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kooppss · 5 months ago

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lost

Jungkook's POV from thirsty.

Sexy Disasters With Feelings series masterlist

warnings: male masturbation. mention of sex and female masturbation. Jungkook is a fuckboy. This is his inner monologue, zero dialog.

word count: 2.1K

Jungkook chose you as his roommate because you're hot.

He thought that, worst case, you’d fuck, and he’ll have to find a new roommate. Returning to where he was.

He was sure it would be a treat to have a pretty little thing like you wandering around the apartment. He did ask you some questions about your cleaning habits and shit like that. But frankly, you could live like a raccoon, and he’d still choose you.

Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

You are a treat when you walk around in your pajama shorts or your slutty going out outfits. Not to mention the thin tank tops with no bra. He likes to imagine you put in extra effort for him to enjoy.

Earlier today, you were a vision—your too-tight, too-short sports set clinging to your body, messy hair stuck to the sweat on your skin. Jungkook hopes he managed to fool you with his cool act when you talked to him. For the life of him, he has no idea what you were talking about. The final straw was the flush on your cheeks—a look he’d imagined on you more times than he’d like to admit.

It’s not his fault. He swears!

What can he do when the walls in your apartment are so thin that he can hear you being fucked in your adjoining room? When he can hear every beautiful sound you make?

He loves how loud you are.

Sometimes, it was just your beautiful moans and whines.

Sometimes, he could hear choking sounds. He imagined it’s him in there. That you’re choking on his dick.

Sometimes, he could hear the guy’s name spill from you. He preferred it when you didn’t. It ruined the vibe for him.

He didn’t mind when you moved in and started bringing your hookups to the apartment. Like, free porn, right? Who would complain?

And he isn’t a hypocrite. He does his fair share of bringing people to the apartment. And you never nudged him about it, unlike his previous roommate.

Was it weird of him to touch himself to the sound of his roommate fucking in the next room?

Maybe.

It’s not like he could do anything else when all the blood in his body traveled south.

So why has he stopped enjoying your little shows for him lately?

Why did he go to the gym when he heard a guy’s voice from your room?

It’s not like he’s jealous or something stupid like that. No way.

It was just annoying that they got to have what he couldn’t.

Why weren’t the two of you fucking to begin with?

Wasn't it the original plan?

Do you not find him attractive?

What do they have that he doesn’t? He can fuck you better. He knows it.

So Jungkook tried to stop bringing girls when you’re at home. He thought that maybe it’ll make you stop as well.

He hasn’t stopped fucking around, obviously. No need to be radical.

But now he has a new problem. He misses hearing you. He wants to hear more of you. He wished you’d make those sounds for him, but until then, he’ll take whatever he could get.

And fuck. You looked so hot earlier. You’re not making it easy for him.

You returned from your yoga class, or whatever hot girls' workout you’re doing. With the way you looked; he couldn’t stop thinking this is exactly how he imagined you. Usually, in his head, you’re wearing way fewer clothes and you’re sprawled on his bed. But close enough.

Shit. You’re driving him insane.

He’d usually just fuck you out of his system. But you don’t seem to be affected by him like he expects you would. He needs to do something about it.

So Jungkook finds himself is lying in bed, trying to think what he could do.

He has been lying for a little while now, hand lazily stroking his length under his boxer. It doesn't seem to be evolving anywhere, but he’s too bothered to just fall asleep like that. A sound from your room snaps him out of his dazing state. It sounded like you dropped something. Maybe it was the water bottle you always take back to your room.

It doesn't matter; the noise is a reminder that you’re right there, on the other side of the wall. He really wishes he could hear you right now. That’s always helped him get going in no time.

He wonders, did you also touch yourself when he brought girls home? He wants to think that you did. He always tried to recall if he heard you, but it’s hard to notice when he’s balls-deep into someone else.

He never heard you when you’re alone. Are you quieter when you masturbate? Do you use your fingers? He bet they’re not enough—not like he could use his fingers on you. Maybe you need battery-powered help? He never heard a buzzing sound. He could help you use it.

Fuck.

Jungkook sits up in his bed, pushing his boxer down to free his dick. He spits in his hand and spreads it over his length. The smoother glide of his hand makes him groan.

He wishes it was your hand on him.

Would you act shy, or would you grab him with confidence? Would you be a good girl for him or a little brat? He’d know how to put you in place. He’ll do it gladly.

He thinks about all the ways he’d take you. How he’d utilize every surface of this apartment.

A louder moan slips out of him, and he halts for a second.

Do you hear him right now?

God, he hopes you do.

The thought pushes him further towards the edge. He increases his pace, thinking about you listening to him in your room. That cute flush of your cheeks spreads as you lie in bed.

And with that image, he comes.

Fuck. He needs to get a grip.

Or get you.

__________________________________________

Jungkook had a good day. He slept like a baby last night and hit a new PR at the gym.

He’s just out of the kitchen on his way to his room when you decide to ruin his day.

Seriously, where the fuck do they sell skirts this short?

Because he wants to buy you a hundred more.

You look amazing. You really do. Why do you have to do this to him?

And it’s not even 24 hours since you made him lose his cool over you.

You didn’t see him, and you fully bumped into him. You look all flustered and cute. Blushing and stuttering.

Well, now it’s his time to shine.

He gives you his best nonchalant grin and teases you until you walk out of the room. He knows the fact that he’s shirtless and a little sweaty works to his advantage. He caught you snicking looks.

Good. He should do this more.

He can’t lose.

Later that night, after he showered and made dinner, Jungkook is sprawled on the couch, mindlessly zipping through Netflix.

Nothing catches his attention; he just chooses something as a background noise while he scrolls on his phone. He goes through stories on Instagram when something is catching his eye.

It's you, in your little teasing outfit from earlier, sitting on a high chair at some bat with a drink in hand.

You look fucking hot. If he’d meet you there, he’d 100% try his luck with you.

Stupid random guys have a chance with you, yet he doesn’t get one.

He clicks on your profile without much of a thought. Scrolling down your photos. He’s stuck on one from your last vacation; you went to a beach house with your friends. You sit on the sand next to the water, a beautiful smile on your face. And you’re wearing one of the smallest bikinis known to mankind.

He barely processes that his hand is already inside his sweatpants. And if he weren't fully hard by now, the next photo would have done it. You stand with your back to the camera, still in the same location, same deviled-creation bikini, ass cheeks on display, covered with sand. Your ass looks fucking amazing.

Before Jungkook even finishes thinking about all the things he’d do to it, he’s already coming in his hand.

He sighs; you make him act like a teenage boy. Cuming in his hand from a photo of you in a bikini. Fucking embarrassing.

He reaches for the tissue box on the coffee table and grabs some to clean the mess before cleaning himself better and washing his hands in the bathroom.

When he returns to the living room, you’re there. He takes his spot on the couch, and before sliding his phone into his pocket, he realizes it’s still open on your Instagram. He knows how it looks. He assumes you can piece together to some degree what has happened here. He expects you to call him out, maybe to lash out. But instead, you look… shy? Could it be? He never pegged you for the shy type.

And you’re blushing now? Oh, Jungkook likes this game.

He looks at you, waiting for you to say something. To make your move. But you fold first. Saying goodbye and turning away.

Jungkook has won this round.

A slow grin spreads across his face as he watches you walk to your room, knowing this won’t be the last time you’ll play.

Hours later, Jungkook is still thinking about what happened. He feels like he should make a move, take advantage of the momentum. He has a proof that he’s had some effect on you; now he just needs to break through your walls. He’ll keep up the teasing, building this tension between you two. He saw an opening, and he should go for it—

Even if it’s just to see you blush more because of him.

__________________________________________

Jungkook pulls the headset down to rest on his neck. They just had a win, and now he’s waiting for Taehyung to come back after taking a piss. He grabs his phone and scrolls through it almost automatically.

Until he sees it.

WTF.

Holly fucking shit.

He mumbles into the microphone, “start without me,” and tosses the headphones away.

He stares at the photo; he can physically feel all the blood in his body traveling directly into his penis. It’s so intense he almost feels lightheaded.

What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

So this is it. After days of him teasing you and trying to catch you off guard, you finally played your move. And what a fucking move it is.

You fucking tease.

Oh, you think you’re so smart with that. You want him to collapse? To fold down? No problem. You’ll get a front-row seat to him burning in hell. He’ll drag you down with him.

You little devil.

Jungkook head spins with the image of you; he’s going to come embarrassingly fast.

Fucking hell, you caused this problem; you should be the one fixing it.

He can’t figure you out. You act all shy and flustered, and then you pull this? Why the hell did you even take that photo? Did you know you’ll need to torture him?

Jungkook doesn’t know if to bless you or to curse you. He doesn't know if he hates what you do to him or if he can't get enough of you.

He thought he had the upper hand, that he was about to win. But you’re all-consuming. He thought he was the one hunting you, yet he feels like your prey. It’s so good and so sinful, this little game you play.

He’s a player, and he’s addicted to the game.

He comes loudly. He doesn’t care if you hear him. You need to know the extent of your effect on him. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?

He leans back in his gaming chair, head tilting back, trying to cool down.

Even with his mind fucked up, Jungkook knows what it means for him. He’s at the gate. He’s almost at his destination. The game is about to end. And honestly, he doesn’t care who wins or loses at this point—as long as he gets you.

After a few more rounds, they finally call it a night. Jungkook shuts down his computer and sets the headset aside. He pulls off his sweatpants and tosses them into the laundry bin. He’s about to get into bed when he hears noises from outside his room. He glances at his phone—it's already past 2 AM. You should be asleep. He grabs his phone and heads to investigate the source of the noise.

It’s you. You catch him off guard again. He finds you bending down in front of the fridge, reaching for a water bottle from the bottom shelf. You’re wearing nothing but a shirt and simple white cotton underwear. Cute. You look even better in real life. That ass looks better.

You turn around, startled by him.

And even though it’s too dark to see it, he knows it’s there.

He knows you’re blushing.

Yeah.

He lost.

Back to series masterlist

#lost #thirsty.#jungkook #jungkook x reader #jungkook oneshot #jungkook fic #jungkook pov #you’ve cat to be kitten me right meow

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meta-sequoia · 3 months ago

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Rose genetics and the law of unintended consequences (or, ten rose bushes, reviewed)

I have a number of longposts in the backlog, including updates on a number of garden improvement projects I undertook over the winter, but I kept putting off posting them because there kept being Horrors. However, spring is here - in California anyway - and plants wait for no one.

Over the winter of 2025, as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned Horrors, I got really into roses. Because of who I am as a person, deciding what roses I wanted to buy also made me feel obliged to reconstruct the history of rose breeding, just to make sense of the teeming confusion of the tens of thousands of named rose varieties. Humans have been raising roses for food, medicine, and beauty for untold centuries, and so they've really grown up with us. The history of the development of roses, it turns out, is the history of the development of humanity in miniature.

This post has it all: history, some light phylogeny discussion, material analysis of English folk ballads, a conceptual framework for understanding how different kinds of roses vary and why, a #haul breakdown of what bare-root roses I got and what I thought of them, and some philosophical musings on what it means for an organism to be subjected to a long-term selective breeding process, to be remade wholly in the image of human desire. All that, and pictures of roses, under the cut.

My general region of California is considered to have a good climate for roses, much good may it do us. It never gets too hot or too cold, so they essentially never go out of season, and even though our winters are wet, the rest of the year is fairly dry. This is absolutely critical, because the main problem that makes garden roses hard to grow is fungal disease. Modern roses are incredibly susceptible to fungal diseases, which are caused, roughly, by Damp. This has typically been combated with toxic sprays (though there are now less-toxic options) and aggressive pruning regimens.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous fucking problem for a plant to have. California natives, by comparison, hate irrigation - they have a natural life cycle involving being dry in summer and wet in winter, like California itself, so if you grow them in a climate resembling their natural range, without too much added water, they will be mostly OK. Roses, as far as I can tell, actually hate all water, including rain and humidity, which is much worse because gardeners do not control the weather. If it rains too often after, say, noon, the rose's leaves might get wet, fail to dry off, get a fungal disease, and die. If there is too much fog, or it is humid, as it is in most of the country in the summer, the rose's leaves might get wet &c. If you have a sprinkler system - you get the idea.

Fungal disease can also weaken roses and make them more prone to insect infestations. This is bad because modern garden roses are, without any help from The Weather, already incredibly prone to infestations from aphids, mites, beetles, and a mite-borne disease undescriptively called "rose rosette disease", which produces a habitus that I can only describe as "rose bush eldritch horror".

Now, this may all have you asking one question. Probably, that question is "why are you so obsessed with a plant that wants so badly to die?" I will not be answering this question today. Instead, I will be answering a different question, which is "Why do modern garden roses suck so bad?"

Now, if roses are subject to some manner of curse, then it isn't a family curse, phylogenically speaking. Roses - genus Rosa species extremely miscellaneous - are a member of the family Rosaceae, which contains a massive number of useful and delightful plants. It is possibly the most economically important family of plants next to the brassicas. The rose family brings us not just roses, but apples, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, peaches, apricots, and almonds. And the wild rose, untouched by human efforts, is a lot like a raspberry, actually.

Its flowers have only five petals, in pink or white. It’s got thorny stems that form thickets, and oval (or, technically, lanceolate) leaves with lightly serrated edges. Its flowers are fragrant, which is an adaptation to their long and necessary coexistence with pollinators and other insects - fragrance serves as a chemical signal for insects to "come here" or "go away", depending. The wild rose is hardy, like all wild plants, tolerant of various environmental problems that would kill a garden rose: shade, salt, normal levels of ambient insect and fungal disease pressure, drought, being consistently rained on in the afternoon or evening. It may reproduce asexually from suckers - strong shoots from near the base of the plant - and this makes it able to withstand browsing pressure from e.g. deer. (Put a pin in that.) It also can reproduce in the normal way, by having its flowers pollinated and forming seeds, which are borne in prominent reddish-orange fruits called "hips".

This is not a rose I bought, but here’s Rosa gymnocarpa, a California native rose. It’s a wood rose, so it’s shade-tolerant, and it’s often found in redwood forests specifically, so it tolerates relatively dry soil and very acidic soil.

Honorable mention: Rosa gymnocarpa (wood rose)

Source: Calscape

A raspberry plant in flower, for comparison. Source

The wild rose has another trait, which may be surprising to those who have only ever seen garden roses: it blooms once, usually in the summer. This is typical of flowers, which almost always have a season, for the exact same reason fresh fruit has a season. Flowering plants are on a tight schedule: they need to finish up their blooming, so they can set fruit, so they can get their seeds out before winter, in case the frost kills them off. And mostly we’re used to that: tulips are for spring, so you don't expect a tulip to make a second showing in fall, or to flower continuously throughout the summer. But roses have been bred to do this, and have done it for centuries, for so long we barely remember what it was like when "roses blooming" was a time of year, an event.

It's possible that for most of human history, roses were all the more treasured for being fleeting, which simply isn't an aspect of how we moderns understand roses. I am constantly subjected to traditional ballads at home, both in English and German, so I am very aware that multiple Child ballads mention roses as a way of placing the events of the ballad at a particular time of year. In 'Lady Isobel and the Elf-Knight', a song traditionally associated with May Day, one version of the chorus references the events as occurring 'as the rose is blown'. And at the start of 'Tam Lin', the protagonist meets her fairy lover while plucking a double rose, is "laid down among... the roses red" by him, and finishes the ballad on Halloween night heavily pregnant with his child. The course of the ballad is inextricably intertwined with the course of the seasons, and the bloom of roses is synonymous with early summer. (There's so much symbolism in 'Tam Lin', but especially around roses. Can I interest you in tam-lin.org at this time?)

European religious literature even uses "a rose e'er blooming" as a purely figurative phrase, something impossible and magical enough to be a metonym for the Virgin Mary - but in the modern era, most garden roses are ever-blooming. The perpetual-blooming rose is not the natural state of the rose plant, but a kind of technology that had to be developed. And I don't know, I just think that's neat.

So what have we learned? The wild rose is: once-blooming, tough, possibly shade-tolerant depending on species, very thorny, bearing simple pink or white five-petaled flowers, that are fragrant, pollinator-friendly, and produce fruit readily enough. In short, a practical, normal sort of plant.

The garden rose is…not that. There’s no other way to put this: the modern garden rose is the wild rose, but bimboified.

Now, in case today is your first day on the Internet - well, first of all, welcome, it’s bad here - but secondly, bimboification is a niche fetish where someone is transformed into a hypersexualized version of themselves that is also very stupid. Plant domestication is obviously analogous. I didn’t originate this joke; in fact, I reblogged a joke like this just last week.

Roses are like this but even more so. Like, wheat is clearly bimboified. Its sexual parts (seeds) have been remade, swollen to ludicrous proportions, and wheat is probably worse at being a plant than wild grasses. But we created modern wheat from wild grass because it was more useful that way, and wheat could in theory survive and spread without human cultivation. Roses are Like That purely because we wanted to make them a more perfect decorative object. Centuries of intensive selection pressure for appearance have rendered roses useless as an independent plant: they are so disease-prone they need extensive intervention to even survive, and they are often physically incapable of propagating themselves - one of the basic features of plants! - without human aid. That’s plant bimboification.

Source: Heirloom Roses. This one is called 'Oranges 'n' Lemons. Hardly seems like the same plant!

Here are just a few examples, of what we've done to roses. Humans love rose petals - eating them, distilling them into perfume, smelling them, just looking at them - so the garden rose has massive flowers that are so stuffed with petals that pollinators cannot get at their centers, rendering the rose incapable of reproducing except possibly with the help of a human equipped with a paintbrush. Humans love bright colors, so modern roses come in every color their natural pigments allow. Garden roses are often - though not always - less thorny than their wild cousins, because thorns are inconvenient to humans, and so have been somewhat bred out.

And what’s just as important is what was bred out of wild roses in the process of becoming modern roses - by accident. As mentioned above, modern roses are often useless to pollinators, and, not unrelatedly, can’t reproduce without human help. They often lose their fragrance, if not specifically bred for it. They are very susceptible to disease, because gardeners can keep alive, through sheer stubbornness, plants that natural selection would have culled. Likewise, they need full sun where many wild roses can get by even in the shade of big evergreens, and they can't tolerate nearly as much cold, heat, or salt exposure as their wild relatives.

This 'use it or lose it' thing, by the way, is a general principle of selective processes like plant breeding, or like evolution. If you have two independent traits, A and B, and you select hard for A, then B is likely to gradually drop out of the population, simply because the subset of A carriers that also have B is likely to be small. It's pure statistics. (It essentially is a human-created population bottleneck.) The more intense and ruthless the selection pressure, the stronger the effect. Evolution cares a lot about seed production and hardly at all about color, so wild roses are plain but make enormous rose hips; humans like beautiful roses the color of sunsets, and are indifferent to seed production, so modern roses don’t make hips at all. The failure to select for eventually becomes an implicit selection pressure against.

(Highly-bred organisms are thus less, I guess, well-rounded genetically even before you get to issues of inbreeding, and if you assume there is no biological link between your selected-for traits and other ridealong traits, e.g. domestication syndrome. Genetics is complicated!)

One adapted wild-type trait that - I speculate - was not bred out, due to its direct usefulness to humans, was the ability of roses to grow back vigorously from having leaves or branches removed. This is, it seems to me, an adaptation to herbivore browsing - if you are a rose with minimal regrowth ability, and a deer chews on half your canes, it’s curtains for you. But humans also fully remove half of the canes of their garden roses every winter - it’s critical to controlling the fungal disease that so plagues them. Specifically, pruning improves airflow through the plant, which evaporates the water that keeps falling on the leaves from the sky. (You know. The rain, that roses both hate and need to live.) In some sense, we are acting as caretakers here, shaping the plant in inscrutable ways for its own good. But to the plant, we are basically deer: just another in a long line of animals that want to steal its leaves. Unbelievable! It needs those! Fuck you too, buddy: here’s a faceful of thorns.

Truly, a tale as old as time.

This brings me to my first actual rose review, a kind of bridge between wild roses and the world of cultivated roses.

#1: Rosa rugosa, probably "Hansa"

Source: the author's yard.

This is a sucker - a vigorous young ground-level shoot - from an unnamed rosebush from my mother's house. I say "probably 'Hansa'" because we have no idea what this actually is, only that it is a rugosa hybrid, purchased from an unknown nursery in the Midwest sometime during the Bush administration.

'Hybrid rugosas' are crosses between garden-type roses and a wild rose species called Rosa rugosa, which is native to much of Asia. This particular rose bush has many traits carried over from its wild parent: it's violently fragrant, a glorious sweet-spicy combo that smells to me like childhood and home; it has wrinkly leaves (characteristic of Rosa rugosa in particular); its stems are practically coated in prickles; and it's quite tolerant of shade, drought, and salt (Rosa rugosa is a beach rose).

The main virtue evinced by this rose, derived from its wild parent, is the same reason that it is still here in my garden: it is extremely difficult to kill. My mother, after hearing me say I wanted this specific rose bush at my house the same way it had been at my childhood home, dug up a sucker from her instance, put it in a bag with some wet dirt, carried it by hand on a multi-hour cross-country plane flight, and handed it off to me. Once I received it, I stuck it in a pot, because I was ripping up my lawn and had nowhere to plant it, and mostly forgot about it, because I was busy ripping up my entire lawn. It lost its leaves suspiciously early in the fall. ("That's not good," my mother said, over FaceTime, brow furrowed. "Are the rest of your roses doing that?")

But as the saying doesn't go, "where there's green cambium, there's hope", and I continued to take care of it throughout the winter. I eventually even remembered to put it in the ground. It is now March, and in defiance of the mockery of certain judgemental housemates, who said things like "why do you have a stick in a pot?" and "it's giving 'dead', my guy", this "stick" has now decided to become a rosebush, and has a grand total of (approximately) twenty-five leaves.

Like I said: extremely difficult to kill. It is currently planted 10-ish feet from the base of a redwood tree, a tough environment where some hardy garden-style roses have nonetheless been known to thrive. Given that its resurrection has occurred entirely while it was planted under the redwood, it doesn't seem too mad about its environment.

Review: holy shit, it’s alive???

#2: Zéphirine Drouhin, the "old garden rose"

Source: Heirloom Roses

Rosarians have conceived of many groupings of garden roses, based on known ancestry, phenotype, genetic studies, and Vibes, but one major breakpoint is those bred before 1867, the "old garden roses", and after 1867, the "modern garden roses".

The old garden roses were derived mostly from ancient European and Middle Eastern stock, which had themselves been created from wild roses centuries prior. For example, this is Rosa x alba, an ancient European rose strain; it was used as the heraldic badge of the medieval House of York during the English conflict known as the War of the Roses.

Source: not mine

Some of these roses are perpetual-blooming, a trait introduced as late as the eighteenth century, and which is entirely due to trade contact with China: as far as I can tell, the genes for strong reblooming only come from the Chinese rose-breeding tradition, which was itself centuries old by that point. So the modern Western concept of perpetual-blooming roses as the default kind of rose - like so many other aspects of modernity - is a direct result of Europeans cribbing from everybody else.

Interestingly, France was a major center for rose development during the early modern period. You can see it in the way old garden roses are named: overwhelmingly after some eminent madame or monsieur. This is probably connected to the fact that Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s empress, was a rose fiend: she had two hundred and fifty new varieties of rose to be brought to her gardens at Château de Malmaison, which was probably pretty much all the named varieties of rose that existed then, and many of which were new to European cultivation at that time. Again, this represented a massive inflow of rose genes that were previously restricted to other countries or continents entirely. Inextricably, these gardens also represent the proceeds of early modern global trade, and of empire: Napoleon, on campaign abroad, himself sent her hundreds of specimens of flowering plants, and the French navy confiscated plants and seeds from ships captured and sea and sent them to her.

Anyway, Zéphirine Drouhin, created at the end of the "old garden rose" period and named for some now-forgotten madame or mademoiselle, is highly fragrant - one of the few roses said to really perfume the air - with a vibrant but old-fashioned color palette. (Apricot and yellow roses were also characteristic of the Chinese rose gene pool, and so were significantly less common in old garden roses.) Zéphirine Drouhin is also thornless, a rare trait that we nonetheless see in some old-fashioned garden roses, and a few modern garden roses as well.

Old garden roses have a variable but generally good level of disease resistance. Zéphirine Drouhin in particular, gets something of a bad rap for poor disease resistance; English rose breeder David Austin Roses says, tactfully, that it "prefers warmer climates" (versus, one must assume, rainy England) and that "controlling disease can be a problem". By this you should understand them to mean that it is a whiny little pissbaby that constantly gets blackspot, a diva that will defoliate at the drop of a hat (or the drop of, uh, water).

However, unlike certain other newer roses I will mention later, I have found Zéphirine Drouhin to be pretty healthy so far. I received this rose, like many in this post, "bare root", basically a stick, dormant in a bag of wood shavings. Upon being planted in a part-sun area, it has leafed out with only a scattering of aphids to show in terms of disease.

Review: So far, so good. Looking forward to the fragrance.

#3 and 4: 'Mister Lincoln' and 'Fragrant Cloud', the hybrid tea brothers

Remember how I mentioned that 1868 is the breakpoint between "old garden roses" and "modern garden roses"? That year marked the invention of a new type of rose, the 'hybrid tea', that is in some sense THE rose, the ARCHETYPE of a rose. If you ask someone who knows nothing about roses to draw 'a rose' - if you look up clipart of a rose - a hybrid tea rose is what you'll get.

Source: Star Nursery

This is Mister Lincoln, and although it was developed as late as the 1960s, it has the classic hybrid tea rose form. Hybrid teas have a very distinctive shape, described as "high-pointed", with a spiral of unfurling petals that curl at the edges, and they're borne singly on long stems, making them great for cutting and putting into vases and bouquets. They are not always strongly fragrant, and they are not generally very disease-resistant. They come in a very wide variety of colors, intense and subtle. They are reblooming.

Hybrid teas were developed by another East-meets-West cross, when the Chinese tea roses, freshly imported from Guangzhou in the early 19th century, were bred with the old garden roses. Tea roses have the same iconic form as the hybrid teas; they have those unique, pastel shades that were previously quite absent from European rose stocks; they smell like a fresh cup of tea. All these traits they impart to hybrid teas. Hybrid teas have been very popular ever since, and have been subject to a great deal of selective breeding for color and form.

Hybrid teas don't generally spark joy, to me. I find the 'cartoon rose' shape kind of twee, honestly. And the reputation for lack of disease tolerance puts me off. But I heard Mister Lincoln was incredibly fragrant, and that drew me in. Likewise Fragrant Cloud (1967), which also has the charming feature of being a violent neon coral that is allegedly very difficult to photograph.

Source: Heirloom Roses

“It'll be fine," I thought. "How much fungal disease can it get? It's not like it's humid here."

Never again. My trust is destroyed; fuck hybrid teas.

please, my son, he is very sick

This is my poor Mister Lincoln, planted from bare-root in mid-December. It has three different fungal diseases, and also an aphid infestation I can't seem to get it to shake. It looks like one of those diagrams of a liver in a medical textbook that has fatty liver and cirrhosis and liver cancer all at once, just so you can see what all the diseases look like. This is a rose that has every problem! No other rose in this flower bed comes close to having every problem! 'Munstead Wood' is also a modern garden rose (though from a very different lineage - see my review below) and it has no fungal diseases and not a single aphid!

Well, maybe the other hybrid tea I bought is doing better... well, nope, it rained last week and Fragrant Cloud has powdery mildew.

Review: Come on, man.

#5 Unidentified ‘sunset’ rose

I didn’t buy these roses; they came with my house. As a consequence, I have no idea what they are, but I am now intimately familiar with their traits, and I think they are very indicative of both the high and low points of modern garden roses.

On the surface level, the fact that these rose bushes are still with us is an impressive proof of their persistence under adversity. When I bought the house, these roses were being choked to death. Lily-of-the-nile had been planted way too close to them, and then permitted to grow unchecked and undivided for many years; their roots were completely infiltrated and surrounded with lily roots. The lily roots had also damaged the irrigation lines, which were dribbling uncontrolled amounts of water into the shared root zone. So when I excavated these roses, the whole area smelled strongly of rot, with visible mold throughout; the roots were fully wet even in the heat of August. The roses were also infested with blackspot, not surprisingly. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was too little, too late.

But when they finally got some drainage, some direct sunlight, and some relief from the brutal root competition, they did start growing back, and even blooming. Come winter, I pruned hard, defoliated, and applied neem oil consistently. And they’ve made a comeback!

Source: these blooms are actually my roses.

They bloom, and they’re beautiful. They do this ombre thing, where the buds are bright yellow and as they open they go from yellow, to orange, and finally to red.

The growth is fairly vigorous, with no powdery mildew no matter how rainy it gets. But their foliage definitely suffers from blackspot, and occasional rose rust; the spores are probably ambiently present in the soil now, and they can’t quite seem to defend themselves, even with ample help from organic fungicides like neem oil.

They also have no fragrance. They smell like nothing. And that’s the standard modern garden rose in a nutshell, I think: beautiful color and form, shaky disease resistance, little fragrance. It’s a little sad, honestly.

Review: Okay, this one is really pretty, actually.

Interlude: Pesticides and the law of unintended consequences

So, yeah, you can sort of see how roses got a reputation for being picky divas. I can only imagine how bad this sort of thing must get in places that get (gasp!) rain or humidity in the summer.

Now, having created plants that are too disease-ridden to live, rose-lovers came up with practical and effective solutions to the disease problem they created. For the past century or so, the go-to fix for our increasingly disease-prone rose population has been chemicals: regular applications of synthetic insecticide and fungicide sprays, as well as plenty of fertilizer and herbicide to feed the roses and kill any competing weeds.

However, recall the theme of this post: the law of unintended consequences. In agriculture, the development of modern pesticides and fertilizers has been genuinely miraculous; the Green Revolution is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Saving a billion people! Can you even begin to conceive of what it would be like to save a billion people, even grapple with the moral weight of that act? I know I can't; the number is simply too large for our moral intuitions to handle, I think. So I'm hesitant to bad-mouth pesticides and fertilizers too much.

But they do have massive downsides. Chemical fertilizers leach into the groundwater and cause algal blooms that make entire bodies of water go anoxic, rendering them uninhabitable to fish and the rest of the aquatic food chain. Insecticides are probably responsible for colony collapse, which endangers the pollinators that we rely on for our food supply.

And, well, even if you don't give a shit about the natural world - you are a part of the natural world. You are an animal, with all the frailty that implies. Our bodies use many of the same ancient metabolic pathways as insects and plants; the majority of your DNA is shared with a banana. And because you are an animal, it is very difficult indeed to create an insecticide that will poison other animals without poisoning you too, at least a little. Herbicides are somehow still worse, despite the more distant biological relationship between humans and dandelions: Roundup, for instance, is linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has led to Monsanto paying out massive legal settlements to cancer patients who used their products.

So if we can't grow roses without coating them in poison, maybe we should just… not do that? Go back to growing super-hardy nearly-wild roses like rugosas, forgoing forever the elegance and sublime color of a modern rose?

Give up this? ‘Glowing Peace’, Heirloom Roses

Not so fast! Maybe this technological problem has a technological solution. If we bred roses so that they sucked, maybe we should just not do that! Make different roses! Make roses that don't suck!

#6-#8, ‘Ebb Tide', 'Eden', and 'Lavender Crush': roses that don't suck

Over the last fifty years, people have become increasingly aware of the impacts of modern lifestyles upon our health and the health of the planet and its ecosystems. So maybe this has made the public less willing to buy roses that need to be treated constantly with toxic sprays. Or maybe it's just that growing disease-prone roses is an enormous pain in the ass. Spray, prune, spray, defoliate, fertilize, spray, fertilize, spray, water - but not too much! Oops, powdery mildew. Defoliate and spray some more.

So the genetic health of the newer varieties of garden roses is greatly improved. The two hybrid teas I struggled with above were bred in the 1960s. All the named rose varieties in this section were bred since the 1990s or later: Eden in 1997, Ebb Tide in 2004, and Lavender Crush, the baby of the group, was introduced in 2016. All of them are vibrantly healthy and quite vigorous; Ebb Tide and Eden are shade-tolerant too, and Lavender Crush is allegedly very winter-hardy. After a scant two months in the ground, they've started to put out flower buds. And they keep some of the glorious color and form of older roses. Look at them!

Source: Heirloom Roses.

I don't mean to say all 20th century roses are bad and disease-ridden. I also have purchased 'New Dawn' (introduced 1930), due to it being the fifteen-dollarest rose at the Home Depot. (My toxic trait is that I am an absolute sucker for a good deal. I don't go into TJ Maxx anymore; it's too dangerous.) 'New Dawn' has all the ancestral, throwback traits I laud here: shade-tolerance, fragrance, disease resistance. It even brings in the pollinators! But it seems to me there's been a noticeable uptick in the quality of newer rose introductions, particularly when it comes to disease resistance. I'm not wired into the professional rose world to know what that is; I'm Literally Just Some Guy. But it's a good trend.

Review: I am so excited for the buds to open, you have no idea.

#9: 'Double Knockout': the 'landscape' rose

Wait, no, I take that back. These roses have too much ease of care. Put some back.

The Knockout rose has one virtue: you cannot kill it with an axe. Literally.

This rose was planted right at the foot of a redwood tree in my garden, because the previous owner of my house was an idiot. This is a terrifically bad setup for roses and redwoods: redwoods acidify the soil, and suck up water and nutrients aggressively, leaving little for surrounding plants, and of course they provide dense shade. Roses hate the acid, the dry and low-nutrient soil, and the shade; this plant never bloomed all last summer. For their part, the redwoods hate having anything planted in their inner root zone - their roots are relatively shallow for such a large tree. This is not a good situation for anyone, so I hacked this rose back to the ground, dug out as much of the root ball as I dared, and in my naivete thought that would be the end of it. Well, it has grown back. Now I am faced with the dilemma of whether to risk root injury to my redwood tree, or just let the rose be, bloomless as it is. Probably the latter is better for the redwood tree, on the whole. Maybe it’ll get choked out if I don’t water it? Anyone’s guess, really.

The category of landscape roses is a 2000s invention. The first Knockout rose was introduced in 2000 after years of intensive selective breeding for being easy-care, free-flowering, and disease-resistant; the similar Drift line was the product of an amateur rose breeder in 2006 to much the same ends. Landscape roses are so named because instead of being demanding prima donnas suited only to those who love roses enough to take on the Rose Tasks, they’re just another pretty shrub in the landscape.

And I will say this for them: in that bad, fungal spore–inundated flower bed I mentioned, my landscape roses (plus Munstead Wood, see below) are notably free of fungal disease.

Also, I think that's leaf tissue proliferating at the center of the bottom left bloom?? A rare but harmless growth disorder of flowering plants.

This comes at a cost, of course, at least if you’re a snob like me. I don’t think landscape roses are very interesting-looking - though of course they come in a wide variety of colors, the better to coordinate with the color scheme of your house! - and they are generally, tragically, without fragrance. While I can’t complain about anything that gets US gardeners to use less pesticides, they are barely roses to me. They are, in fact, the closest roses come to being an inanimate object, a decorative thing you can just plonk down in your garden wherever, like a tacky concrete statue. They’re a commodity; the enchantment is gone. I wouldn’t rip them out where they’re well-sited, but I sure wouldn’t plant more.

Now, this is incredibly mean to people who love landscape roses, but here goes. I’m reminded of a thread from r/Ceanothus, the California native gardening subreddit, that is now burned into my brain. OP asks for a native shrub recommendation, but not just any native shrub. OP wants a native shrub that will grow very tall, but also stay very narrow - 1’ wide in places. OP needs a native shrub that will grow thick and vigorous, to block out their view of the neighbors. OP needs this thing to be evergreen; OP presumably wants low water inputs. And OP needs all this, in a shrub that will grow in full shade.

In fairness, OP was polite about it, and this is a common problem for urban gardeners. The dark, untended canyon between buildings is a very common phenomenon in Californian cities. I too have a narrow, shaded side yard containing a tiny strip of crappy, gravelly dirt, that I’d love to grow something in: how do you think I found this post? Dear reader, I am very much at that devil's sacrament.

And the ceanothusheads of r/Ceanothus tried gamely. But one commenter replied with something that fully changed how I think about gardening:

Source: Reddit

Sometimes, what you need is not a living organism, with its own needs, that will change over time in ways you may not endorse, that interacts with the world around it. Sometimes what you really want is a man-made object. Sometimes what you want to grow in your tall, narrow, lightless, bone-dry side yard, for your privacy requirements, is a fence. And that’s what I think about landscape roses. In Mediterranean and desert climates, as long as there's enough sun, you can always fall back on planting a succulent. But not every location can grow succulents outdoors year-round. In temperate climates, landscape roses could probably be successfully replaced with a particularly attractive boulder. Or, if what you want is a smart-looking, easy-care hedge: consider a fence.

Review: I’d maybe rather plant a fence a succulent.

#10: 'Munstead Wood': the old English rose, reloaded

‘Munstead Wood’, my final acquisition, is a credit to another major modern rose breeding program, this time out of England: David Austin Roses. The main idea of the David Austin rose-breeding project seems to be combining the particular charms of traditional English old garden roses - their fragrance, their romantic, sophisticated forms - with the virtues of modern roses - continuous blooming, a wide range of highly Instagrammable colors - plus disease-tolerance that twenty-first century gardeners now expect. And judging by their singular impact on the contemporary rose market, they seem to have been very successful at that goal. The Reddit reviews are glowing, the forums are abuzz for their hottest new releases (Dannahue restock wen?), their most popular roses are often sold out, and other rose sellers have catalog filters for 'English shrub roses' that allegedly share the looks and fragrance of David Austin's best.

From the author's camera roll. 'I can't believe it's not Dave [sic] Austin!'

Their marketing is also very slick. Their website is very informative, with separate filters for various kinds of roses you might want to buy ('Best for fragrance', 'For a shady spot', 'Thornless or nearly so'), all the rose varieties have literary or historical names or else are named after charming British locations, and are all beautifully photographed in their idyllic show garden, and the prose is carefully engineered to incite lust in the winter-weary gardener. They even do periodic drops of new roses, like a sneaker company.

So last November, I allowed myself to buy one David Austin rose, 'Munstead Wood'.

Source: David Austin Roses

'Munstead Wood' is really gorgeous, I think, blooming in a deep burgundy color. The website claims the fragrance is "Old Rose, with fruity notes of blackberry, blueberry and damson".

An interesting fact about 'Munstead Wood' is that it is actually region-locked. David Austin Roses sells roses in both the US and UK (and maybe other places; sorry I am so American), but the climate of the UK has been changing, with more extreme weather events and even more rain. And you know how it is with roses and the rain. 'Munstead Wood' was no longer able to thrive, and has packed up its little rucksack and gone out to explore the world as a lone vagabond - specifically, America.

So how is it doing here? Great, actually. It may have been rained on every day for the past week, but at least it's not in England, I guess.

'Munstead Wood' has no fungal disease. It looks like it's never even heard of fungal disease. I'm pretty impressed! I can't actually tell you whether the roses are good, but this is a pretty good plant, which is a good start.

Review: I'm holding myself back from buying more David Austin roses right now. God help me, I have two more open full- to part-sun spots in my garden right now.

David Austin, "Lady of Shalott". Call me the Lady of Shalott the way I'm languishing in my tower, gazing only at the mere reflections of the real world (stuck inside, looking at my phone, because of the rain) and am about to throw myself in the river with longing (to be out in the garden)

#this was mostly written like a week and a half ago #delighted to report it has now stopped raining :)#gardening #plantblr #roses #botany #...kind of. not a botanist i just like reading about it #longpost #original content #(i hesitate to call this an 'effortpost': aside from spending an hour on wikipedia trying to graph out the various old garden roses #and their relationships with the species roses that spawned them - it just kind of happened.)

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greatunironic · 1 year ago

Text

eddie wakes up in a strange room. this was not particularly unusual for him, historically: he’d spent most of his twenties waking up in new and interesting places (including a handful of jail cells). but after eddie, the label, and the los angeles superior court system decided it would be best if he stopped drinking and doing blow, it stopped being such a regular occurrence.

so it’s almost alarming to him, now, to be blinking up at an unfamiliar cement ceiling with the raging bitch of all headaches and generally feeling like he got hit by a truck, got whiplash in a crash with the way his neck aches. he’d think he was hungover like all those times before except for how sharp the pain is, bright.

he worries, briefly, he’s relapsed, or someone’s slipped him something. but he remembers what him and the boys had been up to, before this, and he thinks it’d’ve been a strange night indeed if someone roofied a c-list (b-list if he’s feeling charitable) musician at a fucking frozen four game.

because yeah, eddie remembers: they’d been third row, watching the wisconsin ladies clean up and cheering for jeff’s kid sister like she was about to get olympic gold. (she probably would, someday. her and that mayfield girl who played defense were looking down the barrel at a 2026 run apparently.

eddie’s been to a handful of games over the years, when touring and recording allows them to go. he’s resolutely never been a sports guy but he’ll admit, when pressed, that live hockey is pretty dope. to say nothing, of course, of how jeff would probably murder them all in their sleep if they didn’t rep the red and white for lottie.

(and also — and this is between eddie and his god alright — but lottie’s coach? standing back there in his suit, hair styled and dialed, snapping his gum, yelling at the refs? kind of doing it for him, okay. worth the price of admission, even if the tickets weren’t free.)

when he thinks harder — which hurts too — the last thing he clearly remembers was someone from the beavers scoring, bringing their lead to 5-1, and a slapshot from the other team getting out over the boards and nearly taking out some lady’s popcorn. someone behind them in the seats said, “jesus they’re getting desperate, eh?”

then shit goes dark on him, not even a fade to black, but a full on smash cut, roll credits black, and the post-credits scene is where ever the fuck eddie is at the moment. it smells like human and cold and icy hot, so obviously, he thinks, he died and went to hell like all the church ladies said he would back in hawkins, or probably just a locker room. what the fuck?

he blinks at the ceiling, at an interesting water stain on the cement texturing. he’s in the middle of wondering where the rest of his band has gone if he’s here alone, fucking abandoners, when a sweaty redhead with the bitchiest expression he’s maybe ever seen enters his field of vision.

“you’re alive,” she says.

eddie blinks again. “why do you sound so disappointed?”

“yo coach!” she shouts, already on the move away from him. “he’s alive!”

he tries to sit up, but that makes the pain in his head worse, and also draws attention to the fact that his back also hurts. he squeezes his eyes shut and makes a truly embarrassing noise of pain — if pressed, he’d call it a whimper — and a pair of big hands land on his shoulders.

“out, out ladies i got this! hey!, hey, man, don’t move just yet,” says big hands.

“yeah, no problem, i don’t want to anymore,” eddie says. he stirs up the will to open his eyes again and very nearly slams them back shut. because of course the person staring down at him is fucking coach hottie snackycakes himself. he’s even better looking in person, too, big droopy eyes, lips as pink as his bubblegum, and shiny, jesus christ. he’s still got eddie by the shoulders, hands warm through the thin cotton of his flannel and tee — because eddie’s always been more fashion than sense, wayne always said, and it’s even worse now that the paps are on him—

“oh, fuck this is gonna be all over tiktok later, isn’t it?” he moans.

“maybe not.”

“don’t lie.”

“listen, eddie — it is eddie, right?” asks coach hottie. “i’m steve. coach harrington. faughnsie — lottie, i mean — she said you’re eddie. her brother’s guitarist? what do you remember?”

“more like he’s my singer,” he says, “but sure. and not much.”

“well, you’re gonna be okay,” says coach hottie — steve. “it really wasn’t that bad, and it was probably too fast for anyone to get it, unless they already had a camera on you. you took a puck to the head when one popped up. i’d apologize but it wasn’t one of my girls who did it, so. anyway — you weren’t out for long, which robbie says is good — she’ll get a look at you in a second — but you got your bell rung pretty good. and you’re gonna have quite the shiner, trust me.”

“speaking from experience?”

“oh, yeah. closer and faster too.” he gently raps his head with his knuckles. “too many concussions too early ended my nhl days, in fact.”

“oh. oh shit, sorry, i—“

“don’t worry about it, man, it happens,” he says. “and if it hadn’t, i wouldn’t be here.”

“at the frozen four.”

“yeah, sure, that too.”

“what?”

“what?” steve waves him off. “anyway, i’m just glad to see you up, ish, and talking. looked pretty scary, from the bench.”

“i really don’t remember,” says eddie. “but i’m sure i’ll see it on tiktok later, like i said — at least, my unconscious, bleeding form.”

“i got up there pretty fast, so i doubt it,” says steve.

eddie blinks, twice. “you—?”

“you were behind my bench, and you. well,” he says with a shrug, but he’s clearly a little embarrassed, finally putting those hands away — weapons of eddie destruction, he thinks — and shoving them into his pockets of his tight slacks. “i should be getting back out there.”

“do you? you’re murdering them pretty good, unless i black out and missed them getting four more goals,” eddie says.

the corners of steve’s eyes crinkle when he smiles. eddie thinks he might just pass out again. “no, we’re still gonna cinch it, i think. looks bad, though — first time coach missing the final period so’s he can hit on the cute musician who got his clock cleaned by the biscuit.”

“oh,” he says. swallows. “uh.”

steve’s crinkly, smiley eyes go wide. “unless—“

“no less!” eddie shouts and then immediately winces. at a better, less damaging to his more than slightly concussed noggin, volume, he says, “more, actually. because pretty sure i shouldn’t be left unsupervised, and i’ve clearly been abandoned by the band, so—“

“so,” says steve.

“coach, two minutes!” someone calls.

“so, i was hoping maybe i could keep hitting on the hot hockey coach back at his?”

“i’m at the ramada inn,” he says, “and i got tape to watch for the finals.”

“i live for room service,” eddie tells him seriously. “and i’m suddenly very into wisconsin sports teams.”

“coach! go time!”

“yeah?” he asks.

“yeah.”

“COACH!”

he jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “i gotta — but, uh, later?”

“pick me up in twenty?”

“probably more like half an hour, with stoppage,” he says.

someone bangs on the door. “COACH!! let’s boogie!!”

with one last look, wide eyed and smiling, steve leaves. eddie watches him go. he’d heard hockey players were caked up but lord — eddie is about to convert to a new religion, or maybe found one, over the stretch of those slacks.

“damn,” he says quietly.

“gross,” a woman says. eddie startles and looks to the side, where a lanky brunette with a bob and an undercut is staring at him, unimpressed. she’s in some get up that screams athletic trainer, and there’s a white board in her hand.

“how long have you been there?” he asks.

she raises an eyebrow. “long enough, and honestly, i don’t know if that counts as a you rule for him, or a you suck for you,” she says and does not elaborate when he asks. “also don’t look at him like that. it’s steve. he’s basically my sister.”

“yeah? any tips then?” asks eddie. “i promise i’ll only use them for good. well. mostly.”

“god,” she says with an expansive eye roll. “you’re gonna be a nightmare, aren’t you?”

a cheer goes up outside the room as the teams, presumably, take the ice again. eddie, head throbbing, concussed, embarrassed, grins. “sure hope so,” he says.

#stranger things #eddie munson #steve harrington #steddie #rockstar au #hockey au #two great tastes that taste great together tbh #cross posted on twitter #might clean this up later + pop it on ao3

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ramservices1 · 5 months ago

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Discover 5 key signs your geyser needs servicing and expert tips to prevent major issues. Ensure efficiency and safety with timely professional care.

Do Visit: https://ramservicesandsales.com/2024/11/22/signs-your-geyser-needs-servicing/

#Geyser Servicing #Water Heater Maintenance #Signs of Geyser Problems #Geyser Repair Tips #Geyser Not Heating #Water Heater Issues #When to Service Geyser #Geyser Leakage Fix #Geyser Maintenance Guide #Hot Water System Repair

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powderpinkprincess · 13 days ago

Text

Heat II. [Lando Norris x reader]

description: You put Lando back together after an extremely hot race.

The heat was brutal today.

The loudspeaker repeatedly warned the spectators to drink plenty of water and seek shade whenever possible. You watched the race from an air-conditioned room, arms crossed in front of your chest. Earlier, you were outside as well. Of course, the black asphalt absorbed the heat and radiated it right back, making it feel like you could literally melt.

You couldn’t understand why the calendar wasn’t changed. This had been a problem in the previous years as well. Especially last year, when multiple drivers complained about feeling sick from the extreme heat in the car. Some even had to visit the medical centre during the weekend.

No one was having it easy. You watched Lando break too hard into a corner at the very end of the race. He dropped back to fourth place, which then he couldn’t recover anymore.

When the race ended, someone from the team started talking to you. You nodded, smiling politely, trying to excuse yourself as quickly as you could. Then, you grabbed a cold bottle of water and started jogging towards where Lando was.

He was already out of the car when you arrived. His face was flushed, jaw tight, his cheeks way too pink even for him. To your surprise, there was no water in his hands yet. He just wrestled a melting hot car for nearly two hours. There was a team member near him, but his eyes were focused on Oscar, who finished second and was now giving an interview.

You approached Lando carefully. He wasn’t always in the mood to be bothered right after getting out of the car, especially not when he didn’t finish on the podium. You noticed how he was pulling at his race suit, trying to get out of it as soon as possible, still breathing hard. His eyes were on the crowd in the distance, not focusing on anything in particular. He was soaked in sweat.

At first, he didn’t even notice you, even though you had already called his name. You touched his wrist, and he jumped, turning his head towards you. He didn’t smile.

You handed him the water bottle. “Careful, yeah?”

He grabbed the bottle and nodded. Of course, he knew he wasn’t supposed to chug water after getting this dehydrated, but it was hard to resist. He took a long gulp, then poured some down the back of his neck, eyes shutting as he let out a breathless, “Fuck.”

“You okay?” you asked softly, knowing damn well he wasn’t.

“No podium,” he said flatly. “All that for fucking fourth.”

You watched him place the bottle cap back, his hands slightly trembling - not from nerves, but sheer physical exhaustion. His chest rose and fell fast, like he was still trying to catch his breath.

“I know,” you murmured. “It’s brutal out here. You did amazing, though.”

He shook his head, but not harshly. More defeated. “It should’ve been third. I had it.”

Your hand gently brushed his arm, careful not to overwhelm him while his system was still cooking under the heat. “You finished. You kept it clean. You brought it home when half the grid looked like they were about to pass out.”

His eyes flicked to you, softer now, though his frustration still simmered under the surface. Then, he looked down and rubbed his eyes, letting out another long breath. “I feel sick.”

You stepped closer, lowering your voice so no one around would hear. “Sit down, baby. You’re overheating.”

Reluctantly, he let you guide him to the chair in the shade, breathing through his nose while you grabbed the cooling towel the team had ready. As you pressed it gently against the back of his neck, he let out a shuddered sigh, eyes fluttering shut.

“Did you drink anything during the race?” you asked, despite knowing him well. He very rarely drank and often ended up with a headache, even after much cooler tracks than this one.

He just shook his head.

You took a long breath and bit down on your tongue. He didn’t need lecturing, you reminded yourself. Yet, you couldn’t help but feel a bit pissed over his horrible habits on the weekends. Often, he was so nervous before races that he could barely eat, and no matter how many times his team reminded him, he still wouldn’t drink enough. He was fit and strong, yet sometimes it backfired.

“I fucking hate this track,” he muttered, drawing back your attention.

“I know,” you whispered, pressing your lips lightly to his temple, careful not to touch too much. “But I love you anyway.”

His eyes opened just slightly, exhaustion softening the edge of his anger now. “You always know how to make me feel like I didn’t completely mess it up.”

“Because you didn’t.”

He smirked faintly, his hand finding yours in his lap. “Fourth place sucks a little less with you here.”

You smiled. “That’s the idea.”

And for the first time since he’d gotten out of the car, you saw him breathe a little easier.

#f1 x reader #lando norris x reader #lando x reader #lando norris x y/n #lando x y/n #ln4 x reader #ln4 x y/n

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onlypinkslut · 21 days ago

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“five laps” 🩸 coach toji fushiguro x fem!reader

cw : coach x student dynamic, period blood, nonconsensual touching, coercion, grooming, manipulation, power imbalance, psychological conditioning, humiliation, dubcon, implied masturbation, emotionally disturbing themes, vulnerable reader, slow burn escalation, age!gap

summary : you were just supposed to run five laps. but your body gave out before your will did cramping, bleeding, humiliated under the sun while coach fushiguro stood there and watched.

you’re on your fifth lap around the track, and it feels like your lungs are about to collapse. your legs are giving out, your chest is burning, and the sharp pulse of cramps has been stabbing through your lower belly for the last fifteen minutes but he won’t let you stop.

coach fushiguro’s voice cuts through the heat like a blade.

“pick it up. you run like that in an actual game, you’ll get eaten alive.”

he’s standing under the shade of the fence with his arms crossed over his chest. tall. broad. black sunglasses hiding his eyes, whistle hanging from his neck, forearms thick and veined beneath the tight stretch of his dark athletic tee. you can see the outline of his pectorals, the taper of his waist, the sweat already forming on his temples despite the way he hasn’t moved. his joggers cling low around his hips, worn and black and pushed up just enough to show the size of his calves. thick. muscled. heavy.

he looks like a man who used to fight. like a man who still could.

you’ve heard stories. the other girls whisper about him all the time. ex-fighter. street stuff. illegal circuits. gambling problems. dropped out of the system. picked up a wife, dropped her too. has a kid, somewhere. the school keeps him because he gets results. and because no one really wants to be the one to fire him.

you knew he was intense. but you didn’t know he’d be this cruel.

“coach,” you gasp, trying to slow, grabbing your side. “i told you, i really can’t today..“

“you think anyone gives a shit when you’re on the field?” he snaps. “what, you think cramps are a reason to walk? this how you want your opponents to see you? holding your belly like a little girl?”

your face flushes. with heat, with pain, with embarrassment. he says it loud enough that some of the others hear, and your stomach twists.

you keep running. you have to.

but it happens before you even make it halfway around again. warm. thick. slow. blooming in your underwear and seeping out fast through the thin material of your compression shorts. it’s not a light stain, either it’s heavy, visible, unmistakable. your thighs feel wet. your legs slow.

you stop mid-step and just stand there, chest heaving.

when you glance down and see the blood soaking into the light grey fabric, you want to disappear. your skin goes cold. the sun is still beating down on you, but all you feel is the pulse in your ears and the heat behind your eyes.

“what now?” his voice again. impatient.

you don’t answer. you can’t.

his steps are heavy when he walks up behind you. when he finally sees it, when his gaze drops down to your thighs, there’s a pause.

“…shit.”

you don’t look at him.

“locker room. go.”

your throat is tight. your vision is hot with tears and sweat and humiliation. you walk fast, head down, clutching the hem of your shirt to cover the blood but knowing it’s useless.

the locker room is empty. you strip your shorts off quickly and throw them in the sink, turning the water on cold, scrubbing the stain in silence. your panties are soaked. you didn’t bring anything. you didn’t expect it to be this bad.

you’re still trembling when you sit down. the locker room is quiet, echoing with your breath, the ticking pipes behind the wall, the drip of the faucet from where your shorts hang heavy in the sink. the towel clings to your thighs, damp with sweat and blood and heat, and your legs stick to the wood of the bench every time you shift. you don’t have anything else to wear. you don’t have the energy to care.

your stomach hurts. your back hurts. your face still burns with humiliation.

and toji is sitting right next to you.

he doesn’t speak at first. just leans forward with his elbows on his knees, forearms thick and veined, one of his hands lazily hanging between his thighs. he smells like his car air freshener, sweat, cologne that’s too faint to be fresh anymore. his shirt sticks to the shape of his back, damp with heat from earlier, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable. doesn’t look like a man who just spent half the afternoon yelling at you for being slow. he looks relaxed. like he belongs here. like this is nothing.

you hate that it makes you feel so small.

the silence in the locker room isn’t real silence. there’s still the buzz of the overhead lights, the steady drip of the faucet you forgot to turn off, the low, distant creak of pipes somewhere behind the walls. but to you, it feels deafening. like the air itself has gone heavy. thick with something you can’t name. your skin is clammy beneath the towel, sweat drying sticky between your thighs, and your stomach aches with the slow, mean pulse of cramps that haven’t let up since you started running. your legs are trembling beneath the bench, not from fear, but from sheer exhaustion. the kind of aching that makes you want to curl up on the tile and just lie there until someone turns off the lights and locks the door for the night.

you’re seated at the very edge of the bench, barely perched, towel pulled tight around your hips and upper thighs, and nothing underneath except a thin pad that already feels like it’s sliding out of place. your shorts still bloodied, still damp hang limply over the edge of the sink a few feet away, dripping diluted pink water into the drain. your panties are damp too. from sweat, from blood, from the humid weight of everything happening at once. you’ve never felt more raw, more visible, and more exposed in your life, and yet you sit frozen next to a man who hasn’t taken his eyes off you since he sat down.

toji isn’t speaking. he hasn’t spoken in nearly a full minute now. just breathing slow, the steady rise and fall of his broad chest drawing your attention no matter how hard you try not to look. his arms are folded loosely, resting against the heavy spread of his thighs, but there’s nothing relaxed about the way he’s positioned. the weight of him makes the bench creak slightly beneath you both his thick legs opened wide, one elbow propped on a bent knee, the other arm draped low with his fingers loosely hanging between his legs, thumb grazing the inner seam of his joggers. he’s still in his tight black tee from earlier, the material clinging to the swell of his chest, faint sweat stains darkening the collar, the underarms. his shoulders stretch the sleeves to their limit. there’s a vein bulging in his forearm, twitching occasionally. you can see the outline of every muscle, even in this shitty fluorescent light. he’s not trying to impress anyone he just looks like that. all the time.

he shifts slightly, the sole of his foot dragging against the tile. you don’t look at him directly, but you feel it the deliberate motion, the tension in his thighs, the sudden pressure of silence wrapping tighter around your throat. he leans forward just enough to make the towel around your waist feel too small, too thin, and you tighten your grip on it without realizing. the edges of your fingernails dig into the rough cotton, your knuckles tight, your body tense with a shame you don’t know how to carry. you can’t sit normally. the pad’s thick between your legs, and every time you shift, you can feel it slide. your inner thighs are wet, sticky, and cold. you keep thinking you still smell the blood.

“you’re shivering,” he says eventually, not looking at you when he says it. his voice is low. casual. so casual it makes your skin crawl. “bench is cold, huh? that wood doesn’t give you much.”

you don’t answer. your throat is too tight to speak. your fingers squeeze harder around the towel.

he shifts again, just slightly, his knee brushing yours. it’s not subtle. he doesn’t apologize. doesn’t pull away. just lets the contact stay.

“i know you don’t wanna talk right now,” he murmurs after another beat. “probably feelin’ like shit. sore. humiliated. mad at me. all of it.” his voice is smooth, almost warm, like he’s offering sympathy but the words are sharp enough to cut. “but you didn’t quit. not even when you bled through your shorts. you kept going.”

he finally looks at you then. head tilted slightly, those dark eyes dragging over your profile with the weight of something heavy and unreadable.

“that’s strength. you hear me?”

you nod, slowly. like you’ve been trained to.

he exhales softly. leans back a little, but not enough to create space. the air between you feels like it’s shrinking. hotter. thicker.

“most girls would’ve cried. curled up. begged to leave. but you didn’t. you ran until you couldn’t anymore. you sat here covered in blood, and you’re still here.” his voice dips lower, gravel in it now. “makes me think you can handle more than you think.”

his hand twitches. you notice. barely. but it’s there. a slow shift in his lap. a slight spread of his fingers against the stretch of fabric between his thighs. it’s not obvious. not blatant. but your stomach drops all the same.

he’s hard.

you don’t move. your breath is shallow now. every inch of you is buzzing. raw.

he turns slightly on the bench, facing you more now, and his knee presses tighter against yours.

“you ever had someone tell you how proud they were of you for just surviving?” he asks quietly.

you shake your head.

he clicks his tongue.

“that’s a damn shame.”

his hand moves.

not to you. not yet.

to himself.

a slow shift. a palm dragging along the front of his joggers. adjusting. pressing.

you pretend not to see it.

he pretends you didn’t notice.

“you don’t need to feel embarrassed, y’know,” he says, that same soft, falsely kind tone back in his voice. “about your body. about bleeding. about sitting here like this.”

you say nothing.

“you’re just a girl. your body does what it needs. and i’m not a fuckin’ teenage boy. i don’t flinch at a little blood.”

he laughs low under his breath, and you want to cry from how calm he sounds.

“i’m a grown man. you understand?”

you nod again, barely.

“and that means i can be here with you. like this. no problem.”

he places his hand beside your thigh. not touching you. not quite. but it’s there now. heavy. warm.

you still don’t breathe.

then, softly, he mutters:

“you want me to wait with you ‘til your shorts dry?”

you nod. again. you don’t know why. maybe because you’re too tired to argue. maybe because you think he’s being kind. maybe because you want it to mean something other than what it does.

his fingers brush against your outer thigh. just lightly. the edge of the towel.

and he sighs like he’s been holding something in for hours.

“you don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs. “i’ll just sit here. stay close. keep you warm.”

his hand lingers.

he doesn’t move his hand. not entirely. just lets it rest there. fingers spread wide beside the slope of your thigh, barely grazing the towel that’s clinging to your skin. the fabric is damp now from the heat of your body, your sweat, the airless locker room, and you can feel it clinging tighter with every shift you make every small adjustment that causes the pad to tug between your legs, sticky and thick and awful, like a reminder you can’t escape. you try to keep still. to keep your legs together. but you’re aching. not just sore worn out. like something deep in your hips has gone soft and hollow and needs rest. needs warmth.

he can tell.

“you’re really tense,” he says, not unkindly. his voice is calm now. lower. like you’ve already passed some invisible test and he’s rewarding you for surviving. “your muscles are all locked up. you cramp worse like that, you know?”

his fingers slide. not over the towel under it. just enough to brush your skin. your bare thigh. the edge of your hip. slow and light, like it’s unintentional. like it’s an accident you shouldn’t comment on. like it would be rude of you to notice.

you flinch. but you don’t say anything.

he hums softly. doesn’t stop.

“could massage it out,” he says, fingers tracing lightly in slow circles now. “if it helps.”

you shake your head. your voice barely rises. “it’s okay.”

he nods. doesn’t argue. just lets his hand drift a little higher on your leg, settling there again. warmer now. more present.

he’s still palming himself when he thinks you’re not watching. slow movements under his joggers, lazy pressure against the bulge you won’t let yourself look at, but feel all the same. you can hear the shift of his weight as he adjusts it. you can hear his breath deepen just slightly when your thighs part a little wider from the way you’re sitting.

he’s not in a hurry. that’s what makes it worse.

he’s letting you feel the pressure. letting you feel him waiting.

“you were really fuckin’ strong today,” he says after a moment, like he’s picking the thought out of his own head. “ran ‘til your legs gave out. bled through your fuckin’ shorts. sat on this bench in your panties and kept your mouth shut.” his voice dips, drops thick into the space between your ears. “you didn’t cry. not once.”

your heart skips.

he shifts closer. just slightly. the side of his body brushing yours.

“i’ve coached a lotta girls. none of them took it like you did.”

his hand lifts.

you think he’s going to pull away.

but instead, he reaches for the edge of the towel slowly, deliberately and adjusts it like he’s being helpful. like he’s covering you better. but his fingers brush the underside of your breast as he does it. just for a second. slow. padded. thick.

you gasp, barely.

he doesn’t react.

“you cold?” he murmurs again, softer now. his breath is against your cheek.

you nod, just to say something. to fill the space.

he lifts his arm and lets it settle around your shoulders.

“told you not to sit bare on the bench. here.”

and then gently, slowly he pulls you sideways until your body leans into his chest.

you tense.

“it’s okay,” he says instantly, warm breath brushing your ear. “relax. it’s just me.”

his hand is heavy where it rests on your waist. his thumb moves in small, slow circles just beneath the towel. and you can feel the outline of his cock now. pressed against his thigh. solid. hard. slow pulses through the fabric like he’s savoring the way your body settles into him.

you whisper something. you don’t know what.

he tilts his head.

“mm?”

you swallow hard. “coach…”

his arm tightens around your shoulders.

“shh,” he says. “you’re okay. just let me hold you for a bit.”

you stop talking.

he smells like sweat and soap and something warm underneath it all. not cologne just man. salt and heat and clean laundry and his own skin. and it’s worse than if he reeked. because it makes him feel safe.

his other hand moves to the edge of the towel again.

you don’t stop him.

he lifts it slightly. just enough to expose the top curve of your thigh. your hip. the crease where the pad begins to peek between your legs. and his hand hovers there. doesn’t touch. just waits.

you can feel him looking.

he exhales like he’s trying not to groan.

“you don’t even realize how fuckin’ strong you are,” he murmurs, his lips almost brushing your hair now. “sitting here all quiet, bleeding into a towel, like it’s nothing. any guy who gets to see you like this should be fucking grateful.”

his hand finally settles high. just beneath your ribs.

and starts to slide up.

you freeze.

but he says it again.

“relax.”

and you do.

you don’t know why.

but you do.

his hand settles beneath your ribs, large and warm and firm, and for a moment he just leaves it there palm open, fingers splayed, like he’s trying to memorize the shape of your side. you’re too aware of your own body now. the curve of your waist. the thin towel clinging wetly to your back. the blood between your thighs growing colder by the minute. you’re exhausted, sore, half-naked, pressed into his chest like a child too tired to think. and you can feel him shifting underneath you.

his thighs are thick beneath yours. steady. like stone. and the bulge straining inside his joggers is unmistakable now solid against your hip, twitching subtly every time you breathe. he hasn’t said anything about it. hasn’t drawn attention to it. but he doesn’t move you away, either. doesn’t flinch. he just lets it be there, pulsing under your body like it belongs. like he earned it.

his fingers start to move again.

this time upward.

slow. slow enough to convince you it’s nothing. that it’s casual. his palm brushes the bottom curve of your breast, the edge still hidden beneath the towel and pauses there.

you suck in a breath.

he exhales. slow. deep.

“you’re alright,” he says gently, like he’s calming something in you. “you’re still shaking.”

you try to deny it, but you are. not just from the cold anymore. from him. from how close he is. from how heavy he feels on every part of your body, even the parts he hasn’t touched yet.

his thumb brushes the underside of your breast.

you flinch.

he presses a little firmer.

“you’re sore here too, huh?” he asks, low and thick in your ear. “from the run?”

you don’t answer.

“you always tense up in your chest when you’re cramping,” he murmurs. “tightens the whole area.”

his palm cups your breast fully now.

no more pretending.

he does it slowly like he’s helping. like this is about relief. like this is normal. like a coach massaging pain from a muscle. his fingers sink in slightly, firm but not cruel, just heavy enough to make you feel it in your spine.

you exhale sharply.

he leans in closer.

“feels better, doesn’t it?”

you can’t speak.

“i got you,” he says again, softer now. “just breathe. let go.”

his other hand moves. slides down your side. brushes the edge of the towel again. he shifts you on his lap slightly adjusts your position and the pad between your legs presses tighter. it shifts, slips, catches against your soaked panties. and you gasp just a little from the sensation. the pressure.

Toji’s breath hitches.

he moves behind you, adjusting again, and his cock presses firmer against your hip.

he doesn’t hide it now.

his hand squeezes your breast again. slower now. he’s not checking for soreness anymore. he’s groping you. playing with the weight in his palm like it belongs there. and he says nothing about it.

the towel starts to slip.

you tighten your grip on it.

he hums softly.

“don’t hide,” he whispers. “you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. your body’s beautiful.”

he presses a kiss to your temple.

“soft little thing. stronger than all of them, and still so goddamn soft.”

his thumb drags across your nipple, slow and deliberate through the thin fabric of your sports bra.

you whimper.

barely.

he hears it.

he doesn’t stop.

“just a little more,” he says, his voice syrup now. “just wanna help you relax.”

and you believe him.

or maybe you want to.

either way you let him keep going.

his hand doesn’t leave your chest. it cups you fully now, warm and large and steady, his thumb grazing the slope of your breast in slow, lazy sweeps that blur the line between comfort and possession. he holds you like it’s normal, like you’re just sore and he’s just helping, like a hand on your tits is the natural follow-up to pain. your body is stiff against him, spine pulled tight like a branch about to snap, but he keeps petting. keeps squeezing. his hand is heavy and sure, dragging against sore skin and swollen tissue, like he’s soothing something broken. like he’s done this before. like he has the right.

his other hand doesn’t move either. it stays low on your side, curled around your waist, his forearm locking you to his chest like he doesn’t even want you to realize you’re trapped. you can feel the shape of him pressed beneath you hard now, thick and undeniable, the pulse of his cock grinding slow into the underside of your ass each time your legs shift. he doesn’t hide it. doesn’t flinch. he just lets you feel it. lets you sit right there like it means nothing. like you’re supposed to feel how turned on he is. like he earned it.

“let me get this off,” he says suddenly, voice close to your ear, his fingertips slipping just under the tight hem of your sports bra. “probably too tight.”

your breath hitches, heart catching on the panic in your throat. your hands move, instinctive, grabbing his wrist as your body arches away from him slightly.

“wait, coach..”

but he cuts you off before your voice even builds. doesn’t snap, doesn’t argue. just sinks deeper into that low, warm tone that makes everything worse. indulgent. slow. syrup-thick.

“hey… it’s okay. i’m just helpin’. period makes your chest sore, right? i heard that’s real bad sometimes. ’s nothing. not weird.”

his fingers slide higher. he’s not pushing now. just moving slow along the line of your ribs, like he’s mapping where the pain lives. his breath is warm against your cheek, and you feel him nod behind you like this really is about cramps. like he believes it.

“just wanna take a look. help you loosen up.”

you hesitate. you hate how your body softens. hate how his voice slides into you like heat. everything in you wants to say no. to flinch. to pull away. but he holds you steady, and you’re tired, and sore, and bleeding, and so damn hot, and you don’t want to be touched but you don’t want to fight either. his hand still rubs gentle circles into your side. he kisses your cheek like it’s nothing.

“trust me, sweetheart,” he murmurs.

and you do.

he tugs the fabric up slow. slow enough to give you time to stop him, which makes it worse. slow enough to make it feel like a choice, like you gave it to him.

the sports bra peels from your skin with a wet, sticky sound, sweat clinging beneath it, heat trapped in the cotton. your tits spill free, nipples already flushed and tight from the ache, and the cold air hits them like a slap. your arms cross your chest before you can stop yourself, a useless reflex, shame pouring down your back as you feel your own nipples harden and betray you.

toji groans low behind you. not dramatic. not fake. it’s the sound a man makes when something in his hands fits too well.

“fuck,” he mutters, one hand already sliding back to your chest. “look at that.”

you turn your face away. eyes squeeze shut. your breath is hot and trapped behind your lips, and you feel the panic live behind your teeth but no words come.

he cups one breast in his palm. then the other. both full, soft, trembling in his grip. he doesn’t just hold them. he plays. he bounces them gently, like he’s weighing the change in mass. his thumbs roll under the nipples, grazing the sore parts, dragging across the skin with slow, greedy pressure.

“y’know,” he says, half-laughing under his breath, “i always thought girls were prettiest on their periods.”

your whole body goes still.

he leans closer. not threatening. not harsh. soft. calm. like he’s telling you something intimate.

“get all warm. all swollen. tits so fucking soft and cute,” he murmurs, his lips brushing against your cheek as he speaks, dragging low toward your jaw. “so perky. so bouncy.”

he gives them another light shake in his palms, groans again when they jiggle for him, nipples flushed, skin damp and puffy from heat and hormones.

“fuckin’ adorable.”

you whisper his name. not loud. not pleading. just quiet and confused and wrong. your voice doesn’t sound like yours.

his thumb rolls one nipple. slow. steady. his hand cups the weight like it belongs there.

“you feel that? how tight you are right now? that’s blood workin’ through you, sweetheart. makes everything softer. prettier.”

he kisses your cheek again. lower now. near the jawline. closer to your mouth.

“not gross. not ever.”

then his hand moves.

down.

across your belly.

slow.

comforting.

like a man who’s about to check if your pain has gone away.

his fingers drag the towel down slightly. you feel the shift of fabric as your bare stomach tightens, as your thighs twitch and your whole body wants to close.

but he doesn’t stop.

his hand slides between your legs.

and then he cups the pad. full and firm. right over your underwear. right over your cunt.

you jerk. flinch. instinctively.

but his arm around your waist tightens.

he doesn’t let you go.

his voice doesn’t change.

“still hurtin’ down here?” he asks gently, like he’s checking in.

his hand stays there. warm. spread wide. like that’s a normal place to rest it. like it’s part of the treatment.

“cramps still bad?”

you don’t respond.

your body is locked.

he palms you lightly. through the pad. it’s soaked now. you feel it drag against your folds with every breath.

“shouldn’t have pushed you that hard today,” he murmurs. “that’s on me.”

he rocks you. gently. his thigh shifts. your hips move with it.

your head spins.

“but you took it. like a good girl.”

his hand rubs.

slow.

gentle.

like he means it.

and he tells you again, voice soft, steady, the same line he always says when he’s doing something he shouldn’t.

“i’m just helpin’.”

he doesn’t take his hand away.

he holds you like that, fingers spread wide across the thick swell of your pad, palm cupping the blood-soaked cotton like it’s nothing, like he’s proud of it. the heat of him sinks into you through the damp fabric, heavier with each pass of his hand, rubbing so slow and easy you almost forget how much he’s touching. his thumb stays near the top, barely grazing the edge of the pad, and the pressure is light but it’s there. enough to make your thighs twitch when he catches too close to where it throbs.

he feels it.

and moves his hand in soft little circles.

“bet it still aches,” he says, voice low and steady against your ear. “always worse at night.”

you nod once. it’s barely a movement. your head is down, eyes half-closed, the weight of exhaustion sitting heavy in your shoulders. you want to go home. shower. lie down. pretend none of this happened.

but you’re still on his lap. still naked under the towel. your tits are out and your panties are sticking and the cotton between your legs is soaked through, and toji’s hand is right there. warm. steady. comforting.

too comforting.

he’s still got your thigh in one hand and your waist in the other, holding you still, keeping you open. your legs rest over his and you can feel the thick press of his thigh between them now, just beneath the pad. every time he shifts, it rocks up into the heat of your cunt.

“you’re strong, baby,” he says, almost like he’s talking to himself. “fuckin’ strong.”

his hand moves again. back to your chest. he cups one tit, slow and warm, bouncing it gently in his palm.

“pushed through a full run. bled through your shorts. didn’t cry once. just came back here, stripped down, and sat like this. like a fuckin’ champ.”

he gives your nipple a soft roll between his thumb and forefinger, and your body jerks.

“that’s what i mean,” he breathes. “girls don’t get enough credit for this shit. nobody sees how fuckin’ beautiful you are like this.”

his other hand returns to your cunt. not between the panties, not yet. just on top of them. full and firm. he presses slightly harder this time, grinding the pad against your folds like he’s trying to soothe the pressure. you feel how wet it is. how warm the cotton’s gotten. how it shifts against you when he rubs in little circles.

his voice lowers.

“you ever have someone take care of you like this before?”

you don’t answer.

“nah. i know you haven’t. nobody sees how sweet you are. nobody notices how soft you get when you’re hurt. i do.”

he rubs slower now.

“i do, i see it every time.”

he lifts the towel just enough to look down at your lap, at the small red stain soaking into the fabric, the wet press of the pad against the crotch of your underwear.

his voice drops again.

“you’re so fuckin’ cute like this. don’t even know it.”

his fingers drift lower. not inside. just grazing the edge. not yet.

“i’ll wait ‘til your shorts are dry,” he says softly. “just sit with me a little longer. let me help.”

he kisses your jaw.

his cock pulses under you.

and you sit there. barely breathing. bleeding into his hand.

letting him rub.

because his voice is so warm.

and you’re tired.

his fingers dip down again. two of them grazing along the side of the pad, following the edge where the blood stopped soaking. he touches so soft it barely registers but it does. the motion presses the cotton closer to your skin, shifting it deeper into the heat of your cunt, dragging the fabric across the throb.

“does it feel like it’s leaking through?” he asks gently, thumb stroking along the side of your thigh. “couldn’t tell from the front.”

you shake your head. your mouth stays closed. you don’t know what to say.

his hand moves again. under the towel. full palm pressing into your lower belly, the other staying between your legs.

“mind spreading for me, baby?”

you flinch.

“just wanna check the back. it’s probably climbing up. happens when you sit too long.”

you don’t respond. your hands tighten on the towel.

he kisses your jaw again. his voice lower. warmer.

“c’mon. just for a sec.”

you shift.

your thighs open slightly.

he hums.

“there you go.”

his fingers dip between, soft, slow, spreading the backs of your legs until the pad is fully visible between the round press of your ass cheeks, the cotton dark where it’s soaked deepest, clinging to the center seam of your panties. it’s almost coming off, tilted to the side. like it shifted from all the rubbing.

he breathes out low.

his hand stays on the inside of your thigh, fingers rubbing lazy circles.

his fingers slide lower. two of them brushing along the elastic edge of your panties, right where they press into the top of your inner thigh. he rubs there for a moment, slow and thoughtless, like he’s just making room to check but he doesn’t stop.

his voice dips low beside your ear, breath warm.

“lemme just…”

he trails off. the words don’t finish. like he’s so focused he forgets to lie.

your thighs twitch as his fingers slip beneath the fabric. he curls them just under the edge, lifts it away from your skin slightly, then slides the waistband down an inch. the pad shifts with it, dragged sideways with a sticky sound, clinging wet between your folds. you flinch.

but he keeps going.

he tugs the whole strip of fabric gently to the side—panties and pad at once pulling them off-center, fully baring the curve of your inner thigh, the start of your pussy. you feel air hit the blood-slicked heat there. the mess. the shame. and worst of all, his breath when he looks.

he stares for a beat. silent.

then hums, voice thick and low.

“yeah,” he murmurs. “leakin’.”

you go still. your hands grip the towel tighter, fists curling, nails digging into the fabric. but you don’t say anything. your mouth is dry. your heart won’t slow down.

his fingers trace lower. right where the edge of the pad has left a faint red line across your skin. a streak of blood that smeared against your thigh. it’s not dripping. not fresh. just stained. and somehow that makes it worse.

“you didn’t feel that?” he says softly, brushing the mark with the back of his knuckle. “been bleedin’ through this whole time.”

he strokes again, higher now, finger sliding dangerously close to the crease where your lips begin. he doesn’t touch you there, not quite but you feel how close he is. how badly he wants to.

“poor thing. no wonder you were so quiet.”

he tugs the pad further aside. it’s still stuck to your panties, but tilted now, shifted out of place so the soft part of your cunt is exposed underneath, just barely visible between the cotton folds.

his breath thickens.

“look at you.”

his fingers stay on your thigh, rubbing circles like it calms you, like this is something he’s doing for your benefit.

“gonna need to change that one,” he says quietly. “not doin’ much now.”

he doesn’t move to help. doesn’t offer another.

he just keeps looking.

his hand slides back to the waistband, gripping your panties in one fist, tugging them a little tighter to the side so the cotton cuts against your thigh and leaves your pussy open to the air.

“still bleedin’,” he whispers, more to himself than to you.

his thumb slides between your thighs, stopping just above your clit, pressing into the skin without shame. just holding.

“you’re still so warm.”

and then, finally, he leans back a little.

“want me to help clean it?”

he holds you still for a moment. just breathes. his hand between your legs, thumb resting gently above your clit, the pad tugged to the side and your panties clinging wet between your cheeks. you can feel the blood cooling now. feel your own heat against the air. feel the way his thigh is still flexed under you, cock throbbing through the thick cotton of his sweats.

then he shifts.

his hands slide to your waist, warm and sure, and he lifts you slightly just enough to turn your body. he moves slow, like he’s being gentle with something hurt, something breakable. he lays you back across the bench, the towel half slipping down your chest, your bare skin sticking faintly to the cool wood beneath you.

your back arches slightly on instinct. your legs curl in.

he doesn’t let you close them.

his hand slides between your knees, thumb pressing lightly until they part. his voice comes close to your ear again, soft and simple.

“lay back for me.”

you do.

“good girl.”

he moves to the end of the bench, crouching low between your spread legs. the angle shifts everything. your hips tilt forward. your thighs open wider. the pad now hanging uselessly off to the side, panties twisted and soaked, your cunt spread open and quiet under the fluorescent lights of the empty locker room.

he just looks for a moment. doesn’t speak. doesn’t blink.

and then his voice comes, calm and level, a little quieter.

“why aren’t you sayin’ anything, sweetheart?”

you blink slowly, eyes on the ceiling.

“i don’t know.”

his hand presses your thigh down again, making you open wider.

“you always get quiet like this?”

you nod once. voice steady.

“sometimes.”

he hums.

“not when you’re with me though.”

his gaze lingers between your legs, and he reaches for the towel draped across your waist, folding it carefully in one hand. he dips the edge down, pressing it gently between your thighs.

“tell me what you’re feelin’ right now.”

you swallow, voice low.

“tired.”

he smiles faintly.

“mm. what else?”

the towel rubs a little deeper. slow back and forth between your folds, wiping the blood gently, dragging against swollen skin. the pressure isn’t firm. but it’s enough.

“warm.”

“where?”

“my stomach.”

he presses the towel higher, over your pubic bone, thumb slipping close to the top of your slit.

“down there too?”

“yeah.”

he moves slower. deliberate now. the towel folds tighter. his fingers press through the fabric as he wipes, nudging the lips of your pussy apart just enough to see what he’s cleaning.

“what about here?” he says softly, rubbing right along the crease. “still ache?”

you exhale, slow and flat.

“a little.”

his voice gets quieter.

“do you want me to keep cleanin’?”

you stare at the ceiling. breathing steady.

“yes.”

and that’s all he needs.

he folds the towel in half again, eyes never leaving your cunt. the blood is sticky now, clinging in streaks along your lips, your inner thighs, the curve under your pussy where it dripped and dried. he presses the fresh cloth between your legs and wipes you slow, from the back of your slit to the front, dragging upwards in one long, soaking line.

and he groans under his breath.

“fuck.”

his hand shakes slightly.

“you’re so fuckin’ pretty down here.”

his fingers don’t use the towel anymore.

it’s been set aside, forgotten at the end of the bench. his palm is bare now, two fingers pressed to your cunt, sliding slow between the folds like he’s checking for bruises. he doesn’t go inside. doesn’t stroke your clit. he just drags his fingers up the soaked seam, from the curve near your ass all the way to the top of your slit slow, steady, with the same deliberate rhythm he uses when stretching after a workout. like this is part of your cooldown. like this is normal.

his fingers press firmer into your thigh, spreading your legs slightly wider as he shifts forward on the bench. the towel’s half-fallen now, twisted somewhere near your hip, your cunt exposed under the harsh locker room lights panties pulled to the side, pad soaked and tilted, blood streaked down your folds and inner thighs, tacky and dark.

he breathes slow. deep. you can hear it.

“just gonna clean you up,” he murmurs, like it’s a kindness.

his thumb brushes just beside the mess, dragging a faint line into the skin of your thigh.

then his hand slides up, palm dragging over your belly again.

you’re still warm there. your skin soft and flushed from the heat, your muscles taut from the cramps and from how long you’ve been sitting open like this.

he moves slow. deliberate.

one hand on your lower stomach, steady and grounding, the other slipping between your thighs again with no hesitation.

he palms the pad. presses down.

you jerk. not enough to stop him. just a reflex.

“still so full,” he mutters, like he’s impressed.

his fingers hook under the waistband of your panties now.

he peels them gently to the side, dragging the damp cotton down your thigh, just far enough to see all of you.

the pad sticks for a second wet, stubborn, saturated with blood.

he pulls it free. it makes a soft, tacky sound.

you flinch again.

he holds it up between two fingers for a beat, stares at the deep red bloom soaked into the center.

“you didn’t even tell me,” he says softly. “you just kept runnin’ through this.”

he tosses the pad into the trash behind him.

then he turns back to you.

and settles his palm between your thighs again.

bare now. nothing left between your skin and his.

your cunt is soaked.

blood. sweat. the mess of the day.

your lips are sticky, soft, parted slightly from the way your legs have been open too long.

you can feel it all.

and now he does too.

his hand cups you. full. warm.

he exhales slow.

“fuck,” he says.

and starts to rub.

slow circles.

not over your clit. not inside. just pressure broad, heavy palm dragging along the whole heat of your pussy like he’s checking for tension.

the smear of blood under his hand leaves streaks.

he spreads it.

down. up. again.

you gasp once. quietly.

he doesn’t stop.

“don’t worry about the mess,” he says under his breath. “this is normal. this is what a body does.”

his voice is soft. steady.

his hand rubs again.

and again.

you want to close your legs.

you don’t.

he presses a little harder.

your hips rise just slightly.

your breath catches.

“cramps worse now?”

he says it like a real question. like he doesn’t feel your body twitch under his hand.

you nod once. barely.

his thumb presses lower. not on your clit just beneath.

“mm. should’ve known. blood this thick… probably backed up.”

he shifts.

his fingers slide down again.

then, without warning, he slips two fingers between your lips shallow, not deep. just enough to feel the heat.

he groans low in his throat.

your eyes squeeze shut.

“you’re swollen,” he murmurs. “poor baby.”

he strokes you there. inside your folds. slow and soft, not pushing in, just parting you gently.

his fingers are soaked immediately.

you can feel it.

you know what’s on his skin.

and he doesn’t flinch.

“been sitting here so long. all of this buildin’ up. you didn’t even notice, did you?”

his fingers rub slow, dragging the mess through your slit in lazy, thoughtful strokes.

your voice is barely a whisper.

“coach…”

he doesn’t stop.

“i know. you’re tired. this ain’t how you wanna be touched.”

his thumb presses to your hipbone.

“but it’s how your body needs to be touched right now. just let me take care of you.”

his hand moves lower again.

his fingers press to your entrance.

not inside.

just resting.

he breathes heavy.

“you feel how warm that is?”

he drags the tip of his middle finger through the mess again, blood slick and thin now that it’s been warmed by air and motion.

“this ain’t dirty,” he says firmly. “this is natural. beautiful. strong.”

he strokes again.

your thighs twitch.

you swallow a sound that nearly leaves your throat.

“you’re bein’ so good,” he murmurs.

his voice lowers.

“lettin’ me help like this.”

he cups you one more time. full, slow, steady.

holds it there.

no more rubbing. just heat. pressure. presence.

you can feel the shape of his palm against every part of your cunt.

he leans in slightly.

“you don’t even know how proud i am of you.”

his breath is warm against your cheek.

“you bled through your fuckin’ shorts,” he whispers.

“and still made me hard.”

you don’t breathe.

his hand shifts again.

moves up.

over your belly.

then to your chest.

he cups one breast. slow. heavy. full-handed.

and says it again.

“strongest girl i’ve ever coached.

hi, angels. i know i disappeared for a while i needed a break to breathe, and i didn’t want to post anything half-done or soulless. thank u for still being here. thank u for waiting.

this piece is quiet, sick, slow, and heavy. it’s for the girls who like tension that never lets up.

love.

onlypinkslut

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