: 4.7k

Rating: M for now, rating will change in later chapters as things develop.

Warnings: Language, some “light” religious blasphemy (it’s Far Cry 5), the Seeds being themselves. This is an enemies to lovers (enemies to enemies and lovers?), strong canon deviance from here on out. Mentions of blood/carnage, the frantic energy of people who both hate and are attracted to each other. It goes on!

Notes: Hi guys! I'm so, so sorry it took so long for me to get this chapter up. You know how quarantine-times just be like that where you manically write something for like 8 days straight and then never touch it again for weeks? Yeah, it really DO be like that sometimes.Anyway, this chapter is a bit of a filler, for which I apologize; I wanted some softer John/Elliot moments, at least something that wasn't quite so much "fuck off" and "please go fuck yourself" constantly, but also, that is also kind of Elliot's personality, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I promise I will try to be much better at making myself sit down and actually write now that I'm not swallowed up by a black hole of writer's block! Thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding and for all of the lovely comments and kudos; it really means the most to me! I just love getting the chance to interact with y'all.

The adrenaline crash was already happening.

Elliot was familiar with the sensation; as she rifled through the glove box of the Eden’s Gate van, John waited impatiently just on the other side of her while the sound of car doors and voices echoed in the distance. He clearly wanted to tell her to hurry up, and maybe he would, if she took long enough—but she wasn’t keen on these fucking crazies getting their hands on her.

She almost laughed at the thought. Passed from one psycho’s hands to another; wouldn’t that be something? Joey would be absolutely furious.

If she’s not dead, that unrelenting voice in her head echoed, stilling her hands for a moment.

“Deputy?” John asked, when she stopped moving, maybe because he was worried she could hear or see something he couldn’t. That would be nice—John Seed, sweating, for once in his fucking life.

If they didn’t already gut her and plant a whole fucking garden in her.

“Rook.” His voice wasn’t a question now, but a command, and she could hear it in his voice; look at me, tell me what you’re thinking, and her teeth clicked together. She closed the glove box shut, no reward to be found—just loose papers and some napkins—and closed the door beside her. The rattle of the chain link binding their cuffed wrists together reminded her, once again, of the absurdity of their situation.

“Don’t call me that,” she said tiredly, the rush of driving almost head-first into another car at a hundred miles-per-hour fleeing her body, leaving her feeling gutted and emptied out. She coughed into her elbow and the gesture pulled something in the cavity of her chest; now more than ever, she wished that she’d taken the risk of potentially dying and just popped those Tylenol-looking pills when she’d had the chance

John stared at her for a moment. He didn’t respond to her demand, but replied, “You’re still wearing my glasses.”

Elliot shrugged. She pushed the glasses down her nose a little to peer at him over the blue, reflective lenses. “They look better on me anyway.”

His lips pressed into a thin line. He looked like he wanted to say something to her—and she certainly expected him to snap at her to hand them over—but he turned away and started walking. He said, briskly, “Let’s not get hunted down like wild animals, shall we?”

“Yes,” Elliot agreed, falling into step with him, sobering her voice quite purposefully, “wouldn’t it be awful if one of those crazy cultists say, drugged and kidnapped us? Absolutely beastly.”

John shot her a look. He looked awfully like he wanted to say something again; that frustrated tense of his jaw, the way his eyes narrowed, these were all familiar gestures to her. She could tell that she was pushing a button he didn’t want her to have access to. That knowledge gave her a giddy kind of thrill and kick-started her system all over again. Good, Elliot thought, minding her business as picked along a barely-used trail and left the van behind them, going further and further into the wilderness. The river was close; if she had to guess, they were somewhere halfway between where John had taken resident and the border into Faith’s territory. I hope that pisses him off.

“We should head back to the ranch first,” Elliot continued, falling into step with John—and not without some puffing. “And would you slow down? Remember how you got me sick? And then handcuffed us together in a temper tantrum? And then—”

“I was there,” John snipped at her. Despite his brittle tone, he did make an effort of less power walking, maybe because he didn’t want to have to drag her unconscious body along once she passed out from billowing her way across the Montana wilderness.

“Just wanted to make sure. Humility is a virtue, as they say.”

“I have to get Faith back,” he said, ignoring her little jab. “I can’t let those fucking nutjobs keep her.”

Elliot clambered over a log, keeping half of her attention on the sound of voices, still distant enough that she wasn’t worried about it. “In case you’ve forgotten this other small detail,” she continued, “they probably also have Joey, which they wouldn’t, if you had just kept your grimy hands off of her. So, you know—let’s keep in mind we have generally the same goal, here.”

“Thank you,” John muttered tersely, “for keeping us goal-oriented.”

“You’re very welcome, John.” Elliot tugged the sweatpants back up her hips; now, in the dying light of golden hour, she was regretting not changing into her jeans earlier that morning. Of course there was no way she could have known, but hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

She felt breathless from talking and walking, but the desire to really dig in was too great, overwhelming her need to take a full breath as she added, “It’s my pleasure, truly. Any time you need me, all you have to do is—”

As they wandered down closer to the river, John puffed out, “Do you ever stop talking?”

“I remember a time when all you wanted was for me to talk to you.”

Just as she finished her sentence, about to tack another jab on just for the hell of it—and another thing—she heard shouts, closer now, in a foreign language that she didn’t recognize. She stilled immediately, instinctively reaching and grabbing John’s arm to keep him from continuing on.

He opened his mouth to ask her what she was stopping for, but before he could she waved her hand frantically at him and voicelessly mouthed the words, shut the fuck up. Just one moment was all it would take; one second for them to be heard and they’d be gutted and flayed open, just like Waylon. Elliot did not have any desire to become a floral arrangement any time soon.

The voices echoed again, closer this time. John pushed her hand out of his face and instead pulled her further along the trail, moving with greater purpose this time; the second she started struggling to keep up, he wrapped a firm arm around her midsection and hoisted her, planting her right in front of him before he ducked them into some brush.

(She reckoned the heat in her cheeks was adrenaline, certainly, and not the way it had felt to have John’s chest pressed against her back, his arm warm and strong against her: because it certainly wasn’t that, but perhaps more like a pneumonia fever or just her body crumpling under the stress.)

Dark, heavy boots stormed through the underbrush, talking to each other now in a more conversational tone; though Elliot could hear them chattering and occasionally laughing at what the other said (in Swedish, or perhaps Dutch?) she could see their feet moving with distinct, sharp precision, stopping in time with each other and starting again whenever one of them said something.

Oh, fuck, she thought with a sick, desperate, sinking feeling. They’re so fucking organized. God, fuck.

It was one thing to kill peggies, to storm her way into a compound and smash her head into the face of one or peel into the parking lot in her Jeep, Boomer having gutted two or three of them on their way in; Eden’s Gate members carried only chaotic, frenetic energy, barely held together by their worship of their leader and his siblings. Whatever structure they upheld was purely because they were told to, and it wasn’t a system they could execute on their own, without direction.

She had never fought something, or someone, organized. She had never bashed her face into someone who had thirty other comrades marching down to kill her, spear her on a stick and stuff her mouth with baby’s breath.

I’m only a girl. It was a startling, violent moment of realization, that she had been bumbling her way through this, working purely on emotion and instinct. She was not a practiced, methodical killer, but one born out of necessity. I’m only a girl, I can’t kill people who have their shit together.

Elliot was vaguely aware of her breathing becoming labored, grinding in her lungs, and only became consciously aware of it when John’s hand pressed to her mouth, his arm still wrapped around her stomach. His hands smelled—tasted—like leather and dirt, and it was almost comforting enough to ground her, because for once John didn’t smell like that stupid fucking cologne that she hated, but she could still feel the dirt against her mouth like she was getting buried face down—

The steps slowed, stopping just in front of the brush. Elliot could see a silhouette cut across the forest floor, dappled by the branches of the thicket John had plunged them into, the branches pulling and tugging at her hair and shirt and skin. But she only barely saw it, because John’s back faced the trail they’d just been on, his arms around her. A shield.

“I think they’re gone,” John muttered after what felt like an entire fucking eternity and the voices had faded off, hunched in the brush and coiled around her like a snake, dropping his hand from her mouth. She tried to quiet the panicked roaring in her ears to listen (John didn’t know what to listen for; he didn’t know what it was like to have to hold your breath and hope your hunters passed you by) but she couldn’t; all she could think was oh fuck, oh God, I can’t do this. They’re going to kill me without a blink. They’re going to kill Joey. They’re going to—

“Rook,” John said, his voice firmer now. He must have been convinced their pursuers had moved on. “Rook, my hand.”

Her nails were digging into his wrist, revisiting shallow wounds she had made the night that John had held her under. But he didn’t wince or yank his hand away; he watched her intently, waiting for the iron-clad grip of her fingers to loosen. Elliot closed her eyes for a second, just a second, to ground herself.

I feel: John’s heartbeat, the dirt, the wind. I heard: John’s voice, leaves rustling, the river down below. I smell: dirt, leather, pine sap, humid river air.

She kept waiting for John to push her again. She kept waiting for him to say something stupid—Earth to Elliot?—or demand she get moving, or something equally insufferable, but he stayed like that; chest against her back, eclipsing out the little bit of sun breaking through the brush, waiting.

“I’m fine,” Elliot murmured. She felt like she was on auto-pilot.Too much, her body was screaming at her, the sickness’ sticky hands crawling through her, leaving fingerprints all over her lungs.You’re doing too much. The adrenaline was crashing hard through her body now, and all she wanted to do was puke and then lay down for a nice, long nap. She loosened her grip on his wrist for a moment before letting her hand fall completely from his.

John didn’t say whether or not he believed her, but he stood up slower than he had moved before, peering cautiously around before picking his way out of the brush. He remained (blissfully) silent as Elliot stepped around him; what he lacked in personal relatability, she thought with a sort of familiar dryness, he made up for when he kept his mouth shut.

“Elliot,” he said, ruining her peace, bulldozing over it wildly like he did just about everything else in her life. There was a question somewhere in the way that he said her name, and she felt the pull of the cuffs linking them together when he stopped.

She turned to look at him. He didn’t, for once, look as though he wanted to say something; instead, he was waiting expectantly. For an explanation, she supposed. Or maybe a thank you. That sounded much more like him.

Elliot said, again, “I’m fine,” her hands on her hips, resisting the urge to double over like her body was begging her too. She had never known when to stop, not really, not without someone else telling her. Her mama liked to call it her Too Much gene.

John arched a dark brow at her. His mouth curved in something like a smile, but it was too bitter, too wry, too knowing to be a real smile. She knew his real smile, even if he didn’t think so. She’d seen it. Boyish and—dare she say—endearing. This was not it.

She gathered up all of her willpower and bit out, “John Seed, if we don’t get moving, we’re going to having marigolds and daisies and what the fuck else blooming right out of our gutted rib cages.”

Whatever had been sitting on John’s face was wiped clean by her words. A good old dose of reality. She tugged on the chain impatiently, and he fell into step again with her, trudging through the underbrush.

“And don’t look at me like that,” she snapped out over her shoulder. “I told you, I’m fine.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Elliot was not fine.

John would admit —to himself, silently, and never under any other circumstances—that he did not know Elliot Honeysett very well. He did, however, know her enough. The way she’d gripped his wrist, looking for an anchor; the strange, haunted, disconnected way her eyes had flickered from point to point in the nowhere-in-particular when he spoke to her, never quite looking at him. He’d seen those things in her before. He’d seen that look on her face earlier that morning. He’d seen that strange disconnect, a switch of a flip somewhere in her mind, when she’d certainly considered choking one of the guards to death.

All the same, he reasoned as they trudged up a hill, trying to ignore the distant sounds of gunfire that bode poorly and having been walking for what he could only guess was hours now, it was odd. Having her cling onto him. Clutch his wrist for support. It was—

(nice)

—strange, to think about Elliot needing him, in the same way the realization had unseated him when he had understood she’d been relying on him to keep her safe at the ranch.

“Did you take that Tylenol?” he asked absently, an afterthought, still mulling over their odd closeness in the woods, trying to pin down why it writhed and squirmed in the cavity of his chest. The sun was beginning to set behind the mountains, and a slow, uneasy chill had crawled through the air. “Back at the ranch.”

“Do I look like an idiot?” Elliot huffed out, pausing halfway up the hill, to try and catch her breath.

“That was rhetorical, before you consider replying with astonishing honesty,” the blonde snipped out after a moment of breathing.

Her voice sounded raspier now, like she’d picked up chain-smoking. She cocked her head, looking at him for a moment, her hands on her hips; she had Jacob’s old sweats wadded up to her waist—so small, John thought absently, she’s been losing weight like crazy—and an old gray undershirt of his tied in a knot at her stomach. Her ponytail was practically disengaged completely, big chunks of her blonde hair falling into her face and sticking to her cheeks and jaw. She looked feverish, or maybe out of shape, though John suspected it was much more likely to be the former than the latter.

John replied, “I would hate to disappoint your opinion of me.”

“Cute.” Elliot pushed her way up the last half of the hill, cresting the top and finally—finally, because he could tell she’d been waiting to do this—bent over at her hips, hands on the tops of her thighs. They were probably a good hundred yards from the ranch now, in the thickest part of the woods and in the farthest reach from the driveway, which Elliot had insisted on. “Good fucking God, I never want to move for the rest of my life.”

“You’d probably feel better if you took that Tylenol I left you.”

“Hey. Hey, John?” She snapped her fingers at him, not looking at him but waving wildly. “Hey. Oh, yeah? Shut the fuck up.”

“Somehow,” John mused, peering through the trees to see if he could get a glimpse of the ranch, “you are even unpleasant when subdued by sickness, deputy.”

He’d become so accustomed to her casual venom that it was almost a comfort, now. He would know something was wrong with her when she wasn’t trying to bite his head off, but at least for now, bound together by metal, he knew she wasn’t going to try and kill him. It would be too much of a hassle to try and drag his corpse along through the woods.

I have to get Faith, John thought, eyes straining to see through the trees but his body reluctant to get any closer to the treeline. I have to get her. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It’s all fucked, the whole lot of it. They’ve got her on some shit again. Fuck.

Joseph would be so angry; more than that, Faith was certainly going to be scared out of her mind, once the drugs wore off.

“They’re here.” Elliot’s voice shook him out of his thoughts; she had caught her breath, for now, and wandered closer to the treeline. Her brows furrowed together, and for a second John almost laughed at how ridiculous it was to have her face so serious when she refused to give him back his glasses.

Any humor that he might have felt was ripped away when he followed her gaze to see what he saw: the nondescript gray vans, parked in a semi-circle, leaving an exit down the drive. He watched a few of the men in their dark clothes guiding members of Eden’s Gate into the back of the van. Ase, and Faith, and Ase's red-haired executioner man were nowhere to be seen.

“They aren’t fighting,” John muttered as he watched the members of Eden's Gate hand their weapons over. He felt something sick deep in the pit of his stomach.

“Well, John,” Elliot began, and he thought, don’t fucking say it, but she plunged on regardless, “I hate to break it to you, but you’ve got yourself a brood of followers, not leaders.”

“They’re devout,” John insisted bitingly. It welled up inside of him—perhaps embarrassment, or humiliation—and he swallowed thickly. “They’re just surviving, that’s all. It would be stupid for them to all get killed.”

The blonde shot him a look through the side of her expression, wary. She didn’t need to say anything for him to figure out what it meant. Sure, John. They certainly let me and the others mow them down no problem, but right now, they’re just surviving.

“We can’t get into the ranch now,” Elliot ventured after a moment, stepping back from the treeline. “The best thing to do is wait and see if they leave. They don’t strike me as a home-base type of crazy, but you never know; maybe those weird cell-like rooms you put in the basement will tickle their fancy.”

“What?” John demanded. He trailed after her, indignant. “We’re just going to let them take Faith and leave?”

Elliot sighed. She looked to be working something between her teeth, words she wanted to say to him but that she was taking care to mull over first, and he didn’t know if that relieved him or filled him with more dread.

“Yes,” she said after a moment, and he thought, definitely more dread, I like it better when she talks impulsively.

“Tell me this is a stupid joke,” John insisted. Elliot’s lashes fluttered. A strange flicker of emotion streaked across her face, as brilliant and short-lived as a shooting start, and his stomach knotted when he thought it might have been pity.

“We have to. They obviously aren’t planning on killing her, John; if they were, they wouldn’t have flaunted her in front of your face,” Elliot replied, starting to walk again, carefully picking her way down a small ravine and then following its slope downwards, towards the river again.

John’s feet moved forward, even when he didn’t want to, even when he wanted to turn back around and storm the ranch and demand Faith be returned back to him. Finally, eventually, he willed himself to stop, as though he only just remembered that he was the bigger of the two of them and carried the most weight in their little red-rover chain.

“We can’t leave her with them,” he insisted. “That’s bullshit, deputy. Just because she’s not one of yours—”

Elliot turned to look at him. Her eyes were narrowed, and she pulled on the chain, hard, the way that John had done to her, yanking him forward abruptly.

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, John Seed, but I’ve got more experience doing rescue missions for people kidnapped by cults than you do.” Her voice was hard, venomous. “They could have Joseph in there at gun-point and I’d still rescue him.”

John felt the anger blooming in his chest. “I never took you for a liar.”

“I was never going to kill a little fucking girl,” Elliot replied viciously. “And that’s what she is, even if Joseph pumped her full of poison. I was never going to kill any of you Seeds.”

“No?” John demanded. “Then what?”

A moment of silence stretched between them. It welled with something, somethingsoemthingsomething that John wanted to grapple with his hands and squeeze, but that he couldn't.

She said, after a few heartbeats, “Put you in jail to rot, you fuckhead.” Elliot turned on her heel and started marching again. “Death would be too kind an ending for you.”

⭒☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☆⭒

By the time they found a spot to stop, it was nearly completely dark. They had walked in almost complete silence after her little proclamation, enough to make him wonder if that odd moment of closeness had been a figment of his imagination after all.

Elliot picked a spot out for them close to the river, but still kept shadowed by the shrubs, and John didn’t have much will to argue with her anymore; her words kept sliding around in his head like marbles. Death would be too kind an ending for you.

He knew what she was really saying, with that. If I have to suffer with living, her voice said, beyond the words, then so do you.

The blonde was shivering as she loaded John’s arms up with wood (much to his chagrin; he’d already put this Versace shirt through enough, and now she was doing this), and by the time they got a fire going he thought she might pass out from the entirety of the day.

“Cold, deputy?” John asked mildly, watching her untie the knot of the shirt and slink her arms into the over-sized fabric, huddled by the small fire they’d (she’d) made. She glared at him.

“Well—”

“I haven’t forgotten,” he interjected, as though he could hear it already. “I know you’ve got pneumonia, and it's all my fault, as I willed it upon you.”

“Goody,” Elliot replied. There was no bite in her voice anymore; exhaustion was pulling at the edges of her expression, tugging her voice down, and John felt almost a bit of relief at the knowledge that maybe they were done trading blows. For now.

Lit by firelight, she looked softer. There was still an open wound where she’d really dug her words in, and maybe it was still bleeding a little, but John could feel the evening chill sinking into his bones now too, even with the sleeves of his button-up rolled down. So yes; Elliot did look softer, and smaller, and warmer, and John would be stupid to willingly get pneumonia so that they were both huffing and puffing through the woods.

He acquiesced, after a moment of silence and as though relenting to his own mental argument, “It would be warmer if we shared body heat.”

The look she shot him might as well have been daggers. “What,” she quipped, “being handcuffed to me isn’t enough for you?” I suppose we aren't done trading blows after all.

“Look, I’m not dressed for a Montana night out in the woods,” he insisted, “and certainly neither are you. You’re already sick.”

Elliot scoffed and rolled her eyes.

He ventured, again, “You already said we can’t leave the fire burning all night. The smoke would give us away.”

“And I’m also saying that there’s no way in fucking hell I’m letting you spoon me,” Elliot replied, closing her eyes. “If you get hypothermia, then maybe it’s the karmic universe telling you to go fuck yourself.”

“Oh, very nice, deputy.”

He sighed, stretched out on his side and drinking up as much of the fire’s warmth as he could before Elliot would, inevitably, stamp it out and try to get some sleep. The ground was soft and mossy, and while John couldn’t stand the idea of sleeping in the same clothes he’d been running around in, the day had begun to take its toll on him.

“If you change your mind,” John continued, “I can assure you I’m an excellent big spoon.”

Elliot scoffed, again, and he thought, oh, well. Maybe the karmic universe will serve me something after all, but we’ll have to wait and see, and let his eyes drift shut.

He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he first felt a change. It could have been thirty minutes, or a few hours; Elliot’s sleep schedule was so unknown to him—and certainly changed by her illness—that he couldn’t have wagered if he wanted to. But he was still mostly asleep when he felt the warmth of her body tucked against his, shivering, like a leaf in the wind. There was still a soft detergent scent to her clothes, even after everything, and her head fit just under his chin.

John shifted. He didn’t need to open his eyes to tell it was Elliot, and not a bear or mountain lion trying to find the best way to carve out his intestines; Elliot’s hair brushed along his jaw, and she pulled his arm over her like a blanket.

“Is this my karmic retribution?” he rumbled, half asleep still. Elliot’s teeth chattered.

“Just consider this making yourself useful,” she replied. Her voice was muffled from her face being tucked against his shirt. “Now shut up and go to sleep.”

“Yes, boss.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He had expected to get woken up gently, by the rising sun, or perhaps the feeling of Elliot disengaging from their only-for-warmth spooning session.

Instead, John was woken abruptly by the feeling of a cold, wet nose pressing into his face, hot, stinking breath whuffling across his face.

“What—the fuck—”

John swatted the air blindly, the smell of dog breath wafting over his face as he struggled into a sitting position. It took a moment for him to right himself, to get a good grasp on his surroundings; their handcuffs were still linked. Elliot was awake, and sitting up already, and beaming as a Blue Heeler stared at John.

As soon as his eyes landed on the dog, it barked at him. Loudly. All of the hair on the hound’s spine rose, all the way down to the base of its tail, and a low, nasty growl rose in its throat.

“Boomer,” Elliot said, and immediately the dog sat. Boomer’s eyes darted between Elliot and John, wary and uncertain. The blonde, however, looked happier than John thought he’d ever seen her, reaching out and ruffling the dog’s hair until it lay flat again, smiling. “Look, John, Boomer found us.”

“Oh,” John replied, “your killer beast. Excellent.”

Elliot laughed. It was as though Boomer was waiting for the sound; he barked, happily this time (could dogs bark in different tones, John wondered), tail wagging furiously as he crowded Elliot for her attention.

“Don’t worry,” the blonde said, giving John a sly look, “he only bites on command.”

4 notes · View notes

namelists · 4 years

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names inspired by: christmas

this list includes names inspired by christmas stories, songs, traditions and myths, both religious and secular. happy holidays!

Aisling: Irish, meaning “wish” or “dream of”

Alegria: Spanish/Portuguese, meaning “joy”

Alvin: Old English, meaning “elf friend”

Amaryllis: a tropical red flower popular at Christmas due to the colorful blooms that brighten up a winter landscape

Amicitia: Latin, meaning “friendship”

Angel: two angels appear in the Christmas story, bringing good news with them each time

Anise: a warm spice from the star-shaped pericarps of the fruit of an asian evergreen

Aster: from the Greek word for “star”

Bailey: George Bailey from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, the generous banker who sacrifices his dreams in order to help his community

Belle: what sounds like Christmas more than jingling bells?

Buddy: the tallest, happiest Elf ever, singing loud for all to hear.

Carol: originally celebrations of the winter solstice, Carols are dances or songs of praise and joy

Chandelle: French, meaning “candle”

Charity: kindness, generosity, goodwill, compassion

Christian: a believer in the Christian religion

Cider: traditional North American spiced hot drink, made in autumn and winter

Clarence: the guardian angel from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

Clark: the patriarch of the Griswold family in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”

Cookie: traditionally baked and shared with family and friends to celebrate the season

December: the coldest darkest month, during which cultures all over the world hold celebrations of life and light

Demetria: Greek goddess of winter

Douglas: the most familiar Christmas tree type, the Douglas Fir

Dovana: Lithuanian, meaning “gift”

Dream: a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal

Eira: inspired by the Norse Goddess Eir, means ‘snow’ in Welsh

Elvie: from Old English, meaning “elf friend”

Ember: sparks from a cozy crackling fireplace

Emmanuel: a Hebrew name, meaning “God with us”, given to the Christ child as a symbol of God’s protection

Estrella: Spanish, meaning “star”

Eve: the night before Christmas during which not a creature stirs.

Faith: complete trust or confidence in someone or something

Flick: a character from ‘A Christmas Story’ who gets his tongue stuck to a pole

Fraser: a lovely-smelling sturdy Christmas tree

Gabriel: the archangel who delivered the prophecy of the birth of Jesus to Joseph

George: George Bailey from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, the generous banker who sacrifices his dreams in order to help his community

Gloria: Latin for “glory”, what the angels sang to praise the baby Jesus, according to the songs

Grace: the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings

Hoku: Hawaiian, meaning “star”

Holiday: English, meaning “holy day”

Holly: the bright berries of holly trees ripen during the winter, giving a splash of color to a somewhat dismal season

Isabelle: from the French song ‘Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle’, about two female farmhands who have found the baby Jesus and his mother in a stable

Ivy: a winter vine that still looks bright and beautiful in the darkest season

Jeanette: from the song French ‘Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle’, about two female farmhands who have found the baby Jesus and his mother in a stable

Jesper: the worst postman in the world who accidentally creates the story of Santa, in the film ‘Klaus’

Jesus: Hebrew name related to Joshua, meaning “to rescue”, given to the Christ child, whose birth is celebrated during Christmas (even though he was most likely born in the spring)

Jia: Chinese, meaning “home”

Joseph: Mary’s husband, who almost left her when he learned she was pregnant, but an angel let him know it was the Holy Spirit’s baby, so it was okay

Jovie: the honey-voiced love interest of Buddy the Elf, her name means “joyful”

Joy: a feeling of great pleasure and happiness

Kari: Turkish, “covered with snow”

Kevin: was left Home Alone, and engineered an ingenious security system for his house.

Kiseki: Japanese, meaning “miracle”

Klaus: the name of the heartwarming toymaker in the new Netflix movie bearing his name

Kris: Kris Kringle is one of Santa’s many names, and his legal name according to ‘Miracle on 34th Street’

Love: an intense feeling of deep affection

Lucia: the Swedish saint of Christmas, celebrated on December 13th

Lumi: Finnish, meaning “snow”

Lux: Latin, meaning “light”

Mahalo: Hawaiian, meaning “thank you”

Malachi: Hebrew, meaning “messenger angel”

Maria: the name of the woman who gave birth to the Christ child when she was still a virgin

Merry: surprisingly means ‘Guardian of the Sea’ in Welsh, but inspires a warm cozy Christmassy feeling

Mint: a sweet, cooling herb that flavours candy canes

Móshù: Chinese, meaning“magic”

Natalie: Latin, means “the birthday of the Lord”

Natasha: Russian, meaning“born on Christmas Day”

Neve: an anglicized spelling of Gaelic ‘Niamh’ and means ‘snow’

Nicholas: Patron Saint of children, inspired the story of Santa Claus

Noel: French word for Christmas

North: the direction in which you go to find Santa’s house

Peace: freedom from disturbance; tranquility

Poinsettia: a bold, bright, beautiful Mexican flower with red and green blooms

Ralphie: the bold, awkward, near-sighted protagonist of ‘A Christmas Story’

Regalo: Spanish/Italian, meaning “gift”

Roi: Welsh, meaning “to give” & French meaning “king”

Rudolph: the bullied baby reindeer who saved Christmas

Sage: a warm cozy spice known for the distinct taste it gives to classic holiday stuffings

Sahar: Arabic, meaning “magic”

Saman: Icelandic, meaning “together”

Shepherd: the sheep minders who were minding their own business when the angels came to tell them about the birth of God’s son

Snow: atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals, which fall in light white flakes or blanket the ground in cold weather

Star: the star of Bethlehem lead the Magi of the East (the three wise men) to Jerusalem, where Jesus was born

Stella: Italian, meaning “star”

Svetlana: Russian, meaning “light, shining”

Taika: Finnish, meaning “magic”

Tannen: A tannenbaum is a fir tree, long celebrated for their sturdiness and ability to stay bright and green throughout winter

Trúa: Icelandic word for “believe”

Vela: Spanish, meaning “candle”

Vesper: Latin, meaning “evening star”

Winter: the coldest, darkest season of the year, during which cultures all over the world hold celebrations of life and light

Yukio: Japanese name meaning “snow”

Yule: means “winter solstice”

#names #masterlist #rph #name help #christmas #happy holidays! and if you don't celebrate anything this month just celebrate your beautiful self!#seasonal

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pinkcupboardwitch · 4 years

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@justthinkofmeasthetalkingair a Maktahn glossary of all the phrases I was able to find + some basic observations. Linguists please add onto my commentary, or let me know if I missed something.

I. The text

· Das – unknown, probably a location within London.

· Kajt – a swear word

· Kösa – I am sure

· Køt - king

· Krös Mejkt – Stone Forest

· Makt – island where White London is located or its city-state

· Maktahn – adjective/demonym

· Nijk shöst – please, I beg you, I ask you

· Nö kijn avost – I don’t fear death

· Ön vejr tök – The story goes

· On vis och – dawn to dusk

· Ös reijkav vösk – you (s.) + unknown + leave (you must leave?)

· Ös-vo tach? – are you busy?

· Ös vosa nochten - you (s.) + your + unknown

· Öt vosa rijke – for your loss

· Öva sö taro – he is in the city

· Övos norevjk - unknown

· Rhaask – a type of alcohol

· Sijlt - river in London; meaning unknown.

· Tovach ös mostevna - unknown

· Vosijk - unknown; possible relation to Sijlt? The ij sound is relatively common, but the sij combination is not.

· Vösk – leave

· Vos och? – what is it?

· Vöxt – bound

Ia. The names:

Alox - close to Alexander, Greek, “[one who] defending men”

Astrid - Scandinavian, “god’s beloved, god’s beauty”

Athos - Greek, name of a mountain and Titan

Beloc - Catalan? Belloc, “beautiful place”

Gorst - English, “gorse-dweller”

Holland - English, ultimately derived from Dutch Holtlant, “wood land”

Nasi - a Hebrew male title meaning “prince”

Ojka - very close to Korean Okja, “jade girl”

Ros - not a name that I could find, but a common word in many languages. Take a deep breath: Latin for “dew,” Swedish for “rose,” Irish for “headland,” Danish the imperative for “praise, commend,” Dutch for “horse” or “redheaded, russet,” Romanian for “gnawed.” (I keep telling you guys, Ros totally got eaten after he died...)

Stol - Danish for “chair, heap, cluster.” (chair as in throne...?)

Talya - Hebrew for “dew of God.”

II. Miscellaneous observations + a summary on pronouns:

Ös – you are; singular, possibly informal/ vosa - your

Öva – he is

Övos – conjecture, she is

There does not seem to be a definitive first-person singular pronoun. The use of an actual pronoun (you/he/she) also seems to be rare; it is usually implied based on the verb conjugation.

Makt is lifted directly from the Swedish word for power, which itself derives from the same Old Norse word. Swedish as a language indicates the subject and object of a sentence by word order (usually subject-verb-object as English does, although in subordinate clauses it goes verb-subject-object), does not conjugate verbs based on person or number, and maintains two genders for its nouns. Old Norse indicated subject and object through the use of cases (totaling four: nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative) and had three grammatical genders.

On the other hand, the distinctive ij sound is much more characteristic of Dutch. The Dutch language typically follows the English word order of subject-verb-object, but in certain cases will also use verb-subject-object, such as yes-no questions ( “Saw you the king?” where English would have “Did you see the king?”) and imperative sentences ( “Go the book read” for “Go read the book”). Standard Dutch maintains three grammatical genders, although some regions have collapsed the difference between masculine and feminine. The use of cases is mostly obsolete.

Dane and Vortalis are not obvious fits into the language. Potential immigrants?

Of the six male names we have, five are named for some kind of feature in the landscape. A possible trend.

III. Potential applications for fic:

Kell has absolutely mixed up ön (‘the’) and on (‘dawn’) because they sound so similar to his ear.

Depending on which language influences you lean into for Maktahn, Holland might have trouble remembering the English word order of subject-verb-object (ex: “I Astrid see” instead of “I see Astrid”), assign gender to nouns that don’t have them in English (ex: “The door, she is brown.”), and/or mix up pronouns.

IV. tagging @muffinworry, @dr-dendritic-trees, and @house0fsugar who also expressed interest in this

#shades of magic #adsom #white london #holland vosijk #maktahn

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chriswritesthings · 5 years

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Generation Zero offers a great world to shoot in, but is technically flawed

Originally uploaded to MSPoweruser.com

Just Cause and Mad Max creators Avalanche Studios have been busier this past year than I think they’ve ever been. Just Cause 4, the upcoming Rage 2 and the just-released Generation Zero is a rather large line-up for one studio. But are all of these games of quality, or are they hindered by a spread workload?

Set in 1980’s Sweden, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cold War tensions are at their peak. You play as a nameless 18 or 19-year-old in your first semester of university, the threat of thermonuclear annihilation constantly looming in the back of your head. It’s decided that a camping trip is a good idea, as a getaway, and your friend decides that a small island just off the coast is a great locale.

You grab a couple of coolers—for a cheeky bevy with the boys—and food before setting off. On your return, you get shot out of the water, have to swim to shore, discover that everyone has been murdered and that there are machines roaming the wilderness that are out for blood, and you and your friends are left to piece together the events of the last few days while attempting to avoid heavily armoured death, probably all while hungover.

This is the premise of Avalanche’s first foray into a co-op first-person action shooter since theHunter: Primal. At its base level, it feels like an amalgamation of Fallout and Far Cry with a sprinkling of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

However, before you can begin roleplaying your Swedish Rambo fantasies you must first create your character through a fairly rudimentary creation suite. It offers eight pre-set 80s stereotypes to build upon with gender options, face shape and skin tone. We’re not talking Black Desert Online levels of character customisation, but enough to give the player a distinct look from their allies.

Generation Zero starts out solidly, prompting you as soon as you make landfall to find a weapon and some first aid kids in the nearby buildings. There’s ammo in a police car parked on the road—sorted. Not long after you’re introduced to the games’ basic enemy machine, the runner. Fast and deadly, they pose a challenge from the get-go and don’t get much easier as the player progresses. Physically, they look like robot dogs or wolves with a fuel tank and a machine gun strapped to its back. Once these machines are dispatched, the game points you in the vague direction of the nearest settlement that might have people in it at one point and lets you off the leash.

It’s certainly not a game that will hold you hand or tell you where every objective and enemy is. The in-game compass functions purely as a compass, it always points north. It won’t tell you where objectives are, there won’t be a red dot highlighting nearby enemies, it just points north. Enemy detection is only signalled by two things: actual sound and a shotgun mic style detection meter.

This would be great if it wasn’t for the fact that both sound and detection are broken. This much becomes abundantly clear when you go into the first underground location you come across. While inside you’ll constantly have a detection bar even if you’ve cleared the entire building of enemies if you walk or sprint—not because enemies are down there with you, but because they’re above ground and can apparently hear you down there. The second time it becomes noticeable is when trying to sneak past a patrol. If they get too close, even moving while crouched will raise their awareness forcing the player to either sit perfectly still or attempt to engage them hope the entirety of Sweden doesn’t come running.

It’s unfortunate that Generation Zero is consistently marred with technical issues, all of which seem entirely unpredictable. For example, being downed and then reviving too quickly may make the player unable to sprint at full speed. The next time this happens, the same set of actions may have no effect. Machines locked in steel containers can seemingly warp out of them at will, and then there’s whatever this 28-second clip of nonsense is.

youtube

Despite its many, many flaws, I wouldn’t say that Generation Zero is a bad game. From the moody nightime lighting to the midnight thunderstorms followed by dense fog, its world is dripping in a thick, dripping atmosphere. The morning god rays and autumnal leaves are a definitive pep-up after a brutal firefight. Much like their previous games, Avalanche really does know how to sell a world.

All of this is backed by an 80s soundtrack that fits so beautifully to the design of the machines and the world they inhabit. The game is true for the player character who feels as weighty as their firearms, all of which have great audio-visual feedback. Encompassed in a story about a sudden invasion and a missing populace, never meeting a living NPC, interacting with hastily written notes and skittish recordings—it’s a unique and mystical world trapped in a rugged game.

Generation Zero is a game propelled by its ability to be played with a group of friends. While its technical systems may be flawed, its world and mechanics are still engaging enough for fun-times-with-mates. Once you get into the groove, you’ll find amazing atmosphere, story, and a rocking OST. You’ll also discover busted mechanics, flawed AI and bugs crawling out of every corner.

7/10

Pros:

Weighty combat

Incredible visuals

Stunning audio

Cons:

Sub-par AI

Flawed detection system

Mehs:

Inventory management can be sluggish

#generation zero review #review #generation zero

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Darkified — Cthulhu Riseth: The Complete Works of Darkified (Nuclear War Now!)

Cthulhu Riseth - The Complete Works of Darkified by Darkified

It’s sort of fun that a record touting a Complete Works collection can clock in at fewer than 20 minutes. But in the case of Darkified, the overblown rhetoric of “collection” and “works” is just about warranted. The Swedish band issued only a demo on cassette and a demo-quality 7 inch — but timing is everything. The music was released in 1991 and 1992, when Swedish death metal was innovating a melodic sound (“melodic” being a relative term here) out of the country’s productive d-beat and metal scenes. Earlier bands — especially Morbid and Carnage — get much of the credit for inaugurating Swedish death metal. And rightly so. Carnage’s Dark Recollections (1990) is a crucial record. But despite the raw production values of their slim output, Darkified’s songs advance the music’s relation to melodic structure. They articulate a step away from Dismember’s chaotic buzz, and a step toward the more fully refined melodeath of Dark Tranquility.

Seasoned death metal listeners will recognize the geographical slippage in that last sentence and quickly assert stylistic distinctions between Dismember’s Stockholm scene and the Gothenburg sound, strongly linked with Dark Tranquility and At the Gates, among others. But it should be noted that Darkified was literally in between those cities and their fecund punk and metal scenes. Darkified was based in Söderköping, a town of about 6,000 residents located 182 km from Stockholm and 323 km from Gothenburg. The developing vocabularies and vibes of Swedish death metal cross-pollinated at Darkified’s musical crossroads, generating a remote and important sonic site on the period’s cultural map.

For sure, there’s a lot of stuff in Cthulhu Riseth that by 1991 was already pretty conventional. The “Intro” track on Dark, the band’s demo, is all ominously “cold” synths and “creepy” atmospherics, a cheapo attempt at replicating the sort of hijinks Bathory had pulled off on the openings to their late-1980s records. When “Howlings from the Darkness” commences, Darkified announces their thoroughgoing interest in the abstruse lexicon and imagery of Lovecraft’s cosmology. Singer Martin G. intones, “Yiiaghniah Yog Sothoth…”; when the riffs kick in, his voice drops into a gastric register and he growls, “Listen and you’ll hear the screams / Evoking gods from the beyond / Cthulhu, the Great Old One / Rise!” Even in death metal, some stuff never seems to die.

Still, it’s useful to have Darkified’s sounds back in circulation. Listeners engaged by the development of death metal — a genre that has proliferated a dizzying array of niches and endlessly morphing sub-sub-subgenres — will be gratified to have these songs on fresh vinyl. Members of the band went on to stints with other Swedish acts of some note, including Edge of Sanity (kinda cool) and Marduk (no thanks). But the principal interest here is Darkified’s pivotal position in the deep history of Sweden’s raw and melodic death metal traditions. Great Old Ones, indeed.

Jonathan Shaw

#darkified #Cthulhu Riseth #The Complete Works of Darkified #nuclear war now!#jonathan shaw #albumreview #dusted magazine #sweden #death metal

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leviathangourmet · 5 years

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The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Polyamory is a household word. Shame-laden terms like perversion have given way to cheerful-sounding ones like kink. Anal sex has gone from final taboo to “fifth base”—Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue) even ran a guide to it. With the exception of perhaps incest and bestiality—and of course nonconsensual sex more generally—our culture has never been more tolerant of sex in just about every permutation.

But despite all this, American teenagers and young adults are having less sex.

To the relief of many parents, educators, and clergy members who care about the health and well-being of young people, teens are launching their sex lives later. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood.

Over the past few years, Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, has published research exploring how and why Americans’ sex lives may be ebbing. In a series of journal articles and in her latest book, iGen, she notes that today’s young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. People now in their early 20s are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers may also be having less sex today than previous generations did at the same age. From the late 1990s to 2014, Twenge found, drawing on data from the General Social Survey, the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year to 54 times. A given person might not notice this decrease, but nationally, it adds up to a lot of missing sex. Twenge recently took a look at the latest General Social Survey data, from 2016, and told me that in the two years following her study, sexual frequency fell even further.

Some social scientists take issue with aspects of Twenge’s analysis; others say that her data source, although highly regarded, is not ideally suited to sex research. And yet none of the many experts I interviewed for this piece seriously challenged the idea that the average young adult circa 2018 is having less sex than his or her counterparts of decades past. Nor did anyone doubt that this reality is out of step with public perception—most of us still think that other people are having a lot more sex than they actually are.

When I called the anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies love and sex and co-directs Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey of more than 5,000 unpartnered Americans, I could almost feel her nodding over the phone. “The data is that people are having less sex,” she said, with a hint of mischief. “I’m a Baby Boomer, and apparently in my day we were having a lot more sex than they are today!” She went on to explain that the survey has been probing the intimate details of people’s lives for eight years now. “Every year the whole Match company is rather staggered at how little sex Americans are having—including the Millennials.”

Fisher, like many other experts, attributes the sex decline to a decline in couplehood among young people. For a quarter century, fewer people have been marrying, and those who do have been marrying later. At first, many observers figured that the decline in marriage was explained by an increase in unmarried cohabitation—yet the share of people living together hasn’t risen enough to offset the decline in marriage: About 60 percent of adults under age 35 now live without a spouse or a partner. One in three adults in this age range live with their parents, making that the most common living arrangement for the cohort. People who live with a romantic partner tend to have sex more than those who don’t—and living with your parents is obviously bad for your sex life. But this doesn’t explain why young people are partnering up less to begin with.

Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator’s golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.

Some experts I spoke with offered more hopeful explanations for the decline in sex. For example, rates of childhood sexual abuse have decreased in recent decades, and abuse can lead to both precocious and promiscuous sexual behavior. And some people today may feel less pressured into sex they don’t wantto have, thanks to changing gender mores and growing awareness of diverse sexual orientations, including asexuality. Maybe more people are prioritizing school or work over love and sex, at least for a time, or maybe they’re simply being extra deliberate in choosing a life partner—and if so, good for them.

Many—or all—of these things may be true. In a famous 2007 study, people supplied researchers with 237 distinct reasons for having sex, ranging from mystical (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) to lame (“I wanted to change the topic of conversation”). The number of reasons not to have sex must be at least as high. Still, a handful of suspects came up again and again in my interviews and in the research I reviewed—and each has profound implications for our happiness.

1. Sex for One

The retreat from sex is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Most countries don’t track their citizens’ sex lives closely, but those that try (all of them wealthy) are reporting their own sex delays and declines. One of the most respected sex studies in the world, Britain’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, reported in 2001 that people ages 16 to 44 were having sex more than six times a month on average. By 2012, the rate had dropped to fewer than five times. Over roughly the same period, Australians in relationships went from having sex about 1.8 times a week to 1.4 times. Finland’s “Finsex” study found declines in intercourse frequency, along with rising rates of masturbation.

In the Netherlands, the median age at which people first have intercourse rose from 17.1 in 2012 to 18.6 in 2017, and other types of physical contact also got pushed back, even kissing. This news was greeted not with universal relief, as in the United States, but with some concern. The Dutch pride themselves on having some of the world’s highest rates of adolescent and young-adult well-being. If people skip a crucial phase of development, one educator warned—a stage that includes not only flirting and kissing but dealing with heartbreak and disappointment—might they be unprepared for the challenges of adult life?

Meanwhile, Sweden, which hadn’t done a national sex study in 20 years, recently launched one, alarmed by polling suggesting that Swedes, too, were having less sex. The country, which has one of the highest birth rates in Europe, is apparently disinclined to risk its fecundity. “If the social conditions for a good sex life—for example through stress or other unhealthy factors—have deteriorated,” the Swedish health minister at the time wrote in an op-ed explaining the rationale for the study, it is “a political problem.”

This brings us to fertility-challenged Japan, which is in the midst of a demographic crisis and has become something of a case study in the dangers of sexlessness. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen too. (Not that marriage was any guarantee of sexual frequency: A related survey found that 47 percent of married people hadn’t had sex in at least a month.)

For nearly a decade, stories in the Western press have tied Japan’s sexual funk to a rising generation of soushoku danshi—literally, “grass-eating boys.” These “herbivore men,” as they are known in English, are said to be ambivalent about pursuing either women or conventional success. The new taxonomy of Japanese sexlessness also includes terms for groups such as hikikomori (“shut-ins”), parasaito shinguru (“parasite singles,” people who live with their parents beyond their 20s), and otaku (“obsessive fans,” especially of anime and manga)—all of whom are said to contribute to sekkusu shinai shokogun (“celibacy syndrome”).

Early on, most Western accounts of all this had a heavy subtext of “Isn’t Japan wacky?” This tone has slowly given way to a realization that the country’s experience might be less a curiosity than a cautionary tale. Dismal employment prospects played an initial role in driving many men to solitary pursuits—but the culture has since moved to accommodate and even encourage those pursuits. Roland Kelts, a Japanese American writer and longtime Tokyo resident, has described “a generation that found the imperfect or just unexpected demands of real-world relationships with women less enticing than the lure of the virtual libido.”

Let’s consider this lure for a moment. Japan is among the world’s top producersand consumers of porn, and the originator of whole new porn genres, such as bukkake (don’t ask). It is also a global leader in the design of high-end sex dolls. What may be more telling, though, is the extent to which Japan is inventing modes of genital stimulation that no longer bother to evoke old-fashioned sex, by which I mean sex involving more than one person. A recent article in The Economist, titled “Japan’s Sex Industry Is Becoming Less Sexual,” described onakura shops, where men pay to masturbate while female employees watch, and explained that because many younger people see the very idea of intercourse as mendokusai—tiresome—“services that make masturbation more enjoyable are booming.”

In their 2015 book, Modern Romance, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg and the comedian Aziz Ansari (who earlier this year became infamous for a hookup gone awry) describe Ansari’s visit to Japan seeking insights into the future of sex. He concluded that much of what he’d read about herbivore men missed the mark. Herbivores, he found, were “interested in sexual pleasure”—just not “through traditional routes.” Among Japan’s more popular recent innovations, he notes, is “a single-use silicone egg that men fill with lubricant and masturbate inside.” One night in Tokyo, Ansari picks one up at a convenience store, heads back to his hotel, and—sorry for the visual—gives it a go. He finds it cold and awkward, but understands its purpose. “It was a way,” he writes, “to avoid putting yourself out there and having an actual experience with another person.”

From 1992 to 2014, the share of American men who reported masturbating in a given week doubled, to 54 percent, and the share of women more than tripled, to 26 percent. Easy access to porn is part of the story, of course; in 2014, 43 percent of men said they’d watched porn in the past week. The vibrator figures in, too—a major study 10 years ago found that just over half of adult women had used one, and by all indications it has only grown in popularity. (Makes, models, and features have definitely proliferated. If you don’t know your Fun Factory Bi Stronic Fusion pulsator from your Power Toyfriend, you can find them on Amazon, which has these and some 10,000 other options.)

This shift is particularly striking when you consider that Western civilization has had a major hang-up about masturbation going back at least as far as Onan. As Robert T. Michael and his co-authors recount in Sex in America, J. H. Kellogg, the cereal maker, urged American parents of the late 19th century to take extreme measures to keep their children from indulging, including circumcision without anesthetic and application of carbolic acid to the clitoris. Thanks in part to his message, masturbation remained taboo well into the 20th century. By the 1990s, when Michael’s book came out, references to masturbation were still greeted with “nervous titters or with shock and disgust,” despite the fact that the behavior was commonplace.

Today, masturbation is even more common, and fears about its effects—now paired with concerns about digital porn’s ubiquity—are being raised anew by a strange assortment of people, including the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the director of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, who is enjoying an unlikely second act as an antiporn activist. In his book Man, Interrupted, Zimbardo warns that “procrasturbation”—his unfortunate portmanteau for procrastination via masturbation—may be leading young men to fail academically, socially, and sexually. Gary Wilson, an Oregon man who runs a website called Your Brain on Porn, makes a similar claim. In a popular tedx talk, which features animal copulation as well as many (human) brain scans, Wilson argues that masturbating to internet porn is addictive, causes structural changes in the brain, and is producing an epidemic of erectile dysfunction.

These messages are echoed and amplified by a Salt Lake City–based nonprofit called Fight the New Drug—the “drug” being porn—which has delivered hundreds of presentations to schools and other organizations around the country, including, this spring, the Kansas City Royals. The website NoFap, an offshoot of a popular Reddit message board founded by a now-retired Google contractor, provides community members (“fapstronauts”) a program to quit “fapping”—masturbating. Further outside the mainstream, the far-right Proud Boys group has a “no wanks” policy, which prohibits masturbating more than once a month. The group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, who also co-founded Vice Media, has said that pornography and masturbation are making Millennials “not even want to pursue relationships.”

The truth appears more complicated. There is scant evidence of an epidemic of erectile dysfunction among young men. And no researcher I spoke with had seen compelling evidence that porn is addictive. As the authors of a recent review of porn research note in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, “The notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in both academic and popular literature,” while “the mental health community at large is divided as to the addictive versus non-addictive nature of Internet pornography.”

This isn’t to say there’s no correlation between porn use and desire for real-life sex. Ian Kerner, a well-known New York sex therapist and the author of several popular books about sex, told me that while he doesn’t see porn use as unhealthy (he recommends certain types of porn to some patients), he works with a lot of men who, inspired by porn, “are still masturbating like they’re 17,” to the detriment of their sex life. “It’s taking the edge off their desire,” he said. Kerner believes this is why more and more of the women coming to his office in recent years report that they want sex more than their partners do.

In reporting this story, I spoke and corresponded with dozens of 20- and early-30-somethings in hopes of better understanding the sex recession. I can’t know that they were representative, though I did seek out people with a range of experiences. I talked with some who had never had a romantic or sexual relationship, and others who were wildly in love or had busy sex lives or both. Sex may be declining, but most people are still having it—even during an economic recession, most people are employed.

The recession metaphor is imperfect, of course. Most people need jobs; that’s not the case with relationships and sex. I talked with plenty of people who were single and celibate by choice. Even so, I was amazed by how many 20-somethings were deeply unhappy with the sex-and-dating landscape; over and over, people asked me whether things had always been this hard. Despite the diversity of their stories, certain themes emerged.

One recurring theme, predictably enough, was porn. Less expected, perhaps, was the extent to which many people saw their porn life and their sex life as entirely separate things. The wall between the two was not absolute; for one thing, many straight women told me that learning about sex from porn seemed to have given some men dismaying sexual habits. (We’ll get to that later.) But by and large, the two things—partnered sex and solitary porn viewing—existed on separate planes. “My porn taste and partner taste are quite different,” one man in his early 30s told me, explaining that he watches porn about once a week and doesn’t think it has much effect on his sex life. “I watch it knowing it is fiction,” a 22-year-old woman said, adding that she didn’t “internalize” it.

I thought of these comments when Pornhub, the top pornography website, released its list of 2017’s most popular searches. In first place, for the third year running, was lesbian (a category beloved by men and women alike). The new runner-up, however, was hentai—anime, manga, and other animated porn. Porn has never been like real sex, of course, but hentai is not even of this world; unreality is the source of its appeal. In a New York–magazine cover story on porn preferences, Maureen O’Connor described the ways hentai transmogrifies body parts (“eyes bigger than feet, breasts the size of heads, penises thicker than waists”) and eroticizes the supernatural (“sexy human shapes” combine with “candy-colored fur and animal horns, ears, and tails”). In other words, the leading search category for porn involves sex that half the population doesn’t have the equipment to engage in, and the runner-up isn’t carnal so much as hallucinatory.

Many of the younger people I talked with see porn as just one more digital activity—a way of relieving stress, a diversion. It is related to their sex life (or lack thereof) in much the same way social media and binge-watching TV are. As one 24-year-old man emailed me:

The internet has made it so easy to gratify basic social and sexual needs that there’s far less incentive to go out into the “meatworld” and chase those things. This isn’t to say that the internet can give you more satisfaction than sex or relationships, because it doesn’t … [But it can] supply you with just enough satisfaction to placate those imperatives … I think it’s healthy to ask yourself: “If I didn’t have any of this, would I be going out more? Would I be having sex more?” For a lot of people my age, I think the answer is probably yes.

Even people in relationships told me that their digital life seemed to be vying with their sex life. “We’d probably have a lot more sex,” one woman noted, “if we didn’t get home and turn on the TV and start scrolling through our phones.” This seems to defy logic; our hunger for sex is supposed to be primal. Who would pick messing around online over actual messing around?

Teenagers, for one. An intriguing study published last year in the Journal of Population Economics examined the introduction of broadband internet access at the county-by-county level, and found that its arrival explained 7 to 13 percent of the teen-birth-rate decline from 1999 to 2007.

Maybe adolescents are not the hormone-crazed maniacs we sometimes make them out to be. Maybe the human sex drive is more fragile than we thought, and more easily stalled.

2. Hookup Culture and Helicopter Parents

I started high school in 1992, around the time the teen pregnancy and birth rates hit their highest levels in decades, and the median age at which teenagers began having sex was approaching its modern low of 16.9. Women born in 1978, the year I was born, have a dubious honor: We were younger when we started having sex than any group since.

But as the ’90s continued, the teen pregnancy rate began to decline. This development was welcomed—even if experts couldn’t agree on why it was happening. Birth-control advocates naturally pointed to birth control. And yes, teenagers were getting better about using contraceptives, but not sufficiently better to single-handedly explain the change. Christian pro-abstinence groups and backers of abstinence-only education, which received a big funding boost from the 1996 welfare-reform act, also tried to take credit. Yet the teen pregnancy rate was falling even in places that hadn’t adopted abstinence-only curricula, and research has since shown that virginity pledges and abstinence-only education don’t actually beget abstinence.

Still, the trend continued: Each wave of teenagers had sex a little later, and the pregnancy rate kept inching down. You wouldn’t have known either of these things, though, from all the hyperventilating about hookup culture that started in the late ’90s. The New York Times, for example, announced in 1997 that on college campuses, casual sex “seems to be near an all-time high.” It didn’t offer much data to support this, but it did introduce the paper’s readers to the term hooking up, which it defined as “anything from 20 minutes of strenuous kissing to spending the night together fully clothed to sexual intercourse.”

Pretty much ever since, people have been overestimating how much casual sex high-school and college students are having (even, surveys show, students themselves). In the past several years, however, a number of studies and books on hookup culture have begun to correct the record. One of the most thoughtful of these is American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, by Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental College. The book draws on detailed journals kept by students at two liberal-arts colleges from 2010 to 2015, as well as on Wade’s conversations with students at 24 other colleges and universities.

Wade sorts the students she followed into three groups. Roughly one-third were what she calls “abstainers”—they opted out of hookup culture entirely. A little more than a third were “dabblers”—they hooked up sometimes, but ambivalently. Less than a quarter were “enthusiasts,” who delighted in hooking up. The remainder were in long-term relationships.

This portrait is compatible with a 2014 study finding that Millennial college students weren’t having more sex or sexual partners than their Gen X predecessors. It also tracks with data from the Online College Social Life Survey, a survey of more than 20,000 college students that was conducted from 2005 to 2011, which found the median number of hookups over a four-year college career to be five—a third of which involved only kissing and touching. The majority of students surveyed said they wished they had more opportunities to find a long-term boyfriend or girlfriend.

When I spoke with Wade recently, she told me that she found the sex decline among teens and 20-somethings completely unsurprising—young people, she said, have always been most likely to have sex in the context of a relationship. “Go back to the point in history where premarital sex became more of a thing, and the conditions that led to it,” she said, referring to how post–World War II anxiety about a man shortage led teen girls in the late 1940s and ’50s to pursue more serious romantic relationships than had been customary before the war. “Young women, at that point, innovate ‘going steady,’ ” Wade said, adding that parents were not entirely happy about the shift away from prewar courtship, which had favored casual, nonexclusive dating. “If you [go out with someone for] one night you might get up to a little bit of necking and petting, but what happens when you spend months with them? It turns out 1957 has the highest rate of teen births in American history.”

“We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up.”

In more recent decades, by contrast, teen romantic relationships appear to have grown less common. In 1995, the large longitudinal study known as “Add Health” found that 66 percent of 17-year-old men and 74 percent of 17-year-old women had experienced “a special romantic relationship” in the past 18 months. In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked 17-year-olds whether they had “ever dated, hooked up with or otherwise had a romantic relationship with another person”—seemingly a broader category than the earlier one—only 46 percent said yes.

So what thwarted teen romance? Adolescence has changed so much in the past 25 years that it’s hard to know where to start. As Jean Twenge wrote in The Atlantic last year, the percentage of teens who report going on dates has decreased alongside the percentage who report other activities associated with entering adulthood, like drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without one’s parents, and getting a driver’s license.

These shifts coincide with another major change: parents’ increased anxiety about their children’s educational and economic prospects. Among the affluent and educated, especially, this anxiety has led to big changes in what’s expected of teens. “It’s hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion,” said a man who was a couple of years out of college, thinking back on his high-school years. He added: “There’s immense pressure” from parents and other authority figures “to focus on the self, at the expense of relationships”—pressure, quite a few 20-somethings told me, that extends right on through college.

Malcolm Harris strikes a similar note in his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. Addressing the desexing of the American teenager, he writes:

A decline in unsupervised free time probably contributes a lot. At a basic level, sex at its best is unstructured play with friends, a category of experience that … time diaries … tell us has been decreasing for American adolescents. It takes idle hands to get past first base, and today’s kids have a lot to do.

Marriage 101, one of the most popular undergraduate classes at Northwestern University, was launched in 2001 by William M. Pinsof, a founding father of couples therapy, and Arthur Nielsen, a psychiatry professor. What if you could teach about love, sex, and marriage before people chose a partner, Pinsof and Nielsen wondered—before they developed bad habits? The class was meant to be a sort of preemptive strike against unhappy marriages. Under Alexandra Solomon, the psychology professor who took over the course six years ago, it has become, secondarily, a strike against what she sees as the romantic and sexual stunting of a generation. She assigns students to ask someone else out on a date, for example, something many have never done.

This hasn’t hurt the class’s appeal; during registration, it fills within minutes. (It may or may not have helped that a course with overlapping appeal, Human Sexuality, was discontinued some years back after its professor presided over a demonstration of something called a fucksaw.) Each week during office hours, students wait in line to talk with Solomon, who is also a practicing therapist at the university’s Family Institute, not only about the class but about their love woes and everything they don’t know about healthy and pleasurable sex—which, in many cases, is a lot.

Over the course of numerous conversations, Solomon has come to various conclusions about hookup culture, or what might more accurately be described as lack-of-relationship culture. For one thing, she believes it is both a cause and an effect of social stunting. Or, as one of her students put it to her: “We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up.” For another, insofar as her students find themselves choosing between casual sex and no sex, they are doing so because an obvious third option—relationship sex—strikes many of them as not only unattainable but potentially irresponsible. Most Marriage 101 students have had at least one romantic relationship over the course of their college career; the class naturally attracts relationship-oriented students, she points out. Nonetheless, she believes that many students have absorbed the idea that love is secondary to academic and professional success—or, at any rate, is best delayed until those other things have been secured. “Over and over,” she has written, “my undergraduates tell me they try hard not to fall in love during college, imagining that would mess up their plans.”

One Friday afternoon in March, I sat in on a discussion Solomon was hosting for a group of predominantly female graduate students in the Family Institute’s counseling programs, on the challenges of love and sex circa 2018. Over rosé and brownies, students shared thoughts on topics ranging from Aziz Ansari’s notorious date (which had recently been detailed on the website Babe) to the ambiguities of current relationship terminology. “People will be like, ‘We’re dating, we’re exclusive, but we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend.’ What does that mean?” one young woman asked, exasperated. A classmate nodded emphatically. “What does that mean? We’re in a monogamous relationship, but …” She trailed off. Solomon jumped in with a sort of relationship litmus test: “If I get the flu, are you bringing me soup?” Around the conference table, heads shook; not many people were getting (or giving) soup.

The conversation proceeded to why soup-bringing relationships weren’t more common. “You’re supposed to have so much before you can get into a relationship,” one woman offered. Another said that when she was in high school, her parents, who are both professionals with advanced degrees, had discouraged relationships on the grounds that they might diminish her focus. Even today, in graduate school, she was finding the attitude hard to shake. “Now I need to finish school, I need to get a practice going, I need to do this and this, and then I’ll think about love. But by 30, you’re like, What is love? What’s it like to be in love?”

He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.

In early May, I returned to Northwestern to sit in on a Marriage 101 discussion section. I had picked that particular week because the designated topic, “Sex in Intimate Relationships,” seemed relevant. As it happened, though, there wasn’t much talk of sex; the session was mostly consumed by a rapturous conversation about the students’ experiences with something called the “mentor couple” assignment, which had involved interviewing a couple in the community and chronicling their relationship.

“To see a relationship where two people are utterly content and committed,” one woman said, with real conviction, “it’s kind of an aha moment for me.” Another student spoke disbelievingly of her couple’s pre-smartphone courtship. “I couldn’t necessarily relate to it,” she said. “They met, they got each other’s email addresses, they emailed one another, they went on a first date, they knew that they were going to be together. They never had a ‘define the relationship’ moment, because both were on the same page. I was just like, Damn, is that what it’s supposed to be like?” About two-thirds of the way through the allotted discussion time, one of the teaching assistants finally interrupted. “Should we transition?” she asked, tentatively. “I wanted to transition to talk about sex. Which is the topic of this week.”

3. The Tinder Mirage

Simon, a 32-year-old grad student who describes himself as short and balding (“If I wasn’t funny,” he says, “I’d be doomed”), didn’t lack for sex in college. (The names of people who talked with me about their personal lives have been changed.) “I’m outgoing and like to talk, but I am at heart a significant nerd,” he told me when we spoke recently. “I was so happy that college had nerdy women. That was a delight.” Shortly before graduation, he started a relationship that lasted for seven years. When he and his girlfriend broke up, in 2014, he felt like he’d stepped out of a time machine.

Before the relationship, Tinder didn’t exist; nor did iPhones. Simon wasn’t particularly eager to get into another serious relationship right away, but he wanted to have sex. “My first instinct was go to bars,” he said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy. His friends set up a Tinder account for him; later, he signed up for Bumble, Match, OkCupid, and Coffee Meets Bagel.

Unless you are exceptionally good-looking, the thing online dating may be best at is sucking up large amounts of time.

He had better luck with Tinder than the other apps, but it was hardly efficient. He figures he swiped right—indicating that he was interested—up to 30 times for every woman who also swiped right on him, thereby triggering a match. But matching was only the beginning; then it was time to start messaging. “I was up to over 10 messages sent for a single message received,” he said. In other words: Nine out of 10 women who matched with Simon after swiping right on him didn’t go on to exchange messages with him. This means that for every 300 women he swiped right on, he had a conversation with just one.

At least among people who don’t use dating apps, the perception exists that they facilitate casual sex with unprecedented efficiency. In reality, unless you are exceptionally good-looking, the thing online dating may be best at is sucking up large amounts of time. As of 2014, when Tinder last released such data, the average user logged in 11 times a day. Men spent 7.2 minutes per session and women spent 8.5 minutes, for a total of about an hour and a half a day. Yet they didn’t get much in return. Today, the company says it logs 1.6 billion swipes a day, and just 26 million matches. And, if Simon’s experience is any indication, the overwhelming majority of matches don’t lead to so much as a two-way text exchange, much less a date, much less sex.

When I talked with Simon, he was seven months into a relationship with a new girlfriend, whom he’d met through another online-dating service. He liked her, and was happy to be on hiatus from Tinder. “It’s like howling into the void for most guys,” he explained, “and like searching for a diamond in a sea of dick pics for most girls.”

So why do people continue to use dating apps? Why not boycott them all? Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”

At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.

As romance and its beginnings are segregated from the routines of daily life, there is less and less space for elevator flirtation.

This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment. (Among older groups, much smaller percentages believe this.)

Laurie Mintz, who teaches a popular undergraduate class on the psychology of sexuality at the University of Florida, told me that the #MeToo movement has made her students much more aware of issues surrounding consent. She has heard from many young men who are productively reexamining their past actions and working diligently to learn from the experiences of friends and partners. But others have described less healthy reactions, like avoiding romantic overtures for fear that they might be unwelcome. In my own conversations, men and women alike spoke of a new tentativeness and hesitancy. One woman who described herself as a passionate feminist said she felt empathy for the pressure that heterosexual dating puts on men. “I think I owe it to them, in this current cultural moment particularly, to try to treat them like they’re human beings taking a risk talking to a stranger,” she wrote me. “There are a lot of lonely, confused people out there, who have no idea what to do or how to date.”

I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.

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How could various dating apps be so inefficient at their ostensible purpose—hooking people up—and still be so popular? For one thing, lots of people appear to be using them as a diversion, with limited expectations of meeting up in person. As Iris, who’s 33, told me bitterly, “They’ve gamified interaction. The majority of men on Tinder just swipe right on everybody. They say yes, yes, yes to every woman.”

Stories from other app users bear out the idea of apps as diversions rather than matchmakers. “Getting right-swiped is a good ego boost even if I have no intention of meeting someone,” one man told me. A 28-year-old woman said that she persisted in using dating apps even though she had been abstinent for three years, a fact she attributed to depression and low libido: “I don’t have much inclination to date someone.”

“After a while it just feels exactly the same as getting good at a bubble-popping game. I’m happy to be good at it, but what am I really achieving?” said an app user who described herself as abstinent by choice. Another woman wrote that she was “too lazy” to meet people, adding: “I usually download dating apps on a Tuesday when I’m bored, watching TV … I don’t try very hard.” Yet another woman said that she used an app, but only “after two glasses of white wine—then I promptly delete it after two hours of fruitless swiping.”

Many critiques of online dating, including a 2013 article by Dan Slater in The Atlantic, adapted from his book A Million First Dates, have focused on the idea that too many options can lead to “choice overload,” which in turn leads to dissatisfaction. Online daters, he argued, might be tempted to keep going back for experiences with new people; commitment and marriage might suffer. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist who runs a longitudinal study out of Stanford called “How Couples Meet and Stay Together,” questions this hypothesis; his research finds that couples who meet online tend to marry more quickly than other couples, a fact that hardly suggests indecision.

Maybe choice overload applies a little differently than Slater imagined. Maybe the problem is not the people who date and date some more—they might even get married, if Rosenfeld is right—but those who are so daunted that they don’t make it off the couch. This idea came up many times in my conversations with people who described sex and dating lives that had gone into a deep freeze. Some used the term paradox of choice; others referred to option paralysis (a term popularized by Black Mirror); still others invoked fobo (“fear of a better option”).

And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.

As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.

Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”

Apart from helping people avoid the potential embarrassments (if also, maybe, the exhilaration) of old-fashioned flirting, apps are quite useful to those who are in what economists call “thin markets”—markets with a relatively low number of participants. Sexual minorities, for example, tend to use online dating services at much higher rates than do straight people. (Michael Rosenfeld—whose survey deliberately oversampled gays and lesbians in an effort to compensate for the dearth of research on their dating experiences—finds that “unpartnered gay men and unpartnered lesbians seem to have substantially more active dating lives than do heterosexuals,” a fact he attributes partly to their successful use of apps. This disparity raises the possibility that the sex recession may be a mostly heterosexual phenomenon.)

In all dating markets, apps appear to be most helpful to the highly photogenic. As Emma, a 26-year-old virgin who sporadically tries her luck with online dating, glumly told me, “Dating apps make it easy for hot people—who already have the easiest time.” Christian Rudder, a co-founder of OkCupid (one of the less appearance-centric dating services, in that it encourages detailed written profiles), reported in 2009 that the male users who were rated most physically attractive by female users got 11 times as many messages as the lowest-rated men did; medium-rated men received about four times as many messages. The disparity was starker for women: About two-thirds of messages went to the one-third of women who were rated most physically attractive. A more recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute found that online daters of both genders tend to pursue prospective mates who are on average 25 percent more desirable than they are—presumably not a winning strategy.

The very existence of online dating makes it harder for anyone to make an overture in person without seeming inappropriate.

So where does this leave us? Many online daters spend large amounts of time pursuing people who are out of their league. Few of their messages are returned, and even fewer lead to in-person contact. At best, the experience is apt to be bewildering (Why are all these people swiping right on me, then failing to follow through?). But it can also be undermining, even painful. Emma is, by her own description, fat. She is not ashamed of her appearance, and purposefully includes several full-body photos in her dating profiles. Nevertheless, men persist in swiping right on her profile only to taunt her—when I spoke with her, one guy had recently ended a text exchange by sending her a gif of an overweight woman on a treadmill.

An even bigger problem may be the extent to which romantic pursuit is now being cordoned off into a predictable, prearranged online venue, the very existence of which makes it harder for anyone, even those not using the apps, to extend an overture in person without seeming inappropriate. What a miserable impasse.

4. Bad Sex (Painfully Bad)

One especially springlike morning in May, as Debby Herbenick and I walked her baby through a park in Bloomington, Indiana, she shared a bit of advice she sometimes offers students at Indiana University, where she is a leading sex researcher. “If you’re with somebody for the first time,” she said evenly, “don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.”

I’d sought out Herbenick in part because I was intrigued by an article she’d written for The Washington Post proposing that the sex decline might have a silver lining. Herbenick had asked whether we might be seeing, among other things, a retreat from coercive or otherwise unwanted sex. Just a few decades ago, after all, marital rape was still legal in many states. As she pushed her daughter’s stroller, she elaborated on the idea that some of the sex recession’s causes could be a healthy reaction to bad sex—a subset of people “not having sex that they don’t want to have anymore. People feeling more empowered to say ‘No thanks.’ ”

Bloomington is the unofficial capital of American sex research, a status that dates back to the 1940s, when the Indiana University biologist Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering sex surveys inaugurated the field. It retains its standing thanks partly to the productivity of its scientists, and partly to the paucity of sex research at other institutions. In 2009, Herbenick and her colleagues launched the ongoing National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, which is only the second nationally representative survey to examine Americans’ sex lives in detail—and the first to try to chart them over time. (The previous national survey, out of the University of Chicago, was conducted just once, in 1992. Most other sex research, including Kinsey’s, has used what are known as convenience samples, which don’t represent the population at large. The long-running General Social Survey, which much of Jean Twenge’s research is based upon, is nationally representative, but poses only a few questions about sex.)

I asked Herbenick whether the NSSHB’s findings gave her any hunches about what might have changed since the 1990s. She mentioned the new popularity of sex toys, and a surge in heterosexual anal sex. Back in 1992, the big University of Chicago survey reported that 20 percent of women in their late 20s had tried anal sex; in 2012, the NSSHB found a rate twice that. She also told me about new data suggesting that, compared with previous generations, young people today are more likely to engage in sexual behaviors prevalent in porn, like the ones she warns her students against springing on a partner. All of this might be scaring some people off, she thought, and contributing to the sex decline.

“If you are a young woman,” she added, glancing down at her daughter, “and you’re having sex and somebody tries to choke you, I just don’t know if you’d want to go back for more right away.”

Some of herbenick’s most sobering research concerns the prevalence of painful sex. In 2012, 30 percent of women said they’d experienced pain the last time they’d had vaginal intercourse; during anal intercourse, 72 percent had. Whether or not these rates represent an increase (we have no basis for comparison), they are troublingly high. Moreover, most women don’t tell their partners about their pain. J. Dennis Fortenberry, the chief of adolescent medicine at Indiana University’s medical school and a co-leader of the NSSHB, believes that many girls and women have internalized the idea that physical discomfort goes with being female.

A particularly vivid illustration of this comes from Lucia O’Sullivan, a University of New Brunswick psychology professor who has published research documenting high rates of sexual dysfunction among adolescents and young adults. That work grew out of a lunch several years ago with a physician from the university’s student-health center, who told O’Sullivan that she was deeply concerned by all the vulvar fissures she and her colleagues were seeing in their student patients. These women weren’t reporting rape, but the condition of their genitals showed that they were enduring intercourse that was, literally, undesired. “They were having sex they didn’t want, weren’t aroused by,” O’Sullivan says. The physician told her that the standard of care was to hand the women K‑Y Jelly and send them on their way.

Painful sex is not new, but there’s reason to think that porn may be contributing to some particularly unpleasant early sexual experiences. Studies show that, in the absence of high-quality sex education, teen boys look to porn for help understanding sex—anal sex and other acts women can find painful are ubiquitous in mainstream porn. (This isn’t to say that anal sex has to be painful, but rather that the version most women are experiencing is.) In a series of in-depth interviews, Cicely Marston of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that teenage boys experimenting with anal sex—perhaps influenced by what they’ve seen in porn—may find that sudden, unlubricated penetration is more difficult than it looks, and more agonizing for the recipient. Some of her subjects appear to have pressured their partner; others seem to have resorted to what another researcher described to me, clinically, as “nonconsensual substitution of anal for vaginal sex.”

In my interviews with young women, I heard too many iterations to count of “he did something I didn’t like that I later learned is a staple in porn,” choking being one widely cited example. Outside of porn, some people do enjoy what’s known as erotic asphyxiation—they say restricting oxygen to the brain can make for more intense orgasms—but it is dangerous and ranks high on the list of things you shouldn’t do to someone unless asked to. Tess, a 31-year-old woman in San Francisco, mentioned that her past few sexual experiences had been with slightly younger men. “I’ve noticed that they tend to go for choking without prior discussion,” she said. Anna, the woman who described how dating apps could avert awkwardness, told me she’d been choked so many times that at first, she figured it was normal. “A lot of people don’t realize you have to ask,” she said.

As Marina Adshade, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies the economics of sex and love, said to me, “Men have bad sex and good sex. But when sex is bad for women, it’s really, really bad. If women are avoiding sex, are they trying to avoid the really bad sex?”

Sex takes time to learn under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Modeling your behavior after what you’ve seen on-screen can lead to what’s known as “spectatoring”—that is, worrying about how you look and sound while you’re having sex, a behavior the sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson long ago posited was bad for sexual functioning. Some young women told me they felt pressured to emulate porn actresses—and to achieve orgasm from penetration alone, which most women can’t do. “It took me a while to be comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be as vocal during sex as the girls seem to be in porn,” a 24-year-old woman in Boston said. A 31-year-old in Phoenix explained that in her experience, porn has made men “expect that they can make any woman orgasm by just pounding away.”

Learning sex in the context of one-off hookups isn’t helping either. Research suggests that, for most people, casual sex tends to be less physically pleasurable than sex with a regular partner. Paula England, a sociologist at NYU who has studied hookup culture extensively, attributes this partly to the importance of “partner-specific sexual skills”—that is, knowing what your partner likes. For women, especially, this varies greatly. One study found that while hooking up with a new partner, only 31 percent of men and 11 percent of women reached orgasm. (By contrast, when people were asked about their most recent sexual encounter in the context of a relationship, 84 percent of men and 67 percent of women said they’d had an orgasm.) Other studies have returned similar results. Of course, many people enjoy encounters that don’t involve orgasms—a third of hookups don’t include acts that could reasonably be expected to lead to one—but the difference between the two contexts is striking. If young people are delaying serious relationships until later in adulthood, more and more of them may be left without any knowledge of what good sex really feels like.

As I was reporting this piece, quite a few people told me that they were taking a break from sex and dating. This tracks with research by Lucia O’Sullivan, who finds that even after young adults’ sex lives start up, they are often paused for long periods of time. Some people told me of sexual and romantic dormancy triggered by assault or depression; others talked about the decision to abstain as if they were taking a sabbatical from an unfulfilling job.

Late one afternoon in February, I met up with Iris, the woman who remarked to me that Tinder had been “gamified,” at the Lemon Collective, a design studio and workshop space in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The collective hosts DIY and design classes as well as courses geared toward the wellness of Millennial women; Valentine’s Day had been celebrated with a wildly oversubscribed real-estate workshop called “House Before Spouse.” (“We don’t need partners to be financially savvy and create personal wealth,” the event’s description said. “Wine and cheese will be served, obviously.”)

As we chatted (over, obviously, wine), Iris despaired at the quality of her recent sexual interactions. “I had such bad sex yesterday, my God, it was so bad,” she said wearily. “He basically got it in and—” She banged a fist against her palm at a furious tempo. It was the first time she’d slept with this man, whom she had met on Tinder, and she wondered aloud whether she could coach him. She was doubtful, though; he was in his 30s—old enough, she thought, to know better.

Iris observed that her female friends, who were mostly single, were finding more and more value in their friendships. “I’m 33, I’ve been dating forever, and, you know, women are better,” she said. “They’re just better.” She hastened to add that men weren’t bad; in fact, she hated how anti-male the conversations around her had grown. Still, she and various platonic female friends—most of whom identified as straight—were starting to play roles in one another’s lives that they might not be playing if they had fulfilling romantic or sexual relationships. For instance, they’d started trading lesbian-porn recommendations, and were getting to know one another’s preferences pretty well. Several women also had a text chain going in which they exchanged nude photos of themselves. “It’s nothing but positivity,” she said, describing the complimentary texts they’d send one another in reply to a photo (“Damn, girl, your tits!”). She wasn’t ready to swear off men entirely. But, she said, “I want good sex.” Or at least, she added, “pretty good sex.”

5. Inhibition

“Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” Jonah Disend, the founder of the branding consultancy Redscout, told Bloomberglast year. He said that designs for master-bedroom suites were evolving for much the same reason: “They want their own changing rooms and bathrooms, even in a couple.” The article concluded that however “digitally nonchalant” Millennials might seem—an allusion, maybe, to sexting—“they’re prudish in person.” Fitness facilities across the country are said to be renovating locker rooms in response to the demands of younger clients. “Old-timers, guys that are 60-plus, have no problem with a gang shower,” one gym designer told The New York Times, adding that Millennials require privacy.

Some observers have suggested that a new discomfort with nudity might stem from the fact that, by the mid-1990s, most high schools had stopped requiring students to shower after gym class. Which makes sense—the less time you spend naked, the less comfortable you are being naked. But people may also be newly worried about what they look like naked. A large and growing body of research reports that for both men and women, social-media use is correlated with body dissatisfaction. And a major Dutch study found that among men, frequency of pornography viewing was associated with concern about penis size. I heard much the same from quite a few men (“too hairy, not fit enough, not big enough in terms of penis size,” went one morose litany). According to research by Debby Herbenick, how people feel about their genitals predicts sexual functioning—and somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of people, perhaps influenced by porn or plastic-surgery marketing, feel negatively. The business of labiaplasty has become so lucrative, she told me in an email, “that you will actually see billboards (yes, billboards!) in some cities advertising it.”

As one might imagine, feeling comfortable in your body is good for your sex life. A review of 57 studies examining the relationship between women’s body image and sexual behavior suggests that positive body image is linked to having better sex. Conversely, not feeling comfortable in your own skin complicates sex. If you don’t want your partner to see you getting out of the shower, how is oral sex going to work?

Maybe, for some people, it isn’t. The 2017 iteration of Match.com’s Singles in America survey (co-led by Helen Fisher and the Kinsey Institute’s Justin Garcia) found that single Millennials were 66 percent less likely than members of older generations to enjoy receiving oral sex. Which doesn’t bode particularly well for female pleasure: Among partnered sex acts, cunnilingus is one of the surest ways for women to have orgasms.

Ian Kerner, the New York sex therapist, told me that he works with a lot of men who would like to perform oral sex but are rebuffed by their partner. “I know the stereotype is often that men are the ones who don’t want to perform it, but I find the reverse,” he said. “A lot of women will say when I’m talking to them privately, ‘I just can’t believe that a guy wants to be down there, likes to do that. It’s the ugliest part of my body.’ ” When I asked 20-somethings about oral sex, a pretty sizable minority of women sounded a similar note. “Receiving makes me nervous. It feels more intimate than penetration,” wrote one woman. “I become so self-conscious and find it difficult to enjoy,” wrote another.

Over the past 20 years, the way sex researchers think about desire and arousal has broadened from an initially narrow focus on stimulus to one that sees inhibition as equally, if not more, important. (The term inhibition, for these purposes, means anything that interferes with or prevents arousal, ranging from poor self-image to distractedness.) In her book Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, who trained at the Kinsey Institute, compares the brain’s excitement system to the gas pedal in a car, and its inhibition system to the brakes. The first turns you on; the second turns you off. For many people, research suggests, the brakes are more sensitive than the accelerator.

That turn-offs matter more than turn-ons may sound commonsensical, but in fact, this insight is at odds with most popular views of sexual problems. When people talk about addressing a lack of desire, they tend to focus on fuel, or stimulation—erotica, Viagra, the K‑Y Jelly they were handing out at the New Brunswick student-health center. These things are helpful to many people in many cases, but they won’t make you want to have sex if your brakes are fully engaged.

In my interviews, inhibition seemed a constant companion to many people who’d been abstinent for a long time. Most of them described abstinence not as something they had embraced (due to religious belief, say) so much as something they’d found themselves backed into as a result of trauma, anxiety, or depression. Dispiritingly but unsurprisingly, sexual assault was invoked by many of the women who said they’d opted out of sex. The other two factors come as no great shock either: Rates of anxiety and depression have been rising among Americans for decades now, and by some accounts have risen quite sharply of late among people in their teens and 20s. Anxiety suppresses desire for most people. And, in a particularly unfortunate catch‑22, both depression and the antidepressants used to treat it can also reduce desire.

“I have a therapist and this is one of the main things we’re working on,” a 28-year-old woman I’ll call April wrote to me, by way of explaining that, owing to intense anxiety, she’d never slept with anyone or been in a relationship. “I’ve had a few kisses & gone to second base (as the kids say) and it really has never been good for me.” When we later spoke by phone, she told me that in adolescence, she’d been shy, overweight, and “very, very afraid of boys.” April isn’t asexual (she gives thanks for her Magic Bullet vibrator). She’s just terrified of intimacy. From time to time she goes on dates with men she meets through her job in the book industry or on an app, but when things get physical, she panics. “I jumped out of someone’s car once to avoid him kissing me,” she said miserably. As we were ending the conversation, she mentioned to me a story by the British writer Helen Oyeyemi, which describes an author of romance novels who is secretly a virgin. “She doesn’t have anyone, and she’s just stuck. It’s kind of a fairy tale—she lives in the garret of a large, old house, writing these romantic stories over and over, but nothing ever happens for her. I think about her all the time.”

In exchanges like these, I was struck by what a paralyzing and vicious cycle unhappiness and abstinence can be. The data show that having sex makes people happier (up to a point, at least; for those in relationships, more than once a week doesn’t seem to bring an additional happiness bump). Yet unhappiness inhibits desire, in the process denying people who are starved of joy one of its potential sources. Are rising rates of unhappiness contributing to the sex recession? Almost certainly. But mightn’t a decline in sex and intimacy also be leading to unhappiness?

Moreover, what research we have on sexually inactive adults suggests that, for those who desire a sex life, there may be such a thing as waiting too long. Among people who are sexually inexperienced at age 18, about 80 percent will become sexually active by the time they are 25. But those who haven’t gained sexual experience by their mid-20s are much less likely to ever do so. The authors of a 2009 study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine speculated that “if a man or woman has not had intercourse by age 25, there is a reasonable chance [he or she] will remain a virgin at least until age 45.” Research by Stanford’s Michael Rosenfeld confirms that, in adulthood, true singledom is a far more stable category than most of us have imagined. Over the course of a year, he reports, only 50 percent of heterosexual single women in their 20s go on any dates—and older women are even less likely to do so.

Other sources of sexual inhibition speak distinctly to the way we live today. For example, sleep deprivation strongly suppresses desire—and sleep quality is imperiled by now-common practices like checking one’s phone overnight. (For women, getting an extra hour of sleep predicts a 14 percent greater likelihood of having sex the next day.) In her new book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness, Lori Brotto, an obstetrics-and-gynecology professor at the University of British Columbia, reviews lab research showing that background distraction of the sort we’re all swimming in now likewise dampens arousal, in both men and women.

How can such little things—a bad night’s sleep, low-grade distraction—defeat something as fundamental as sex? One answer, which I heard from a few quarters, is that our sexual appetites are meant to be easily extinguished. The human race needs sex, but individual humans don’t.

Among the contradictions of our time is this: We live in unprecedented physical safety, and yet something about modern life, very recent modern life, has triggered in many of us autonomic responses associated with danger—anxiety, constant scanning of our surroundings, fitful sleep. Under these circumstances, survival trumps desire. As Emily Nagoski likes to point out, nobody ever died of sexlessness: “We can starve to death, die of dehydration, even die of sleep deprivation. But nobody ever died of not being able to get laid.”

When Toys “R” Us announced this spring—after saying it had been struggling because of falling birth rates—that it would be shutting down, some observers mordantly remarked that it could be added to the list of things that Millennials had destroyed.

Societal changes have a way of inspiring generational pessimism. Other writers, examining the same data I’ve looked at, have produced fretful articles about the future; critics have accused them of stoking panic. And yet there are real causes for concern. One can quibble—if one cares to—about exactly why a particular toy retailer failed. But there’s no escaping that the American birth rate has been falling for a decade.

At first, the drop was attributed to the Great Recession, and then to the possibility that Millennial women were delaying motherhood rather than forgoing it. But a more fundamental change may be under way. In 2017, the U.S. birth rate hit a record low for a second year running. Birth rates are declining among women in their 30s—the age at which everyone supposed more Millennials would start families. As a result, some 500,000 fewer American babies were born in 2017 than in 2007, even though more women were of prime childbearing age. Over the same period, the number of children the average American woman is expected to have fell from 2.1 (the so-called replacement rate, or fertility level required to sustain population levels without immigration) to 1.76. If this trend does not reverse, the long-term demographic and fiscal implications will be significant.

A more immediate concern involves the political consequences of loneliness and alienation. Take for example the online hate and real-life violence waged by the so-called incels—men who claim to be “involuntarily celibate.” Their grievances, which are illegitimate and vile, offer a timely reminder that isolated young people are vulnerable to extremism of every sort. See also the populist discontent roiling Europe, driven in part by adults who have so far failed to achieve the milestones of adulthood: In Italy, half of 25-to-34-year-olds now live with their parents.

When I began working on this story, I expected that these big-picture issues might figure prominently within it. I was pretty sure I’d hear lots of worry about economic insecurity and other contributors to a generally precarious future. I also imagined, more hopefully, a fairly lengthy inquiry into the benefits of loosening social conventions, and of less couple-centric pathways to a happy life. But these expectations have mostly fallen to the side, and my concerns have become more basic.

Humans’ sexual behavior is one of the things that distinguish us from other species: Unlike most apes, and indeed most animals, humans have sex at times and in configurations that make conception not just unlikely but impossible (during pregnancy, menopause, and other infertile periods; with same-sex partners; using body parts that have never issued babies and never will). As a species, we are “bizarre in our nearly continuous practice of sex,” writes the UCLA professor Jared Diamond, who has studied the evolution of human sexuality. “Along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive aspects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged.” True, nobody ever died of not getting laid, but getting laid has proved adaptive over millions of years: We do it because it is fun, because it bonds us to one another, because it makes us happy.

A fulfilling sex life is not necessary for a good life, of course, but lots of research confirms that it contributes to one. Having sex is associated not only with happiness, but with a slew of other health benefits. The relationship between sex and wellness, perhaps unsurprisingly, goes both ways: The better off you are, the better off your sex life is, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the converse is true as well. Not having a partner—sexual or romantic—can be both a cause and an effect of discontent. Moreover, as American social institutions have withered, having a life partner has become a stronger predictor than ever of well-being.

Like economic recessions, the sex recession will probably play out in ways that are uneven and unfair. Those who have many things going for them already—looks, money, psychological resilience, strong social networks—continue to be well positioned to find love and have good sex and, if they so desire, become parents. But intimacy may grow more elusive to those who are on less steady footing.

When, over the course of my reporting, people in their 20s shared with me their hopes and fears and inhibitions, I sometimes felt pangs of recognition. Just as often, though, I was taken aback by what seemed like heartbreaking changes in the way many people were relating—or not relating—to one another. I am not so very much older than the people I talked with for this story, and yet I frequently had the sense of being from a different time.

Sex seems more fraught now. This problem has no single source; the world has changed in so many ways, so quickly. In time, maybe, we will rethink some things: The abysmal state of sex education, which was once a joke but is now, in the age of porn, a disgrace. The dysfunctional relationships so many of us have with our phones and social media, to the detriment of our relationships with humans. Efforts to “protect” teenagers from most everything, including romance, leaving them ill-equipped for both the miseries and the joys of adulthood.

In October, as I was finishing this article, I spoke once more with April, the woman who took comfort in the short story about the romance novelist who was secretly a virgin. She told me that, since we’d last talked, she’d met a man on Tinder whom she really liked. They’d gone on several dates over the summer, and fooled around quite a bit. As terrified as she had been about getting physically and emotionally intimate with another person, she found, to her surprise, that she loved it: “I never thought I would feel that comfortable with someone. It was so much better than I thought it was going to be.”

As things progressed, April figured that, in the name of real intimacy, she should explain to the man that she hadn’t yet had sex. The revelation didn’t go over well. “I told him I was a virgin. And he broke up with me. Beforehand, I figured that was the worst thing that could happen. And then it happened. The worst thing happened.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was steadier and more assured. “But I’m still here.”

#psychology #mental health #mental illness #parenting #child development #feminism #anti-feminism #archive #article #sociology

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