#he even lost frames trying to run away

[sacredsorceress]

the fling / bob reynolds

pairing: bob reynolds x f!avengers!reader summary: bob finds out that you had a one night stand with bucky a few years earlier and feelings bubble to the surface. a/n: heavy on the dialogue since i'm still trying to learn how to write for these characters I'm sorry. for the people who went to thunderbolts for bucky and walked out with a crush on bob- I hope this is okay!! first time writing in a bit word count: 4.3k warnings: no smut, but there are mentions of sexual content so minors please dni!!, former one night stand with bucky (y/n living the dream life fr), john walker!! jumpscare!! (kidding, but he is in it), feelings of worthlessness- anything that would have been in thunderbolts*, drug mention

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"Just one more time?" You asked. "Please? For me?"

Maybe you batted your eyelashes on purpose- your smile soft and warm, as you brushed your baby hairs from your face. Maybe it was on accident. Even you had been unable to differentiate between the blurred lines of how you instinctively reacted to his presence versus when you consciously tried to impress him.

You had been in the training room for an hour and although the ceiling fan whirred incessantly above the both of you and the fluorescent lighting had begun to give you a headache, you weren't ready to quit.

A glass of water stood on the far side of the room, among a few small puddles that had spilt as Bob had tried (and failed) to successfully raise it in the air telekinetically. A month earlier you had offered to help train Bob; with abilities the most similar to his out of anyone in the group, it felt like a natural step.

But as days turned to weeks, you needed a win just as much as him.

"Try to feel the energy running through you." You said, laying your hand against his shoulder. "I can feel it radiating off of you. You have to remind yourself that you're the one in control, Bob."

Bob's skin rose underneath his sweater- tiny goosebumps scattered across the expanse of his body. A shiver ran down his spine at the spark of your touch. As your hand trailed from his shoulder down his arm, his heart raced.

"It's all you." You whispered. "Now concentrate. Focus on the energy coursing through you. From your fingertips, up your arms," your fingers tracing up his arm as you spoke until they reached for his chest. "...to your heart..."

When Bob could feel your fingertips ghosting over his chest, pressing through the sweater that hung loosely on his frame, his breath hitched. His brain- a jumble of emotions that had far less to do with whatever god-like power was flowing through his veins and more to do with the brain of a man fogged by the woman he loved- lost focus on the task at hand.

His eyes screwed shut as the glass shattered in midair.

"Nice going, Bobby." Walker called, learning against the door frame.

Suddenly aware of how close you had become, you swiftly pulled away from Bob.

You scoffed.

"Don't be an ass, John."

The tension in the room was palpable as the three of you stood in silence. Only the mechanic whir of the fan click, click, clicking as it rattled on the ceiling kept you from hearing each other's breaths.

Glancing between John and Bob, you rolled your eyes and scooped your things up off the floor.

"Good work today, Bob." You said turning back with one last smile as you headed for the door. "See you at dinner."

Bob raised his hand to say something back, but before he could, you had scurried out of the room leaving him with Walker. Wonderful.

As if the room had been vacuum sealed and released, it was as though the liveliness of the room had been sucked out with your departure.

John gestured to the door.

"So you two are getting close, huh?" He asked, striding into the room with a beer bottle in his hand.

Bob felt the heat rise to his cheeks- was it that obvious?

"Oh uh... I guess." Bob smiled politely, shoving his hands in his pockets.

John's feet dragged against the floor as he walked, the sound of rubber against concrete like nails on a chalkboard in Bob's ears. Walker's gaze travelled across the room as if he was seeing it for the first time and hadn't trained in it himself daily, until his focus landed on the water spill from moments earlier. He kicked a stray piece of glass with his foot.

The super soldier cleared his throat.

"You know, man-to-man, Bobby: I'd be careful with her if I was you." Walker chuckled dryly. "Y'know, after what happened with Bucky."

Just as quickly as it had raced by your touch, his heart now stopped.

Everything that had been bothering him previously- the mechanic clicking of the fan, the bright white lights that reminded him a bit too much of a ward, the crisp tag that scratched the back of his neck, the way John spoke with drops of beer still hanging on his lips- it was endless, really- had faded into the background.

What did Bucky have to do with you?

He fidgeted with his hands, digging into the nail beds that were still dried with blood.

"What uh.." A nervous laugh escaped his throat. "What happened with Bucky?"

"Hooked up." Walker said, bringing the bottle to his lips. "Yeah.. it was like, a while ago back in my Captain America days." He raised his eyebrows. A pause. "She didn't tell you?"

As much as Bob had a difficult time lifting a glass, his heart had no problem dropping into his stomach.

One thing that Bob had always been cursed with from a young age was a hyper-active imagination that rarely ever served his own benefit. Now, it plagued him with the idea of you and Bucky together. Blurry images of you falling into bed together- your laugh in his ear. His lips on yours. His hands running up and down the length of your body...

He could be sick.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

They all had their flaws but Bucky had been forced into a life of heinous acts and had still managed to come out on top. Captain America's best friend. A hero against Thanos. Fuck, he was even a congressman... meanwhile you had been there to witness the vivid memory of Bob high out of his mind working as a sign flipper first hand. He didn't even work for his abilities, he received them on the hunt for another high.

What was he thinking?

Bob's eyes fell to his hands as they fiddled in his lap and he shook his head.

"No uh, no..." He coughed, attempting to mask the tremble in his voice. "She never um.. mentioned it."

"Huh."

"What?"

John took another swig from his bottle.

"Nothing, nothing..." Walker said with a shrug. "I just figured you guys were close. Always hanging out n' all."

And by all means you were.

There was no coffee run complete without Bob's vanilla milkshake, or a night where you fell asleep on the couch without him by your side. He tasted everything you made before it managed to find its way into the oven. He came with you to every bookstore and supermarket run under the guise of 'wanting to feel useful', while really just wanting to observe you in mundanity outside the tower and carry the bags for you effortlessly home.

Him and Yelena were close, but you and him were partners.

Bob had understood that his more-than-friendly feelings for you would likely have been in vain, but he had never considered that yours were already taken by another.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Bob tugged at his hair and scratched the scruff that had begun to grow on his jaw.

"Yeah..." He shrugged. "I mean.."

John sized Bob up, trying to estimate how he was feeling. He was a difficult one to read- chronically calm in the face of adversity as if it was the life he was assigned to live. Staring at the polite smile that Walker could've sworn was glued to Bob's face, he accepted that he wouldn't know.

"Well, anyway," John said. "Time for dinner, right?"

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"Can I ask you a question?"

It was a simple question. One that you didn't think would have much bearing. Afterall, the two of you were finally organizing your bookshelf- the final step in making Avengers Tower your home. You figured that it would be about where to place a book or how you liked it.

You would have never anticipated where the conversation was heading.

You absentmindedly flipped through the pages of one of your paperbacks before slipping it onto the shelf.

"You can ask me anything, Bob." You replied. "I'm an open book."

Bob watched where you were knelt on the floor below. The sun peeking in through the window behind him had cast a golden glow on your face, highlighting the crinkles that formed as you focused on the task at hand.

Did he want to know if you were Bucky's? Now, with the two of you alone in your room, doing a mundane task like organizing your bookshelf he could convince himself that this was his life. That you were his.

The truth could shatter that illusion.

What was he thinking? Of course he wanted to know.

The sound of his sock feet shuffling on the floor pulled your focus from the shelf to his flushed face.

"Is everything okay, Bob?"

You pulled your hand from the pile and laid it gently against Bob's clothed leg.

Bob cleared his throat.

"Are you and Bucky.. are you... did you-" Bob tugged at his hair. "Fuck, uh.. this is awkward. Were you two ever...?"

Your eyebrows furrowed as you listened and you swear you felt your blood pressure spike.

How did he know?

Bob was the last person on Earth you wanted knowing about your sex history- especially with someone so close to the two of you. His spluttering only dragged the moment on and you needed a mercy kill.

"Are you asking if Buck and I were a thing?"

Buck. Bob's mind raced. She's the only one in the tower he lets call him that. How did I not notice?

You watched him physically deflate once you posed the question for him- whether that was out of defeat or relief at the awkwardness being stripped from his own hands and shoved into your own, you weren't sure.

Your eyes trailed to the books in front of you.

"I guess, once." You replied trying to even the thumping in your chest. You were never sure of the extent of Bob's powers and if super-hearing had slipped its way into his skillset. "It was a one time thing. I think we just got lost in the heat of it all and when we were done with our mission, we got busy with our own things and it just... fizzled, you know? We're just friends now, Bob."

Without realizing it, your hands had clasped together, circling around one another nervously as you spoke. Noting your demeanor, you picked up another book from the pile.

"Walker just made it seem like-" Bob started.

Of fucking course it was Walker.

You shoved a hardcover into a free space on the shelf with a thud.

"Well Walker's an asshole." You stated flatly, loosing the composure that had been held together by the wringing of your hands. "There's nothing there, Bob. I mean, Buck is a good friend, but he's not the type of guy who'll grab coffee with you, or read your book recommendations, or-" You stopped yourself short, realizing the relationship you were describing was your own. "He's just.. he's not the guy for me."

A silence hung in the air for a brief moment until you could no longer take it.

"I'll be right back."

Before Bob had the chance to argue, you were on your feet, slipping through the door, and rushing down the hallway.

You welcomed yourself inside Yelena's room and shut the door behind you.

"I could kill John!"

Yelena, who had been sat on her bed reading, threw her book to the side.

"Uh, hello?" Yelena said pulling out an earbud. "Have you heard of knocking?"

Waving away her argument, you paced the length of her room.

"Walker told Bob that I had sex with Bucky."

Yelena had become well acquainted with John Walker's slights in the time since meeting him- he enjoyed getting under someone's skin like no other- a natural instigator- though, the team had become immune to it. But watching you now, burning a whole in the carpet with your pacing, Yelena realized she had never seen you so frantic.

"Well?" She asked. "Did you?"

You gave her a pointed look and sighed. That's all she needed to know.

Her jaw dropped.

"When was this!" She shouted, waving her arm in the air.

"Three years ago!" You yelled back. "But that's not the point- the point is that Walker told Bob!"

Yelena, quickly digesting the grenade of a revelation you just threw at her, shrugged.

"Well you just told me," she said. "Who cares if Bob knows?"

"I care!" You said flopping onto the bed. "It's different."

The blonde furrowed her brows.

"Why is it different?"

Staring up at her ceiling, you let out an exasperated sigh.

"Because you're a girl."

Yelena tapped her finger against her chin: "Well Walker knew and you did not care until he told Bob."

"That's because he was there, Yel." You argued. "I wouldn't want Alexei to know either."

A dry laugh escaped her lips.

"That is different." Yelena said. "Alexei would tell the whole world that you had sex with Barnes and the news would call you the Avengers' whore."

You reached for one of her pillows and threw it at her.

"Oh my god, Yelena!"

You hid your face in your palms.

"Not that I am calling you a whore!" She defended herself. "I am just saying-"

"Yelena." You said, face still hidden behind your hands. "Focus."

"I just do not understand why you care if Bob knows!" Yelena said with an exasperated sigh, running her hand in circles on your back. "You two are very close. He won't judge you. I mean, he is very awkward, but I am sure he's had sex before. It won't affect your-"

As if a cartoon lightbulb had appeared above her head, the thought finally came to her. Yelena ceased the motion with her hands.

"Wait." She said, pulling herself away from your touch. "Do you like him?"

You rolled your eyes.

"What are we?" You said, deflecting. "Kindergarteners?"

"Aha!" Yelena said, hopping off the bed. "I knew it!"

Somehow telling another person only made your feelings more real, tangible. Before you could deny that they had ever existed, but now that it was out in the open, you were vulnerable not only to your feelings but Bob's too. You could feel your face burning from the confession and groaned.

"You like Bob!" She said with a pout, as if it were the most wholesome idea in the world. "That is so cute. Why do you not you tell him?"

She asked it as if it were simple. As if the only thing that stood between you and what you wanted was a sentence. And that if things didn't go the way you hoped, that your desires would blow away like dust in the wind.

If anything, the revived information that you had a history with Bucky only further pushed down your inclination to confess your feelings to Bob. If three years had passed since a mutual one night stand and that was still haunting you, how would an unrequited love with your roommate be?

You weren't sure you could take it.

"You're joking, right?" You wrapped your arms around your legs and tucked your knee under your chin. "He's literally 'the golden god'. I mean Bob's just... he's so attractive and fit and nice... there's just no way he would feel the same and then it would make everything so awkward."

Yelena quirked her eyebrow at you.

"I am confused." She said. "Are we talking about the same Bob?"

You gave her a sad smile and swat at her arm.

"Yelena. I'm serious." Your argued. "Just think about it."

Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth, tut, tut, tuting you as she brushed her hand against your forehead.

"Y/n, before you started training with Bob, he could throw us all across the room without even thinking about it." Yelena said, stroking your hair. "Now, he can't even pick up a glass of water. Do you know why that is?"

You hadn't considered it.

"Do I make him uncomfortable?" You asked.

"No! I mean, yes, but it's not like that." She said, pulling away. "You make him so nervous that he cannot think straight. We all know that he's in love with you, we just did not think you felt the same."

You pulled yourself up onto your elbow to get a better look at Yelena, the sheets crinkling under your touch. In your chest, you swore you could feel your heart thumping against its cage.

Bob liked you? You?

As if you were a kid again you felt an adrenaline rush through your veins, begging you to hop off the bed, skip around the room and run into the arms of the man you loved.

But you were an adult who lived with both a man from your past and one who would, hopefully, be your future. Care and precision was needed.

"Really?" You asked, pressing your hand to your chest to steady your breathing. "Don't mess with me, Yelena."

Yelena laughed.

"Oh yes. He is very obvious." Yelena shook her head. "Always making the googly eyes at you when you talk and asking where you are... it's gross."

Without thinking, you closed the space between you and Yelena by gripping her hand.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes." She assured you, squeezing your fingers, "And you should tell him. Now that he knows about Bucky it is going to mess with his head. It is better to tell him soon."

Suddenly, you thought of Bob's feelings. The way he must have felt learning about Bucky.. if you were in his shoes and he had been with a member of your group, you think you would be sick.

As much as you wanted him- to hold him, to tell him you love him and hear it back, to be able to call him yours- it wasn't your feelings that drove you, but Bob's.

Yelena could be wrong, but she could also be right. You couldn't risk the latter by fear of the former.

You'd tell him tonight.

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After your conversation with Yelena, you had headed back to your room only to find it abandoned by Bob. The afternoon had dragged on in agony, avoiding Bob like the plague until dinner. Even once the dishes had been served, wine was poured, and you had relaxed into your seat beside him, it had taken you all dinner to get up the nerve to speak to him again.

Afterall, what if Yelena's intuition was wrong?

"Can we talk after dinner?" You asked.

You turned your head towards Bob and whispered, careful that the other members of the table wouldn't hear. Bob, who had been half-heartedly been picking fries off of his plate the entire dinner, bit his tongue at the sound of your voice.

"Ow- what? Y-yeah," He said with a polite smile. "We can talk."

You smiled.

"Perfect." You smiled. "It's a date."

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Your footsteps were the first thing he heard.

They were soft, hesitant. As if you had to convince yourself to take another step. You had wrapped your sweater tight around yourself to brace the chill that came with being so high above the ground and all Bob could think was he would warm you up if you let him.

But he'd never say that.

Instead, he braced himself against the railing and greeted you with a wordless smile.

"Hey."

"Hi."

You glanced down at your shoes then back to his face.

Just do it.

"I'm sorry that you had to find out about Bucky and I from Walker." You glanced between Bob and the traffic lights on the street below. His stare, so filled with kindness and care, made your breath catch in your throat. "But it's only because it's one hundred percent in the past. And I... was afraid that you'd look at me differently because of it if you knew."

Bob, usually the victim of low self-confidence, hated the look on you. Not because it made you look weak or worthless, no- but that he wished he could take whatever weight it carried in your body and absorb it into his own. Valentina may have called him the golden god, but you were the shining light that kept him him.

"Why?" He asked. "I could never judge you."

Your eyes locked with his and for a brief moment it was like the rest of the world fell away. You studied the blue in his eyes and the way gold specs floated around in them- as if the power within him was always just beneath the surface, waiting to be unleashed. You took it in. If this all went south, at least you could remember him like that.

"Fuck." You laughed, taking a sudden interest in your shoes. "This sounds so childish, but I really don't know how else to say it..." Wrapping your arms tighter around you to brace the wind, you looked up at him and smiled. "I like you, Bob. Like more than... more than I probably should."

A shiver visibly rattled your body as another gust of wind hit. Rather than suggest that you go inside, Bob laid his hands against your arms, warming them.

"What do you... what do you mean by that?" He asked.

"C'mon, Bob." You sighed, shielding your face in your palms and burying your face into his chest. "You know what I mean. I just look at you and don't even know what to do with myself anymore; and I know I'm supposed to be your friend, but I can't keep pretending that I'm not having a heart attack every time you look at me like that."

A deep sigh shook your frame.

"Anyway just tell me you don't feel the same and I'll forget it." You said, "and we can pretend this never happened."

He could feel his heart shatter in his chest.

He knew the tremble in your voice well. The tone. The complete lack of confidence. It was unfamiliar coming from your lips but he had heard it come from his own every time he opened his mouth. To hear it come from you was not just unfathomable, but heart breaking.

How you could think that way about yourself in comparison to him... he couldn't believe it.

"Don't... don't say that." He said no more than above a whisper. "You're like, just perfect to me."

Bob stepped back, leaving space to get a better look at you. Running his hands up your arms, he reached your cheeks. He cupped your face in his hands, gently as if one wrong move would make his earth shatter, and guided your face up to meet his gaze.

"Look, I'm uh.. I'm not good at this whole... relationship thing..." Bob said, eyes darting from your face to your hair, to the space behind you as the glimmer in your eyes made him nervous. "But I- I feel the same... About you."

He laughed. The same sweet, nervous laugh that followed you into your dreams and gave you a reason to come home; and you felt your heart swell at the familiar smile painted on his face- this time for you.

"Really?"

Your fingers clung to the fabric of his sweater as if you feared that if you let go, it would turn out to just a figment of your imagination.

"Yeah."

Tendrils hung in his eyes as he leaned further, close enough that you could feel the heat radiating off of his skin and and breath fanning your face. When your noses touched, ever so slightly brushing at the tips, you placed your finger against his lips.

Confusion and hurt painted his features until you gestured behind him.

"We have company." You whispered.

Framed by the warm light of the tower behind them, five all-too-familiar figures watched from the doorway.

"Should we be worried about the two most powerful people on the planet being in love?" Ava asked, taking a sip from her glass of wine.

"I'm more worried about the mental stability of their future kids." John deadpanned.

"No!" Alexei argued, slapping his hands against Ava and Walker's backs. "What are you saying? They will make strong babies!" He raised his fist in the air: "And they will be the pride of the New Avengerz!"

"Alexei!" Yelena groaned. "Stop making it weird."

As if Yelena had physically stung him with her words, Alexei's hands flew to his own chest.

"I do not make it weird." He argued. "I am being supportive. How is that weird?"

"They have not even kissed and you are talking about super babies!" Yelena shouted. "You are lucky they cannot hear you."

You called back.

"Oh no, we can hear you!"

Bob pointed to his ears and mouthed: "Super hearing."

Still cradled in Bob's arms, your eyes met Bucky's from across the landing pad. He smiled softly.

"C'mon." Bucky said waving the onlookers inside. "Let's go. Leave them alone."

Waiting until they left your sight, you looked back at Bob and breathed him in. His cheeks had begun to burn a bright pink that was visible even in the dim light of dusk, but he looked at you with eyes that could only be described as love drunk.

"So..." You said, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. The palm that still laid flat against his chest felt his heart skip a beat. "Where were we?"

[symbiomancy]

scientific curiosity —frankenstein's monster

—summary: You created him. You patched him together from pieces of humans and beasts - lost your license to practice medicine and your PhD for that. He should not look at you and lust. But he does. | 1.8k | AO3 | monster masterlist

—warnings: monster x human, monsterfucking, handjob, implied mating cycle/heat, thigh fucking, rutting.

The creature has an affinity for music. That fact is not even near the most fascinating thing you’ve discovered about him, but it is a very pleasant one. He taps the keys of the piano with grace, despite his size. Mozart today, huh?

“Your motor skills are improving at an incredible rate,” you say more to yourself as you scribble furiously into your notebook. The creature voices a grunt of approval as he stares at the sheet music propped up in front of him. Mentally, you pat yourself on the back for selecting such a fine brain.

You cannot deny his improvement at everything, really. He’d graduated from picture books to children’s books within two days, to classical novels and medical books within a week. Getting him acclimated to his size had been a challenge at first but it has been leaps and bounds from those days. Writing, string instruments, key instruments, all of it, a truly incredible progress. There’s only a handful of things you’ve yet to ask.

“Any sexual desire?”

His fingers stumble on the keys.

You whip around, one arm slung over the back of the chair and push so the legs screech loudly against the wooden floor. There’s a grin on your face, pen in a death grip in your hand. “Care to elaborate?” You blindly reach for the notebook still on the table, eyes fixed on his large frame, at the way he hunches over, staring firmly at the sheet music.

“No.”

“Well, it is fall,” you muse, raise your elbow to lean it against the chair backrest, pen tapping against your bottom lip. “And I did have to supplement some parts for beast parts.”

“Hadn’t even noticed.” He thumps a foot against the ground. Griffin’s hind legs. Could’ve used the wings but taking too much from one body would’ve created too much suspicion.

“I really thought a vampire’s hand would, y’know react to warm blood — a mistake on my part, I’ll admit it. But,” your grin widens even further, “fascinating how a werewolf’s knot is still a knot even if you cut it off. Does the full moon affect it in any way?”

Your creation glares at you from across the room.

“What? Scientific curiosity.”

“You had your PhD and medical license revoked for…” he takes a deep breath and takes his hands from the piano keys to motion to himself, “me.” There’s a hint of something in his tone, something that borders on disgust. You file that away to discuss at a later time. “It’s why we’re out here. Hiding.”

“There are worse reasons to lose a doctorate for. And I was a scientist while creating you. So, scientist. Now, answer my question, please?”

The creature gently pulls down the key lid on the piano, stands, and wordlessly leaves the room.

He doesn’t come down for dinner.

You stare at the vacant seat on the other side of the dinner table with a frown. His plating is untouched, steam rising from the potato stew where he usually sits. There is no creaking in the house, nothing to signal he’s coming down. You eat alone and place his meal into the still-warm oven.

His door is closed. You stand there for a while, mulling over your words, trying to string together an apology. Should you wax something long together? An explanation? Run-on sentences to try to justify your innate curiosity at your creation’s physiological state? Nothing sounds right. Nothing sounds like enough.

“I’m sorry… for asking like that. I got carried away. It wasn’t proper of me. There’s um,” you clear your throat, “I left your plate in the oven. Heat it up if you get hungry. Good night.”

You stand at the door for another prolonged moment, trying to catch any sound on the other side of the door. It’s faint, barely there, but you can make out his breathing, slow and steady. At least he’s still here. But you decide not to test your luck any further tonight and retreat to your own room, leaving the door slightly ajar. It doesn’t fit into the frame quite correctly, anyway.

Maybe he’ll at least go downstairs for dinner later.

He stands in front of your door, staring at the small sliver of moonlight that pours into the dark hallway. There are too many loud thoughts in his head, racing and colliding. His skin feels ill-fitting, a heat simmering underneath it. You ask too many questions, he thinks — has thought since he left you in the study alone to hide away in his room with the blinds drawn and his cock in hand — too many questions that prod all the right places.

It’s in your nature. You were a scientist. And a doctor with an intricate web of knowledge about the human (and creature) body. He shouldn’t fault you for asking.

While you were downstairs eating dinner alone, he had his cock in hand — not a wholly new experience but a new-ish one — stroking it over the low bathroom sink. He’d tried, tried thinking of other things but nearly all of his experiences are tied to you and your presence. So he keeps coming back to you. Your pretty face, your smile, the light in your eyes when you ask him about his body, his psyche to scribble into your umpteenth notebook all about him.

Even now with his pants undone, cock hanging out, already (or still) hard, he thinks of you. He stares at you through the crack in the door, soundly asleep in your bed. The covers are tucked tightly over your body but legs exposed to the fall chill. It’s not right, he thinks, he should at least tuck you in before you get a cold.

He pushes the door open slowly. It creaks a short, aborted squeak and you shift in bed, pull the blanket tighter against yourself. The creature steps forward, carefully placed footfalls dancing around the one creaking floorboard right at the entrance, long slow strides taking him to the foot of your bed. You shuffle again, and for a moment he thinks this is it, you’re awake, but you turn onto your back, kick at the blanket with one foot.

You are… enticing like this, he finds. He thinks that’s what this feeling is. All he has to compare it to is the novels he’s read over and over and over again.

He grabs onto your ankles with his warm hand, touch featherlight, and gently, slowly, pulls you forward. The end of your nightgown catches against the sheets, drags further up the closer you get to him. He has the anatomical knowledge of the human body — he’s read every book in the house several times over no matter if fiction or an anatomy book, he’s effectively memorized all the illustrations, if not the texts themselves.

His fingers trace the expanse of your skin, gently knead into the flesh. He can name the muscles and the tendons, the nerves at the crook of your knee. He’s spent countless hours staring at the illustrations, even the more… explicit ones. He’s curious — you’ve rubbed off on him — but it’s dark. Instead, he stares at the gap between your thighs. It’s inviting, just perfect for him to slip his cock through. It jerks at the thought, precum dribbling from the tip.

You blink slowly. The room is dark, save for the moonlight filtering in through the window above your head. In front of you, right at the foot of the bed stands a tall figure, hand wrapped around your ankles, resting against his shoulder. Your brain jogs the existence of your creation before you startle involuntarily. He startles too, nearly dropping his grip on your ankles.

“Everything alright?” You ask. The fall chill bites at your thighs and oh.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pressing his body against the back of your legs. Something hot and heavy, wet presses between your thighs. The tip of his cock presses between your thighs, forward and backward. Slowly, like he’s testing the waters. You stare at it for a moment, then press your thighs together.

The creature groans and thrusts forward, hips assuming a sloppy pace. He’s tall and wide and big and that’s how you built him. The bed rocks with his thrusts, the headboard banging against the wall, scraping at the paint. His cock plunges between your things, smears precum onto your skin, slick and wet and loud. The sound of his cock plunging between your slick thighs is nearly deafening in the silent house. Your own arousal curls under your skin but you file it away to stare at him.

This… this is not what you had in mind when you first came up with this (quite possibly very stupid, very illegal, medically and scientifically (not to mention ethically) dubious) idea. It cost you your license and your reputation, sent you into exile. You don’t regret it on the worst of days but especially not right now.

His cold hand wraps nearly wholly around your thigh and you clench around his cock involuntarily. Your muscles jerk from the sudden chill. He groans and his hips stutter for a moment, stumble in their sloppy rhythm before he regains whatever shred of his composure is left and continues thrusting. The bulb at the bottom of his shaft is engorged, knocking against your clit with every thrust. You can’t even focus on that, just on the beads of precum dribbling from the tip of his cock, smearing against your thighs as he pulls nearly all the way back. When he thrusts towards you, pearly droplets fly, splatter against your wrinkled nightgown.

He pulls you into him, hips slamming against your thighs. The metal bed frame screeches at something, you can’t even react as he thrusts forward one last time. He cums with a guttural growl that reverberates in your own chest, thighs pressing against yours, hips jerking forward. Ropes of hot cum shoot from his cock, land on your torso. You reach out, wrap a hand around the enormous cock to jerk him off, prolong his orgasm, milk him for everything he has to offer. There’s a hiss from the back of his throat as you work him empty, splattering onto your stomach and chest, even your chin. It’s warm and sticky and it sinks into your cotton nightgown, clings to your skin.

His breathing is erratic once his large frame stops shaking. His chest expands and constricts against your legs, nails digging small crescents into your ankles. Your toes are cold from the forced position.

You reach down to the puddle of cum pooling on your stomach and draw a heart into it with a small giggle.

The creature looks up from his mess tentatively, brow furrowed and lips jutted into a hopeful smile.

“You’re not mad?”

“I’ll have you know I picked out every part of you according to my personal preferences.”

banners/dividers by @/cafekitsune

[mostly-imagines]

Hi!! If you're up to it do you think you could write something about the first time Jason brings his gf to the manor. Like maybe he brings her in but doesn't tell anyone and so everyone is trying to sneak a glimpse of her??

meet the family

jason todd x fem!reader

aka jason has a girlfriend???

warnings: none

The manor sits full as ever—a cloud of mild boredom sweeping over the Wayne clan.

Dick sits perched on top of an armchair reading a catalog, Stephanie’s splayed out across the couch, Cass is bundled up in blankets atop the ottoman, and Damian leans up against the center table from the floor.

It’s a relatively slow afternoon, until Tim comes bursting into the room, out of breath.

“There’s a girl here!”

Everybody looks at him, disinterest scattered across the room. “There’s a couple of ‘em.” Dick says, flipping through the pages of the magazine.

Tim huffs, “No! In Jason’s room—he has a girl in there!” Eyebrows shoot up at that.

“Now I know you’re lying.” Damian mutters.

Tims head snaps over to Damian. “Dude, go see for yourself. I heard her!”

“You really think Jason would bring a girl here and not even introduce us?” Steph asks, unconvinced.

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously.”

Cassandra nods fervently.

“Okay, yeah. Maybe.” Stephanie mutters. “I bet he’ll introduce me before any of you guys, though.”

Dick barks out a laugh, “You’re nothing short of delusional if you think he’s introducing any of us.”

“We’ll have to take matters into our own hands, then.” Tim says, decidedly.

Damian audibly sighs and rolls his eyes.

“I’m meeting her first.” Steph confirms. “I’ll put money down right now.”

“Meet her or see her?” Cass signs.

“Same thing.” Stephanie shrugs.

Dick shoots up from his seat, “First person to see her gets to be the ring bearer!” He announces, racing out of the room.

Knock knock knock knock knock…

Knock knock.

It takes a good forty seconds, but Jason opens the door, an annoyed frown already on his face.

Dick gives him his brightest smile. It beams of deceit in Jason's eyes. “Hey man. What’cha doing?”

He crosses his arms. “What do you want?”

Dick tries to peer around Jason into the room, but Jason made a point of barely opening the door and his large frame isn’t doing Dick any favors right now.

“Just wanted to say hey…You wanna hang out?”

“No.”

Dick lingers awkwardly. “…Are you sure?”

Jason shuts the door.

A couple minutes later, Tim comes running up the stairs. He opts to skip over the courtesy of knocking and go straight for barging through the door himself. Or he would’ve, if Jason hadn’t seen that coming from a mile away and locked it.

“Fuck off, Tim!” Jason calls from inside the room.

“You lost your right to privacy the second you walked in this house!” He shouts back, hitting his fist against the door.

And Tim swears he can hear a sweet laugh as he trudges away. The authenticity of that claim will be heavily debated downstairs for the next several minutes.

Not even a thirty seconds later, Stephanie comes a knockin’. Jason opens the door wordlessly, patience clearly dissipating more and more.

“Hey, Jason! I can’t find my comm, you wouldn’t happen to have it, would you?”

His face deadpans. “No, Steph.”

Stephanie clicks her tongue, “Can you check?”

He stares at her.

“Actually you’re right, it would be faster if I did.” Stephanie tries to push past him into the room, but Jason, unsurprisingly, doesn’t budge.

“Stephanie.”

“I just want to meet her!” She pleads. “I won’t even tell the others, I’ll just say you wouldn’t let me in either!”

“Bye.” He closes the door.

He doesn’t make it all the way back to the bed before the next knock, singular and short.

Jason snaps the door open again, looking down at Damian with a glare.

Never one to waste any time, “Is there a girl in here?” Damian asks, seeming thoroughly disinterested in the answer.

Jason shuts the door in his face.

Several minutes later, another, quieter knock. Jason’s groan can be heard from outside the room. He pulls open the door once again.

It’s Cass.

She stares at him.

He stares at her.

“Can I say hi to her?” She signs.

Jason sighs. “I’ll pass along the message.”

She smiles and turns back down the hall.

Jason closes and locks the door once again, trudging back over to the bed where you lay. He collapses onto your chest, your arms wrapping around each others bodies immediately.

“Cass says hi.” He mumbles, the sound obscured by his face-down position.

“That message would be a lot more meaningful if I actually knew Cass.”

He groans. “You don’t want to meet them.”

“I do.” You say, running your fingers through his hair. “And I think you do too, or you wouldn’t have brought me to the house where the world's best detectives live.”

“I’m starting to regret it now.”

“Come on. Please?” You plead.

He picks his head up to look at you.

“Are you sure?” He asks with a grimace.

“Absolutely.” You say, topping it off with a kiss on his cheek.

He sighs.

Well. It’s never been within Jason’s skill set to deny you, anyways.

You descend the stairs hand in hand with Jason, his energy mopier than usual. You can hear a gaggle of voices coming from a room ahead, all talking over one another.

“Okay, Tim, you climb up outside the window and—”

“—It’s your plan, you scale the side of the house.”

Jason drops his head and mutters a “Jesus Christ…” as you near the commotion.

You give him a reassuring smile and pat his back as you both move into the doorway.

Everyone’s heads snap to the doorway, eyes wide and waiting.

Jason takes a deep breath like he’s steeling himself for torture. “Guys…This is my girlfriend.”

“Hi.” You smile sweetly, waving to the room.

There’s a moment of still silence before the room erupts.

“Hold on—”

“—my god, she’s so pretty!”

“Oh wow—”

“Wait, what?”

”—You’re real?”

“—didn’t place that bet.”

Stephanie comes scurrying up to you and grabs both of your hands in hers. “Hi, I’m Steph!” She says with a beaming smile. “What’s your name?”

“I’m—”

But the others are right on her tail, crowding around you.

“We didn’t even know Jason had a girlfriend.” Tim says.

“Still not convinced.” Damian mumbles from the back.

Cass waves and signs something to you.

“She says we’re really happy to meet you, which we are.” Dick tells you.

Damian moves closer within the huddle and inspects you closely. You have no idea what he’s inspecting you for. You don’t need to dwell on it for long because Jason pushes his head away from you with mild force making Damian scowl.

Stephanie chimes in, “Did he bring you here to meet us? The others said—”

Jason cuts her off, already knowing exactly where that sentence was going. “I brought her here to show her my old room.”

Dick snickers, “Oh, is that what you were off doing?”

“Watch it.” Your boyfriend warns.

You nudge him with your elbow, be nice.

Tim moves closer to you, narrowing his eyes. “So you’ve like, spent time with him and everything? And you still want to be around him?”

“Okay and you’re done.” Jason takes your hand and leads you out of the room and back down the hallway.

“No wait!”

You’re already out of the room and into another and then another before you can even realize that you’re headed for the front door.

You stop in your tracks, pulling him to a halt as well. “What about—”

Jason shakes his head. “You don’t want to meet him.”

You lower your chin at him, “Jay. Do you want me to meet him?”

He’s silent and doesn’t look like he particularly does.

You sigh, “Okay, do you want him to meet me?”

“I—yeah…” he trails, and you give him your best sweet eyes, the ones that he knows he has no business saying no to. “I…okay. Okay.”

He leads you down another hallway, the sounds of his siblings clambering echoing in the distance. You end up in a room that looks like a never used study, where Jason pushes on one of the walls. It slides open with a bit of force from him, revealing a door with a keypad next to it.

He types a series of numbers into it, and opens it up to a narrow passageway that looks remarkably like a cave.

The passageway leads down to a set of stairs, and you can hear the loud sound of water in the distance.

You’re quite nervous about walking into the Batcave, but you know Jason wouldn’t bring you anywhere near it unless he was sure it would be okay. Okay for you that is, more so than his father.

“Careful. It’s slippery.” Jason holds your hand the whole way down anyway, making sure to linger no more than a step and a half in front of you.

You see Bruce Wayne, sitting at a desk with a large array of computer screens in front of it, and case files scattered all throughout the surface.

He doesn’t acknowledge your entrance, though you have to imagine if Jason got his observation skills from anywhere, it would be him.

As you approach, Jason switches your hands so that his left is holding your left. The result has his figure half covering you, you can only assume partially limiting Bruce’s view of you.

“Bruce.”

Bruce turns his chair around, regarding Jason with a raised chin. The greeting is somehow even more formal than you’d expected.

“Jason.” He readdresses his gaze to you. “Who’s this?”

Jason has a hell of a feeling that Bruce already knows exactly who you are. He’s probably known about you since you started dating. He would’ve had to, to not be pissed as hell that Jason brought a civilian into the cave.

Jason introduces you, his hand reluctantly letting go as you step forward to shake Bruce’s.

Bruce looks surprised, though pleasantly so. He smiles and shakes it kindly.

“It’s nice to finally meet you.” He says.

“You too, I’ve heard a lot about you.” You say, smiling.

He laughs, “Oh, I bet.” Looking to Jason, he says, “I can’t say I’ve had the same pleasure, unfortunately.”

Though Jason’s behind you now, you can practically feel him roll his eyes.

“No, I can’t imagine him sharing anything unprovoked.” Bruce smiles widely at that.

He opens his mouth to say something else, but Jason, who’s probably on the brink of losing his mind down here, interrupts.

“Alright. Time to go.” Jason says, grabbing your hand again. He doesn’t give you much time to protest before he’s guiding you by the waist past him and towards the stairs.

You let him nudge you out and call over your shoulder, “It was nice meeting you!”

He’s halfway up the stairs as you exit, only to be stopped by Bruce addressing him again.

“Jason.”

Jason stalls his steps, turning around slowly. You’re out of the cave now, and Jason’s not excited to be alone with his Dad for even a minute. It doesn’t help that he has no idea what he’ll say.

“She’s kind.” Bruce says, simply.

“Yes.”

He tilts his head at Jason, observing him. “You love her?”

Jason looks at the ground. “Yes.”

Bruce nods. “Good.”

He returns to his work at the computers wordlessly, and Jason has to take a moment to realign himself before he climbs the rest of the stairs.

Jason doesn’t particularly seek his fathers approval, nor does he place any definable value on it. However, hearing him give his own version of his blessing to you struck something inside Jason. Something deep in his chest.

He re-enters the study, finding it empty. He walks out into the hallway, where you’re nowhere to be found. Despite being halfway across the house by this point, he can distinctly hear his siblings chattering in the living room. Chattering. And chattering. And chattering…

Oh god, you went back to the living room.

As Jason approaches the conversation becomes clearer.

“—long have you been together, anyways?”

“Well—”

Stephanie gasps suddenly, cutting you off. “Oh wait, you have to meet Alfred!”

“Oh, we’ve already met.” You tell her.

Dick’s head snaps up. “What? When?”

Jason enters the room, draping his arm around your shoulder. “About six months before you met her.”

A chorus of gasps and shouts ring out.

“What?”

[yeagersss]

Sukuna as a Firefighter (Part 2)

<- Previous | Next ->

Thanking him was the only logical explanation.

The man saved your life after all. Pulled you away from the jaws of death. You know you tried to thank him just before you lost consciousness but that felt like a poor excuse.

So you do what you do best. You bake him some brownies as a thank you. (Those brownies never failed you. Everyone loves them. Friends, family, charity events, your burned down workplace.)

So you carefully place them into a container and head down to the local fire station.

Your heels click against the marble floor as you walk inside the building. You were a bit nervous. The men turn to stare at you curiously or in amusement or were checking you out.

You straighten up and go to the closest fireman.

"Excuse me."

He turn towards you. He is just as large as the man who had saved you but with black hair and a scar running across the corner of his lips.

His lips curl up into a sultry smirk as he eyes you up and down. "Well, well. What's a pretty, little thing like you doing here?"

You ignore his obvious flirting attempt and just get to the point. "I'm, uh... Looking for someone. He saved me and I just want to thank him."

The man steps closer. "You sure it wasn't me? I'm the chief around here. I know a thing or two about saving pretty things like you."

You try your best not to roll your eyes. "No, I'm pretty sure it wasn't you. The man has pink hair."

And that's when the fireman sighs and steps back. "Of course, he does... Sukuna! Someone's here for you."

The man—Sukuna—walks over, running a hand across his hair. Unlike last time, he has ditched his heavy jacket and is wearing a compression shirt that accentuated his muscular frame.

The fireman mutters something about "why does this damn guy keep getting all the credit around here. I work my ass too." as he walks away. Sukuna merely smirks his way. "Not my fault I'm too unforgettable, Fushiguro."

And then he turns to you. At first he narrows his eyes and then a flash of recognition passes across his face.

He grins. It almost looks feral.

"It's you. What? You here to make good on your promise?"

You frown at that. "Excuse me?"

"The one where you said you were going to marry me before you passed out."

"Excuse me?" You squeak out. "I said no such thing!"

He leans closer to you but you lean away, glaring at him. He merely chuckles. "Oh, that's definitely what you said. I'm used to women saying I'm hot as hell when they're delirious but marriage? That's new."

"I was thanking you!"

"By saying you wanna marry me?" He snorts and stares at you in amusement. "You're going to have to work harder than that if you want me, girl."

Oh... This... This jerk! You suddenly regret even doing all of this for him. You should have just forgotten about it and moved on with your life!

Sukuna's gaze then shifts to the container in your hands and he perks up. "That for me?" He doesn't give you chance to say anything as he takes it from your grasps and opens it, staring down at the brownies.

He picks one up and takes a large bite, humming. "Not bad. Too sweet for my taste though."

You splutter because he had the audacity to call your precious brownies too sweet. You had enough and turn around, storming out of the fire station and hoping against hope that you will never get to see that jerk face ever again.

[ohbo-ohno]

animal, sick as they come

summary: Ghost has been starving his whole life. Never enough food to fill his stomach, never enough blood to cover his hands, always leaving him hungry and ready to snap. You’re the supposed solution to his problem, willing or not. (or: the kidnapped home chef au)

wc: 14.2k

cw: graphic nonconsensual sex, kidnapping but you’re lowkey chill about it, rough sex, pain play, dirty talk & light degradation, non-consensual spanking, rough/painful anal sex, gratuitous description of cooking/food written by someone who once lit a pot of boiling water on fire and is really just trying her best

read on ao3 - see the pinterest board

You may have never been kidnapped before, but you can’t imagine this is how it’s supposed to go.

The masked man looms in the doorway to the kitchen, shoulders so wide that he can’t stand in the opening properly because he wouldn’t even fit, the very top of his head hidden by the worn frame. He’s a beast of a man, hulking in every sense of the word, and you can’t help but wonder how he managed to sneak up on you in the first place. Surely you’re not that unaware of your surroundings? He’s easily 6’4, probably no less than three hundred pounds.

Not much time had passed since you’d woken in a dark room with a thudding pain between your temples, mouth dry and throat swollen. You were sure you’d been blindfolded at first, eyes dry and heavy, until ice-cold water splashed onto your face and your eyes flew open on instinct.

He’d just… been there. One minute you were walking home, trying to avoid large puddles and squinting through pouring rain, and the next you were shivering and scared, your captor towering over your crumpled and bound form.

You’d lost control of your bladder the moment the sight of him registered. He’d looked down, snorted, and lumbered away to find a hose. 

You’d been inconsolable when he told you to strip, shaking with your sobs and keeping your arms wrapped tight around your chest. Even when he’d grunted ‘m not gonna fuck you when you reek of fuckin’ piss, you hadn’t been able to calm enough to follow his demands. It was only when he’d reached up to run a hand over his face and his shirt lifted just enough for you to get a glimpse of the piece on his hip that you’d been snapped away from your panic.

You can see the shape of it now, tucked in its holster. You’re fucking terrified that at any moment he could pull it out and end your life, like that. It would take hardly any effort at all. Just a twitch of the finger and bam, you go from captive to corpse.

“How long’ll it be?” The man grunts, massive arms crossed over his chest, breaking you out of your fearful stupor. 

You blink at him, wide-eyed and silent. He’d given you clothes – clothes that fit, to your comfort and horror – so you’ve been spared the further indignity of forced nudity, but the extra layer doesn’t make you feel much safer. 

He dips his chin when you don’t answer, dark eyes boring into yours. That only makes you clam up more, joints stiff.

He huffs. “Dinner. When’re you gonna fuckin’ feed me, bird?”

You stare at him, baffled. “What?” It’s the first word you’ve said to him without sobbing, and your voice trembles, shrill and weak.

He steps forward, angling his shoulders to fit into the room, fuck, and you skitter back, pressing yourself to the wooden cabinets. They’re tall, taller than the countertops in any house you’ve ever lived in, and the lip presses into the middle of your back.

“There’s food in the fridge,” he grunts. “Get to work.”

You’re not sure you could move even if you wanted to, your fight-or-flight instinct having settled firmly on freeze. 

He rumbles low in his chest and plants one hand on the island in the center of the kitchen, leaning over it. He’s so tall that his head nearly reaches the other side of the counter, hardly a foot away from yours. The counters are the perfect height for him. 

“What’s not clicking, girl?”

You pinch yourself, a quick twist of skin to make sure that this is all real and you’re not just trapped in the world’s most confusing nightmare.

“I-I don’t… you want me t-to cook? For you?” You manage, voice strangled.

He looks spectacularly unimpressed with your lack of understanding, and a distant part of you recognizes that you should probably be worried about making your captor displeased so quickly. However, the far larger part of you hasn’t had a rational thought since he hosed you down with freezing water and is still almost entirely useless.

He turns to the side to open his fridge, hand dwarfing the handle, and drops a chunk of frozen meat on the counter. It’s wrapped in brown parchment paper, a little string holding it closed. The fridge rattles with how harshly he closes the door and you can’t help but flinch. 

If he weren’t closer to the exit than he is to you, you’d have bolted away the second he turned his back. But he’s close enough that he could reach out and grab you with one hand if you got to the doorway, and you can’t even bring yourself to think about what he might do if you were caught. 

“Cook it.” He nods at the meat, voice bored like this is simple. Like it’s obvious, and your lack of understanding is an inconvenience that he’s rapidly losing patience with.

You listen, because it is obvious. He’s the captor, you’re the captive. At any moment, at the slightest whim, he could shoot you, strangle you, beat you, or a dozen worse things you can’t imagine for fear of ruining his dinner with your bile. 

He has every advantage and you don’t have anything but the shapeless hoodie and sweatpants he gave you. Here, you are nothing and he is everything.

So with shaking hands and tears streaming down your face nearly the entire time, you listen. 

You find a pan – he doesn’t help you and it’s incredibly awkward to try and dig around in unfamiliar cabinets without turning your back to him, but you manage it – and get the burner turned on. He steps out of the doorway again, still watching you from the hallway, and that gives you just enough bravery to inch towards the fridge, snatching the butter from it like he might lurch forward at any minute. 

It’s a good cut of meat. A ribeye, think and with not much fat on it. You’ve worked in the resturaunt business for a long time and it’s obvious to you that this is cut by a local butcher, not some packing plant. This is fresh. 

You have to stand with your back to the counter beside the stove to keep him in your eyeline. He doesn’t seem to mind, though the black balaclava covering him from scalp to neckline keeps almost all of his expressions a mystery to you. 

“How do you want it?” You manage to ask, after what must be five minutes of psyching yourself up internally and darting your eyes between him and the meat. 

“Rare,” he says, and you find that you’re not exactly surprised by his answer.

Basting the meat is the hardest part, but you manage. You’ve watched your father do this since you were born, spent countless nights in the corner of your parent’s restaurant watching line cooks and chefs and dishwashers and paying them all far more attention than you ever did your homework, nodding off in class the next day because the restaurant was open until eleven and your parents never once left early.

You could cook this meat in your sleep. Even with his minimal ingredients (he just shakes his head when you ask where the garlic is, and you quickly realize the only seasonings you have to work with are salt and pepper), you’re confident that the meat has come out tender and juicy, if flavorless. 

There are no sides. No drinks. No dessert. If you’d made this meal for either one of your parents, they’d lecture you for so long that the steak would go stone cold. 

You don’t have a plate to serve it on. When you ask tentatively about the dishes, voice hardly audible to even you, the man doesn’t answer. 

He instead begins to stride towards you, sending you careening around the island to try and keep as far from him as possible, hips crashing into the sharp edges of the counter and socks slipping across the tile. He ignores you completely as he leans over the over, sniffing loudly. 

You’ve thrown yourself, completely unintentionally, to the side of the counter with a large and well-stocked knife block. Before you even really think about it, you’re gripping a carving knife with both hands and holding it straight out in front of you, like you’re hoping he runs into you and impales himself. It’s probably your best bet, considering your knees are nearly knocking and barely holding you up.

He is entirely unconcerned by you. He grabs an oven mitt that was either always black or has been scorched so badly that it’s been darkened, the back of it split with its thin lining peeking out, and grabs the cast-iron by its handle, turning back to the rest of the kitchen. 

He snorts when he sees you, the sound distinctly amused and unafraid. “You think you could hurt me? With that thing?”

You may be shaking in fear, the knife quivering in front of you even with your knuckles clenched so tight they nearly spasm, but you still manage to find yourself almost offended.

“I’ll stab you,” you threaten, voice quiet but the steadiest it’s been since you woke up in that damp basement. “I’ll do it.”

The cheeks of the balaclava pull up, the imprint of his lips clear throught the fabric as he smiles, an indent where his teeth must be. “Don’t think you’ll like what happens if you try, pet.”

He steps around the island again, striding for the door and completely dismissing you. At least, that’s what you think until he calls, “Follow,” over his shoulder, like you’re an animal being called to heel.

The dining room is visible from the kitchen, a section of one wall carved out so you can see into each room from the other. You only lose sight of him for a second before he reappears on the other side of the wall, heading to sit at the table. 

The room has a horrible dark red carpet, the walls the same old-fashioned panneling as the hallway he’d dragged you down hardly an hour earlier. He seats himself at the head of a small rectangular table. It’s the only chair in the room despite the fact that five more could easily fit at the table, one leg shorter than the other. There’s nothing on the walls, no decor anywhere, just one table and one chair for one man.

You linger in the doorway, shifty and nervous, halfway to rushing back to the kitchen if only for some deluded sense of familiarity you’ve already built. 

“Don’t make me chase you,” he warns, eyes narrowing into a brief glare before he drops the pan in front of himself, silverware already set at his place, cast iron still smoking. “Neither of us’ll like it if you ruin my meal, bird.”

Then, he digs in. 

You’ve seen a lot of people eat. More people than you can count, in fact. You’ve seen them eat good food, bad food, life-changingly good and life-changingly bad food. As a child you’d been fascinated by the expressions on customers’ faces when they tried something new for the first time.

A woman with her eyes squeezed shut and eyebrows raised high as she bites into a new chocolate cake recipe your mother spent weeks making you taste test, moaning so loudly her husband had blushed. A man nearly collapsing over his bowl of soup on a cold winter day, just barely keeping his tie from falling into it as he desperately shoveled another bite into his mouth. You’ve seen people cry over your father’s wagyu, pepper your mother’s face with kisses after tasting her dacquoise.

This man eats like none you’ve ever seen before.

He’s like an animal. It takes him just a second to push his mask up to his nose, revealing pale skin decorated with atrophic and keloid scars both, then he’s pulling the pan as close to his chest as he can and hunching over it like a predator guarding its kill. 

He seems entirely unworried about burning his wrists on the edges of the pan, instead focused on tearing his steak into barely bite sized pieces with his fork and messily rubbing it in the extra butter still pooling in the bottom of the pan. 

He doesn’t even pick the first piece up with his fork. He pinches it between two fingers and pushes it between thin, scarred lips, ignoring what must be a burn on his fingertips. He chews twice, then swallows. His digits shine under the low light of his dining room, juice from the meat dripping down his fingers to cover his hand, nails choppy and with a little piece of fat stuck under one until he digs it out with his tooth.

You gape as he does it again and again, pushing two, then three pieces into his mouth at once as he works through the meat. 

It was a massive steak. It took more than half an hour to cook, if the clock on his stove is right. It’s gone in less than five minutes.

He moans as he eats, nearly pornographic in a way that makes you shift in discomfort. The steak is rare enough that the juice dripping from it is pink, the meat itself a brighter color than the man’s thin lips. Juice sluices down his chin as he chews with his mouth open, bits of the meat caught between crooked teeth. 

When he gets to the last piece of the cut, half of it submerged in butter, he holds it in front of himself for just a moment. Then, he turns to you for the first time since he left the kitchen.

His lips are flat, expressionless, as he holds the piece of steak up in front of himself. His elbow is planted firmly on the table to keep his hand in his eyeline, and he looks at you expectantly, silent. 

Your stomach growls, loud enough for him to hear. His lips twitch up in a smirk before he smothers it. You glare. You have no idea how long the drugs knocked you out for, how many days it’s been since your breakfast omlette. Standing over the oven, smelling the steak as it cooked, has made you hungry. 

The two of you are silent as you inch forward, hardly daring to lift your feet from the carpet. It doesn’t take you very long to reach the table, not when the room is as small as it is.

You shift the knife to just your dominant hand, your now free hand reaching forward slowly as you keep your eyes trained on his. The steak is still so hot that steam is still curling from the pink center of it, right between his eyes. He’s still as a statue.

Then, the second your fingertips brush the meat, he snatches it back, slipping it between his lips. 

You flinch back as your mouth drops open, offended and startled by his sudden movement. Your fist tightens around the knife, no longer so limp at your side. 

He chews with his mouth open, smiling meanly at you. His teeth are stained pink from the juices, and you think for a moment that it almost looks like his gums are melting. 

“Forget your manners, pet?’ He asks, only swallowing once he’s finished talking.

You wince at the lack of manners, your p’s and q’s brow beaten into you with a stiff wooden spoon to the back of your hand when you were young, shocked to see someone ignore what you’ve always seen as instinctual and then ask you about manners. “What?”

He leans forward in his seat, greasy hand set on his jean-clad knee. “You didn’t say please.”

You blink at him, caught in some sort of trance that you have no idea how to pull yourself out from. “Oh.”

He sits, still and silent, for several long moments, belly rising and falling beneath his folded fingers, before speaking again. “You’ll call me Ghost while you’re here.”

Your brows furrow a bit but you nod, fingers trembling where they rest limp against your thighs, knife almost entirely forgotten in this almost-hypnosis he’s dragged you into. You can’t quite make your lips move enough to give him a verbal answer, but he seems to accept the nod. 

He snorts, eyes narrowed as he looks at you. He doesn’t even have to tilt his head up even though he’s the one sitting. The realization makes you sweat, something hot igniting low in your belly. 

Before you even register that Ghost is moving, he’s snatched the knife from your now-slackened grip. He drops it into the pan immediately, the handle and blade both becoming drenched in the butter. 

You’d nearly forgotten you even had the knife but the lack of it now drags the fear back up your throat, makes your heartbeat louder and your fingertips colder. 

“Don’t need that,” he grunts, leaning back and folding his hands over his belly, fingers sliding against the fabric and already staining. This close, you can see that it hangs over the hem of his pants just enough to cover the button. You swallow thickly. 

“‘S good,” Ghost says, looking you up and down. Just like in the kitchen, the chair and table here are taller than what you used to, like they were tailor made for your captor instead of bought from a store. You’re only barely taller than him even as he sits, but he somehow still manages to make you feel like he’s looking down on you. 

There’s something in you that keeps you from backing away, even though being hardly a foot away from him makes the backs of your eyes sting with tears. It’s like your feet have sunk through the floor, like you’re up to your knees in shag carpeting and you can’t even try to get yourself out until the behemoth before you looks away.

“Congratulations, girl,” he rumbles, lips quirked up into a mean smile. “You just bought yourself a life, right here with me.”

You can’t stop the tears from falling, shaking hands clapped to your mouth in a fruitless attempt to muffle your sob. 

Ghost leans forward, smile growing when you stumble back until the small of your back meets the half-wall. “What’re you cryin’ about, doll?” He lowers his voice, like he’s sharing a joke with you. “Think I won’t treat my new pet well?”

Your heart feels like it’s going to beat so hard it gives out, its galloping thump felt even in your teeth, gums numbing. Your tears blur your vision, but you can see enough to know when he stands from his set, the chair creaking as he scuffs towards you.

He comes into focus when he crouches in front of you, his knees hovering just above your naked feet, toes curling into the carpet in a futile attempt to get as far from him as you can. 

“I won’t,” he says lowly, hot breath gusting over your face and lighting your nerves on fire. “Not until you earn it. Y’hear me?”

Whimpers eek through your fingers at his words. There’s something in his eyes that still looks hungry, little drops of grease dripping from Ghost’s fingers to your toes, and it makes you feel like prey just inches away from the predator’s jaw. 

His hand darts out, smacking your clothed thigh and making you yelp. 

“Don’t fuckin’ ignore me,” he snarls, sharp and sudden anger upon him like a wave, your thigh stinging from his hit. 

You nod as soon as the chain of words connects in your brain to mean something, head bobbing up and down quickly in desperation to avoid any more physical contact.

His eyes narrow, unimpressed. “Repeat it, then.”

“I have to–” you cut yourself off, breath suddering out of you almost painfully. “I have to earn it.”

“Earn what?”

Exasperation mixes with terror, eyelids straining to stay widened, unwilling to miss another twitch from him.

Think I won’t treat my new pet well? He’d said. You have to earn it.

You can’t think of a way to distill that down into a singular answer, not quick enough for him, at least. 

“I don’t– I don’t know,” you sob.

His movement is slow this time, but it’s no more possible for you to avoid his touch than it was when you hadn’t seen anything coming. His hand drags into your hair, nails catching on scalp, and he tugs your head back, slamming it into the wall. 

“Everything,” he hisses, the fabric covering his nose brushing against yours, snot sliding down your fingers. “You earn everything here. You work for it all. Get it?”

You can hardly nod this time, his fingers tightening around the strands of your hair and pulling at your scalp, but thankfully it’s enough for him.

“Good,” he spits, leaning back and standing, dragging you with him. 

Once you’re standing, half crouched to try your best to ease the pain rippling from your head but pushed up on your toes so his hand isn’t practically lifting you, Ghost grabs you by the elbow instead and drags you out of the room before you can even fully realize what’s happening.

He grabs you in the exact spot he had when he’d dragged you to the kitchen in the first place, each finger laid precisely where there were already bruises emerging. His grip so tight you can’t even think of trying to rip away – you imagine your arm would come off your body before Ghost’s hand came off of you. 

He drags you from the dining room and down a small hallway. From what you’ve seen of the house, and what you can remember that isn’t clouded over by a haze of panic, the floor-plan is closed off, more claustrophobic than anything else. 

Every room seems connected by a new hallway and they're each thin enough that you couldn’t walk by the man’s side – the two of you might not even be able to walk chest to chest without somehow getting wedged between the wood-panneling, considering the bulk of him. 

Your toes drag, catching on the warped wood floor as he pulls you behind him. Your hands are wrapped around his wrist in a wasted but desperate attempt to keep everything below his grip from going numb, leaving your choking whines and sobs and pleas to rush out of you, voice bouncing off the panneled walls. 

Ghost ignores you entirely, doesn’t even seem to notice when you dig your nails into his skin and you try your best to yank. 

You start to grasp at the walls, trying to slow his stride in whatever way you can. You have no idea where he’s taking you, no idea what you’d do even if you did somehow manage to break free from him, but you try nonetheless. 

He doesn’t react, no matter how much you scream and hiss, no matter how much you claw and kick and make your body dead weight, nearly breaking your wrist from the way you yank and twist. 

It’s only when your fingers catch on the edge of something thin that you’re given a tangible thing to wrap your hope around.

You only realize it’s a picture frame once you’ve already yanked it from the wall, the photo itself a complete mystery to you.

It’s the adrenaline that makes you pull back and slam the frame glass-first into the side of his head, reaching up as high as you can to make contact. There’s a horrible crack when glass meets fabric, a screech when you drag it down the side of his face, glass catching on mask and skin and more glass.

Ghost doesn’t let you go but he does stumble into the wall, grunting like a bull and batting your opportune weapon like it’s hardly more than an annoying mosquito, sending it crashing to the ground despite your death grip. 

He falls back into the wall, tugs you with him with enough force to nearly knock you off your feet, your head a mix of fear and victory and adrenaline and pain and more fear, coherent thoughts a far-off dream.

“Little fuckin’ cunt,” you hear him spit, heavy boot smashing fallen glass into further pieces as he turns to press you against the wall with his body, heavy and hot against you.

His eyes are raging, scarred lips curled to bare his teeth and little pieces of glass sticking from his skin and balaclava. 

You only have about four drops of blood to speak of for your desperate attack, and with your kidnapper furious and holding you down all you can manage to think is why the fuck did I do that? What was I thinking? 

There’s no room for anything but shame when you’re staring down the barrel of God only knows what he’ll deicde to do to you. 

“Off to a bad fuckin’ start,” he hisses, spittle landing across your cheeks. “Thought I’d be nice to you. Send you off to sleep with hardly a damn scratch.”

Ghost snarls, shakes his head like a beast shaking off fleas. Glass goes flying around his head. You can hardly breathe.

“Tha’s not good enough for you, is it?” He says, hand coming up to lock around your throat. You’d cry out if he left you enough air, but he’s squeezing so tight you can barely get enough breath to stay conscious. 

“You need a heavy hand, ‘s that it, pet? Need someone to show you what happens when you fuckin’ misbehave?” He pulls your head a few inches away from the wall on the last word, slamming you back enough to rattle your brain in your skull, eyes unfocused and hardly seeing and unable to groan with his hand squeezing your airway shut. 

You try to shake your head, can’t manage to do anything more than shift with the grip on your throat. You think, briefly, about how he could snap your neck with one hand. His palm rests over your vocal chords, fingertips pressing against the nape of your neck. A flick of his wrist and you’d be dead. You think your heart may give out, overwhelmed and unable to keep up with everything Ghost is drawing from you, spitting at you.

Capture myopathy, a friend told you once, sitting beside you in a required biology class only one of you was interested in. When a rabbit is so scared that their heart gives out on them and they die. Just like that. Snap. Easy dinner for a fox. Isn’t that sick?

Sick. She’d said. This, you think, is sicker than anything a fox could do to a rabbit. 

“You’re lucky your meat was good,” he says, tone calming into something less rageful and more frustrated, hand loosening enough to let you breathe more easily but still keeping you from speaking. “Don’t mind trainin’ you up knowin’ you’ll be an investment. Just need some work, huh?”

You try your best to nod, eager to pick training over certain death any day. 

He hums, thumb stroking the crease of your skin between neck and shoulder and you can’t stop your shiver.

“Don’t worry, bird.” His teeth gleam when he flashes them, finally leaving your space. He practically throws you in front of him with the hand on your neck, letting it shift to wrap around your nape so he can guide you forward. “I’ve had pets before. All those tears tell me you’ll at least be easier to break in than the boy was.”

You only have a brief moment to wonder who the fuck the boy is, if he’s in this house, and what that could possible mean for you, before Ghost is nudging open a rickety door and nudging you down the stairs. 

He lets you go once you’re firmly on the narrow staircase and taking slow, tentative steps out of fear you’ll miss one in the dark. Ghost takes his hand from you, looming as you make your leaden-footed way down.

You can’t stop your sniffles or your tears, terrified of the nightmares that must be waiting at the bottom of the staircase and back in the basement you’d woken up in. You know some of what waits for you, what the room will look like and what will be in it – Ghost had been with you since he dragged you to the kitchen, there would’ve been no time for him to change anything – but you’ve got no idea what training means or what Ghost will do to you when your feet hit concrete. 

You don’t move any further into the room when you reach the bottom, Ghost easily stepping around you and choosing to ignore you in favor of looking for whatever he’s decided he needs. The sight of a small carabiner with keys latched to one of his belt loops makes your idea of running back up to the door leave as quick as it comes.

“Over here,” Ghost calls, back turned to you as he crouches down and fiddles with something at the wall.

You don’t move, feet anchored to the floor.

He huffs when he doesn’t hear you following him, shifting one knee to rest on the ground so he can turn over his shoulder and level you with an unimpressed look.

“You really want to make me come get you?” He rumbles, and the threat is enough to get you rushing forward then pulling to just as sudden as stop just out of his arm’s reach. 

It doesn’t matter much, you can’t really do anything to stop him when Ghost’s arm darts back to grab you by the knee, his torso leaning back to get a hand on you and tugging you forward. 

You can’t keep yourself from falling to your knees right at his side, nothing around for you to grab onto other than him and even looking at a face-full of concrete you know not to make any unnecessary contact with Ghost, not if you can help it. 

The weight around your neck is sudden and unexpected, his quick movements around your head even moreso. You don’t even have enough time to decide if it would be worth it to try and fight him off before there’s a resolute click, and he’s pulling back with something thick wrapped around his knuckles.

It’s a chain. Silver, hardly a hint of rust on it, thick and well-kept, and leading right back up to your neck.

You don’t put it together until shaky hands come up to press around the- the collar. Thick leather, two or three inches wide, just tight enough that you can feel it on every exhale. 

A collar. A collar with a chain leash, heavy enough that you can feel the hint of pressure pulling you towards Ghost, the length of the chain that’s not tight in his fist resting in loops by his boot. 

You can’t do anything but stare up at him, wide eyed and trembling, can’t begin to think of what to do before he’s standing and tugging you with him.

“Here now,” he grunts, not bothering to give you any time to get to your feet. You sort of stumble after him, knee scraping the ground as your head is jerked along. You can’t let yourself lag at all, not unless you want to get dragged along by your neck.

You feel like you’re moving through quicksand, every move only making things worse for you. Every forced step forward is another step closer to him, every jerk of your head pulls at the hair stuck in the back of the collar that he hadn’t bothered to move before locking it onto you, every panicked breath only serves to keep your breathing short and hitched.

Ghost drops himself onto the small cot pressed against the wall, it’s metal legs creaking under his weight. You can’t straighten fully with how short he keeps the chain, which leves you in a terribly vulnerable hunched position, eye-level with his stomach and bent at the waist, knee throbbing.

“Over my knee,” he rumbles, voice quiet. “Get this over with.”

You stare up at him with wide eyes, panting open-mouthed, drooling. A panicked animal with its leg caught in a trap, unable to do anything but stare up at the jaws closing around its body.

“Please,” you beg, voice hardly a whisper. “Don’t hurt me.”

His eyes are hard behind the mask, mouth a firm line as he looks down at you. You can feel your heartbeat in your throat beneath the thick leather. 

Ghost doesn’t give you another chance to obey. One quick jerk of his hand and you’re toppeling forward, choking on spit and holding your hands out to catch yourself. 

He manhandles you quickly – one hand on the chain yanking it further down, head forced lower than his knee while his other hand grabs you by the hips and hefts you on top of him, elbow jamming itself between your thighs while blood rushes to your head. 

You yelp, legs kicking out as you push at the bed with one hand, the rough ground with the other, throwing your head back and forth as much as you can with the leash giving you almost no room to move.

“Settle,” Ghost hisses. You don’t listen, can’t listen with the way panic alone rules your mind, and in response he lands a harsh smack on the center of your ass, enough to push you forward a few inches.

Your pleas come to a sudden stop, breath stuck in your throat as you absorb the pain, a noticeable sting even through the sweatpants.

“You’re gettin’ fifty,” he grunts when you’ve gone silent, tucking two fingers in the back of your pants and tugging them down, lifting up one knee to lift your torso so he can yank them to your waist. “Take ‘em, then we’re done.”

“No, no, please, God,” you choke, one hand flying to your mouth and pressing against it. Tears stream down your face, cheeks blazing with heat, a horrible mix of terrified and humiliated that leaves you all but limp over his legs.

Ghost snorts above you and you jump when you feel his cold hand make a pass over the fat of your ass. “Won’t be thinkin’ that much longer.”

You only have a brief moment to think hysterically is he making a joke right now? before there’s a horrible pain on your ass, the smack loud in the otherwise silent room.

It takes a second for the pain to hit you, but when it does you yowl. You push up on his thigh with both hands as another smack rains down, pulling as hard as you can against the chain.

“Stop, stop, stop it!” You screech, toes sliding uselessly against the cement as you writhe, all of your struggles doing absolutely nothing to stop his hand from falling again, this time right on the center of both cheeks. 

“Y-You can’t- you can’t d-do this!” You wail, throat filled with tears and snot as you realize you can’t even get close to standing, not with his grip on the chain as immovable as it is. “Stop!”

His next smack is his hardest, his grip around the chain loosening at just the right time to allow you to be sent sprawling over his lap, sobbing at the pain that lights up your backside. It hurts, and now your forehead is nearly pressed to the floor, leaving you completely off balance.

Ghost grunts as he shifts one of his legs, tucking your flailing limbs between his thighs and forcing you to be bent over just the one thigh, knees hovering inches off the ground.

“Stop your fuckin’ wailin’, Christ,” he hisses, peppering you with more spanks, each of them as hard as the last and forcing all the air out of your lungs. “Damn lucky this is all you’re gettin’. I should make you count ‘em, start over every time you get one wrong.”

You cry out at that, wriggling desperately and only serving to push your ass further into the air, trapped on both ends.

“We’d be here all damn night,” Ghost mutters to himself, hardly audible over your fit. “One picture ain’t worth bruisin’ my hand over.”

Your feet just barely brush against his thighs when you manage to kick up, but you’re embarrassed to find that you don’t have the strength to do much more than hang limply in his hold, one hand reluctantly wrapped around his calf to keep yourself from falling to the floor. 

Your tears and sobs don’t stop as he continues his assault on your ass, but there’s a part of you that almost… settles. Not into the pain, not when he’s smacking you hard enough to jolt your body forward and make you wail at every new touch, but into the steadiness of his smacks.

He doesn’t wait more than a second between hits, each spank no heavier or lighter than the last. It hurts, hurts worse than anytime you’ve burned or cut yourself in the kitchen, but after the first minute or so your body comes to expect what’s coming.

That doesn’t make it any easier to handle. You couldn’t stop your crying if you tried, like his hand is resting on your tearducts instead of your ass, squeezing every bit of moisture out of your eyes. 

He stops at some point, hand resting on your cheeks. He squeezes, nails digging in deep, and pulls your cheeks apart. You sniffle at the indignity, free hand covering your eyes as your face crumples.

“Half way through now,” Ghost says, ignoring the way you cry out. You can’t imagine taking one more hit, let alone twenty five. 

He shifts back on the cot and for a moment you have absolutely no idea what’s happening. It’s not until he not-so-gently readjusts your legs, his own laid out flat in front of him with his feet hanging off the cot, your body readjusted so you’re lying properly over his thighs.

It’s more comfortable, certainly, but you’re not sure you want comfortable right now. It feels impossible to imagine the brute above you as thinking of your comfort, completely analogous to his actions and leaving you a confused and weak mess. 

Ghost shifts his hand along with the rest of him, dropping the chain entirely in favor of resting a heavy palm on the back of your neck, equally as effective at keeping you still. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t comment on your heaving breaths or shaking thighs, just lets you breathe with your hands curled beneath your chest and your forehead pressed to the thin sheet covering the cot.

The next spank catches you completely off guard, your body having gone limp and leaving you unprepared for the sudden pain. It reignites your sobbing, your throat on fire from all the screaming you’ve done. You can hear your voice crack as you absorb the pain, shoulder shaking.

“Christ,” Ghost sighs, hand briefly leaving your ass. 

He’s lifting you by your hair a moment later, thick fingers laced through the tresses as he pulls your head back and stuffs something in your mouth. You whimer at the feeling, tongue working at the frankly disgusting taste, brows furrowed.

“Keep that there,” he orders, and you just barely get a glance of the side of his head before he’s shoving you back down, face-first. You realize, blinking slowly, that he’s shoved his mask in your mouth. “Can’t be bothered to teach you to shut the hell up, gonna hafta work on that once you learn how to behave.”

He spanks you again and this time your sob is muffled as you bite down on the fabric and grind it between your teeth. 

His pace is slower now, hand more thudding than stinging. It feels like he’s putting his weight behind every smack, each one delivered with what you’re sure is bruising force. Though truly you can’t tell much of a difference, not with your whole ass already feeling like it’s on fire. 

It gets harder and harder to differentiate between new and old pain as he lays brutal spanks over spots that are already hot and throbbing, varying the strength of each smack this time. You sink into the pain, limp and unable to do anything but take it.

“Better,” Ghost says, the rough pads of his fingers rubbing your scalp when you jerk at the sound of his voice. His next hit lands on the crease between your thigh and your ass, but your whine is almost silent. “Can hear myself think now, for one.”

Another smack, and your body doesn’t even jerk this time. You’re not even fully present in yourself, mind floating. You don’t quite feel like an outside observer, more like you’re just a few inches removed from the situation. All your sensations feel dulled, and you bear the pain as best you can. 

“Can enjoy the sight too,” you hear him say, and suddenly there are pauses between each smack, a little break Ghost takes to rub your glowing ass and thighs as much as he wants before laying another handprint across your soft skin. 

“‘S too bad I don’t fuck where I eat,” he muses, and you groan into the mask at a particularly rough hit. “You don’t take much fightin’. I like that in a girl. Go down real easy with a firm hand, don’t you?”

You shake your head as best as you can, which really isn’t much at all. He snorts at your effort, tightens his fingers to keep your head still.

You’re sapped of all energy, unable to move even as his punishing spanks linger lower on your ass, and even when he bullies a hand between your thighs and spreads your legs.

“Look at that,” he says, voice low. You can feel it through his stomach, goosebumps racing from your ribs to the rest of you. “Dirty girl, are you?”

You’ve got enough wherewithal to try and squeeze your legs shut when his fingers prod at your center, yanked back into your body at the sharp turn from painful to… something else.

He strokes two fingers over your slit, and you groan at just how much slick you can feel him spreading. You have no idea when it happened, have no idea why it happened, but you’re drenched between your thighs. Your cunt feels as hot as your ass, and the realization yanks a horrible little whine from you.

“Guess that wasn’t much of a punishment,” Ghost muses, spreading your lips and letting cool air ghost over you. You feel him blow a breath across you and struggle more than you have since he’d laid you flat across him, knees coming to tuck up under yourself.

“No,” he says simply, landing a horrible, smarting slap to your pussy. It sends you flat to your tummy again, squirming against him and wailing through the pain. It hurts. “Down, girl. No strugglin’ now.”

He only continues to stroke you, now pushing the steadily dripping wetness from your clit to your asshole, making you tense and writhe where you’re pinned, his order ignored.

“Think I’ll do the last few here,” he says, landing another harsh smack to your center, this time focused on your clit. “Make sure you remember your lesson.”

He doesn’t wait any longer, just begins to lay quick, harsh slaps all across your cunt – your spread lips, your hole itself, your clit. Once, even, on your bottom hole, digging his nails into your stinging cheeks to spread you wide for him.

It hurts more than any of the smacks to your ass did, undeniably, but you’re sapped of all energy and find yourself hardly able to cry, let alone struggle. You’re too busy being swept away in a maelstrom of pain-pleasure you’ve never experienced before to even try defending yourself.

Your only option is to lie still and wait for him to finish with you. So that’s all you do.

It feels like it’s been an eternity when he finally stops. 

The hand near your ass gropes you firmly, pinching what you can already feel are tiny little raised spots from where his palm landed the hardest. 

You don’t have the energy to even think of struggling when he finally moves you off him, letting you flop uselessly to the cot as he moves out from under you. There’s the sound of metal clinking, the tension from the collar finally eased as he lets it go completely.

He doesn’t bother to pull your pants up, but he does nudge your legs closed. It’s a bit of decency you didn’t expect from him. 

You can’t do much more than blink wearily at him as Ghost reaches to tug his mask from your mouth, lip curling in disgust at the drops of saliva that fall from it. Good, you think. That’s just the start of what you deserve, bastard.

He crouches in front of you a moment later, bringing his face into full focus in front of you.

He’s… not traditionally attractive, that’s for sure. Even your defeated and exhausted mind can recognize that you would’ve avoided this man had you seen him on the street. Probably would’ve even risked being seen as rude and crossed to another sidewalk before he walked past you. Seeing as this is where you’ve ended up, your instincts wouldn’t have been wrong about him.

He’s got a square head and blond hair buzzed close to the scalp. The scars you’d seen across his cheeks and jaw extend further up his face, something textured across his temple that you can’t guess the cause of, eyebrows patchy and only half-grown in from burns, little bumps decorating his scalp.

But there’s something captivating about him. In his eyes, maybe, such a dark blue that you can only tell they’re not brown because he’s hardly a foot from you. There’s something about him that says look at me. Don’t forget where I am.

Though maybe, you think deliriously, you’re only thinking that because he’s the captor who just spanked your ass raw and dragged his fingers through your cunt.

“Rule one,” Ghost rumbles quietly, breath gusting over your lips. “You hurt me, I hurt you. Heard?”

It takes all the energy you have left to nod, eyes falling shut even as the little prey voice in the back of your head screams at the danger so near, never mind that you haven’t been able to do anything to keep him from you. You’re too loud to listen to the voice anyways, only a very distant part of you acknowledging it as you slip into a sort of half-sleep.

You don’t hear him leave.

From there you settle, bizarrely, into a routine. 

Every day begins with you waking up in the basement. Always before Ghost comes to get you, some primal instinct buried deep knowing that you need enough time every morning to brace yourself for seeing him.

He locks the chain, the leash, to a hook on the wall a couple feet above your cot every night, the key to the padlock always left on him. The chain is long enough to give you plenty of room to roll and shift in bed at night but it’s too short for you to reach the small bathroom across the basement. There’s no clock for you to keep track of time with but you spend what must be half an hour every morning just sitting on the cot, waiting for Ghost to come get you.

He’s always nearly stumbling when he comes down the basement stairs to fetch you, sleep keeping his bones heavy. It’s only in the mornings when you see him with his shoulders hunched, movements weighted down, any other time he’s perfectly alert. 

You think, at first, that your best shot at trying to hurt him would be in those early mornings when he’s groggy and slow moving, but Ghost never lets you off the chain when he’s like that. It’s always after he’s stiffened up, shoulders rolling back and permanent-scowl firmly back in place.

He’ll unhook the chain from the wall first, rarely saying a word as he half-drags-half-leads you over to the bathroom, doesn’t let you close the door while you do your business and shower.

(There’s a way he looks at you in the morning, when he’s at his rawest. Something animal and hungry in a way you don’t see even when you serve him his meals, pupils blown and lingering on your curves, unabashedly staring at your ass when you glance over your shoulder at him.

It had been terrible, at first, to get naked in front of him. He’d just stare, and most days you could see his hardness tenting his pants. Hell, some days he came down the stairs with his cock making itself plenty known, not a speck of shame in him.

You’d once listened to him jack himself off while you were in the shower. You’d had to step over the puddle of cum on the tile when he’d tugged you out of the room, nearly slipped into it when he’d pulled you just a little more harshly than usual.)

The chain stays in the basement, always unlatched from your throat along with the collar before he shepherds you up the creaky stairs, never much more than a foot or two away from you. 

Then, breakfast. 

It had taken a while for you to really believe him after he’d said you were only there to cook. What kind of person kidnaps a woman just to keep her as a private chef? But days went by where he never once touched you any more than necessary to get the collar on and off, his only reaction to your body a seemingly unintentional erection and usually ignored when you were naked. 

Days, weeks pass where all you do is cook. Three meals a day, snacks when he’s hungry (which seems to be always). 

Ghost’s cabinets were bare the first week of your captivity. He had enough meat in his freezer to last him months, but little else. There was a loaf of bread on the counter, a few condiments in the fridge with crusted lids and misshaped bottles, and some cans of soup in the pantry. Nothing else. He’d drop a cut of meat on the counter and expect you to work with it and seemed plenty content when you served him the blandest roast chicken of your life.

It took you three days until you worked up the nerve to ask him to go grocery shopping. It was the first thing you said to him that wasn’t a plea for your freedom. 

You’d been terrified that you’d end up face down ass up over his thighs again, your ass still bruised from his first punishment and his subsequent much quicker corrections. But he’d hardly reacted, had just given you a piece of paper and a short pencil with bite-marks on the eraser, told you to write what you thought you needed.

He locked you in the basement for hours (you tracked the sun through the sole window as best you could, left behind fear and anger for boredom around what you guessed was the three hour mark) when he left. Briefly, you’d regretted asking in the first place. If the bastard wanted to eat nothing but protein and die of a nutrient deficiency, who were you to stop him? It would serve him right.

But you have nightmares, sometimes, of being stuck in the basement. Your captor dead in his bed, fallen to the bathroom floor with his head cracked open, bleeding out in the forest one of the times he goes off hunting. And you, stuck here, chained to a wall. No key, no way out, no one to find you.

A part of you had breathed a sigh of relief when he came home, letting you up to the kitchen and supervising while you dug through the plastic bags and put everything where you wanted it.

He doesn’t… do much during the days, is the thing.

He goes hunting, sometimes. You find that that seems to be his most consistent outing. He’ll spend hours out there at a time, sometimes coming back with nothing and other times coming back with a twelve-point buck you watch him drain through the kitchen window. He also has to keep his weapons – his many, many weapons – in shape, and you find that it’s not rare to spend an afternoon watching him clean guns or sharpen knives.

You enjoy his hunting moods most. He’ll disappear for hours on end to even find his kill, then spend days skinning and preparing the meat, then doing whatever it is he does in his shed with the bits of the body he doesn’t bring you to cook. Those days spent in the forest or the shed for him guarantee you hours of time alone, which isn’t nearly so miserable when he doesn’t keep you in the basement. 

Sometimes he goes out after dinner. You’ll hear the front door slam shut after he locks you up in the basement, his truck’s old engine loud enough to be obvious when he revs it. You’re never sure where he goes, who he might even go with since he never takes calls, but you also have little interest in asking.

But most nights he watches TV. Almost exclusively old VHS recordings of The Price is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Password, and shows so out-of-date you’re sure you could count the pixels on the screen. He’ll roll himself a blunt and relax into an old recliner with cracked leather, eyes half-lidded and hazy.

(You watched him rest a hand in his pants, once. He hadn’t even been focusing on the TV, eyes far away and breathing heavy as he stroked himself slowly beneath his jeans. You don’t even think he finished, he was just… relaxing. You’d decided to just be glad he wasn’t coming after you for that job.)

Sometimes he’ll watch the same Manchester United games every night for a week straight, grunt approvingly or shout at the TV at the same points no matter how many times you’ve seen him watch it. By the end of your first month in his captivity, you could guess who scored every goal in the team’s 2012 championship game. You have absolutely no idea why he doesn’t just turn on the newest games.

You learn quickly that Ghost mounted a hook to nearly every wall in the house, and that he’s not shy about chaining you in the same place for hours at a time and leaving you to your own non-existent devices while he lumbers off. You spend the most time in the kitchen, undoubtedly, but you find that the horrible plush carpet in his living room isn’t too uncomfortable to sit on either.

It doesn’t take many days for your fear to turn to boredom, is the thing. Absolute, complete, mind-numbing boredom. There’s simply nothing to do but watch Ghost, and for a kidnapper he’s turned out to be spectacularly uninteresting. 

He’d laid out the rules in the first few days. You hurt him, he hurts you. Listen to his orders, don’t make him repeat himself. Don’t try to escape, you won’t find anyone to help anyway and he doesn’t want to chase you down. Don’t try to fuck with the food you make him, he expects good meals consistently.

It had been the third you’d struggled most with, though you could hardly blame yourself. You’d thought he was going to make you bleed when he caught you trying to throw yourself out of a recently-broken window.

He’d taken you over his lap a few more times for smaller infractions too. To make sure the lessons stick, he’d said. They did. Ghost hits hard, and even after just his first punishment you’d been plenty cowed. You don’t give him many reasons to punish you again.

The bright spots in your life are, as they have always seemed to be, food orientated.

There’s a part of you that hates how much time you think of ways to quite literally serve him, but you have nothing else to do. He may enjoy his shows, but after about two weeks you think you may go insane if you have to focus on much more Tom Kennedy in an other-wise silent house. 

You spend long hours staring out his windows at the foggy forest surrounding the cabin, running through the recipes you’d wanted to try before you’d been taken, notes for your parents’ dishes that were never listened to, plans on what you could make for Ghost himself with what he would provide.

And he does. Provide, that is. He provides plenty.

The fifth day of your captivity, he drops a chicken carcass on the wood island. Whole, unplucked, the blood from its neck still drying.

“I can’t…” You start, hesitating at the doorway to the kitchen as he moves further in. “I’m not a butcher. I can’t cook it like that.”

Ghost looks over at you, mask covering his expression. You find that it’s a fifty-fifty chance he doesn’t pull it on in the morning, dependent on some factor you’re not allowed to know.

“I’ll cut it up,” he grunts, turning his back to you and tugging a drawer open, digging around noisily. “Don’t need you to do anythin’ but cook it.”

You shift from foot to foot as he turns back to the bird, empty trash bag at his side and carving knife in his hand. 

For a man who you’ve always assumed to be inept in the kitchen, he handles the bird like a professional. He has it plucked in less than a minute, his mess minimal.

His butchering is less impressive, though no less effective. He’s a bit of a slob with his cuts, reckless with his knife in a way that has you craning your neck to see just how much breast is left on the bone. 

Ghost is slow-moving, careful in a way you’ve never seen him when he pops the thigh from the leg joint. It must’ve been a well-fed bird during its life, there’s plenty of meat for his thumb to dig into as he carefully rotates and pulls, not too much strength but not too little. A balance he seems to struggle to find before the thigh finally pops away from the body easily, and he moves on.

It’s… intimate is the wrong word, but it’s not far off. His hands – damp from being washed, something you’d been glad to see him do without you needing to draw his attention back to you – are shiny with the bird’s juices covering them, his thick fingers brutalizing the delicate, pale meat. The job is done quickly and cleanly enough to leave you plenty of meat.

He doesn’t butcher it completely for you. He leaves the wing connected to the breast, the breast and the tenderloin one large piece of meat when he lays his carving knife on the counter. His most precise cuts are around the oysters, each of them dug out and set to the side quickly. 

It’s not a quiet process, his knife cutting through bone and joint. But it feels particularly loud with the only other sound the soft humming of the fridge, the call of a bird outside the window. 

You feel squirmy for reasons you can’t quite place when he’s finished, bird butchered and glistening under the dim kitchen light. The look he gives you, heavy and stifling, doesn’t help. 

You make him get mason jars next time he goes to the store, mourning all the stock that goes to waste because you’ve got no way to store it. He praises the tenderloins you make for dinner that night, voice rough in a way that makes your cheeks heat.

Most of the food he buys for you to work with is store-bought, but the meat continues to be fresh. He enjoys the food most when he kills it himself – he moans when he bites into a piece of duck in a way that you feel no shame in calling pornographic – but you learn that he’ll settle for anything fresh.

There’s a calendar on the inside of the pantry. 

It’s an old military one, each of the pictures a dramatic shot of a soldier, covered in filth more often than not and staring across some sort of beautiful landscape. It’s from 2014, each of the pages worn and ripped where fingers have pinched and flipped. Each of the days is already marked off with an X in the box, some of them even with little notes written in different colors from over the years.

G birthday in Lancaster

S appointment - needs ride

L retirement on base

You know when he flips it to read June that you’ve been with him a month. You’re not happy, far from it, but you don’t spend everyday shaking in fear. 

You know what to expect from Ghost, he knows what he expects from you, and you’ve settled into an almost-peaceful cohabitation. 

He takes to ordering you prettier clothes about halfway through your second week. Sweatpants get traded in for sundresses and uncomfortably tiny shorts, sweatshirts exchanged for cardigans and low-back tank-tops. 

Some days, watching him feed the chickens through the window in your daisy-print sundress and flour-covered apron, you feel almost like a homesteader’s wife.

If not for the chains hanging from the walls, of course. 

You’re wearing one of those dresses when Ghost comes to visit you in the kitchen, nearly six weeks after he’d taken you.

He’d been letting you wander the house off-leash more and more, in small doses. Whether confident in his ability to catch you or your inability to get far from the cabin, you’re not sure, but you’re thankful nonetheless. You’re still a little sore from your last escape attempt, ass smarting from his belt, and haven’t quite gotten into your head to try again yet.

You’re leaning over the counter, tasting a fresh brownie from the middle of the pan while he smokes with his Wheel of Fortune on, having sent you off with a pat on the ass and a I want somethin’ sweet, doll. 

You’ve never been nearly as good at baking as you have cooking, and you’re not sure you’ve perfected your brownie recipe yet. But you’ve always had a bit of a sweet tooth, and Ghost keeps his house cold. Biting into a still-steaming gooey brownie, the top just enough of a crust to give the bite texture, the chocolate melting into your tongue, is one of the best things you’ve done since you first woke up in that basement. 

You don’t realize you’ve made a noise until there’s an echo behind you, Ghost’s groan so quiet it’s nearly drowned out by the TV in the other room.

You jerk back from the counter, hands braced on the rounded corner as you look over your shoulder, sure that there’s a pipe groaning in the wall.

Instead you see your kidnapper, already hardly a step away and boxing you into the counter, hulking body smothering you with ease.

Your spine goes ramrod straight, brownie abandoned in its pan as he presses himself into you, hard chest pushing against your softer back. You’re silent, stiff, too surprised and scared to do more than wait. 

“‘S got you moanin’ in here?” Ghost rumbles, heavy against you. “Thought I said I wanted a treat.”

“I–” You gasp, arching when he presses his hips into you. His sweatpants don’t do anything to disguise his length and you can feel every inch of him against your back. “I–I made brownies.”

“Hm…” One hand comes to rest on your hip, his head lowering enough that you can see his profile in your peripheral. “Let’s have it then.”

You don’t move at first, fingertips tingling and lips pressed tightly together.

He huffs, smacks your ass once. He pushes the fabric of your dress up just enough to clip your skin, simple granny panties doing little to soften the blow. You gasp and jerk forward, soft stomach pressing into the counter.

“Give me one,” he says, hand rubbing where he’d just spanked, fingertips just dipping under the edge of your underwear. “C’mon, bird, I want a bite.”

Your fingers quiver as you lift the brownie in your hand to his lips, holding it just over his shoulder as he feels you up with both hands, roughly kneading the cheeks of your ass as you try to stay as still as possible.

Ghost gives you more of his weight and bites the brownie, the sharp edges of his teeth scraping your knuckles. You jump at the feeling, unwittingly grinding yourself against him. 

“Fuck, pet,” he moans, face dropping to rest his forehead against your temple. You can do nothing but stare at the cabinet. “That’s fuckin’ delicious. I need another bite.”

You’re reaching towards the pan to cut him another piece when you realize he’s shifting to his knees behind you.

“Ghost,” you whine when he takes your hips in his hands, hefting you up so you’re fully resting on the island with your toes unable to even skim the tile. Your eyes are wide as you stare at the backsplash, unable to quite believe what’s happening.

“Hush,” he scolds, and you get a smack to the thigh for your trouble. “I want my sweet thing.”

Ghost eats your cunt the same way he eats your food: voraciously, messily, and shamelessly.

He gives you no warm up, no time to prepare for something he’s only hinted at wanting to do before. There’s one broad swipe of his tongue across your sex, then his lips wrapping around your clit and your eyes rolling back into your skull.

You’re not sure that he cares about your pleasure, but he’s certainly giving you plenty. He licks from cunt to clit again and again, tongue quick and stiff against where you’re sensitive and drawing breathy moans from you, nails scratching uslessly at the counter.

He focuses mostly on your hole, licking up your slick like it’s the best thing his tongue has ever touched and leaving you pushing back for more unconsciously, wanting more than just the tip of his tongue inside you. 

“Greedy,” he huffs when you nearly slip off the counter. He slips two fingers into your leaking hole and you squeal at the stretch, noticeable even with his mouth working you over. “This is for me, not you, pet. Settle down and let me eat.”

You cry out when he laps at your clit, quick, broad licks over the bud and just enough pressure to make your mouth hang open. He gives you almost too much suction, your brain rattling around between your ears when he crooks his fingers and tugs.

He uses just one hand on your thigh and two fingers in your cunt to shove you up the counter, giving him more space to have you practically sitting on his face. He laps around his own fingers, fucking with you just enough to coax more slick for him to drink, your knees knocking against the cabinet.

Eventually, what feels like it must be hours later, you come. The combination of Ghost’s fingers pressing at just the right spot, the suction on your clit and the sound of his mouth against you making you feel insane and finally pushing you over the edge.

It’s heaven, to have him lick and suck you through your orgasm. Your limbs feel tingly, bright white starbusts flying behind your eyes as you go limp across the counter, head pressing against the backsplash.

It isn’t until he doesn’t pull out his fingers, doesn’t pull his tongue away, that you start to feel truly gone, a puppet dancing to his tune, a piece of fruit squeezing whatever juice he wants into his mouth for as long as he wants.

“Not done with you yet,” you hear him murmur, the rumble of his voice against your cunt making you moan from overstimulation. “Gonna drain you dry, pretty thing. Shouldn’t have made yourself so sweet if you didn’t want me taking it all.”

You want to growl that you can’t make yourself taste like anything, but he slips a third finger into your hold, curls his fingers and rubs his knuckles against your g-spot, and you’re coming too hard to even attempt a protest.

By the time he pulls your dress back down and pets your ass, taking a brownie from the pan without even bothering to use the knife to cut himself a piece, there’s nearly as much drool dripping from your mouth as there is your cunt.

From there, your life centers around two things: food and sex. Both of them exist only because of and with Ghost, him your constant companion as you unwillingly grow more and more comfortable in his house. 

You cook him a stew made from cow leg he’d dropped on your counter that morning. Small russet potatoes float in the broth, popped into his mouth whole and swallowed almost as completely, pieces of carrots he chews to mush and celery he avoids, wine soaked meat leaving grease stains down his shirt. 

Ghost puts you on your knees beneath the table, feeds you his cock while he feeds himself your food. You suck him as well as you can, trace your tongue over the thick vein up the side of his cock, ignore the throbbing in your jaw and try to push his foreskin back to suckle on his head.  He wraps his fingers around the base of his cock, doesn’t let himself come until he’s finished with his meal. You can’t tell if his groaning is for your work on the stew or your work beneath the table.

Fuckin’ heaven, that mouth. Want me to send you off with a full belly, huh? Bet you like your meal as much as I like mine.

Half a dozen eggs, scrambled, served with enough bacon to make you feel sick from the smell alone and half-soaked in maple syrup. 

You, needy and desperate, grinding your cunt across his thigh. You lean back as far as you can with your hands carefully resting on the table at your back, desperate to avoid his syrup-sticky fingers, and end up with a view of his cock lancing you. He scoops your slick up with his clean fingers, picks up another piece of bacon and rips it in half, offers you the bit he doesn’t take.

Please, please, Ghost, I need it so bad, it hurts and it’s supposed to, love, I said I wanted a show with my breakfast, didn’t I?

A rack of lamb, sliding off the bone, bites of it shared between Ghost and you as three of his fingers work slowly in and out of your ass, leisurely and for his viewing pleasure more than your own orgasm. Red juices smeared across your lips and face, dripping down his chin and staining his fingers. A thumb on your clit, meat shoved between your teeth as you come. 

Gonna fuck you here too. Gonna make it hurt, listen to you cry a little when I eat. Oh, hush, you’ll be fine, don’t get yourself worked up. Not yet, at least. My cock’ll spread you out at least twice this much, save your tears for when you’ll need ‘em, pet.

Sticky fruit laid across your stomach, cantaloupe and watermelon and kiwi and banana. His fingers picking them off you piece by piece, savoring them as he fucks you hard. You laid flat to the table, legs spread why and throat sore from your cries, the stark difference between the way he relishes the food and the way he fucks you like an animal making you feel wanted in a way that threatens to drown you.

You need it bad, don’t you? Slut. Pretty, tasty, perfect little slut. Fuckin’ squeezin’ my dick off, goddamm, honey. Gonna fuck you full, gonna fill you up and feed you plenty. 

Stir fry you make with hog maw, a recipe you’d never tried before given to you by a girl in cooking school who was set to inherit her parent’s restaurant. His face moving between your cunt and his meal, your whines about a UTI and cross-contamination go ignored, and he holds his bowl beneath your cunt while he strokes your g-spot with two calloused fingers. 

Tightest fuckin’ cunt in the world. Pretty little thing and her pretty little meals, just made for me, huh? ‘S that right, pet? You’re made just for me and my mouth and my cock, hm? Gonna give me a nice little dressing for my food?

A night spent in his bed, after you make him angel-food cake from scratch. Waking up to a cock pressed against your ass, chain leash and collar heavy around your throat and locked around the headboard but the sheets soft under your skin, pillows thick and his own body warm in a way the basement never gets. 

Ghost isn’t awake yet. He’s snoring like a freight train, completely unaware of the way you stare at him in the blue-dark of the early dawn hours. 

The chain is heavy in your hand, cold against your soft palms. You feel almost like you’re in a trance, the world still hazy around its edges as you shift to kneel over him. 

You don’t know how much strength it takes to strangle a person, but evidentially you don’t use enough. 

You wrap the chain tight around either knuckle, press your hands hard into the mattress on either side of his head, and hold your own breath. His snores quiet, his breathing shudders. He coughs once, twice, you feel his hips and legs begin to shift beneath you and you really put your body weight behind your hold. He goes still.

Then, his eyes fly open. 

There’s hardly time for you to think fuck before he’s flipping you onto your stomach, harsh hand shoving you into the mattress while another rips the chain from your hands and pulls.

You wail a breath as your head is pulled back, scalp nearly touching your spine as Ghost forces your back into a steep arch, ass pushed into the air.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he hisses. You can’t tell if the heat in his words is rage or hunger or some sick mix of both, have even less of an idea which one you should be hoping it is. “You tryin’ to fuckin’ kill me?”

You can barely breathe through the anticipation, the fear that’s been gone for so many days suddenly wrapped around you as tight as the collar, but you find enough breath to shout when he lands a horribly heavy hit across your ass. 

“Ghost!” You shout when he only follows it with several more, eyes squeezed shut as he overwhelms you in pain and discomfort.

“What?” He snarls, fingers clipping your cunt and making your squeal. “What, now you don’t like pain? I watched you cream my cock without a single finger in your cunt last night, girl, but this?” Another spank, harder than you’ve ever taken and burning. “This too much for you?”

You huff, squirming as much as you can in your strained position. 

“You wake me up with a goddamn chain around my neck and bitch when I beat your ass for it?” His voice is nearing a shout now, thick with what you’re sure is anger. “You’re gonna try and kill me in my own fuckin’ bed and pitch a fit when I make you sorry?”

You can’t find it in you to do anything but cry, chest tight and eyes squeezed tighter while he doles out punishment, bruising slaps landing anywhere from your cheeks to your cunt to your thighs to your hole, his hand spreading you wide for him.

“Spread,” he grunts eventually, a harsh hand shoving your knees wide. “Need to get to that hole.”

You don’t get to listen, he makes you do what he wants without giving you a chance to, and then lays a dozen terrible, painful smacks to your asshole.

You’re nearly screaming through them all, feet slamming into the bed as the pain rushes through you. He yanks the chain hard when you try to pull forward and bury your face in the pillow, forcing you to keep the tortuous pose he’s holding you to.

You feel the bed rocking with the force of his hits, spit and tears dripping down your face as you can do nothing but lay there and take it. 

“Naughty, naughty fuckin’ thing,” he spits, two rough fingers pushing into your cunt with little care for your cry. “My own little chef tryin’ to strangle me, I can’t fuckin’ believe it. I bring you here to feed me, give you a load in your stomach anytime you need it, and you wrap your leash ‘round my throat?”

“I’m– I’m sorry!” You wail, inconsolable as he roughly rubs a palm over your clit, your cunt quickly getting slick. You’re still damp from the way he’d bent you over earlier, a mix of his and your cum wet between your thighs.

“Not good enough,” Ghost hisses. He quickly fucks his fingers back inside you, once twice, then pulls them out again.

You go taut as a board when those slick fingers move up, towards your far, far tighter hole.

“No,” you gasp, struggling even pinned as you are, a sense of panic shrouding your mind. “No, no, nonono, you can’t, oh God, please, Ghost, don’t–”

Ghost drops the chain in favor of grabbing you by the throat, tearing you back so violently that you’re staring at his sneer upside down. 

“Shut the fuck up.” His spit is tacky when it lands on your cheek, mixing with your tears, and his smile looks evil as he glares down at you. “Gonna make sure you don’t even think of that shit again. Gotta make it hurt if you’re gonna learn a lesson.”

You sob as he lets you go, head finally falling limp to the bed as you turn your face to the side so you can still breathe. You watch as he reaches for a half-full bottle of lube on his bedside table, the label peeling and stained. 

“Gonna cry for me some more?” He coos, laughing when you jump at the cold feel of the lube on your ass, thighs tense with nerves. “You know I like it when you make yourself look silly, pet. Go on, cry all you want. Still gonna fuck you.”

One finger pushes the lube into your ass, then two, then three. He gives you no time to adjust, only one thrust from each digit before he forces you to stretch further, lands slaps across your ass seemingly whenever he feels like it.

“Ghost, pl-ease,” you cry when you feel the hot head of him press against you, sure that it’ll be excruciating. 

He threads a hand into your hair, pulls you up enough that he can bend to speak into your ear.

“You’ll call me Simon while I fuck your ass,” he says, voice low. “I wanna hear you scream it when I hurt you, pet.”

You listen to him against your will, the scream he wanted tearing from you and echoing the sheer pain of being fucked by someone as massive as Ghost with such little prep.

Your hole feels like it’s on fire, the pain racing through the rest of your body and leaving you limp and panting, only able to close your eyes and endure as he mercilessly pushes forward, uncaring of your pained hiccups and cries.

“Simon,” you whine when he bottoms out, warm balls settling against your neglected cunt. “Hurts…”

His laugh is mean, nasty in your ear. “Good, fuck, say it again, girl. Tell me how much it hurts.”

“So bad…” is all you manage, even just those words warbling off into nothing as he pulls out, fucking himself back in with a harsh thrust that nearly chokes you. 

“Can’t believe you tried it,” he huffs, bracing himself over you as he sets a ruthless pace, no consideration for your comfort. You can see the chain in his right hand, feel the way it just barely tugs at your neck with how viciously you’re moving along the bed. “Been waitin’ for you to give me a chance to do this to you, to fuck you up.”

Your fists clench in the sheets as you do your best to breathe through the pain, the slide of the lube only making his thrusts marginally easier to endure.

“Been waitin’ to get my cock in this hole. Wanted to watch you cry and make you put your tears in the food, gape your little hole and make you ride me while I smoke, shit. Tightest ass I’ve ever felt, love, goddamn. ‘S that feel good?” A slap to the side of your face, rousing you. “You feel good with my cock drilling your little ass?”

“No,” you moan, miserable.

“Good,” he hisses, thrusts quickly becoming uncoordinated as he stares down at your ruined face, his eyes gleaming. “You’re so much sweeter when you’re hurtin’, girl. Wanna keep you like this all the time.”

You sob at the idea, already unable to imagine how excruciating it’ll be to sit tomorrow with your ass covered in welts.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Ghost pants, staring at you ravenously. “Cry a little more for me, attagirl…”

You feel his cum shoot deep inside you before his thrusts slow, the heat spreading as he fucked you through his orgasm, face twisted in pleasure. Your tears haven’t slowed, even as the pain lessened and lessened throughout your fucking.

“Fuck, fuck, that feels good,” he breathes, grinding himself against you as he empties the last of himself inside you.

You feel nearly catatonic as he pulls out, only able to whine when he slips free from your hole and then again when he rearranges you on the bed, limbs sore and neck stiff as he continues to hold you by the leash.

“Took it well,” he grunts, shifting to lay on his back again and tossing the lube to the table beside him. “You gonna pull that shit again?”

You sniffle shaking your head no, only verbally answering when he cocks an eyebrow. “No, Simon.”

He smirks. “I’d love if you did,” he whispers, like it’s a secret. “Would love if you gave me another chance to ruin you. Just go ahead, love. I’ll tear into you whenever you want.” He tilts his head, considering for a moment. “Whenever I want too. ‘Cause you’re mine to do whatever I want with, aren’t you?”

You nod, hands tucked beneath your chin as he tugs you closer by the hip, fingers pressing into rapidly developing bruises and making you whimper.

“Yeah, gonna fuck you ‘til you cry as often as I want. And you’ll gimme those tears every time, won’t you?”

All you can do is nod, a part of you calmed and feeling safer as you watch the predator’s teeth pull away from the prey’s neck when he nods.

The plate you balance is larger than your face and still nearly overflowing with food.

It’s filled to the edges with steak, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and rolls. You have a bottle of wine tucked under one arm, a corkscrew held between your lips and one glass in your hand as you saunter towards Simon.

“Smells good,” he grunts. You’ve learned that his compliments are concise but rare, and you greedily take in the praise from him. “Enough for us both?”

You snort. There’s enough food on your plate to feed five people, easily. But Ghost’s stomach is never-ending, and you’d made sure that there would be no way he’d go to bed hungry.

He spreads his thighs as you approach, pats one of them like you’re not already lowering yourself to him. He takes the glasses while you lay the plate, setting his silverware to the side as he opens the bottle and fills the glass nearly to the brim.

You hum as you take in a breath of the food, that familiar sense of pride from a meal well-made settling in your chest.

Ghost cuts the food while you lean back on his chest, watching his thick fingers work. 

He lifts one of the little pieces of steak to your mouth once he’s cut it, swiping it through the potatoes and guiding you to look at him with a finger on your jaw.

He presses the tender, rare meat between your lips and you take it greedily, letting your eyes slip shut as you savor the taste. He kisses you almost immediately after, passes his tongue over the food before you can even swallow, but lets you keep it.

You giggle when he pulls back, swiping a thumb over the potato on your lip. He picks himself up another bite, pinches a bit of carrot with his steak and swallows without chewing, a moan slipping from his lips. You feel yourself dampening against his thigh, breath hitching.

“Happy Valentine’s day,” you say, voice quiet and held just between the two of you.

He snorts, ever unromantic. “Eat up, doll. Wanna have you for dessert after a meal this good.”

You smile softly at him, opening your mouth willingly when he lifts a bite of food to your lips.

[sttoru]

sukuna never understood humans. they always say and do things that annoy him in a way. though after meeting you—his favorite little concubine—that annoyance has slowly started to turn into fondness, something he isn’t ready to accept or even acknowledge.

“come inside and quit your foolishness,” the king of curses groans, sighing for the nth time. his four arms are crossed over his chest and his expression is unreadable. he’s exasperated by your silly antics once more.

it’s raining—pouring—yet you’re outside in the courtyard. you’re smiling from ear to ear as you hop from puddle to puddle, enjoying the cold droplets that continuously fall and wet your skin. “oh, come on! it’s fun,” you giggle, urging sukuna to join you.

the pink-haired man only shakes his head and clenches his jaw. he doesn’t see the fun in being out there when it rains. he doesn’t understand why you’re so happy about getting dirty and wet. the kimono you’re wearing is one he specifically ordered for you and here you are, ruining it.

sukuna wants to get angry, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to raise his voice or show his disdain. the smile on your face and your happy giggles refrain him from doing or saying anything too hurtful.

if it were any of his other concubines, he’d probably have punished them the second he saw them being somewhere they shouldn’t.

but that doesn’t mean sukuna isn’t going to talk you out of it. or try to.

“y’ll get sick, brat. get back here i said,” sukuna calls out with a frown. he lets out a low groan of frustration when you simply continue to walk around happily in the rain. are you seriously not aware of how fragile humans are? being in this cold with little coverage is going to make you sick.

sukuna has had enough of your antics. he stomps forward, not caring about the rain that’s wetting his clothes. he just wants you to get inside and dry. he frowns and opens his mouth, ready to scold you.

however, as he closes the distance between you two, his voice got stuck in his throat. the sight that greets him makes his frown slowly disappear. his eyes wander over your face and body from up close, finally noticing just how beautiful you are while enjoying the stormy weather. the pure joy looks good on you.

you’re soaked, clothes and hair dripping wet, and yet you still manage to captivate him. the carefree smile on your face only adds to your charm. sukuna stops just an arm’s length from you, eyes narrowing.

you turn to face him properly and chuckle. “thank you for coming out to play with me,” you comment half-jokingly. you reach out to hold onto two of sukuna’s hands, tilting your head back to stare at him with those eyes.

those puppy eyes that will make even a ruthless monster like him calm down.

sukuna clears his throat and grumbles, “this is stupid.”

you laugh softly as you notice how he’s trying to hide the effect you have on him, though you know better than to address it directly. you wrap your arms around his waist, your bodies now pressed together. you tilt your head with a teasing grin, “reaaally? is it now?”

sukuna rolls his eyes, but doesn’t make a move to push you away. he can feel every curve of your frame pressing against his through your wet clothes and the sensation sure is tantalising.

his large hands move on their own. two settle on your waist while one other creeps up your back to come tangle into your hair, yanking slightly at the strands to make you tilt your head back.

sukuna leans down, his red eyes focused on your parted lips that are calling out to him. his mouth is on yours before he realises it, claiming you in a fierce kiss.

the rain continues to fall around you two, but neither of you seem to care. you’re too lost in the feeling of each other to pull away from the intimate kiss. your lips are moving in tandem, tongues brushing together.

you only pull away when you run out of air. you breathe heavily as you look up at sukuna, seeing the same yearning reflected in his piercing eyes. it makes your tummy tingle—makes you feel all giddy to know the power you have over such an unfeeling man.

sukuna doesn’t say a thing. the tension between you two is only emphasised by the rain. the continuous pitter patter of the droplets seems to only increase with time, making it harder to see, yet also intensifies the unspoken feelings. perhaps now he can understand what humans find so romantic about being in the rain with their someone.

but there’s this all-consuming thought that drives his mind towards a more dark place. looking at you with your kimono hugging every curve, the water drops dripping down your bare skin and your half-lidded eyes staring at him like he’s all you care about—it’s making the king of curses want to devour you whole. a carnal desire that threatens to take over every time he feels that foolish, sappy emotion which humans call love.

sukuna snaps out of his daze and a muscle in his jaw ticks. he grabs your wrist and cocks his head towards the doors leading inside. “alright, let’s get y’r ass inside,” he huffs and starts dragging you off with him, “i don’t want you complainin’ to me when you get sick, y’hear?”

you whine but now better than to struggle. you walk with him, heart still racing as you think of the intimate kiss you shared. you know you’re the only one who gets the privilege to kiss the king of curses, to be so close to him, to have him indulge your silly requests, to have him look at you with such insatiable desire.

it makes you even giddier thinking about it.

you look up at the back of sukuna’s head as he guides you inside of the palace, attempting to convince him to extend your little romantic outing, “can we do it agai—”

“no.”

well, it was worth a try.

[thecoochiefairy]

gamer girlz. onyankopon.

𑄽𑄺 warnings 𑄽𑄺 4.6K word count. blackfem!reader, drabble, college football coded! onyankapon, grumpy!onyankapon, sweet!onyankapon, dominant!onyankapon, kinda sorta makeup sex?, couch sex , black woman, vaginal penetration, rough, lil bit of sweet talkin’, hair pulling, creaming, oral [f] [m], choking, praising, LOTS of dirty talk, backshots, missionary, condomless sex, cumming on face, kissing, spanking, just a fine ass black man, minors aren’t welcome!

━━ 𝒄𝙤𝒐𝙘𝒉𝙞𝒆𝙛𝒂𝙞𝒓𝙮 𝙩𝒉𝙤𝒖𝙜𝒉𝙩𝒔 .ᐟ day 283737272 of liyah’s ovulation and faithful celibacy pact meaning she’s having the most nasty, egregious thoughts. please enjoy my black man fantasies. the links inspired this fic heavily, so enjoy those too.

𝓐ᥫ᭡ :: onyankopon just wants to help you finish your game.

link. link. link. ony’s visuals.

YOUR FINGERS SHOULD'VE HURT AT THIS POINT. Swiftly moving from button to button, they tap the controls as you’re on another level of the game you desperately wanted to beat.

You had some time off of studying, and this is how you wanted to spend it. Your boyfriend was at football practice—although a part of you just wanted to be swarmed up in his arms, your attention span also had you elsewhere—this damn game. You enjoyed the older games, replaying the hardest version of Batman: Arkham Asylum, your boredom peaking your interest back in the game you’d had since childhood. 

You didn’t even register that the door had opened, or maybe you didn’t just care enough. You knew who it was. You eye him dropping his keys against the counter, black hoodie over his head, sharp jaw grunting lightly from his sore muscles, scowl along his face—definitely had to do with practice. 

You pause the game for a second, turning your face to the side, fuzzy socks along your feet, his large jersey slung along your body as you greet him, “Hell, baby. What they’ do to you?” 

“Coach was on dick today. Had me running laps cause other niggas couldn’t catch the ball and I got mad,” he huffs, taking his helmet and slamming it on the counter next to him. He massages the nape of his neck, sighing deeply to himself. 

“Now you know coach don’t like all that cussing on his field,” you sigh, “He knows you're good. That’s why he’s on your ass.” 

“Nah. He just annoying as fuck. Can’t expect me to do everything.”

He’s like a child, grumpy and pouty. His tall frame comes closer, wanting your attention in response to his rough day at practice. 

“How’s my baby?” he says in your ear, wrapping his large muscular arms around your waist and gently biting your shoulder. His broad frame shadows under his hoodie, tat against his face shining under the lights of your shared apartment, full lips moisturized—you’d never let him leave the house otherwise. 

You give him a soft laugh, rubbing your fingers over his durag as you say, “I’m fine. Had some time off studying, tryna’ beat this game. I meant what I said, Ony. He doesn’t just give you a hard time because he’s bored. You’re his star player, gotta make sure he ain’t treating you like everybody else.” 

“Don’t tell me you on yo’ nerdy stuff. C’mon. I’m sore,” he groans, his grip around your waist tightens and he pushes himself against you. 

“Oh, is it nerdy shit when you’ screaming on the game playing 2K with your friends? I was gonna offer a little massage. Now you’ve lost your entry to that,” you say, trying to push him off of you, reaching for the controller in between your lap. 

He doesn’t budge. He holds firmly onto you, pressing sloppy kisses against your neck to distract you. 

“Don’t be like that. I was kidding, you know I like that shit,” he huffs, his breath against your neck as he presses his lips on the sensitive part of your skin, “Forgot to tell you, I got an away game coming up in a few weeks. So I’ll be gone for like, a week.”

Your head comes down a bit to look directly at him, “What? You’re not coming with me to my parents? You know the holidays are coming up, Onyankopon. I told them you’d be there.” 

“You know imma’ just be sitting around hiding behind you,” he murmurs against your skin, his hot breath tickling you. 

It’s not that he’s shy— rather, he just doesn’t enjoy the unnecessary attention. 

“How ‘bout we do our own Christmas, before I go?” 

He’s nuzzling himself against your neck now, his hands roaming all along your body. You press his body away from yours, standing up as you become annoyed. 

You then say, “I wouldn’t be going up to my parents place if you didn’t agree to come with me in the first place,” going into the kitchen, searching through the freezer. 

He runs a hand over his face, seeing how instantly irritated you became. He knew having his support for the holidays meant a lot to you, and he might’ve waited on telling you about the going away game to lessen your disappointment. 

“Mama,” he calls, watching you from the sofa. 

You turn, raising an eyebrow as you say, “Oh, so now I’m Mama, you love hitting me with that shit when you know I’m mad.” 

“You know I don’t like going to those family functions, I swear that house always stinks cause yo’ auntie cooks that nasty ass fish. A week ain’t no big deal. Let’s just have our own thing here.” 

“So which one is it? You don’t wanna go or you got your football shit?” You narrow your eyes, pulling the ice pack from the freezer, arms crossed as you come back closer to him.

He knows better than to lie, especially to you. 

“They got some NFL scouts coming to this game,” he mutters, scratching his temple. I’m sorry. But I’m tryna’ go pro, you know that.”

“Mhm.” 

You hand him the ice pack, “Put it on your knee. I know it’s been sore lately.”

He raises an eyebrow, “You’ not mad?”

“Did I say I was mad? You’ want the ice pack or not?” 

He takes the ice pack, wincing once the coldness hits his knee. He knew you were gonna give him a scolding if he didn’t.

“You’ got a bad ass attitude right now.” 

“I wonder why, Onyankopon? If we had plans to go back to your parents house for the holidays and at the last minute I told you I have exams and that I just didn’t wanna go, you’d be irritated too.”  

“Damn, you gon’ be on my ass about this for the next three weeks?” 

He didn’t like it when you were like this, cause instead of being pissed you were more disappointed, which was somehow a lot worse to him.

“I’m gonna be gone for a week.” 

You scratch your nails in between the baby blue orchid claw-clip that holds your curls. You dismiss him, “You need to go shower.” 

“What, you ain’t tryna’ join me?” he murmurs, a smirk on his lips, “Quit being mad. I’m tryna love on you. Wanna put on The Isley Brothers and give you a rub down.” 

“You’re playing too much right now,” you deadpan, “Bye Onyankopon.” 

“What’ you mean bye?” he says, his smirk turning into a frown.

“I’m finna’ go finish studying,” you’re already walking back towards the bedroom, ending the conversation off as that. 

When you finally hear him smack his lips and make his way into the shower, you glance over your notes, deciding you weren’t gonna let him ruin your previous plans. You’re now back on the sofa, eyes set onto the screen, trying to defeat the computer generated opponent. 

You switch over to the sound of the bathroom opening, seeing him re-tying his durag back on, basketball shorts baggy and house shoes on his feet. His tattoos all along his face, neck, chest and arms always had your attention—but not as much attention as you usually gave him at this moment. You sprawled along the furniture, elbow deep into the couch's pillow as one leg laid straight out, while the other bent itself over the top of the couch. 

He doesn’t like how you’re paying no attention to him. As stupid as it sounds, he’s always got to have your eyes on him. They were pretty. 

“You’ still mad? You for real ain’t finna’ give me a massage?” 

“I’m good,” you swiftly respond, “Just playing my game. You can massage yourself.” 

“Why you’ gotta be like this?” 

He sits down next to you, his large frame takes up a lot of the space. The couch becomes smaller somehow. His eyes watch the game intently before he decides to get comfortable. Lying back down on the sofa, he lets his head rest in your lap. Even with you being irritated, you let him lay there. 

You continue going up level by level, your focus intently on the game. The little argument between you and Onyankopon irritated you to say the least, but you didn’t have the energy to completely push him away. It’s unfortunate he was persuasive. You notice out the corner of your eye that he lifts his head a little, the warmth between your legs along the back of his neck, and that’s when he sees that you’re wearing nothing under his jersey.  

He takes the time to admire you, legs lazily hung open, his eyes staring directly against your pussy, scenting of vanilla on your legs, freshly shaven. One of his large hands comes to rest on the back of your thick thigh, rubbing small circles with his thumb.

“What you’ got on?” he mutters.

“Had to wash clothes, didn’t have any underwear. That’s why I put on your jersey,” you tell him, eyes still not looking at his face, unable to see how his jaw clenched at the sight. 

He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. In that moment his large hand rubs along the skin on your thigh, pushing the jersey up further.

“You look good as fuck in my shit,” He mumbles, a low rasp in his tone.

“Thank you,” you say in a softer tone, mainly because you’re distracted, buttons pressing harder against the controller. 

He can tell how focused you are—how your face scrunched up, the way your fingers move, even the way your thighs fall open on his head.

That’s when you feel him lean down, giving a gentle peck to your inner thigh. The feeling makes you tense a bit, but you still keep your eyes against the screen, huffing out a breath as your character is close to dying. This level was difficult. 

He’s giving small, light kisses along the sensitive flesh of your inner thigh, taking small intervals to glance up to you as you keep your eyes against the screen. His hand moves higher up on your leg, slowly pushing the jersey up even more.

Your eyes go to him for a millisecond, seeing as his head is down, lips attached to your thighs, sucking ever so gently on your skin. You can almost feel a pressure building in your stomach, the slow ache of his movements almost purposeful, teasing you in a way. You press your glasses up against your face, huffing out a breath as you mutter, “Stupid ass level,” trying to come up with a reason as to why you sound so breathless. 

He grins as he’s laying there, hearing your breathing getting heavier. It’s obvious how hard you’re trying to focus on the game, but he’s working you up.

“You’ trying so hard, Mama,” He murmurs against your hot skin, his kisses trailing to the spot he knows is extra sensitive.

You shift your body, clearing your throat as you say, “Gotta restart,” adjusting your legs a bit, opening them up just a little more than before. 

He can tell how you’re slowly giving in, how you’re shifting your body around, legs opening just enough for him to move closer. He lets his free hand come to caress your stomach, rubbing against the skin under the fabric of the jersey. His lips are so close to you, his breath is hot against your skin. 

“Restart then,” He mutters, tongue now coming to flick out from his lips, gliding across your skin, hiding beneath the pillows of his lips as they begin sucking a dark red mark against you.

You narrow your eyes lightly as you restart the level you play, but your body is distracted by Onyankopon’s lips along it. You drag your teeth along your lip a bit, pressing your fingers harder into the controller, feeling his lips coming up higher. 

You could feel the arousal you had flooding in between the lips of your pussy, protecting your clit as it now begins to pool farther down, dampening the couch. His large fingers wrap along the outside of your thighs, using his thumbs to pull the skin on the inside apart, showing the dark pink of your pussy, squelching at his presence. Your body tenses even more as you feel his thumb meet with your clit, rubbing so softly against it, dropping his mouth down to press another kiss to your skin. The leg hiked up against the top of the sofa trembles a bit. 

“You’ winning?” You hear him murmur against your skin. 

You take a deep inhale, squeezing your fingers against the hooks of your controller as you softly reply, “No.”

He circles your clit with maddeningly light touches, barely grazing the swollen nub. At the same time, he’s still pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses, occasionally grazing his teeth. 

"You’ getting distracted. Wet ass pussy," Onyankopon murmurs appreciatively, feeling the slick evidence of your arousal coating his finger.

Your chest heaves a bit at his tone, but you don’t let up. You keep your eyes on the screen, but you seem to be losing. In both games. 

He spreads you even wider as he leans in closer, hot breath fanning over your slick folds. He pulls his thumb back as he replaces it with his mouth, giving you an innocent kiss against your clit. His beard captures your arousal, your fingers shuddering as you hear him groan, “Ooh, fuck, Mama. You’ wet for real.”

Without warning, he seals his lips around your clit and sucks, tongue flicking rapidly over the sensitive bud. He releases it with a lewd pop before trailing open-mouthed kisses along your slit, lapping up your dripping arousal. Your eyebrows deepen into a frown, lips trembling as you give one more press to your controller, before you take your hand and reach it to the back of his head, getting a clutch against the knot of his durag. Your eyes roll to the back of your head, clasping your mouth shut as you whimper for him.

He delves his tongue deeper between your opened folds, dragging it up and down, lapping up to create more secretion. His hands grip your thick thighs, spreading you obscenely wide as he eats you out like a starving man.

"Mmmm, this a nigga favorite fuckin’ meal," he rumbles, voice muffled by your flesh. He alternates between slurping you up and flicking rapidly, determined to make you fall apart. One hand slides up to grope your ass roughly, kneading the plush flesh.

“O—Ony…” you gasp, voice small and high pitched, fingers squeezing harder against his head, dropping the controller out of your other hand, the object hitting the ground with a thud. The music of the battle within the game becomes something you hear, but not as loud as his mouth gulping you down, heavy tongue sopping against your pussy, drenching his beard so much that he could drown in you.

“Pretty ass voice,” he encourages huskily, the vibrations from his words sending shockwaves through your core. He dips two thick fingers knuckle-deep into your weeping cunt, pumping them slowly as he continues his relentless assault on your clit with his tongue. The wet sounds of him feasting on your pussy fill the room, mixing obscenely with the forgotten video game noises.

His free hand roams your curves possessively, groping and squeezing every inch of exposed skin he can reach—your ass, your thighs, the underside of your breasts. You’re lost in a haze of pleasure.

You were always so sensitive to his touch, the pleasure that you received from him kept you so kidnapped that it was hard to be mad at him. You grind your clit along his mouth that waits to catch it, voice ineffective of composure as you struggle, “Gonna cum soon, Ony…” 

“Yeah?” He grunts, head knocking up and down, your eyes only able to watch as his lower face disappears in between your legs, glistening a coat against his beard, “Where you wanna cum?” 

“On your dick, baby…” you whine softly, rotating your hips gently to match his moments, “Please…”

"You wanna cum on your dick, Mama?” He coos against you, the sound reverberating through your core, you’re whimpering with an urgent nod, “Mhm,” before he can even finish his sentence. 

He pulls himself back, already tugging his tip from beneath his basketball shorts, taking off the material as your eyes follow the curve, the vein in his dick, heavy against the stretch of his large palm. Tattoos spread against his pelvic, scriptures and inspirational quotes that didn’t belong in his blasphemous moment.

"Turn around, put that ass in the air for me.“

Your legs feel a bit numb, bringing yourself up as you know exactly how he wants you. Raising your left leg along the arm of the couch, you lean your breast over the top as your face hides beneath your arm, right knee digging into the seat of it. He places his fingers along the side of your neck, other hand digging into your thigh thrown over the furniture. He doesn’t have to tell you to look at him—you always give him your eyes, feline as they blank beneath his control. Your body trembles as he slams his palm against your ass, “Arch more,” your body following suit, deepening the valley your silhouette creates. 

He grips your hip with bruising force, using the leverage to grind the swollen head of his dick teasingly along your soaked slit. Up and down, he rubs himself through your slick folds, coating his length in your essence. Your hips tense as you feel the weight of his tip stretching open your pussy, sinking in that it makes your abdomen cramp, aching in a pleasure that has your entire body tighten. Your eyes are beginning to roll back, digging your nails into the sofa as you keep your eyes on his, he looks mad at you, slamming his palm against your ass again as he grunts, “Keep that fuckin’ arch.” 

Your chest is filled with oxygen, holding your breath to cure the slight discomfort you feel, but it’s also an agonizing pleasure, feeling so full from him. He’s slowly dragging himself halfway out, rolling his hips back in and going even deeper, your mouth dropping open as your eyes flutter shut, turning your head back towards him as you whimper, “Fuck, baby. You’re deep…” 

Silence goes in between the both of you, savoring the rush of pleasure that clutches the air as he drags his first couple of thrusts, so slow it felt like time wasn’t even passing. The sedated actions almost feel better than if he sped up, his eyes locking down as he sees you painting his tip, creaming on him. 

“I’m in your shit, huh?” he talks to you, it’s almost tortuous as he hilts himself fully inside, his heavy balls slapping against your throbbing clit. Your walls clench around him like a vice, your head tilting back as you completely tense. You whimper, “Ungh,” attempting to push him back to relieve the stimulation, jumping as he gives you a bruising spank, deep voice aggressive as he says, “Uh-uh, don’t do that. You know I don’t do that running shit.” 

His fingers dig into the flesh of your hips as he starts up at a carnal pace. The wet squelch of your pussy being split open echoes obscenely in the room, mixing with your deep whines, nodding your head, gently dropping your hips against his abdomen to meet his strokes.

“Keep riding that dick, goood fuckin’ girl,” each thrust is punishing and deep, stirring up your insides. The wet slap of skin on skin echoes obscenely as he rails into you, chasing your pleasure to insanity.

You always try to keep up, but you never could. All your organs feel tossed around by him, so blinded in your erotic state, your mouth opens as you give long moans, deeply gasping each time you need to catch your breath. He brings you to a point of saying things you’d never thought would leave your lips, mouth parted as you groan, “Yes, yes, baby. Agh, fuck, Ony. Deeper.”

"You want this dick deeper?" He growls, accentuating his question with a thrust that has your eyes rolling back farther. His grip on your hips tightens, surely leaving finger-shaped bruises on your toffee skin as he sets a merciless pace.

He’s back at palming his hand brutally against your ass, rushing it up to come around the front of your mouth, resting his fingers there as he grunts, "Take this fucking dick then," yanking your head back.

The new angle allows him to go even deeper, his hips slapping against your clit, “Finna’ tear this fuckin’ pussy open.” 

His filthy words mix with the lewd sounds of your bodies coming together, filling the room, it has you groaning through his fingers. 

“Love you so much,  baby—“ this was a regular routine, the affection you give him as he’s hitting that spot that only he could find, whines plummeting from your mouth, eyes to the back of your head as you reach back and grab onto his wrist that holds your hip, moaning louder each time he rolls his hips back to meet the weight of your ass matching his rhythm.

“What happened to you being mad?” He questions, going slow as he tugs you back into his dick, the echo of your skin bouncing off each other like a drug induced round of applause. 

You shake your head, “Not mad at you, Onyyy,  love you so much….”

He chuckles darkly, low and rumbling in his chest as he leans over you, pressing his muscular torso against your back. His hot breath fans across the shell of your ear as he murmurs, "I know you do, Mama. I love you too.” 

One large hand slides up from your hip, reaching around to splay across your stomach as the other now tangles in your hair, tugging your head back. He rolls his hips in a slow, deep grind, stirring you up from the inside, your mouth releasing broken shouts, your face hot, pleasured tears wanting to stroke along your face. 

"Fuckin’ love you, princess. Pussy was made for me,” He gives another sharp thrust, grinding against your cervix. "You’ getting tight as fuck—You’ cumming, Mama?”

“I’m….” You gasp, defeated in your inability to speak, taking your hand and reaching back to hold his face closer to yours, hips trembling as you dangerously moan in a cracked tone “I’m cumming, baby. I’m cumming. I’m—agh,  c—cumming…”

His chuckle is dark with lust as you flutter and clench around him erratically. He grips you harder, using the leverage to pound into you relentlessly, chasing his own release.

"Good job, baby. Biggg fuckin’ girl. Cum on this dick. Fuckin' soak it," he growls, his voice strained with pleasure. One hand moves from your hip to your clit, rubbing tight circles around the sensitive nub as he continues his brutal pace.

Your whole body tenses and shakes as your orgasm crashes over you, a loud cry tearing from your throat. Your pussy spasms almost violently around his thick shaft, gushing against him so much it pushes him out of you, trying to milk the sensation for all it’s worth. 

“I’m finna’ bust, baby,” he warns, groaning in your ear, “Come eat this dick up.”

Your body feels numb as you turn yourself towards him, immediately wrapping your lips along his tip, enveloping the taste of your own arousal within the walls of your mouth, sucking him in to reach the heavens of your throat. He clasps your hair within his palm, bobbing yourself back and forth as you reach down, rubbing your clit as you still feel your orgasm rushing through your body. You moan around him, giving him those cat eyes, fluttering your dark extensions as you swirl your tongue against his tip, begging for a reaction.

He throws his head back with a deep, guttural moan as your warm mouth engulfs him. His grip on your hair tightens, guiding your movements as he starts to thrust shallowly into your throat.

“Shit—just like that. Eating that dick up good as fuckk," he pants, his abs flexing with each snap of his hips. The sight of you—eyes fluttering, cheeks hollowed, one hand buried between your thighs—it’s almost too much.

He pulls your mouth off him, a string of saliva connecting your lips to his glistening tip. With another smack to your ass, he flips you onto your back, settling between your spread legs. 

"I wanna see your face when I nut in this pretty ass pussy." 

He lines himself up and sinks back in with one smooth thrust, bottoming out instantly, clutching your throat, holding you down as your back arches up, clawing into his back at the visceral sensitivity.

He sets a hard, fast pace, the wet sounds of your joining filling the room. His intense gaze locks with yours, pupils blown wide with lust as he takes in every expression that crosses your face.

"That's it, baby. Gonna fill this pussy up real good," he grunts as you whimper with his talking, “Ba-by,” angling his hips to hit that special spot inside you. One hand slides under your thigh, pushing your leg up and back to change the angle, allowing him to go even deeper.

He leans down, capturing your lips in a searing kiss as he continues to pound into you. His tongue dominates your mouth, swallowing your moans and cries of pleasure. Breaking the kiss, he buries his face in your neck, biting and sucking dark marks into your skin as he chases his release.

"Fuckk, finna’ cum soon. You want it in you, baby?”

“On my face baby, you say it’s pretty there,” you whimper, deepening your nails in his back, “Mmmph, c’mon, Ony. Please…” 

A grin spreads across his face at your pleas. Grabbing his throbbing tip, he positions himself at your face, smearing the leaking pre-cum across your cheek. He’s moaning, stroking himself rapidly, aiming his tip at your parted lips. His free hand grips your chin firmly, keeping you in place as his strokes become erratic. He then cums, painting your face—across your cheeks, over your lips, some even landing in your waiting mouth.

You stick your tongue out, running your tongue over your lips that darken in color, bruised as you dig your teeth into them with a sultry giggle. Heavy breathing fills the room as you keep your eyes up at him. 

He steps back as he says, “Hollon, baby,” going into the bathroom as he finds a towel, rubbing it along your face to clean you up. He then leans down, pulling you into a kiss as he grunts, “Gimme’ your mouth. I love you, Mama. I’m sorry.” 

You give him a kiss, holding his face in your hands, running your tongues together sloppily, passion filling your entire body from the previous actions. 

You say, “It’s okay. You’ want your massage now?”

He pulls his mouth back a bit, eyeing you before he chuckles. It makes you pout, “What’s funny?”

He laughs, shaking his head as he helps you stand, “Nothin’ Mama. Just thinkin' 'bout how quick you forgave me after I tore your ass up."

You roll your eyes, “I can always change my mind.” 

He runs a hand down your side, squeezing your hip possessively. "Chill out. I want that massage. You know I'm always ready for your magical hands."

He stretches languidly, his muscles rippling beneath his tattoos as he leads you towards the bedroom, “ And don’t be all stingy with the lotion. Do that lil’ thing I like if you feeling extra generous.” 

“You’ getting beside yourself. Do you need that?”

He turns, “Do you?”

You scrunch up your nose, “No. I want a massage next!”

“Exactly. C’mon, get that ass on the bed.”

[lets-try-some-writing]

I got the image of the Jack, Miko and Rafael learning to imitate Distressed/terrified Sparkling cries and using them against the decepticons. It’s a very efficient defense mechanism. Every cybertronian who heard them is freaking out because oh primus how is the squishy thing making that noise and I gotta protect it at all costs. The sheer chaos that would ensue as the ‘protect/rescue the sparkling’ programming kicks in full force.

——

The vehicons are clustered at the other end of the room panicking. They don’t know what to do. The human sparklings are looking right at them and making distress noises. The guilt is killing them.

Knockout going “is the car form less alarming?! If I turn into a car will you stop seeing me as the threat?!”

Breakdown is having a breakdown.

Starscream pinned to the wall on the other side of the room having an internal crisis. He doesn’t like this. Make it stop.

Soundwave makes no noise but you can FEEL the sheer distress radiating off of him.

Megatron is frozen. No thoughts, head empty. He’s not moving at all. He doesn’t know how to handle this.

——

The autobots have mixed feelings about this. They’re glad the kids have a way of defending themselves but please don’t do it near them. They’re stressed out enough as it is.

(This might sound kinda dumb but I thought it was kinda funny. Very tired while writing this)

Wait no this is actually brilliant.

The Decepticons never anticipated their long buried parental nature to be used against them. No one did. But they day the human children turned up on the battlefield looking far too confident, every Bot and Con present had the all encompassing feeling that something was terribly wrong. Their suspicions were quickly confirmed when, before the Decepticons could do much of anything to get the relics they were after, Rafael began to wail.

Normally, human screams meant nothing. But there was a certain pitch that sounded so close to a cry of distress from a sparkling that, to warriors who had not heard a sparkling in millennia, it was enough to send them running to help. In this case, the issue was only compounded as the children scattered like mice and started making the same noises. The Decepticons could hardly focus on the Autobots booking it to the relics as they frantically tried to locate the fictitious sparklings calling for aid.

The Vehicons managed to get to Jack, but he just kept looking up at them defiantly. Every time one of the dozen or so Vehicons on the field tried to grab him, blast him, or otherwise hurt him, Jack would chirp like a sparkling and send all of them scurrying back. It wasn't cute to the Vehicons. Having never seen actual sparklings but still having the coding needed to adore them, they looked at Jack and saw a weird frame-walker. They weren't sure what to do about it except try to haul themselves away while also keeping a vague circle around the human male.

Miko on the other hand made it a point to chase after Megatron and Soundwave, screeching like a sparkling about to be shredded. Neither stopped for her, but Megatron completely lost his train of thought every time that screech rang out. He could have been aiming at Optimus with a perfect head shot and he would be unable to fire as Miko's distressed sounds rang out in his audials. He KNEW she wasn't a sparking. His coding wasn't even that strong. But by Primus, hearing her screech was the same as watching a civilian get run over by a bus, repeatedly. Focus was impossible.

Soundwave wasn't much better. He didn't react outwardly, but the slowing of his steps and the way he tried to sidestep Miko gave away his distress. He avoided her like the plague, trying to refocus but being unable to really get far as Miko screamed like a demon. It was a fight against the Unmaker himself to keep Soundwave from bolting over to collect the sparkling who sounded so very upset.

Rafael, for his part, followed Miko's lead and harassed the other three members of High Command most often found out on the field. Breakdown ran screaming the moment Rafael started chirping at him. This was both out of fear of the frame-walker and to escape the inevitable overreaction of his coding. He may or may not have attempted parkour once or twice to get as far away from the smallest of the humans as possible.

Knockout tried to ignore Rafael when the kid chirped up at him, he really really did. But how does one ignore the Cybertronian equivalent of a soaking wet kitten meowing up at you? Simply put: you don't. Knockout gave in and quickly dropped down to try and soothe the non-existent sparkling every. single. time. Rafael pulled his noise trickery. He never fails to panic and attempt to flash colorful things at Rafael to get him to stop. Every Decepticon has since been endlessly disappointed in him.

Starscream, being terrified of things that really shouldn't be there, took the skies the instant the trio began screeching. Nope. Not today Unicron. He'll get the mission done or get the heck out of dodge to avoid coding coming online. He doesn't need empty nest syndrome on top of a crippling case of "I Love Power." He also doesn't need to deal with the horrific mental image of a squishy somehow managing to sound like a sparkling. Nope. Nope. NOPE.

The Autobots are grateful the kids can protect themselves a bit now. But by Primus, they have known NO peace since the kids figured it all out.

[lilacxquartz]

love you, need you;

mr. crawling x reader

plot: although it couldn’t psychically happen, mr. crawling found himself obsessed with getting you pregnant — themes: smut, breeding kink, needy/clingy behaviour, no dialogue — a/n: via request for a breeding kink imagine with him, hope this is okay! — w.c: 700ish • ao3 • masterlist ♡

Mr. Crawling often doted on you like there was no tomorrow; often lingering in the depths of your shadow like a constantly looming presence. He was always there when you went to bed and was already tethered to your side by the time you woke up. At first, you had no idea what to think, but over time, you grew to love and even anticipate his company.

And lately, his hands kept running over to palm against your bare stomach with an almost thoughtful, wistful stare. He’d press his lips against the soft contours of your abdomen, his cold breath ghosting along your flesh—dreaming of everything could have been—had the two of you been alive.

Such spiralling thoughts left him nothing short of needy and he’d latch onto you with much more fervour than ever before, his touches becoming heated, almost scalding, if even worshipping.

Mr. Crawling subtly crept into such magnitudes of adoration though, starting off real slow and gentle with longing cuddles, pressing lazy kisses into your skin whenever he could. He’d then move on nipping down your collarbone, to your chest, to wherever he could—down to your stomach, to your hips—to the deep apex of your inner thighs.

Slowly, he surrendered himself to you like you were some sort of god, his intentions loud and clear. Nights of professed passion soon passed by on a nightly basis, finding himself pushing—rutting away almost like a man crazed into your core—wanting to experience you again and again.

His hands would drift back to your stomach after a while too, pretending that it all had worked, growing close to crazed at the idea of it somehow being possible. You didn’t mind too much whenever he got this way, though, loving it all the same. There was something special about the way he loved you, after all, and especially so in the way that he fucked you.

And as if right on clockwork, Mr. Crawling settled right beside you in bed, not wasting a single second before he moved to hover over you. His frame towered over yours, easily swallowing you whole with his presence and after a while, he was ready to try again.

His lips crashed against yours and the rest of him settled right into you; your lips shuddering out an anticipated gasp as he positioned the tip of his cock slick into your soaked sex, sliding right into you, thrusting forward as a strained, barely contained whimper choked out of him.

Mr. Crawling always had such a cutely flustered look of focus too, as he succumbed to the sensation of you. His lower lip quivered and his cheeks grew a warm blushed red, barely containing his composure as he drove himself into you. It wasn’t that he didn’t mean not to be gentle as this happened, but it was that you—your body—left him overwhelmed, so he simply just… lost himself in the moment, that was all. The idea in his mind was so intoxicating; the thought of seeing you so perfectly swollen with the aftermath of his love—the concept of what could have been—all pushed him to go harder than he had meant to.

And even though he loved you so, his guilt subsided whenever he caught wind of the pure and utter bliss written all over your face—of your pretty, breathless moans that rolled out in sharp, ragged gasps. As your hands searched for his, interlocking and squeezing hard. As your insides clenched around his girth, feeling yourself come undone all the while he rendered you into a sopping, equally whining mess.

At last, Mr. Crawling violently trembled above you, his body giving way into a brutally recoiled stutter, his moans growing just as loud as yours while riding out the end of a desperate climax. He grunted, squeezing you tight against his body, milking himself directly into your cunt, yet not quite leaving despite how spent he felt.

So obsessed with the thought of filling you up, Mr. Crawling couldn’t bring himself to leave—he loved you so much, after all.

Enough to imagine what could have been.

Enough to believe that it could actually happen.

[stevebabey]

pre-steddie, post the events of s4, and some good ol' steve harrington gets some new glasses <3, 2k-ish

There was a time where Steve would've rather died than wear them.

Then he did nearly die—several times over, actually.

But if Steve had to sum up what he actually gained from the horrific annual monster-hunting bullshit—besides the scars and trauma, of course—he would say perspective.

It's a lot easier to see what matters on the other side of the end of the world. Or in Steve's case, it's actually harder to see. And he should've totally been wearing those prescription glasses his parents bought him back in the seventh grade.

Maybe then, instead of an occasionally foggy memory and migraines, he'd be a little better off.

But as things go, he hadn't worn them. No, instead, when he was a foolish 13-year-old, Steve had hidden the glasses. Pretended they got lost. Fibbed while knowing exactly where in the house he'd stashed them.

It had certainly earned him an earful of chastising, as well as an actual sore ear from how his mother had pinched it tightly. But, either way, in the end he'd got what he wanted.

Sure, it definitely made it harder on his grades. More often than not, if Steve didn't cop one of the seats closer to the front of class, he'd earn himself a headache from all his squinting. But it was worth it because at least he wouldn't look uncool. Popular kids never wore glasses.

And then... years later, a couple brushes with his fragile morality, old friends turned enemies and new friends, genuine friends earned... he gets perspective.

This is all to say, Robin finally convinces him to wear his glasses again.

Well, actually, the doctor had been the one to convince he needed to wear them, given all the other problems he'd gathered from his mounting concussions.

Robin had been the one to somewhat bully ("Lovingly!" She'd protest) him into actually wearing them. An uphill battle she had been determined to win, despite all Steve's abject objections.

She won. They'd gotten him new frames, made sure the prescription was up to date and that Steve didn't completely hate the way they looked.

But even though they didn't look anything like the smaller pair still tucked away in a shoebox beneath his bed, collecting dust, there's still a hesitance to wear them.

But... perspective.

It's what Steve keeps trying to hold onto as he scrunches his nose down at the glasses in the case in his hands. The lenses glint in the fluorescents of Family Video.

He huffs and picks them out, unfolding the arms gently. Looking a little stupid was better than getting another migraine at work, he decides.

He stores the case beneath the counter and sits back down at the computer, hands in his laps, the wire-rim glasses in his fingertips.

You put these on and you may as well just declare the 'You Suck' side a forever winner. Some part of him whispers meanly. Not as if you're much of a looker anymore. It's a sliver of that slimy ego lurking within him. Steve's mouth twists as he does his best to shove it away.

It's true, to some extent. That last run-in with the Upside Down had left its mark well and truly. Along his chin, rippling down toward and along his jaw, is a scar where the skin split and had to be patched back together. The discoloration of it makes it impossible to miss.

Robin says chicks dig scars. But even if she's right and not just saying it to banish the sad lilt in his voice, there's still some part of Steve that wants to cling to what once made him important. What made people look at him, pay attention to him.

The point is wearing the glasses isn't just about wearing the glasses.

But Steve also isn't trying to be all about appearances anymore — so if they made him look... worse, then so be it.

He slides them on and tilts his head up, focusing on the screen. The pixels on the computer sharpen and the blurriness of his surroundings saps away, smoothing out his field of vision. Steve blinks.

It's much different to how it was trying them on at the doctor's office. He's in familiar turf now and as he blinks again, looks around, Steve realises how many details he's been missing. Holy shit. Can Robin see this well? All the time?

He can read the things all the way across the room — can parse out the poster titles without having to squint in the slightest. Jesus Christ, should he even have been allowed to drive—

The bell on the door chimes and Steve turns instinctively.

"Oh! Steve, you're wearing them!"

It's Robin, dropped off by none other than Eddie, for the half-shift she shares with Steve on Thursday afternoons. Sure, she could bike from school, but it’s getting icier in the mornings and Steve likes to drop her off before his shift.

Eddie takes the other half. If that means he also meanders into Family Video to hang around for a half hour and talk to Steve? Well, Steve’s got no problem with that at all.

They’re friends. Hard not to be, given the circumstance of their springtime shared together. It's not exactly something Steve ever predicted happening, but considering his newfound perspective, he's taken it in stride as one of the pros of the whole situation.

Except with his newly corrected vision, two things change simultaneously.

Behind Robin, Eddie steps into the Family Video and Steve suddenly sees Eddie Munson with a reverent clarity.

Has Eddie always looked like... that?

With his glasses, Steve can see the true brown in his eyes and the brightness in them as they meet Steve’s own. He can see the sweeping lashes that kiss in the corner, the strong line of his nose.

The curve of Eddie’s bottom lip and the blister in the middle of it, chewed too frequently, pinker than his lips. He sees the faintest of freckles, hidden in his hairline, and—

— he sees the exact moment Eddie clocks the glasses.

Because Eddie stops, midway through the door, full-body stutters and then just halts. The door he'd pulled open swings and hits him in the back.

Right. There's a neon-bright sign from the universe that Steve does, in fact, look as stupid as he feared. Embarrassment wells up inside him, hot and itchy.

Steve whips the glasses off so fast they hit the counter and bounce over, onto the ground.

"Jeez!" Robin jumps, for which Steve can't blame her for considering both he and Eddie made two loud noises in the space of roughly two seconds. She looks over her shoulder to see Eddie's frozen figure and mutters, "Oh, I'm clocking in." Then disappears out the back.

Steve watches her go, already missing the clarity of his glasses but hell if he's putting them back on. Not after that god-awful reaction. They can get trod on by customers for all he cares.

God, okay, so maybe that's an overreaction (those things are expensive) but also, this was the first test in trying them out in public.

Look, Robin's obviously his best-friend but shit, he was hoping she wasn't straight up lying to him telling him they looked good.

How did this turn into 13-year-old Steve's exact nightmare?

Eddie only seems to realise he's still stuck in place when the chime of the door bell sounds once again, alerting Steve of his presence—as if he could ignore that reaction coming in.

Well, at least it was an honest reaction.

How much were contacts again?

Steve pushes back from the counter with a sigh, beginning to head round to retrieve the glasses from the floor. Except, the movement seems to kickstart Eddie and he scrambles forward so that when Steve straightens up, glasses in hand, Eddie's right before him.

Brown eyes wide. Expression... serious?

"You didn't tell me you wore glasses." Eddie says. He sounds almost breathless.

"Yeah, well, not anymore." Steve replies dryly, heading back around the counter.

Eddie tracks him as he goes, looking almost devastated at what he's hearing. He stumbles in closer, palms pressing against the counter, and leans forward as Steve retrieves the case.

"What do you mean? What do you mean not anymore?"

He sounds a little panicked now.

Steve levels him with a flat stare. "C'mon man, I know what a bad reaction looks like when I see one—"

But Eddie's shaking his head furiously, hands flying as he does everything to signal the word no. "Nope, no you do not. That— nuh uh. Will you put them on again? Please?"

"No way!"

"Steve, I promise you that was not a bad reaction. That was- was-" Eddie stammers for the right words before pivoting. "Can you just put them on again? Please put them on again?"

It's the genuineness in Eddie's tone that actually gets Steve to pause. He glances down at the glasses in his hand, hovering midway to the case, and then back up to Eddie.

Is this some elaborate way to make fun of him? No, Eddie wouldn't. But then what?

The pause is long enough for Eddie to spring into action and he slowly reaches out, heading for the glasses in Steve's hands. Eyeing him hesitantly, Steve reluctantly lets him take them from him, unfolding them with his ringed fingers.

Then, he holds them out and up. Through the lenses, he can see the detail of Eddie's face once more and he swallows. His fingertips brush Eddie's as he takes them and slides them back onto his face.

It takes another blink to get used to the change and in this time, Steve notices, Eddie has managed to turn a wonderful shade of pink.

Steve can see it in much better detail than usual as well, can track how it seems to crawl up his neck. He bets the tips of Eddie's ears are red too, hidden amongst his wild curls. He's blushing. He's blushing?

And he's smiling too, this maddening curl to his lips, as he drinks in Steve and his new glasses with a hungry gaze that darts all over his face.

Man, Steve thinks absently, using the moment of quiet to examine all those new details of Eddie's face, how long has Eddie been pretty?

Then Eddie huffs a disbelieving laugh and Steve's stomach drops.

It must show on his face because instantly Eddie's hands are up, waving away the thought in Steve's head. "No, no, no! Not bad! Just... Jesus Christ," He mutters the last part into his shoulder, his face turned away for a moment.

"I just actually didn't think it was, uh," He coughs. "Like, possible for you to get any hotter."

“What?” Steve says.

That's what that reaction was? Something fizzles inside him, suddenly feeling pleased as punch.

“What?” Eddie parrots.

The pink in his face has dipped closer to crimson and if it keeps going that way, Steve reckons he could roast marshmallows over it.

Steve shifts on his feet, reaching up and running a nervous hand through his hair. Sure, he said wanted attention but this is something new, something different. He's not sure if he likes it just yet.

Eddie watches the motion, wide eyes glued to his hand, and when he catches Steve's questioning gaze through his glasses, he does a full 180 turn away from the counter.

"Oh my god, I'm so gay," He mutters, in a breath that Steve probably wasn't supposed to hear.

Steve's eyebrows raise. It sounds like... and he could be wrong here, but it sounds like Eddie likes his new glasses. Very much so.

And that makes Steve feel... good. Really good. Top of his game, one tally in the You Rule side of the board, good.

Eddie turns back and fixes a smile that Steve is sure isn't supposed to look that crazy. Steve reaches up and nudges the glasses further up his nose with his knuckle idly.

"So," Steve says, the uncertainty in his voice not false. "You don't think they look... bad?"

"Nope," Eddie squeaks out.

His smile has gotten a little more deranged. Then, in one big breath he says, "Tell Robin she betrayed me and I'll see you later-bye!" and peels out of the Family Video, the door-chime announcing his departure.

Robin treads out from the back-room, her Family Video vest on now and she surveys the store as she walks. Upon finding only Steve, her brows wrinkle together.

"Where'd Eddie go?"

Steve shrugs. "Dunno. Left in a hurry. Told me to tell you that you betrayed him or somethin'." He makes quotation marks with his fingers.

Robin frowns harder at that, her puzzling face on. A moment later, it melds away into a deviousness that means Steve instantly knows he's missing out on some inside joke. Especially when Robin starts to cackle, laughing so much that she has to hide a snort in her palm.

"What?" Steve all but pouts. "What is it? Tell me."

Robin, still laughing, snags the returns trolley and begins to wander backward. "Trust me, Steve. You'll want to figure this one out on your own. Either way, I think you should wear your glasses around Eddie again. Preferably while I'm there to watch."

She wiggles her brows as she disappears around an aisle, still wandering backward. Steve hears the moment she bumps into a shelf and snickers at her responding ow!

He turns back to the computer and settles in the seat, nudging the glasses up his nose once more. Huh. So Eddie likes the glasses. Maybe they weren't so bad.

And if Steve got to see that blush again, in glorious good-vision detail? Then that wouldn't be so bad either.

[lacelottie]

art plotting on you (he’s so girlie).

art who.. first saw you in the crowd at one of his stanford matches. tashi brought you along after the two of you bonded over being the only two intelligent people in your philosophy lecture and decided to hang out outside of class. he nearly choked on his water when his gaze flickered over the crowd and caught you during his break between sets. you had to have been the most gorgeous thing he had ever seen. the way your hair framed your face? the way the sun made your skin glow? your laugh? he was sure he was a goner when he started to look around for cupid and where she could’ve shot that damn arrow from to make him fall this hard.

art who.. lost his match, naturally, as he was too busy catching glimpses of you and not focused enough on the rally between him and mr. who cares from notre dame. both you and tashi came down to congratulate him on a game well (poorly) played and so tashi could properly introduce the two of you.

art who.. felt like he was in a trance the moment he heard your voice. the way you said your name. he stared at you like an idiot and could only hope that blistering california sun would cover up the fact that your hand in his was the cause of the flush working its way up his body.

art who.. studied tashi’s calendar, memorizing when you both had class and ate lunch together so that he could conveniently get lunch around the same time and sit with you both. you welcomed him with open arms, wanting to know more about him and possibly be friends since you didn’t have many on campus. but tashi saw through his attempts, knowing that he was acting the same way with you that he was with her back when patrick and tashi had started dating.

art who.. started to catch you around campus, picking up small conversations with you whenever he could and remembering every detail that you’d share. he damn near wrote down every fact he knew about you in his notes, from you mother being sick to that one time you slipped down the stairs in school, making sure to go over them every time he left the dorm in hopes of finding and striking up a conversation with you.

art who.. made patrick practically hate you without even knowing you because he talked about you so much. cutting him off after his fifteen minute long rants about you with “dude, seriously? just ask her out already. or stop fucking talking about her.”

art who.. practically avoided you for a week out of anxiety while he pestered tashi constantly to help him come up with the perfect date idea. when you noticed his absence in what would be your everyday run ins, you consulted tashi, wondering if there was anything you had done to offend him. art nearly cried when tashi reported back to him that you thought you had scared him away, deciding to rush his plan and ask you that friday instead of a few weeks ahead.

art who.. practically cornered you in front of your dorm building, clearly out of breath after running around campus to try and find you. “i’m— you didn’t scare me away,” he started, his face beet red as he tried to catch his breath. “i’m just an idiot. i really— fuck.” he turned away for a moment, looking away from your stunned expression of confusion as he clenched onto the tulips he bought for you, remembering they were your favorite flower. he eventually got his thoughts together, turning around once more and looking at you with a nervous smile on his face as he finally confessed his feelings and asked you on a date, holding out the bouquet for you to take.

art who.. was genuinely shocked when you had accepted the flowers and his ask for a date, reciprocating his feelings with a smile. the flush that he had just gotten rid of creeping right back up his neck, smiling and nodding like an idiot as you invited him into your dorm building to hang out in the lounge together. he had to remind himself to thank tashi for practically interviewing you while he stayed away to (hopefully, no— successfully) make you his.

this is just my mind rambling and me typing it down at random but thank you for 50 followers <3 halfway to 100 i 🫀you all !!!!!!

[invincidick]

💗I'll be good💗

18+

Mark Grayson x F!Reader

Summary: PATHETIC MARK GRAYSON

Word count: 1.3k

Tags: Smut, mlw, Male Sub, Teasing, Edging, Hand jobs, aftercare

You and mark hadn't had sex in weeks.

That was perfectly okay with you, in fact you hadn't even realized until he was barging in through the window unannounced, stumbling over himself before falling onto your bed. He was sprawled out on your mattress, dick straining against his pants, he wasted no time and quickly began begging for you to touch him.

"Really Grayson?" you grinned, eyes raking over his large frame, suddenly not as intimidating when he's desperately begging you to let him cum.

"Please-" he whined out, hips bucking upwards against nothing in frustration at the lack of attention.

"I haven't- I haven't came in weeks." He paused, looking away as he spoke again. "You said I wasn't allowed to- do it without you." he managed to mumble out, his face practically red at this point.

"Was not being able to cum for a few weeks really that agonizing for you?" you strode towards him as you spoke, stopping in front of him to run a hand up his thigh, his leg jerking back at the sudden contact.

His head fell back against the mattress and he closed his eyes, anticipating your touch.

Except it never came.

He slowly opened his eyes to see that you had actually gone back to doing something at your desk, leaving him alone on your bed, painfully hard.

Confused, he sat up, calling out your name questionably, as you continued ignoring him, typing away at something on your computer.

Taken aback by your sudden change in demeanor, he got up and walked over to you, awkwardly standing beside you like a lost puppy. Unsure of what to do, he hoped you would eventually notice and take charge, but you didn't.

"I-" he began before you cut him off sharply "Yes?" you asked, not bothering to even glance in his direction. "Please?" he pleaded, frustration growing evident in his tone, assuming you'd understand what he was asking for. You once again took no notice in his cry for attention.

For a moment you're about to give in, thinking you've pushed him too far, but then he's kneeling beneath you, eyes begging you to touch him as you met his gaze.

He was desperate for you.

His arm reached for you, hand grasping at your knee, turning you towards him in your chair, as he rested his cheek on your other knee.

"I'll do anything you want, just please-, please touch me- I need you." he whined, his body ached as he reached his limit, cock twitching against the confines of his jeans.

You grin, something sadistic behind your eyes as your foot raises to press against his crotch.

He's immediately curling into himself, head dipping down, as moans spill out from his mouth, one arm shooting out to grip your ankle as it pushes against him.

Your toes firmly on the bulge in his pants and you've already got him whimpering. "T-Thank you" he manages to say between heavy breaths.

The little relief he did get was quickly overshadowed by your relentless need to tease him, because before he knew it you had pulled your foot away, not bothering to let him finish.

He groaned at the loss of contact, eyes half lidded and clouded with pleasure. Frustrated, he resigned to lie on his back against the cold floor to try ground himself, but then your foot was back, pressing against his length.

You continued, scrolling mindlessly on your phone throughout everything, as he writhed on the floor beneath your foot. Every time he started to calm down you would start to tease him again to keep him hard. You watched him fall apart a bit more each time you pulled away, loving the defeated noises it pulled out of him.

After just a few hours mark was a moaning incoherent mess, tears staining his face, precum soaking through his jeans, he was practically running a fever by human standards.

He kept begging for you to let him cum, slurring his words, chest heaving as the ache in his dick grew absolutely excruciating, not being able to focus on anything else.

He was a mess.

It drove you crazy.

You couldn't hold yourself back anymore and got up from your chair, walking over to your bed and sitting down.

He looked up at you, exhausted, brows furrowed, as he took in shallow breaths.

"Do you wanna cum?" you asked innocently. His eyes light up and he practically jerks himself off the floor as he speaks "Yes- please" stumbling towards you and onto your soft bed.

"Are you gonna be good?" He's shaking with excitement as you speak, quickly stammering out a reply. "Yes, I promise, I'll be good- I'll be so good- please."

He's hardly managing to hold himself upright, as you press a soft hand against his chest, forcing him to lie back against your blankets, resting his weight on his forearms.

You reach down to undo his jeans and his breath hitches in his throat, eyes slamming shut. You smirk, slowly pulling his jeans down just enough to slide his stiff dick out from his boxers. Your slender fingers wrap around his length and his back arches.

"Ah- fuck-" he whines out from the sudden contact. His brows knitted together with a mix of pain and ecstasy, embarrassed he reaches one arm up to lay across his eyes, shielding his face from your view as best he could.

You start to stroke your hand up and down his length, the pads of your fingers delicately sliding across each vein, enjoying the way his cock would twitch against the feeling.

Instinctively, his hips try their best to keep up, attempting to thrust up into each stroke. His other hand gripping the sheets as you slide a soft thumb across his tip, collecting a drop of precum and spreading it down his cock.

"Mmm-" he moaned, struggling against you, his body starts to shy away from your hand, trying to escape the unbearable assault of pleasure on his nerves. You notice and your other hand immediately catches his hip, pinning him down as he twitched .

"Mm-ah- no" he hiccuped "I can't-" he begged, tears streaming down his face, his breath heavy and hot as you continued your brutal pace.

"It's- too much-" more precum flowing out of him as he cried. He raised his foot, placing it on the bed, attempting to get any leverage to break loose from your ruthless grip on him. Your hand followed after him, speeding up it's pace as his whimpers got louder.

He whined, hips stuttering as he came into your hand, you worked him through it as he kept leaking more. It took him an entire minute before he was able to form a full sentence again, and you finally allowed him a break from the relentless teasing.

You brushed a tender hand through his hair as his breathing began to slow, relaxing against your touch. You got up to get a wash cloth to help clean up the mess, you helped him out of his jeans as you wiped him down.

"Oh you don't have to-" he tried to speak before you cut him off, "I want to" was all you said as you smiled down at him. You made him feel so cared for, he couldn't help himself from smiling back, he sat up lips meeting yours in a kiss as you lifted a hand to gently cradle his cheek.

You broke the kiss, standing up to strip down, his face flushing as you laid down beside him adjusting beneath the blankets. When you were both settled in he turned towards you arms snaking around your waist, holding you tightly against his chest.

"I'm so happy that i get to be with you." he spoke, his voice full of genuine love. "Me too, Mark" you said, as he held you softly in his arms, you both slowly drifting to sleep.

[soapysoapysoapysoapy]

Tactical Porn | Soap x TF141!Reader

The pub wasn’t packed, but it buzzed with the low thrum of end-of-mission tension finally loosening its grip. You were leaned against the corner of the booth, half a drink too deep, cheeks a little warm, boots scuffed and muddy under the table. Ghost sat across from you nursing a dark ale, Price was at the bar charming the poor bartender for the fourth time that night, and Gaz was telling a story with too many hand gestures and not enough point.

And then—he walked in.

Soap.

Freshly showered, but still wearing his tactical pants, boots laced up tight, black tee stretched across his chest like it was trying to hang on for dear life. Dog tags clinked softly against his chest as he slung his bag down, arm flexing with the movement.

He didn’t notice you watching. Not yet. He was talking to someone from another squad, smiling wide, that same damn smile he used after blowing something up and getting away with it.

You stared. Shamelessly.

“I mean… Jesus Christ,” you mumbled.

Gaz leaned a little closer. “What’s that?”

You blinked, realizing you’d said it out loud. But it was too late now—your drunk mouth was running. Full speed.

“I just don’t get how he exists, you know? Like—how is that man real? Look at his arms. His arms, Gaz.”

Ghost raised a brow, amused. “You alright there, sunshine?”

You waved your hand dismissively, laughing. “I’m just saying! It’s criminal. He’s got that... older guy confidence. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing and how you like it—probably doesn’t even have to try.”

Gaz nearly choked on his drink. “Bloody hell, you’re in deep.”

You nodded solemnly. “You ever seen him disarm a bomb? It’s porn. Tactical porn.”

“I’m regretting this conversation,” Ghost muttered, though his eyes were definitely smiling under that mask.

And then, as if summoned by the sheer weight of your thirst, Soap turned. Eyes scanned the room and locked right on you. His smile curled into something sharper, something knowing. He raised a brow.

You went very still.

“Oh my god,” you whispered. “He definitely heard me.”

Gaz snorted. “He didn’t have to. You’re practically drooling.”

Soap started toward your table, slow and loose, and you suddenly remembered how to panic.

“I hate everyone here,” you muttered under your breath.

“You love it,” Ghost replied.

Soap reached the table, gaze flicking from Gaz to Ghost, and then settling on you. He leaned down, bracing one hand on the back of your seat, voice low and amused.

“Somethin’ you wanted to say to me, bonnie?”

Your mouth went dry. Heat crept up your neck.

“I—uh… I like your shirt?”

Smooth. Nailed it.

He just smirked, voice like velvet and mischief. “That right? Thought I heard something about my arms.”

You buried your face in your hands as the guys lost it around you. Ghost let out an unholy wheeze. Gaz was doubled over.

Soap leaned in even closer, lips brushing your ear. “Keep talkin’ like that, and I’ll give you somethin’ better to look at later.”

He pulled away with a wink and walked off, leaving you red-faced and speechless, the table roaring with laughter.

You were never drinking around the Task Force again.

The barracks were quiet. Most of the squad was still out drinking, laughing off adrenaline and bruises. But you had ducked out early—blaming your headache, or maybe your pride.

You’d hoped he’d forget. You’d prayed he hadn’t heard you go on and on about his arms, his older-guy confidence, the way he disarms bombs like he’s undressing someone. But Soap wasn’t the type to let something like that slide.

You were halfway through changing—jacket off, shirt tugged up over your ribs—when you heard the door creak open.

You froze.

"Didn’t mean to interrupt,” came that familiar voice—low, lilting, amused.

You yanked your shirt back down and turned, heart hammering. Soap leaned in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, hands in his pockets, that smirk already locked and loaded.

“Johnny—”

He stepped inside, closed the door behind him. “No need to get shy now, bonnie. You had plenty to say earlier.”

You crossed your arms, trying to fight the heat crawling up your throat. “I was drunk.”

He tilted his head. “Drunk enough to say the truth.”

You didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

Soap took a slow step forward, then another, until he was right in front of you. His eyes dropped, dragging over your face, your parted lips, the rise and fall of your chest.

“You said I look like I know exactly how you like it,” he murmured.

You swallowed hard. “I didn’t mean it.”

He grinned. “Aye, but you do wonder.”

You opened your mouth to snap back—deny it, laugh it off, something—but he leaned down and kissed you. It wasn’t soft. It was precise. Confident. Just like you imagined. His hand found your jaw, thumb brushing your cheek as he angled your head and deepened the kiss until your knees gave just a little.

When he finally pulled back, your lips were swollen, breath uneven.

“I was gonna wait,” he said quietly. “Figure you might get nervous. Might think I’m just older and lookin’ for fun.”

You blinked up at him. “Aren’t you?”

His grin turned dangerous. “No. I’ve had fun. What I want now’s a little more than that.”

Your heart flipped, fast and stupid.

He stepped back, letting you breathe, eyes dragging down your frame again—just long enough to make your skin burn.

“Come find me when you stop pretending you don’t want it,” he said, heading for the door. “And next time, love, don’t whisper it in a pub. Say it to me.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

And you just stood there—flushed, breathless, and already aching to chase him down.

[sturniolohouse]

Warm - M.S.

a/n: hiiii, so this has been in the drafts for a while... finally decided to post it. enjoy !! :)

summary: for the first time as a couple, reader and matt attend wedding together, leading to deeper talks about their future... bf!matt

warnings ! : none just cute shit

word count: 1.7k

song: warm - ariana grande

cause im cool, on my own. but it's warmer in your arms

“We should get married here,” I think out loud, my voice getting lost in the crisp January breeze.

I lean over the railing, gazing at the skyline stretched across and reflected on the dark lake. The mountains in the distance stand tall and stark against the night. The stars shine so brightly in New England, each one just as breathtaking as the next.

New England always has a way of taking my breath away, no matter how many times I’ve been here.

The cold air fills my lungs, but the alcohol running through my system keeps me warm enough to ignore it.

From inside, you can still hear the muffled laughter and the distant bass of music spill out through the double paned glass doors, a reminder that we’ve stepped away from the party. But out here, it’s just us and the brisk winter night.

Matt chuckles softly under his breath behind me in response, the sound faint as another brutal gust of wind whips past my ears and through my hair. Goosebumps rise along my neck and exposed arms, but I stay wrapped up in my daydream.

“Alright, kid. Come on, it’s freezing out here,” Matt says, his voice lighthearted as he rubs his hands together vigorously. 

“Like a fall wedding… when all the leaves turn,” I murmur, still lost in thought.

I hear a deep sigh and some silence falls again, which brings me back to reality. 

I turn to Matt, finding him watching me intently; his head tilted slightly, a crooked smile tugging at the corner of his lips, his eyes ever so glossy– most likely from the wind. 

His chin points towards me, before shaking his head. “You’re drunk.” he finally states, all while biting back a grin.

My jaw drops in mock offense, and his shoulders shake as he giggles at my reaction. His eyes squeeze shut and he looks away momentarily to hide his smile once more, but the crease on the corner of his mouth deepens.

“I’m not drunk, Matt. I’m serious,” I insist, crossing my arms and standing my ground.

I’m really not. My last drink was an hour ago, and I’ve only had two drinks the entire night– three if you’re counting the glass of champagne from the toast at dinner.

I can tell he’s only teasing me, so I let it go, allowing my eyes to wander down his lanky frame instead. 

The outdoor stone fire pit crackles beside him, illuminating his eyes and casting a warm glow along the right side of his face. His hair is tousled, a few strands sticking to his forehead from the sweat we worked up dancing, cheeks flushed from the cold air– evident by the way his breath clouds in front of his face. His hands are shoved deep in his pant pockets, his shoulders hunch against the chill as he shifts his weight to try to keep warm.

Butterflies swarm my belly and I feel myself warm up simply from taking in his appearance alone.

"Have I told you how hot you look in a suit?" I ask, my gaze dragging over him shamelessly– the silhouette of his shoulders, the broadness the jacket gives him. Down to his pants, where they hug his legs just right, making them look even longer.

I glance back at his face just as he smirks, shaking his head and looking away with a hint of bashfulness before recovering quickly.

He licks his lips, giving me a curt nod. "Yeah, I think you've mentioned it a few times tonight, sweetheart," he says.

The urge to be closer to him consumes me, like a magnet pulling me in, needing the familiar comfort of his touch.

He rocks back on his heels, his teeth chattering slightly as I slowly step toward him. When I reach him, my hands slip beneath his suit jacket, arms wrapping around his middle. I hum softly, breathing him in, soaking up the warmth radiating from his body before tilting my head up to meet his gaze, my heavy lids blinking slowly. 

A content smile tugs at my lips as I lean up, pressing a soft kiss to his chin, then his jaw. The scent of his aftershave lingers, sending another wave of goosebumps down my arms.

He looks down at me as I pull away, his hands still in his pockets, but his body instinctively leans in to mine. Molding into me. His eyes soften as they flit across my face and a smirk tugs at the corner of his lips. 

“I can’t believe there’s not more people out here, it’s stunning,” I motion to our surroundings and the scene behind me. 

“Maybe because it’s negative 18 degrees out here,” He raises his brows and I roll my eyes, pinching his side. 

He jumps, his body jolting against mine as he yelps but I still keep him close. I laugh maniacally and he barely hesitates before pulling a hand from his pocket, just enough to pinch me back on my ass.

“Ow! Okay, okay– truce,” I surrender, wincing but squirm no further from his warmth.

“Yeah, you know better than to pinch me, you little fuckin’ crab,” he says playfully through his teeth, failing to keep a straight face as I throw my head back laughing.

His lips twitch, betraying the smirk he’s fighting before he places a hand on the small of my back, keeping me steady.

“You’re such an idiot,” I say through giggles, wiping at my eyes—only to collapse against his chest in another fit of laughter.

“Alright, alright,” he grits out, half-amused, half-exasperated, shifting to keep us upright. “You’re gonna take me down with you,” he exaggerates. 

I lift my head, trying to compose myself, but before I can wipe at my face again, he beats me to it, brushing my tears away with his thumb. “You’re a mess, kid,” 

“You just make me happy,” I say without even thinking. It slips out effortlessly because with him, it’s so easy to speak my mind.

His eyes blink once, then twice, like the words catch him off guard. He looks away for a moment, his cheeks flushing a deeper pink. He meets my gaze again, something softer settling in his expression.

“You wanna tell me more about that wedding?” His tigterns his arms around my back. 

My breath gets caught in my throat and now, I’m the silent one. 

“What? You were the one rambling about this fall wedding– go on. I’m listening, tell me more.” He sweeps my hair out of my face with his hands, cradling my head in his hands. 

His attention was all on me. 

“Well, it’d be a small ceremony," I start, my voice soft but certain. "Just the people who matter the most."

“Loving what I’m hearing so far, go on,” he hums encouragingly.

His thumbs absentmindedly brushing against my jaw.

"I want it to be here– well, not here-here. But New England," I clarify, watching for his reaction. "I know how much this place means to you. It would make me really happy to have it here."

His eyes flicker between mine as something soft settles in his expression, like he’s letting himself picture it.

"Early fall would be a good time of year," I continue, my voice turning a little dreamy. "Not too hot, not too cold."

“Best season, so again, I’m loving what I’m hearing.” 

I let out a small breath of laughter, shaking my head. "You act like I’m pitching you a business proposal."

His smirk grows, a teasing glint in his eye. "Hey, it’s a big decision. Gotta make sure I’m on board with it all."

I roll my eyes, but I can’t help the way my stomach flips when his hands move back down, locking behind my back. He tugs me just a little closer, closing the space between us, and leans in– his face inches from mine.

His voice drops, softer now, low enough that it feels like a secret meant just for me.

"Okay, okay. But, you know in my head, you’re already my wife. A party to celebrate that would just be the cherry on top." He murmurs into the side of my face. 

I’m not sure why, but my breath catches and my heart skips a beat. My fingers instinctively tighten around the lapels of his suit jacket as I pull back to look between his eyes, his gaze unwavering.

We joke about it all the time, how we act like an old married couple, we’ve lied to servers about celebrating our first year wedding anniversary just for free dessert.

But, I think it was the way he said it so casually, so sure.  

Another flood of warmth runs through me when I see how serious he’s being. 

"Matt," I murmured speechless, my heart hammering against my ribs.

He smirks, tilting his head slightly. "What? Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true. You’re it for me, kid."

I don’t even hesitate to throw my arms around his shoulders, hiding my face into the crook of his neck. His hands find my hips, holding me gently as he rocks us side to side. Our heartbeats moving in sync– recognizing one another, like they’ve known each other in every lifetime.

I hear the door sliding open before the music from inside floods into the air and pulls us out of our moment. 

“Alright, lovebirds, get back inside. They’re serving the cake now—holy fuck, it’s cold,” Nick calls out, hugging his arms around himself dramatically.

Matt groans, his forehead tipping against mine. “There goes the peace.” 

I giggle uncontrollably, catching Nick’s eye over Matt’s shoulder. Matt doesn’t even acknowledge him, just buries his face into my neck, still wrapped around me like I’m his human shield. 

“We’ll be right there, Nick,” I say, rubbing Matt’s back absentmindedly.

Nick shakes his head in disbelief. “You two are nuts. I think I actually just caught pneumonia from being out here for thirty seconds.”

He bolts back inside, muttering under his breath, and I can’t help but laugh as the door slides shut behind him.

Matt lifts his head and breathes in deep, eyes closed like he’s mentally preparing to reenter the chaos.

I squeeze his hand gently, watching the way his shoulders rise and fall with that slow, dramatic exhale.

“Ready?” I ask, my voice soft but teasing.

He cracks one eye open at me. “No. But… cake awaits.”

I grin. “Cake does await.” I lean up and peck the corner of his mouth, already reaching for his hand to pull him toward the door.

But before I can take a step, he pulls me right back against him.

His hands cup my face, and he kisses me, slow and tender. The kind of kiss that makes your head spin and your stomach flip. The kind that lingers, even after it’s over.

When he finally pulls back, breathing against me, his voice is barely above a whisper.

“Okay. Now, I’m ready.”

[norristrii]

10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU.

Summer at the Leclercs’ was always easy—sun, sea, and your best friend Arthur by your side. But now Charles is back, older, bolder, and looking at you like you’re not a kid anymore. And suddenly, everything feels new, exciting, and a little dangerous.

pairing. Charles Leclerc x fem! reader. (bonus: platonic! Arthur Leclerc x fem! reader)

warnings. 11,6k words, best friend’s brother! charles (based on this post), summer romance, angst, fluff, mean! charles kinda, drinking alcohol, 3 years age gap, implied timeskips, badly proofread (sorry was too lazy).

YOU GREW UP IN MONACO, running barefoot through the streets and spending almost every day with Arthur Leclerc. He was your best friend, your partner in crime. The two of you were always getting into trouble, laughing too loud, and making every summer feel like a movie.

Arthur’s house became your second home. You knew every room, every smell, every sunlit corner of it.

And then there was Charles.

Arthur’s older brother. He was taller, moodier, and always seemed annoyed when he had to watch over you. He didn’t like missing out on plans because of “the kids,” and he never let you forget it.

There were a lot of things you hated about Charles Leclerc.

When you grew up, things changed. You moved away, found new streets to run on, new friends to laugh with. But you never lost touch with Arthur. Not really. There were messages, blurry video calls, bad jokes that still made you smile.

Still, your favorite part of the year was always summer.

Because every summer, you came back. Back to the sun, the sea, and the little town that still felt like yours. Back to the Leclercs’ house—your second home, even now.

This year, you were back again. The air smells the same, the sea still sparkles the way you remembered, and your heart raced faster than it should.

Because you were about to find out if you still hate all those things about Charles Leclerc.

─── 1: I HATE HOW YOU STILL CALL ME KID.

You were back. Finally.

The air smelled just as you remembered—salt from the Mediterranean curling into every breath, sunlight warming the pavement, and that familiar scent of citrus and expensive perfume that always clung to the Leclerc villa like a secret. It was the smell of summer, of comfort, of the place that shaped you. Coming home didn’t feel like going back. It felt like waking up.

“I missed you so much, Y/n,” Arthur said, his hand wrapped around the handle of your suitcase as he hoisted it up the stone steps like it weighed nothing. His voice was the same—familiar and easy. “Everyone’s already here. Even Charles,” he added casually, like the mention of his older brother didn’t land in your chest like a stone skipping across still water.

You hadn't seen Charles in five years.

You were nineteen the last time you saw him. Half-baked plans, scraped ambitions, and a heart still soft around the edges. You came back every summer since, but not once had his car pulled into the drive, not once had his voice echoed down the hallway. He was too busy chasing the dream you'd heard him whisper about when he thought no one was listening—Ferrari, podiums, the roar of the track.

Now you were twenty-four. You had your own life, your own routine, your own apartment with a loose drawer handle you never fixed. You had grown into a version of yourself that didn’t chase things anymore. But something about being here—this house, this moment, that name—unraveled you slightly. Softened edges you’d carefully carved out.

“Go wait on the terrace, I’ll be there in a sec,” Arthur said, nodding toward the tall glass doors that framed the golden light spilling onto the patio. His tone was casual, but your pulse wasn’t. You offered him a small smile—tight-lipped, trying to look like your heart wasn’t suddenly echoing in your ears—and stepped forward, the wheels of your suitcase clicking softly on the stone as you walked away..

The door gave easily, and as you stepped out, the familiar scent hit you like it had been waiting: warm salt air, blooming jasmine, sunscreen, and sea breeze rolling straight off the Mediterranean. Everything about it said home.

And then you saw him.

A figure stood at the far end of the terrace, lean frame silhouetted against the view of Monaco—postcard-perfect and glittering in the late afternoon sun. He hadn’t heard you at first, too caught in whatever thoughts the horizon was pulling from him. But the sound of the door clicking shut behind you must’ve given you away, because he shifted, turned.

Charles.

His name collided with your heartbeat.

He looked—different. Not unrecognizable, but older. Sharper around the edges. There was a mustache now, annoyingly well-suited to the shape of his face. His hair was longer, messier, starting to brush the tops of his ears like he didn’t care much for styling anymore. He wore a plain white T-shirt, one hand tucked into his back pocket like he had all the time in the world.

But the eyes—those were the same. Steady, unreadable, a shade too amused for your liking as they landed on you.

"Kid’s back in town?” he said, and the sound of his voice nearly tripped your step.

It was deeper than you remembered. Rougher. And somehow, that one line managed to undo five years of growing up.

You stiffened, heat creeping up the back of your neck. Of course he’d go straight for that.

“I’m twenty-four, actually,” you replied, sharper than intended. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

His eyes skimmed over you then—slowly, thoughtfully—not with the arrogance you braced for, but with something quieter. He was taking you in, cataloging the details: your longer hair, your steadier voice, the way you didn’t shrink beneath his gaze this time.

“Yeah,” he said finally, voice low and lazy. “I see that.”

Then, without missing a beat: “But for me, still a kid.”

He said it so easily. Like it wasn’t a knife disguised as a tease.

Like it didn’t sting the way it always had.

And still, your breath hitched. You hated that. You hated how much that one word could pull you backward. How five years dissolved into nothing the second he opened his mouth.

Worse, you hated that a part of you wasn’t sure whether it was anger or something else rising in your chest. Something more dangerous. Something like longing.

Your voice came out before you could stop it, sharper than intended, laced with something that had been sitting in your chest for too long. “Why did you disappear for five summers? And not even say anything?”

The words surprised even you, but the ache behind them was real. It had always hurt when he teased you—but it hurt just as much when he simply vanished.

Charles shifted, his shoulders tightening ever so slightly. “I was working.”

You let out a dry laugh, folding your arms. “Right. Living your dream. Must’ve been exhausting.”

His gaze flicked to you, more tired than annoyed. “It wasn’t as easy as it looked. We struggled for a few seasons—midfield car, no podiums. It wasn’t all champagne and celebrations.”

You shrugged, tone cool. “I wouldn’t know. I was busy working too.”

He tilted his head, studying you like he hadn’t expected that answer. But you didn’t flinch.

Charles didn’t answer right away. He just kept looking at you—not glancing, not brushing you off the way he used to. It was the kind of look that pulled threads loose. Like he was comparing memories with reality and realizing they didn’t quite match anymore.

The quiet stretched, and you felt it settle heavy in your chest.

Your gaze dropped to the terracotta tiles, their pattern suddenly fascinating. Anything to ground yourself. “You could’ve said something,” you murmured, softer now, the fight draining from your voice. “Even just a message.”

He exhaled slowly, raking a hand through his hair, and for the first time he looked like he might feel it too. The absence. The distance. The weight of what wasn’t said.

“Yeah,” he said, voice low. “I know.”

Before the moment could tilt too far, Arthur’s voice cut through the haze.

He appeared behind you, all bright energy and innocence, throwing an arm around your shoulder. “So,” he grinned, “how’s the big reunion going?”

You didn’t even look at Charles. Your reply was sharp, dry, and laced with more than a little salt.

“Perfect.”

─── 2: I HATE HOW YOU LOOK AT ME.

The morning sun spilled across the terrace like honey, painting the table in gold and warmth. Plates clinked, cutlery scraped gently against ceramic, and the scent of fresh espresso mingled with ripe melon and toasted bread. You sat across from Charles, barely breathing, trying to pretend you hadn’t noticed the way he kept watching you.

Arthur was in the middle of a story—loud, animated, waving a spoon around for emphasis. “—and I swear, we thought it was our boat. It had the same name, didn’t it? I mean, what are the odds, right? We were halfway into the harbor when this man comes running down the dock yelling in Italian—like actual yelling. Y/n looks at me and goes, ‘Arthur, why is that man pointing at us?’ And then—wait, wait—this is the best part—she hits the throttle!”

His voice was all sunlight and nostalgia, his laughter easy and infectious. Around the table, someone chuckled; someone else swore they remembered it differently. But for you, Arthur’s voice was more like background music—a melody you loved, but couldn’t really hear right now.

Not when Charles was sitting right across from you.

He hadn’t said much. Just sipped his coffee, eyes half-lidded behind sunglasses he didn’t need anymore. But you could feel his gaze burning into your skin. Not teasing, not mocking—something slower. He looked at you like you were something he didn’t expect to find again. Like he was trying to memorize you without letting on.

And you hated it.

You hated how your fork paused in midair when you felt his eyes again. How your skin heated under the weight of it. How every glance felt like a wordless conversation you weren’t ready for.

Arthur was still talking—“…and she’s shouting at me over the wind like, ‘Do you even know how to steer?!’ Like I ever had a chance, Y/n, you were the one pressing buttons like it was Mario Kart—”

But his voice had faded now. The table, the clatter, the laughter—it all blurred behind the silence stretching between you and Charles. The silence said more than Arthur ever could.

Because Charles wasn’t just looking at you.

He was seeing you.

And that terrified you more than anything else.

The second you stood, his eyes followed. Of course they did.

“Sorry—bathroom,” you muttered, not meeting anyone’s gaze as you pushed your chair back. Arthur was too deep into a tale about someone’s disastrous karaoke night to notice, but you could feel Charles watching you leave. You didn’t need to look to know.

The hallway was cooler, quieter. You stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, and exhaled like you hadn’t breathed properly all morning.

You braced your hands against the sink, heart pounding in your ears. You hadn’t expected it to be like this. The staring. The tension. The way his eyes felt like a hand on your skin, pulling something up from the inside that you thought you'd buried years ago.

You looked at yourself in the mirror. Same face. Same mouth. Just… different somehow. You hadn’t changed overnight. But the way he looked at you made it feel like you had.

And you hated that.

You hated that his stare said things he’d never said out loud. You hated how your body responded, like it hadn’t gotten the memo that you were supposed to be over him.

You gripped the edges of the sink one last time, the porcelain cool beneath your fingertips. Your reflection stared back at you, chest still rising and falling too fast, eyes too wide like they’d seen something they weren’t ready for. You'd come in here to breathe—to break whatever invisible thread was pulling taut across the breakfast table. But even behind a closed door, that look had followed you.

You ran your hands under the tap, splashed cool water on your cheeks, and closed your eyes. It helped. Not enough—but just enough to move again.

You dried your hands slowly, counted to five under your breath, and opened the door.

And there he was.

Standing in the hallway like he belonged there—which of course, he did—but to you, in that moment, it felt suffocating. His arms were crossed loosely over his chest, posture relaxed, but his eyes were anything but. Focused. Watchful. Like he’d been waiting.

You stopped short. “Charles!” The name escaped like a reflex, startled and sharp.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t apologize. Just looked at you. That same heavy gaze that you’d run from minutes ago. Quiet. Curious. Too much.

You swallowed hard, throat tight. “Can you stop looking at me like that?”

Still, he said nothing at first. Just tilted his head slightly, eyes never leaving yours.

And then, finally, that voice—low, slow, achingly calm.

“You’ve changed so much, kid.”

─── 3: I HATE HOW YOU ALWAYS WIN.

It took you a while to adjust to the new version of Charles—the older, quieter, more unreadable one. He wasn’t exactly the boy you remembered, and yet… being around him felt frustratingly easy. Too easy. As if no real time had passed at all.

What surprised you most wasn’t how much he’d changed—but how little it mattered.

You, Charles, and Arthur sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the big TV, pillows and half-finished drinks scattered around like evidence of a lazy afternoon. The sun was dipping outside, turning the windows soft gold.

“Loser pays for drinks,” Arthur announced, wiggling his controller like a sword. “No excuses.”

You narrowed your eyes. “You always say that after you’ve had a practice round.”

Charles leaned back slightly, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “That’s because he cheats on the practice round,” he said. His voice was smooth, low. Relaxed in a way that made your skin buzz.

Arthur gasped dramatically. “I do not cheat! I am simply… fast.”

“Fast at losing,” you muttered, smirking as you selected your go-to Mario Kart character.

Your kart was spinning, bananas flying, and your voice rising above the chaos. “You idiot!” you shouted, smacking Arthur on the arm as his character swerved in front of yours, blocking your path on Rainbow Road. “Get out of my way!”

Arthur was already laughing, wheezing through his half-shouted apology. “It was an accident! I swear, I didn’t mean—”

But whatever excuse he was making got drowned out by the sound of Charles erupting into laughter beside you.

Not just the usual chuckle, either—full-on, head-thrown-back, eyes-crinkling kind of laughter. It tumbled out of him, warm and boyish and utterly unguarded.

And then—he leaned into you.

Barely. Just enough for his shoulder to press against yours, solid and warm through the thin cotton of your shirt. He didn't pull away. Didn’t even seem to notice. Or maybe he did, and that was worse.

You froze for a beat.

Just long enough to miss the next turn.

Your kart plummeted off the side of the track.

“Are you serious?” you groaned, eyes wide, “Now you’re in my way!”

But Charles just kept laughing.

And for a moment, you almost did too.

Except now your heart was racing, and it had nothing to do with the game.

You barely had time to recover before another green shell flew across the screen and sent your kart careening into a wall.

“Arthur!” you shrieked. “Are you targeting me on purpose?!”

He doubled over beside you. “I swear I’m not—I’m just chaotic neutral!”

“You’re just chaotic!” you snapped, frantically mashing buttons as your character respawned in 12th place.

“Hey,” Charles cut in, voice smug but smooth, “try staying on the track next time.”

You whipped around, glaring at him. “Try not breathing so loudly. It’s distracting.”

It was complete, unfiltered mayhem. Controllers clicking like mad. Arthur howling. You yelling threats you had no intention of following through on. And Charles—silent but deadly—always three moves ahead, glancing at you from the corner of his eye with that maddening grin he tried to pretend wasn’t there.

When the race ended—Charles in first, of course—you threw your controller onto the rug in mock defeat. “I hate how you always win.”

He leaned back on his hands, eyes glinting. “Then get better.”

Arthur gasped. “Ooooh, the audacity!“

You lunged for a throw pillow and launched it across the room.

It hit Charles square in the chest. He didn’t even flinch—just tossed it right back.

And for the first time in a long time, you forgot to be guarded.

You just laughed.

Arthur had barely finished laughing when another pillow flew through the air—this time from Charles. You ducked, but not fast enough. It clipped your shoulder and sent you twisting, more out of laughter than anything else.

“Oh, you want to play dirty?” you challenged, scrambling for a second cushion.

Charles didn’t answer. He just lunged.

You shrieked, tossing a pillow wildly in his direction, but he dodged with infuriating ease and caught your wrist instead. In the next breath, you were flat on your back on the rug, giggling uncontrollably as Charles loomed over you with a wicked grin.

“Charles—don’t you dare—”

But he did.

His fingers found your ribs and you shrieked again, dissolving into breathless laughter as he tickled you without mercy. Your legs kicked. Your hands flailed. Arthur howled in the background, absolutely no help at all.

“Say you surrender!” Charles laughed, breathless himself now.

“Never!” you gasped, tears in your eyes from laughing so hard.

“You’re stubborn,” he murmured, still grinning, “just like I remember.”

Eventually, you gave up, limp from laughter, panting against the carpet. He stopped tickling, resting back on his heels as he looked down at you, the edges of his smile softening.

Arthur declared something about needing a refill and disappeared into the kitchen, still cackling to himself.

And for a moment, the room was quiet again.

You lay there, hair a mess, cheeks flushed, heart thudding far too fast.

Charles was still watching you—but this time there was no smirk, no teasing. Just a calm, quiet recognition in his eyes. Like something had settled between you.

It felt reckless. Familiar. Like right before a storm, or right before a kiss.

Like summer had finally come home.

Charles shifted beside you, the pillow slipping from his hands as the last echoes of laughter faded into a quieter kind of silence. The kind that settles when the chaos dies down but the feeling lingers—bright and warm and heavy in all the right places.

You were still catching your breath, head tipped back against the couch, hair in every direction, chest rising and falling a little too quickly. He was close. Not in the accidental way. In the way that happens when neither of you decides to move.

You turned your head just slightly, and there he was—watching you again. But not with that sharp, impossible gaze from breakfast. This one was softer. Like he was remembering something and seeing it completely differently this time.

“What,” you whispered, a laugh still stuck in your throat, “you gonna say I’m still a kid after that performance?”

Charles gave a small smile, not the smug one he wore during Mario Kart victories. This one was real. Quiet. Thoughtful. “You’ve got fight in you,” he said softly, almost to himself.

You raised an eyebrow. “I always did.”

“I know,” he said. And the way he said it made your breath stutter again.

Outside, the light shifted into that golden hour glow. The kind that softened every corner and turned even old memories into something cinematic.

Arthur shouted something from the kitchen—something about cocktails and “where’s the damn ice?”—and the moment cracked just slightly, letting a breeze of normalcy back in.

You sat up, brushing your fingers through your hair. “We should probably go help before he burns the house down.”

Charles stood and offered you a hand without a word.

You took it.

─── 4: I HATE HOW YOU MAKE ME LAUGH.

It was far too late for you to be awake. The villa had gone still hours ago, the only sounds outside your window were the gentle lap of waves and the occasional rustle of night wind in the palms. Everyone else was sleeping off wine and laughter, the kind of drowsy contentment that came with salt-soaked skin and sun-kissed shoulders.

But not you.

Sleep refused to come, your thoughts coiled tight beneath your skin. Every shift beneath the sheets only stirred more questions—about him, about tonight, about the way he looked at you like he saw something he wasn’t ready to admit either.

Then came the knock.

Soft. Barely there.

Two polite taps against the wood, like someone trying not to be caught.

Your pulse skipped.

“You up?” Charles’s voice was quiet, almost careful. The kind of careful that made you think he’d been standing there for a minute, hand hovering, debating whether to knock at all.

You blinked at the door. What the hell was he doing here at—what? Two in the morning?

You threw the covers back and padded over, unsure if you were annoyed, curious, or worse—excited.

You cracked the door open just wide enough to peer out. He stood barefoot in the hallway, hoodie slung loose over his frame, curls messy from sleep or maybe indecision. His expression was unreadable. But he was here.

“No,” you said flatly, though the corner of your mouth betrayed you with the ghost of a smirk.

His grin was already trouble the moment it curled up the side of his face. “Wanna go swimming?” he asked, voice hushed like a secret he was daring you to share.

You narrowed your eyes, arms crossed loosely over your sleep shirt. “Now? You want to sneak out? Are we seventeen?”

The roll of your eyes was automatic. But your smile—damn it—gave you away.

He didn’t miss it. “Just like when we were teenagers,” he said, smirking with a warmth that made the hallway feel ten degrees hotter.

You paused. Thought about the cool water, the hush of the waves, the moonlit grin of a boy who knew exactly which part of your brain still belonged to summers past.

“Give me five minutes,” you muttered, already turning to grab your towel.

He nodded once, already turning with that smug, unbothered confidence that somehow hadn’t faded with time. “I’ll be waiting at the dock,” he said over his shoulder, voice low, almost teasing. The hallway swallowed him up, and the air felt warmer for it.

You closed the door and leaned back against it, pulse thrumming just beneath your skin. It was ridiculous. Reckless. Exactly what you weren’t supposed to be doing.

And yet—five minutes later, you were slipping into the hoodie you always stole from him back then, your swimsuit underneath, towel in hand, tiptoeing barefoot down cool stone steps toward the water.

The moon sat high, casting silver ripples across the bay, and the yacht rocked gently against its ropes like it had been holding this secret just for the two of you. Charles was already there, one hand on the railing, waiting. When he saw you, his expression didn’t shift—not really—but something in it softened.

“Nice hoodie,” he said.

You rolled your eyes again, but your mouth twitched. “Still smells like you.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Is that a complaint?”

You ignored him, stepping onto the deck. The sea shimmered like glass all around you, and suddenly everything felt too quiet, too close.

“It looks so cold,” you muttered, tugging the hoodie—his hoodie—over your head. The salty air kissed your bare skin, sharp with night chill, and goosebumps rose instantly along your arms.

You padded to the edge of the yacht, eyes on the water, but you could feel it—him. That unmistakable weight of his gaze trailing over you, pausing like punctuation, drinking in every inch with quiet certainty.

You turned, and your eyes met.

You weren’t sure what you were expecting. A smirk, maybe. A smart remark. But what you found was steadier than all of that. Intent. Like he knew something you didn’t—or maybe just wasn't afraid to admit what you both had stopped pretending not to feel.

And just when your lips parted to say something—anything—

His arms wrapped around your waist.

“What the—Charles!”

But you didn’t get to finish.

He lifted you, fast and without warning, laughter already catching in his chest. You shouted, twisting in his grip, but it was too late. You were airborne—both of you—and then falling.

The world paused.

You weren’t in the water yet, but your stomach had already dropped.

“You absolute asshole!” you yelled, just as the sea swallowed you.

Cold and wild and breath-stealing. You surfaced sputtering, hair slicked back, a curse halfway out of your mouth when he popped up beside you, grinning like the devil.

“You were taking too long,” he said, brushing hair from his eyes

You laughed—harder than you had in weeks. The kind of laugh that left your ribs aching and your voice cracking, tangled somewhere between disbelief and pure, breathless joy. The sea cradled you both in its cool hush, waves rising gently around your shoulders as you swam closer to him, every stroke slow and easy like the night had finally let you go.

“You are such an idiot, Charles,” you managed between gasps, your grin wide and irrepressible as another giggle slipped through. Water beaded along your collarbones, your skin flushed with the thrill of it all—of sneaking out, of salt on your lips, of him.

He floated nearby, treading water with casual grace, that infuriatingly confident smirk still pulling at the corner of his mouth. “You love it,” he said, his voice low and smooth, rippling across the water like a secret.

Maybe you did.

You drifted forward, slow and unhurried, like the water itself had drawn you toward him. It was barely more than a ripple, but the space between you vanished. His hand found your waist again, confident but gentle, fingers steadying you like the water might carry you away if he let go.

You didn’t realize how close you'd come until you were looking directly into his eyes—dark and lit by the shimmer of moonlight, reflecting something quiet but impossible to ignore.

Then his hand rose slowly, fingertips brushing your cheek before pushing a wet strand of hair behind your ear. The contact was featherlight but deliberate. Like he needed an excuse to touch you, and that one moment was all he dared to take. You forgot to breathe.

“You’re driving me insane,” you said, the words slipping out on the edge of a laugh. You meant it to be teasing—sharp, flippant—but the way it caught in your throat gave too much away.

He didn’t respond immediately. Just looked at you like that was exactly the effect he’d been hoping for.

And still—you laughed. Not because it was funny. Because it was safer than silence. Safer than admitting what was happening between the laughter and the splash fights and the way his thumb had drifted from your waist to rest just above your ribs.

You hated that even now, with the ocean holding you both in its quiet cradle, you couldn’t stop smiling. That your body kept reacting like it remembered this version of him—warm, close, daring—before your mind could catch up.

His eyes flicked down, barely a breath, to your mouth. Then back up.

Not cocky. Not assuming. But sure.

Sure that he could kiss you right now.

Sure that you wouldn’t stop him.

He was watching you again—really watching. Like the only thing he could see in this whole endless dark was you.

“Charles…” you started, but you didn’t even know where the sentence was going.

Then—just as your lips parted, just as your eyes flicked down in that barely-there way that meant you could—

A clatter.

Somewhere nearby. Metallic. Sharp.

Your heads whipped toward the source instinctively—a boat hook had slid off the deck railing and clanged against the rail with enough noise to shatter the fragile quiet.

You sucked in a breath. He let out a muttered curse under his.

And then, from the far-off shore, Arthur’s voice carried like a warning flare: “If you two are making out, at least wait ‘til I’m asleep!”

You both blinked. Froze. And then burst into laughter again—real, ridiculous, too-loud laughter that cracked the silence and brought you crashing back to earth.

Charles leaned in, forehead briefly against yours in mock defeat, still chuckling under his breath.

“I swear, he times these things.”

You didn’t move. Just let yourself float there with him, tangled in the could-have-beens and the not-quites.

─── 5: I HATE HOW YOU SAY MY NAME.

It wouldn’t be summer at the Leclercs’ without a chaotic night at your favorite club—the one with sticky floors, neon signs, and exactly zero self-control. The bass vibrated through your bones, sweat-slick bodies packed wall to wall, drinks flowing like Monaco didn’t believe in hangovers.

And, of course, this time you were paying.

So naturally, Charles had been at the bar like it was a personal challenge. Three shots in, he was charming. Five shots in, dangerous. By the seventh, he was gone.

Now he swayed through the crowd with a glazed grin, sunglasses (where had he even found those?) perched crookedly on his nose, mouthing lyrics he didn’t know while dancing in a way that could only be described as... enthusiastic.

You and Arthur had been dancing near him, sharing glances every time he nearly tripped over nothing or saluted the DJ with a full drink in hand.

“Should I take him out?” you asked, leaning close to Arthur so your voice didn’t get swallowed by the bass. Close enough that your breath brushed his ear.

Arthur shrugged without looking too concerned. “Maybe.” Then he turned his head, giving you a far-too-knowing look. “Do you need help?”

You narrowed your eyes, shaking your head with a roll of your own. “No.”

Of course not. You knew Charles’s drunk rhythms better than anyone.

You cut through the crowd and caught his wrist mid-dance, halting him just before he could spin himself directly into a group of strangers. His skin was warm and damp under your fingers, his whole body still moving like the music hadn’t let him go yet.

“Time to go, buddy,” you said, tugging gently.

But Charles just blinked at you, lids heavy, hair sticking to his forehead, and smiled the slowest, most devastating grin. He leaned in—closer than necessary, breath brushing your temple—and mumbled, slurring ever so slightly, “You look so hot when you’re responsible, Y/n.”

You froze. Not because of the words—but because of the way he said them. No teasing lilt. No smugness. Just soft, honest awe. It landed somewhere dangerously deep in your chest, like gravity changed direction for a second.

“Oh god,” you muttered, looking anywhere but at his eyes.

He tilted his head, clearly pleased with your reaction and entirely unaware of the emotional war he’d just started inside you. “What?” he asked, grinning like he'd just won something.

You gritted your teeth and started guiding him toward the exit, trying not to trip on your own thoughts. Outside, the air was cooler, laced with sea breeze and the echo of muffled bass from inside. The cobblestones were uneven beneath your heels, and Charles wobbled dramatically, clinging to your arm like you were the only thing anchoring him.

“I’m fiiine,” he said as you helped him down the steps. “Just... tired. But you’re very pretty.”

“You already said that,” you muttered, but your cheeks betrayed you.

He dropped himself onto the curb like the weight of the night had finally caught up to him, elbows resting on his knees, head slightly bowed. The streetlights cast a soft gold glow over his face, making his flushed cheeks and unfocused eyes look even younger than usual.

You hovered nearby, arms crossed, watching him with a sigh that came from somewhere deeper than just annoyance.

He looked up at you—slow, lazy—his eyes wide and glassy and far too sincere. That kind of drunk honesty that clung to the edges of everything he said.

“You’re so beautiful, Y/n,” he slurred again, voice thick and slow like honey warmed too long.

You rolled your eyes, even as your stomach did a quiet, inconvenient flip. “You’ve already said that, Charles. Twice.”

“I meant it both times,” he said, lifting one hand to gesture vaguely, as if his words needed space to land. “I’d say it a third. I’d say it a hundred. You’re—” He paused, squinting at you, a crooked smile tugging at his lips. “You’re drop-dead gorgeous. Like, movie-scene gorgeous. Like… I’d die for you.”

You froze for a second, your breath catching somewhere between disbelief and reluctant softness.

“Okay,” you said, crouching in front of him. “That’s enough compliments for one night.”

“I’m serious,” he murmured, voice dipping low, suddenly quieter. “You don’t get it. You never got it.”

He was still slouched on the curb, the fluorescent spill of the streetlight painting soft shadows along the line of his jaw. You watched him, your arms crossed, trying to mask the chaos bubbling just beneath your skin. You'd seen Charles drunk before—knew the rhythms of his laughter, his stumbles, the way his charm dialed up to blinding—but this? This was different. The words that had slipped from his mouth weren’t tossed out for effect. They had landed with a weight you hadn’t been ready for.

“Y/n, mon amour,” he repeated again, quieter this time. Like maybe he liked the way it sounded in the air between you. Like maybe he’d been saying it in his head for years and only now had found the nerve to speak it aloud. His French curled around the words, gentle and devastating. It made your name sound like something delicate. Sacred.

“I think about you all the time,” he said. His eyes flicked up to meet yours, no longer teasing but soft, unexpectedly vulnerable. “Like… damn.” He chuckled to himself—an embarrassed sort of sound—and you could see the pink bloom across his cheeks, deeper than the flush from the alcohol. “I’ve been in love with you since like… forever.”

You felt the ache bloom slowly in your chest. It was a strange kind of ache—familiar and foreign all at once. Because in some impossible way, it made perfect sense. Like maybe you’d been waiting to hear those words your whole life and just didn’t know it. But before you could say anything, before you could let yourself feel anything, he added quietly, “But Arthur would probably kill me, you know how he is.”

And there it was—the unspoken name that always hovered like a ghost in the space between you. Arthur. His brother. Your best friend. The tether that had kept you both firmly rooted in the land of what-ifs and never-coulds. You swallowed hard, trying to find air in lungs that had forgotten how to expand.

Charles didn’t seem to notice your silence. Or maybe he did, and chose to fill it anyway. “Just look at you,” he whispered, voice low, almost reverent. “Who wouldn’t love you, darling?”

You crouched down next to him, knees brushing the edge of his thigh. He turned toward you slowly, his eyes glassy, but still full of everything he hadn’t said. Your name sounded dangerous in his mouth now. Like a truth he couldn’t stop telling.

─── 6: I HATE HOW YOU KNOW ME BETTER THAN ANYONE.

You hadn’t talked about it.

Not the things he’d said on the curb. Not the way he’d looked at you like you were the center of every blurry constellation in his mind. Not the way your name had fallen from his mouth in that accent of his—careless and reverent at the same time.

And definitely not the night swim. The moonlight. The silence that had almost turned into something else.

You’d both slipped back into the rhythm of summer like nothing had cracked beneath the surface. No one mentioned it. Arthur was clueless. Everyone else was oblivious.

And now—now it was just you and Charles in the kitchen. Late afternoon sun filtering in through the shutters, making the countertops glow. A bowl of half-sliced watermelon sat between you, juice bleeding into a paper towel. The hum of the fridge. The rhythmic thud of a knife against the cutting board. Your wet bikini clung uncomfortably to your skin, the water from your hair dripping onto the marble floor and leaving little trails behind you.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

“Can you pass me a bowl?” Charles asked, not loudly. His voice was gentle, like he was being careful with it.

You didn’t look up. Just reached for a clean one from the open cabinet and passed it to him wordlessly.

His fingers brushed yours. Briefly. Deliberately?

You didn’t ask. Didn’t meet his gaze. But you could feel it anyway—resting on your temple, drifting across your collarbone, dragging slowly down to where your hair was still damp against your shoulder.

The silence stretched. Thick. Charged. Still pretending to be casual. You sliced another strawberry. A little too hard this time.

You hadn’t said much in days. Not since *that* night. You stuck close to Arthur, keeping conversations quiet and safe, using him as a shield from what the rest of the world—what Charles—might still remember.

So when Charles finally spoke, it landed like something breaking. “Are you okay?” His voice was careful, but not distant. Not forced. He was watching you again, really watching. “You’ve been quiet lately.” You didn’t look up. You didn’t have to. Of course he noticed. Charles always noticed. He knew how loud you were meant to be, how your voice usually filled spaces and your laugh skipped over tile floors and soft poolside evenings like it belonged in every corner of his summer. Now, you barely made a sound.

“I’m fine,” you said automatically, your voice clipped and too polished to be honest. And maybe you hoped he’d let it slide. Maybe if you delivered it with just enough steadiness, he wouldn’t ask again.

But he didn’t back off. Instead, Charles stepped closer—not enough to touch, but enough that you could feel his gaze trying to reach beneath your skin. “C’mon, Y/n,” he murmured, voice just low enough to feel private in the open room. “I’ve known you long enough to know when something’s off.”

You said nothing, eyes still locked on the cutting board as if the watermelon rind would answer for you. You didn’t expect what he said next.

“You’re doing that thing,” he said, softer now. “With the corner of your lip.”

Your breath caught in your throat, subtle but sharp. That hit in a way you weren’t prepared for. It was something tiny. A detail. Something so easily missed, even by people who claimed to know you inside out. Arthur hadn’t noticed. No one had ever said it aloud. And yet here Charles was—casually cracking open a part of you you hadn’t even known you were showing.

It wasn’t fair. That he could do that. That he could see through the armor you’d spent days, maybe years, building up. You hated how it rattled you, how it made your fingers falter just slightly on the knife. You hated even more the warmth blooming in your chest—because maybe, deep down, you wanted someone to notice. And it had to be him. Of course it was him.

You finally looked at him, really looked, and saw that he wasn’t teasing. His gaze was steady, unwavering, all the warmth stripped of charm—just the quiet kind of concern that only comes from someone who’s paid too much attention for too long.

“You know you can tell me anything,” Charles said, voice low and careful, like he was handling something fragile—like maybe he was handling you.

Your grip tightened around the edge of the counter. “I’m just—” You stopped, jaw clenching as emotion scraped against the back of your throat. “I’m just fucking confused, Charles.”

You tried to sound annoyed, sharp, anything but shaken. But it cracked at the end, too raw to hide.

His brows pulled together, but he didn’t interrupt.

You drew in a shaky breath and pressed on, your voice quieter, tremor riding every syllable. “I thought… I thought there was never gonna be anything between us. Especially not from your side. You were always joking. Flirting. But I figured it was just... you being you. And now—” You shook your head, words starting to tumble faster, too much and not enough. “And now you say these things. And I feel like you want me but maybe only halfway. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”

Your chest rose and fell faster now. You hated that your eyes were stinging. You hated even more that he was still just standing there—quiet, listening, like he wasn’t going to run.

Charles exhaled slowly, his voice barely above a whisper. “It’s not halfway.”

You blinked, unsure if you’d heard him right.

He took a step closer. “It was never halfway.”

The silence that followed was thunderous, vibrating between your ribs. You turned slightly, your hand now resting on the counter more to steady yourself than anything else.

“You’re not just another person I flirt with, Y/n,” he said, and you could hear the weight in his voice now. “I joke around because I’m scared. Because what I feel for you doesn’t fit into something simple or easy or casual.”

You turned your head, eyes meeting his, and what you saw there unraveled something in you—honesty, fear, hope, all tangled together.

Charles stood quiet for a moment, watching the way your fingers clenched the edge of the counter, like if you let go you might fall apart entirely. There was something in your eyes that made his throat tighten—vulnerability you hadn’t meant to show, heartbreak you hadn’t had words for until just now.

He stepped forward again, slower this time, and leaned slightly against the island across from you. “I should’ve told you sooner,” he said, his voice rough at the edges. “God, I wanted to. So many times. But I didn’t want to ruin what we already had. I thought maybe if I kept it to myself, it’d go away. That I could just... be near you and be fine.”

He swallowed hard, eyes not leaving yours. “But I wasn’t fine. I never was. I’ve been carrying this thing around for years—this stupid, constant, inconvenient feeling. And I didn’t know how to give it to you without making everything harder.”

You stared at him, and for a second, the ache in your chest felt too heavy to speak around. But the words came anyway—fragile, but true. “Then why say it now? Why wait until you’re drunk and I’m already trying to forget how much it almost meant?”

Charles looked down, then back up, eyes glassy and unguarded. “Because pretending it didn’t matter hurt more than the idea of losing everything.”

A silence fell, thick and trembling between you.

Your voice broke it first. “I don’t know how to be your friend after this.”

His lips crashed into yours with no warning—just heat and certainty and a kind of desperation that had nothing to do with impulse and everything to do with time. Years of restraint, half-swallowed words, and silent moments that had begged for more—all of it spilled out in the space of a single breathless kiss.

His hands settled on your hips like they’d belonged there all along, steady and warm, grounding you even as your world tipped on its axis. You didn’t move at first. Maybe from shock. Maybe because deep down, you’d imagined this exact moment a hundred times and still never expected it would feel quite like this—both inevitable and completely surreal.

Your breath caught in your throat as he pulled back, just an inch, his forehead barely brushing yours. He was close enough that you could feel the heat of his breath against your lips, close enough to see the way his eyelashes fluttered before his eyes opened again, searching yours for permission—or apology. Neither of you spoke. Not yet. The quiet buzzed between you, too fragile to break.

“I can’t do this to Arthur,” you whispered, your voice frayed and trembling, the words escaping before you could hold them back. Guilt coiled instantly, sharp and familiar, winding around the base of your ribs and tightening with every syllable. Even saying his name aloud in that moment felt like betrayal. Your arms were still around Charles. His hands were still on you. But everything inside you had started to ache with the weight of what this meant.

Charles didn’t move away. His gaze didn’t waver. “I know,” he said softly, and his voice wasn’t defensive—it was resigned. Honest. A quiet confession of a boundary he never wanted to cross but already had.

“I know,” he repeated, and something in the way he said it made your chest ache. Because he wasn’t just saying it about Arthur. He was saying it about all of it. The guilt. The risk. The impossibility of pretending this hadn’t just happened.

─── 7: I HATE HOW YOU ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY.

Those days felt almost unreal—like living inside a warm, slow-motion dream you knew couldn’t last. You and Charles kept falling into each other easily, effortlessly. Whispered jokes over breakfast. The way his fingers would brush your lower back as he passed behind you. Shared looks that lingered a little too long across sunlit rooms.

But always—always—there was Arthur.

He wasn’t saying anything, but he didn’t need to. You felt it. In the way his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes anymore. The way he’d glance up when you laughed with Charles, and then look away just as fast. Like he was bracing for the confirmation he didn’t want. And when he’d sit at the table with you both, his hands wrapped around a glass too tight, pretending not to notice the space between you narrowing… you knew.

Charles noticed it too. You caught him watching Arthur sometimes—subtle, cautious. Like he was waiting for him to say something. But Arthur didn’t. Not yet.

The silence between the three of you was turning into something dense. Fragile.

And you could feel it bending.

The afternoon sun cast golden stripes across the stone terrace, the air thick with late summer haze and the fading scent of oranges from the grove below. You sat perched on a cushioned bench, legs draped lazily over Charles’ lap, one of his hands idly tracing circles just above your knee as you laughed at something dumb—some ridiculous childhood story involving a treehouse, jellybeans, and a poorly timed wasp. He was smiling, easy and warm, the way he always got when he felt like the world had narrowed to just the two of you.

And for a few fragile seconds, it almost felt normal.

Then the sliding door creaked open behind you. Arthur stepped onto the terrace.

You felt it instantly—the shift. The way laughter collapsed in your throat. The way Charles' hand froze. You moved quickly, instinctively, pulling your legs back to the floor with an awkward glance down, like maybe if you didn't look at him, it wouldn’t look like what it was.

Arthur didn’t say anything at first. He walked to the table, hands tucked into the pockets of his hoodie, and sat in the chair across from you with a calmness that felt louder than shouting.

He didn’t look at either of you when he spoke. “That’s okay,” he said, voice even but heavy. “You can keep them there.”

You didn’t move.

“I’m glad you two are getting along,” he added, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the railing, past the olive trees, toward the blue stretch of sea where no one had to answer for anything.

Charles sat a little straighter, eyes narrowing, the sudden shift in tone igniting something defensive beneath his skin. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, not cold, but edged enough to invite tension. The humor was gone.

Arthur let out a dry, clipped breath, half a laugh, half disbelief. “I think you know exactly what it means,” he murmured, his eyes still on the water. “I’ve seen it.”

Charles ran a hand down his face like he was trying to smooth out the moment, but his words came sharp anyway. “If you have a problem, just fucking say it.”

Arthur’s jaw clenched. When he finally looked over, the disappointment in his eyes landed like a punch you’d been bracing for—but still knocked the wind out of you. “Alright,” he said. “My problem? Maybe it’s that you’re sleeping with my best friend and acting like it’s just another one of your harmless flings.”

The words dropped heavy and final, like a door slamming that neither of you had the courage to close. You could feel Charles bristle beside you, but he forced a scoff, masking his tension with mockery. “Oh, so what, you’re jealous? Is that it, little brother?”

Your stomach twisted. The shift in Charles was subtle but sharp—his voice too calm, too practiced. You reached to nudge his knee under the table, but it didn’t slow him.

Arthur let out a sharp breath, somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “I’m not jealous, you idiot. I’m disappointed you didn’t tell me,” he said, shaking his head like even speaking it aloud stung more than he expected.

His voice wasn’t raised, but it hit hard—each word clipped, careful, hurt wrapped in sarcasm he couldn’t quite control.

He turned toward Charles first. “I saw the way you looked at her for years. You think I didn’t notice? I expected this from you, honestly. The flirting.“

Then his eyes landed on you. And this time, they didn’t waver.

“But you?” he said, softer now—but sharper somehow. “I didn’t think you’d be that easy to pull in. I didn’t think you’d make it that easy to leave me out.”

Charles spoke before you could even form a thought. “Maybe it’s time you accept she’s not yours to protect forever,” he said, his voice colder than the air between them.

Your heart sank. Oh god, no. Not like this.

“Charles!” you snapped, your voice cutting through the tension. “That’s enough.”

Arthur turned, something flickering behind his eyes—hurt, betrayal, something years old finally surfacing. “I wasn’t trying to own her,” he said, voice rising just enough to crack. “I was trying to make sure she didn’t get dragged into your mess like everyone else.”

Then, with a bitter scoff, “You’ve always been good at talking, Charles. Never been great at staying.”

He shook his head and stepped back, fists clenched at his sides. “You’re still the same selfish bastard you’ve always been.”

And just like that, he turned and walked inside, the door swinging slightly in the breeze behind him.

“Arthur!” you called, already pushing back your chair, chasing the echo of the door and the boy who once knew all your secrets.

Charles barely had time to react before your words sliced through the tension like a blade.

“You are such an asshole, Charles,” you snapped, your voice trembling with exhaustion and disbelief. He looked at you—like he hadn’t expected that from you of all people—but you didn’t care. You didn’t stop. You just turned, jaw clenched, blinking back the heat in your eyes, and stormed into the house after Arthur.

“Arthur, wait!” you called, voice urgent as your footsteps echoed down the hallway. He was already halfway to the guest room, shoulders rigid, head down like he didn’t want you to see how much he was breaking. You caught up and reached for his wrist—gently, like any more pressure might cause him to shatter completely.

He paused but didn’t turn. The seconds between you stretched impossibly thin.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, breath catching. “I was stupid.”

He let out a breath—half a sigh, half a laugh—and finally glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said, a shrug in his voice. “A bit.”

And somehow, it broke the tension enough for your chest to loosen just slightly. You smiled—tiny, wobbly. “You know you’ve always been the most important Leclerc to me, right?”

Arthur turned all the way around then. And his expression—soft, exhausted, barely held together—cut deeper than any shouting ever could.

“God, Y/n,” he murmured, finally facing you. “You know I can’t stay mad at you.”

You didn’t expect it—not that fast, not like that. One second you were barely holding yourself together, and the next his arms were around you, grounding you like gravity had suddenly picked sides.

It wasn’t tentative. It was tight, certain, and real. The kind of hug that speaks before you can. His chin brushed your shoulder, his hand curled lightly into the fabric of your shirt like he was afraid if he let go, something might disappear.

─── 8: I HATE HOW YOU LEAVE WITHOUT SAYING GOODBYE.

The silence after the fight wasn’t just quiet. It was heavy. Every room in the house felt colder, like the laughter that used to fill it had been packed away too. You and Charles hadn’t spoken. Not properly. Just a few passing looks, a few stiff moments in the same space—but nothing real. Nothing that fixed anything.

Instead, you found yourself spending more time with Arthur. At first, it was just easier. Less tense. But soon, it started to feel like something you needed. You’d sit together on the back steps in the mornings, sharing coffee. Walk through the orange grove in slow silence that didn’t need words. He didn’t ask for explanations. He didn’t push. He was just there, and maybe that was the most comforting thing of all.

But still, it felt like choosing sides. And some part of you hated that.

Then one morning, you noticed the space behind the gate was empty. Charles’s car was gone.

You asked Pascale, his mother, where he had gone. She answered casually—like it meant nothing. “He went to Carlos’s for a few days,” she said, stirring sugar into her tea like it wasn’t strange. Like it wasn’t everything.

He hadn’t told you. He hadn’t said goodbye. And somehow, that made it worse. Because after all the noise, the arguments, the pain—you thought maybe he’d at least say something before leaving. But he didn’t.

The sun poured through Arthur’s window, soft and golden, stretching across the bed where the two of you lay belly-down on the covers. The photo album was open in front of you, pages slightly curled from years of flipping and laughter.

You turned another page, and there it was.

A snapshot of you and Arthur at around ten years old, sitting on the dock with your legs dangling over the edge, clutching ice cream cones like treasure. Your head leaned sleepily on his shoulder, both of you grinning so wide it looked like your faces might split.

“Oh my god,” you laughed, pointing. “I remember this. I dropped mine on the ground like, three minutes later.”

Arthur chuckled. “And I gave you mine, because I’m a saint.”

“You gave it to me after taking one last dramatic bite,” you said, nudging him with your elbow.

“Fair. I was ten and deeply attached to my desserts.”

You smiled, eyes soft. “That was the day I decided you’re the one I need to keep.”

Arthur turned to look at you, mock-scandalized. “Decided? As if I wasn’t already keeping you? Please.”

You both broke into laughter, full and warm, the kind that shakes your shoulders and leaves your cheeks aching. The kind that belongs to inside jokes and old stories and years of knowing someone down to the last freckle on their nose.

“I swear, we peaked at ten,” Arthur said between giggles, flipping to the next photo.

It was one of him in a bright blue bucket hat, mid-cartwheel, legs a blur and his shirt flying up.

You burst out laughing again. “Never mind, I take it back. This was the actual peak.”

Arthur groaned. “Burn it. Burn the entire album.”

“Nope,” you grinned, hugging the album to your chest. “This is going in my will.”

Arthur rolled onto his side, propping his head up with one hand as he looked at you, still laughing. “I swear, if someone ever publishes this album, my dignity is done for.”

You hugged the book tighter to your chest, feigning solemnity. “Don’t worry. I’ll only leak the bucket hat photos. The rest are safe—maybe.”

He gasped. “You wouldn't.”

You grinned. “I would, absolutely.”

He groaned and flopped back onto the pillow. “I knew trusting you at six was a mistake.”

You bumped your shoulder against his. “Too late now. You’re stuck with me.”

He glanced over at you again, his smile softening just a little. “I can live with that.”

You turned the page, and the photo made you smile the second you saw it. There the three of you were—on the yacht, the day before Charles’s 18th birthday. You were lying on your stomach with cards in your hand, laughing at something out of frame.

Arthur and Charles were sitting behind you on the sofa, both grinning like everything was simple and good. Charles looked like he had just won a round of UNO and was very proud of it. Arthur looked like he was pretending not to care, but you could tell he was annoyed that he was losing. Everything about that photo felt warm—sun, sea, and three people who didn’t know things would change.

You turned the page, and the photo made you smile the second you saw it. There the three of you were—on the yacht, the day before Charles’s 18th birthday. You were lying on your stomach with cards in your hand, laughing at something out of frame.

You stared at it for a moment before speaking. “Do you think it was always that innocent?” your voice soft, maybe even a little unsure.

Arthur looked at the photo for a long moment, then at you. “Was it ever?” he said with a quiet laugh, like he wasn’t sure of the answer himself.

You laughed a little too, shaking your head. “I don’t know,” you said, tracing the edge of the picture with your finger. “But I was so into him back then. Like, so into him.”

Arthur burst out laughing, louder than you expected. You turned to look at him, surprised, but he just grinned. “You still are,” he said through a laugh, nudging your shoulder with his.

You raised an eyebrow, but you couldn’t help but laugh too. Something about the way he said it—casual, light—made it easier to breathe. It didn’t feel like teasing. It felt like honesty, said kindly. And for the first time in days, the memory didn’t sting. It just made you miss the way things used to be. Before it all got so complicated.

You exhaled a small, guilty sigh. “Yeah, maybe,” you admitted quietly. “I’m... sorry.”

He blinked, then rolled his eyes with a grin. “Oh, come on, Y/n. Don’t apologize. I think I’ll survive the emotional trauma of you liking my absurdly good-looking brother.”

You smiled, a little caught off guard, but grateful for how easily he brushed it off.

He leaned back slightly, arms folded under his chest as he looked at you, his voice gentler now. “I just want you to be happy. If that means it’s him… then that’s okay.” He smiled again, more honest this time. “Really.”

And somehow, sitting there with him like that—laughing, remembering, being heard—it felt easy. Easier than you thought it would. Like maybe forgiveness didn't always have to come wrapped in pain. Sometimes, it could just sit quietly between two people who still cared.

Arthur’s words settled between you, light but real, like sunlight warming the edge of a shadow you hadn’t realized you’d been standing in.

For a second, you didn’t speak. You just looked at him—really looked at him—and felt something settle in your chest. Not confusion. Not guilt. Just… gratitude.

“You’re amazing, you know that?” you said, your voice still soft, but steadier now.

He rolled his eyes with a smile. “Took you long enough.”

You laughed and leaned your head briefly on his shoulder, the way you had in the photo from years ago. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away. He just let you rest there, like that was exactly where you were supposed to be.

─── 9: I HATE HOW YOU KNOW I’M WAITING FOR YOU.

The night was quiet, and the dock felt like the only place where the world stood still. You sat at the edge, legs dangling over the side, your feet slowly moving through the cool, dark water. The air smelled like salt, wood, and a little bit like everything you hadn’t said. Above you, the sky stretched wide and clear, filled with stars that didn’t help answer anything at all.

Your thoughts always went to Charles.

You didn’t know where he was, or who he was with. Maybe he was laughing. Maybe he was thinking of you. Maybe he wasn’t. That hurt more than you wanted to admit. You wondered if he missed you even a little, or if it was easy for him to leave without saying anything.

You thought about what he might be doing, if he had already moved on, or if he was still somewhere in between like you were. You never thought loving him could feel this heavy, this confusing. But here you were, sitting in the quiet and trying not to fall apart. Maybe if you hadn’t been so quick to fall for him, things would be different. Maybe everything would be fine. Easier. But you did, and it wasn’t.

You heard it then—footsteps behind you, slow and uneven on the wood. You didn’t move. You didn’t have to. You already knew it was him.

“I knew you’d be here,” came his voice, low and familiar. That voice that had been missing.

Charles.

You didn’t turn around right away. You just stared out at the dark water, your voice soft and full of something tired. “You came back, huh?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then, slowly, he stepped closer and sat down next to you. Not too close, but close enough that you could feel his presence again. Like he never really left, not completely. You didn’t look at him. Not yet. But his being there stirred something that had been still for days.

His voice cut through the quiet. “I had to come back. For you.”

It landed too sharp. Too flat. Like the feeling got lost somewhere between his chest and his mouth.

You didn’t turn to look at him. You just stared at the dark water, trying to breathe around the ache in your throat. “You didn’t have to,” you said, barely loud enough. “I would’ve been fine.”

It was a lie, and you both knew it.

He let out a breath, like he’d been holding it for days. “I love you, Y/n,” he said, softer now. “I love you too much to stay away. I tried. I really did. But I couldn’t do it.”

That stilled something in you.

You drew in a shaky breath, the air cool against your skin, and finally let the words fall. “I’m scared, Charles. I don’t know what to do next... after this ends.” Your voice was low, barely louder than the waves brushing the dock’s edge. It felt like saying it aloud made it more real—that this moment, this summer, this version of the two of you might slip away the minute it was over. And you didn’t know how to make peace with that.

You turned to look at him then, really looked, the tears clouding your vision making his face blur slightly. But you could still see the way his expression shifted—how the boy you knew sat beneath the man in front of you. He seemed just as lost. “I don’t know, Y/n,” he said after a long pause, his shoulders lifting in a quiet shrug. “I wish I did.”

There was a weight behind those words, the kind that only comes from knowing something good has an expiration date. He looked out toward the water as if the answer might be hiding in the waves, and for a second, you both just let the silence stretch between you. It wasn’t empty. It held everything unsaid.

“Maybe we should just... not think about it,” he said finally, his voice gentler now. “Just enjoy the last few weeks. Let it be what it is. And then... maybe we just forget.”

Your chest tightened at that. The idea of it all—being reduced to a memory, a footnote in a chapter you didn’t want to close—made something inside you ache. You were about to nod, to agree even if it was a lie, when he added, softer this time, as if he wasn’t even sure you were meant to hear it, “I don’t want to forget.”

That changed everything.

His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, like he wasn’t sure he should say it—but he did anyway. “I just want you to know I’ll always love you.”

You didn’t look at him right away. The words settled between you like something tender and impossible to hold.

“Yeah,” you said softly, nodding just once. “Me too.”

Then your smile faltered a little, and you added, “Maybe that’s the problem.”

You breathed out slowly, your chest tight with the truth of it. Loving him had always been the easiest part. It was everything else—the timing, the choices, the weight of what ifs—that had turned things hard. The love was constant. Maybe that’s what made it so complicated.

─── 10: I HATE HOW YOU ALWAYS WILL BE THE ONE.

And somehow, you did enjoy it as much as you could.

The days blurred into one another—warm mornings by the water, quiet afternoons full of sun and stories, soft nights under the stars. You laughed more than you expected. Sometimes too hard. Sometimes just enough. Arthur kept finding ways to pull you into old games, silly traditions, the kind of things that didn’t matter unless you were ten years old or heartbroken and trying not to be. Charles didn’t say much at first, but he didn’t leave your side either. And slowly, he softened again. Or maybe you did.

It all felt dreamlike—so easy it was hard to believe it belonged to real time. Like you’d stepped back into some version of childhood, but this time you knew what was coming. So you held on a little tighter. Laughed a little louder. Let every golden hour slip into your skin before it passed completely.

They tried not to talk about the end. About what would come after. Arthur joked more. Charles stayed longer when he didn’t have to. You never asked. You just let the days keep coming.

But every moment slips away, as all things do.

You stood outside the airport, suitcase by your side, the air a little colder than you expected. People rushed past with bags and tickets, voices rising and falling, but your whole world had narrowed to the two people in front of you—Charles and Arthur. Both of them just standing there, like they didn’t know what to say either.

You gave them a small smile, one that didn’t quite reach your eyes. “It was really good to see you again, boys,” you said, glancing from one to the other slowly. Taking them in one last time. You wanted to remember everything—the way Arthur’s smile always made things lighter, the way Charles looked at you like you still mattered, even when neither of you said it.

You stepped forward and wrapped your arms around Arthur first. He didn’t hesitate—just pulled you in tight like he already missed you. You held onto him like you weren’t ready to let go either.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” you whispered. “I’m going to miss you so much.”

Arthur stepped back, and you saw it right away—the way his eyes were glassy, blinking too quickly. He tried to smile, but it wobbled at the edges. “Aw, don’t cry,” you said with a soft laugh, your voice catching as your own tears finally slipped free.

You wiped at your cheeks, half-laughing through it now. “Great, now we’re both a mess.”

He shook his head, chuckling quietly as he swiped at his face too. “We’ve always been a mess.”

But in that moment, it didn’t feel like a bad thing. Just honest. Just the kind of goodbye that only happens when it really meant something.

You turned toward Charles, and the look in his eyes almost undid you. They were shining with the kind of emotion he rarely let show, blinking too fast like he was trying to hold it all in. “Char,” you said gently, your voice softer than it had been all day, “come here.”

He didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around you, holding you tight like it was the only thing keeping him grounded. His breath shook near your ear. “I love you,” he said, barely louder than a whisper, but thick with everything he couldn’t say before.

You laughed through the lump in your throat, trying to keep it together. “Stop,” you said, voice shaking, “or I’ll cry even harder.”

When you finally pulled back, both of you were smiling through tears. His laugh came first, low and a little broken, then yours followed, and suddenly you were both laughing like you hadn’t just said goodbye.

“So...” he said between breaths, trying to calm the shake in his smile, “see you next summer?”

You looked at him, heart full and aching, and nodded. “Yeah,” you said quietly, “see ya.”

You knew, deep down, that you’d made the most of this summer. You’d squeezed every last drop from the slow days, the warm nights, the laughter that echoed through quiet rooms and open fields. Even with the weight of saying goodbye, even with the ache that came from leaving Charles behind, you didn’t regret a single moment of it.

The ending was bittersweet—yes. But you wouldn’t have traded it for something easier or simpler. Not when it gave you memories that felt like sunlight, friendships that held you up, and a love that, even if only for a while, felt like everything.

© norristrii 2025

babsie radio ! First summer break day. Can u believe it? That’s crazyy… hope u guys enjoy it as much as you can!! <3

tag list ! @haniette

[bunnis-monsters]

NSFW

warnings: teasing, breeding kink, lingerie

A/N: Introducing a new oc of mine, Kuro Ume. He’s connected to Momo’s dark past… also Momo stickers are now available in my kofi shop!!

“You’re the one who lost the bet, Kuro Ume,” you said with a huff, watching as he grumbled while removing his suit jacket.

“I barely even remember making that bet in the first place. You’re depraved, you know that?”

This made you laugh, and his cheeks reddened even further at your response.

“Oh hush, I’m the only one that’s going to see. Now put it on, I’m tired of waiting.”

The dark haired bunny hybrid stared at the items of clothing laying on the bed. A cow print bikini, a pair of cow ears and horns, and a tail were placed neatly in front of him.

“This is demeaning. Why would you ever suggest this in the first place?”

“Well, why did you agree to it?”

“Because I thought there was no way Momo would get that girl’s number-!”

Kuro groaned, his bunny ears twitching in annoyance as he slipped his pants off. He definitely remembered the previous night.

He was a couple drinks in when you sauntered up, sitting beside him at the bar. As per usual, his heart began to race the second your eyes met his.

“Hey, Kuro. Been a long day, huh?”

Truly, the day had been horrible. After taking out two hybrid traffickers, he had a run in with a rival mafia gang and had to escape before he could clean up the mess.

Now, he was covered in a few bruises, his right arm bandaged. “Yeah, long, you could say that again.”

Kuro downed another shot of whiskey, the pain he had been feeling slowly numbing with each new shot. You reached out and gave his uninjured hand a squeeze.

“You should really slow down. If you don’t, you’re going to make yourself sick.”

He huffed. “You’re not my mom, (Name). Quit smothering me.”

Despite being quite intelligent, Kuro was also stubborn and often rude, even if he didn’t mean to be. He regretted his words the second he noticed you recoil, your eyes closing as you took in a shaky breath.

“I just worry about you.”

He stared into the amber colored liquid before setting his glass down. “You don’t need to, I’m fine.”

Both of you knew that wasn’t true.

You looked around the bar, trying to find something to talk about besides the elephant in the room. “Is that… Momo?”

The two of you spotted him chatting up a girl, nearly tripping when he leaned against the wall and lost his footing.

“Ah, trying to flirt again,” you said with a laugh, taking a sip of your drink. “Wanna bet on if he’ll get her number or not?”

Kuro smiled, leaning his elbow against the bar. “Sure, I’ll take you up on that.”

And now, he was paying the consequences of that spur of the moment decision.

“This doesn’t cover anything!”

You covered your mouth to quiet your giggles as his muffled voice came through the bathroom door. “That’s kind of the whole point, Kuro. I want to see what you’ve got going on~”

“Oh, so that’s your real intentions, huh? I wouldn’t have pegged you for a pervert, (Name).”

He peeked his head out, a frown on his face when he noticed your excited expression. “This gets you off, really?”

“Just a little. Now come out so I can see you already!”

With a huff, he walked out into the opening. His lean, scarred frame was on display, and you could already see the bulge in his cow print panties. His cotton tail wagged, giving away his true feelings on the matter.

“Excited already?” you mused, stepping forward so you could get a better look. “Pose for me, I’m getting some pictures.

“I can’t help it, you- h-hey, don’t take so many pictures!”

He tried to cover himself, but you pushed his hands out of the way. “Oh stop it, you know I won’t show anyone.”

“I know…” he murmured, pouting at you. “Doesn’t change the fact I didn’t want you of all people to see me like this.”

Once you had enough pictures, you pressed your chest against his, smiling up at him. “Why’s that?”

The bunny hybrid huffed. “I’m sure you know why by now. Isn’t it obvious I’m head over heels for you? Everyone can tell, except you.”

This news made your heart rate spike, and you found yourself unable to breathe for a moment.

“I…”

Your cheeks heated up, and Kuro let out a deep sigh. “It’s hard, you know? Being in love is something I wanted to avoid. You… make things difficult for me.”

It was hard to take him seriously when he was standing in front of you with his hard on barely being contained by the small cow print panties.

“Kuro…”

You cupped his bulge, fondling it while you pouted up at him. His cheeks flushed red and he let out a strangled moan. “Did you think I’d go easy on you just because I love you?”

“Th… that wasn’t the point but-“

He yelped when you pushed him onto the bed, straddling him before rubbing your clothed cunt against his bulge. You played with the strings of his top, your bottom lip poked out in a pout.

“Come on, you love me, don’t you? Breed me and make me a mama.”

That activated his bunny hybrid instincts, his hands instantly bringing your hips down to properly grind against him. “You’re playing with fire… mmm…”

He buried his face into your neck, taking a wiff of you before marking you with his own scent. “You want to mate? Fuck, I’ve wanted to mark you for ages…”

His tail swished behind him, smacking the bed as he lifted your skirt. Kuro felt his cheeks turn red the decks he laid his eyes on your bare pussy.

“It’s like you planned for this…” he murmured, rubbing at your wet slit. “No panties, and you’re already this wet…”

You gave him a sheepish smile, biting your lip when his fingers pumped in and out of you. “I was hoping this would go well, that’s all.”

Precum soaked the front of the cow print panties, and you could see he was panting every time you grinded against him.

“I want you…”

Kuro gripped your hips tightly, but not enough to hurt. His thumb rubbed over the soft fat, almost tenderly. “So much that it hurts… I know that right now we can’t be mates, and honestly that hurts even more. I… just can’t put you in danger like that.”

He laid you down, his bunny ears flicking as he hovered over you. “Don’t cry… I do love you, and tonight I’m going to show it.”

You hadn’t realized you had been crying. He wiped a stray tear from your cheek, licking it from his thumb. Kuro had a troubled past, and was still running away from it. He knew that right now, he couldn’t be a proper mate to a wonderful woman like you.

If anything were to happen to you because his past came back to haunt him, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

“I love you too, Kuro… maybe one day…”

His lips moved across your neck, leaving hickeys and love bites. “Don’t think, just feel.”

Kuro pulled his bottoms down just enough for his cock to spring forward. He rubbed against you, groaning against your lips as he tangled his tongue with yours in a lustful dance.

“Fuck, princess…”

Just the scent of your arousal was enough to have his cock twitching with need, Kuro was ready to be inside of you already, to breed you like a proper mate would.

He pushed in, his fingers leaving bruises on your hips as he pulled you closer. You were unbelievably tight, milking his cock already. He came inside almost instantly, but fucked you through his firts orgasm.

“K-Kuro!” you babbled out, pleasured tears falling down your cheeks. He leaned forward to kiss them away, his fluffy bunny ears brushing against you.

“Take it, princess. So good, fuck you feel so good!”

You looked down, watching as his cock moved in and out of you, his balls slapping against your ass. He was completely entranced by you, and by your third orgasm you were a blubbering mess.

Kuro pulled out, staring at your pussy with hazy eyes before moving down to taste you. The taste of your fluids mixed together was like heaven, and he licked his own cum out of your dripping pussy.

“You’re doing so good for me, princess. Such a good girl,” he murmured, looking up at you with pussy drunk eyes.

You came on his tongue, feeling worn out. Kuro sensed you were tired, and laid down with you.

“I have to leave in the morning,” he murmured, lifting your leg so he could fuck into you softly. You whimpered, but relaxed as he carefully played with your clit. “I won’t be back in town for a while.”

“Don’t… want you to go…” you murmured, rubbing your sleepy eyes. “I’ll miss you.”

Kuro’s movements slowed until his cock rested inside of you, kept warm in your cunt. “I’ll miss you too, princess. I have to go, though. It’s for your own safety.”

You could barely keep your eyes open, glancing back at him. “… you’ll come back?”

He was quiet for a moment, rubbing your thigh tenderly. “…”

His bunny ears lowered slightly, and he pulled you so close he could feel your heartbeat against his chest.

“I hope so.”

——————

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