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silkscream · 3 months

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natural devotion

ੈ✩ synopsis: gojo finds you, his ex-wife, in a sketchy dive bar. he almost doesn't recognize you.

ੈ✩ cw: smut (minors dni, ageless + blank blogs will be blocked), previous arranged marriage, ex-husband!gojo, clanleader!gojo, rough bathroom sex, semi-public sex, drunk sex, oral, fingering + penetration, light choking, gojo is.... weird idk how to explain. he's just strange and cold and possessive and so odd

ੈ✩ wc: 3.2k

ੈ✩ a/n: literally nobody asked for this. also it's unedited. sorry

Gojo thinks he sees a ghost when he sees you.

At least, he thinks it’s you.

You don’t see him yet, so he takes the liberty to scan you over more thoroughly. You’re not wearing anything like the simple, modest attire he remembered you donning around his estate. Instead, you’re in a form-fitting crop top and the tiniest mini skirt Gojo has ever seen. He’s not sure if it even classifies as a skirt.

Interesting.

He takes a breath as he sits down next to you, interrupting your conversation with the bartender to offer his card. You turn to look at him and you laugh.

“Put hers on my tab,” Gojo says.

“Always the gentleman.”

“You know I’ll always take care of you. Even if we aren’t married anymore.”

You could scoff at that, but you decide to be polite. He’s as candid as he’s always been. It used to humiliate you, but you aren’t the same docile little wife you used to be. You also realize his gesture could be interpreted as tender, which isn’t something you were ever used to in your marriage.

He was a cold man and it was a marriage of convenience.

Or perhaps he was only cold to you. You would watch how he would interact at social gatherings and clan parties, his charisma infecting entire rooms. Toothy grins that shone as brightly as his hair. Always loud, animated, and magnetic.

To you, he was mostly indifferent.

He was never outwardly mean, but he was constantly occupied with missions. It almost felt as if you weren’t married at all. You enjoyed speaking to him when he was around, though. There were moments when you could almost picture yourself being his friend, but then he would be away and come back cold.

When you asked for a divorce, he complied without a blink. Even after you were free from becoming an incubator for the Gojo clan’s next heir, something in your chest ached at how easily Gojo signed the papers.

And now, he’s tipsy in a bar with you and more tuned into your presence than ever. When he looks at you, there’s a lingering that you convince yourself you’re hallucinating.

Small talk with him is odd. He’s much more complicated than that, but here you are, discussing trivial things right now. If he’s remarried yet (he hasn’t). If you honed in on your cursed technique (you have).

It’s terribly odd. Like talking to a stranger that you’ve only met in a dream.

“I thought you’d have better taste in bars,” he drawls, sipping a Cosmo. It was annoyingly endearing, the way he wasn’t the kind of man to have a glass of whiskey despite acting like it.

“I could say the same to you.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not a regular. This place is full of perverts.”

“Does that include you?”

Gojo grins. “Not like some of these guys. You would’ve gotten roofied if I didn’t sit down. And your outfit certainly isn’t helping.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” you scoff.

“It is one. You’re a sight to behold. Never saw you in anything like this when we were married.”

“Your clan would have my head. I assume you would, too,” you mutter.

His eyes are taking you in, flickering between your face and your body. It would make you uncomfortable if you weren’t already three beers in.

“I wouldn’t be angry. I just don’t promise that I would’ve kept my hands to myself.”

You stare at him in disbelief.

“I think this is the most forward you’ve ever been to me.”

“You were so timid back then,” he smirks. He places a hand on your knee, his thumb tracing the skin. “Such a nervous little girl. There were times I assumed you were cheating on me, the way you were so rigid with me.”

You remember being obedient and quiet. Perhaps rigid, but you had only followed his lead, pushing yourself away from him just because he was doing it to you first. You know you shouldn’t apologize or feel guilty for your lack of intimacy with him, but the way he teases you makes your face heat up.

“I wouldn’t cheat on you,” you frown.

“Good,” he smiles. It almost seems genuine. “I wouldn’t have let anyone have you, anyway.”

Your eyes widen in slight surprise.

Why did you let me divorce you, then?

His fingers are tracing circles into the skin of your thigh absentmindedly. The flutter in your chest threatens to pull on your lungs when you notice.

“You’re so different now,” he notes.

“Not really.”

“I don’t just mean the way you look, by the way. Your eyes are sharper. Posture better. Not a meek little thing anymore, huh?”

You could flush at how he belittles you, but the praise gets to your head.

“Huh. You’re the opposite. You look and act the same as when I last saw you.”

He laughs. “I always liked when you talked back, you know. Anyone ever told you can be a bit of a brat?”

You raise a brow. “Yes.”

His breath smells sweet. Tongue like a candy apple from the sugared liquor in his glass, you were sure. You don’t wince when he gets closer to you.

“Yeah? And how do they deal with it?”

You bite the inside of your cheek before entertaining him.

“Everyone’s a little different,” you mumble.

You miss the flicker of jealousy in his eyes. You’re too distracted by the shape of his mouth.

“What do you think I’d do?” Gojo tilts his head as if he’s taunting you.

“I don’t– what?” you stammer.

“You’re a smart girl. Use your imagination.”

He grins again. Everything about him is sickeningly sweet. It’s not a side of him you’ve ever seen directed at you. There’s almost a fondness there. You would only see it before in rare moments, usually when Gojo was a little drunk. You suppose he could be drunk now and you’re almost grateful despite yourself. He would always get a little handsy, especially if you were dressed up for his clan events. He’d have his hand only on your leg, crawling up the skirt of your dress. During times like those, he felt like a real husband.

They were always such fleeting moments. Even years after the divorce, certain memories could still make you dizzy.

Your mouth goes dry. You compose yourself.

“Sorry. I, uh, have to use the bathroom.”

“Gonna use your imagination in there?” Gojo jokes.

“Something like that,” you mutter back, if only to humor him.

You don’t realize the hole you’ve put yourself in once you utter the words. The invitation you’ve given him. Unfortunately, you’re also still reeling from the conversation, so you forget to lock the door of the handicapped bathroom.

To be fair, Gojo did try to convince himself not to follow you for the entire three minutes you were gone. But he’s never been that good of a man. It was your fault for being so damn tempting in the first place. But he had tried to be good even in the very beginning – he was polite, kept his hands to himself. Bought you anything you wanted.

He even let you leave him. After seeing you tonight, he now knows it was a grave mistake.

“Satoru.”

“Hey.”

He closes the door gently and locks it. Leans against the door with his arms crossed as if waiting for you to do a magic trick from the way he’s looking at you expectantly.

“Why are you–”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t want me to follow you,” he tuts.

Okay. Fine. He had a point.

“This must be exciting for you, yeah? Seeing me lose it over you?”

You can’t form words. Despite the fire in your belly, you aren’t completely sure what his angle is here. He steps forward and backs you into the wall. He could pin you to it, easily.

His hands rest on your thighs, riding up the length of the pathetic excuse you call a skirt.

“You’re trying to kill me with this,” he huffs. “Just making everything so… difficult.”

He almost sounds disappointed in you. There is a rush of desperation flooding your brain like a knee-jerk reaction. You can feel your heart about to burst.

“Sorry,” you mumble. You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.

“I was really trying to behave, too,” Gojo sighs. “Wouldn’t want to scare my ex-wife away with how much I missed her. Christ.”

“You– what?”

“Yeah, baby. How could I not miss this face?” He strokes your cheek. You’re convinced he’s been possessed by someone else, maybe. Mistaken you for a different stranger.

Your knees are already going weak. He leans in to whisper in your ear. The hand stroking your cheek holds your chin, squishing your face slightly.

“Didn’t you miss me?”

“I… I did,” you whisper.

“Good,” he smiles softly. “I like knowing you still think about me.”

The proximity is driving him insane, but he’s always liked to play with you. Sometimes he would be a little mean on purpose, but never enough to be considered bullying. He just enjoyed watching you squirm back then — it was adorable how dedicated you were to playing the part of a doting wife. He wanted to see you crack, maybe beg for his attention, but you were always too stubborn.

His cock throbs knowing that you’re putty in his hands now. Melting against him, soft and willing like a blooming flower. God, he needs a taste. He nibbles on your earlobe and grins when he feels your breath hitch.

“I kind of wanted to just take you right there on the bar. Let all those creeps see how good I’d fuck you.”

Your eyes flutter rapidly at his words. He has pinned you to the wall now. You’re close enough to feel him press against you, bullet-hard. A little more teasing and he’d pull the trigger.

He kisses down your neck, mapping it out with his teeth. He’s barely touched you and you feel like an elastic band about to snap.

“S-Satoru–”

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

You pant lightly. You’re preening into his touch. Lightning makes roots down the center of your spine. You forget what you wanted to say.

“What is it? You want me to take care of you?” He pulls back this time to look you directly in the eyes. His expression softens just a second at the lovestruck look in your eyes. Tender and glistening.

You nod slowly.

“I need your words, sweetheart.”

“Yes,” your voice shakes. “I want you to take care of me.”

He hums, pleased. The desire in his face is so new to you despite having been his wife. He’d only fucked you once before, on your anniversary. You were too tempting and he, admittedly, was tired of punishing himself by not allowing himself the pleasure of having you.

He could see you now, sprawled on the tatami mat, how you smelled like cherry blossoms. Flashes of images reeling in his mind, every little sound you made. He’d fucked his fist to the memory of it all too often after you left him.

He felt honored to have the real thing in his hands right now.

He kisses you like he needs you to breathe. You feel blood rush to your ears, the music from the bar muffled. All you could hear were the sound of his grunts, the slickness of his tongue in between your lips.

He spins you around abruptly, bending you over the sink. Hand on your throat, teeth in the tendon of your shoulder.

“Look at how pretty you are,” he rasps.

You whimper, feeling his hard cock rut against the curve of your ass. He laughs when he swipes his hand underneath your skirt, the fabric of your underwear already wet.

You gasp sharply when he eases a finger in without any resistance. He swallows the sounds you make, craning your neck towards his face with his hand while the other works another finger in. Your stomach flips, all boiling heat when he curves his fingers in just the right spot. As if he’d done it a dozen times.

“Dirty girl,” Gojo mumbles. “Getting off to her ex-husband's fingers all the way up in her cunt. In a fucking dive bar bathroom, too.”

When you whine, he only scissors into you harder and laughs. It kills you how much it turns you on, even while knowing he’s being cruel. You would fantasize about it all the time back then. Needed him to make you a real wife so you could forget yourself. You close your eyes, groaning.

“S-Satoru, I–”

“You’re not gonna cum just from that, are you?” You hear a grin in his voice.

“Fuck, please —”

His fingers leave you, making you whine in protest. The sopping mess of your arousal trickles down your inner thighs.

“Not yet, baby. Want you to cum in my mouth.”

Gojo drops to his knees and flips up your skirt, pulling your soiled underwear down your legs at the same time. You cover your mouth to keep from moaning when you feel his tongue prodding at your cunt.

“I always regret not tasting you on our anniversary,” he murmurs, his voice rough. “You’re sweeter than I imagined.”

“Imagined?” you squeak out.

“You thought I stopped wanting you just because I signed a piece of paper?”

“I didn’t – oh, fuck —”

You’re distracted by the plunge of his tongue into cunt. He sucks at the hood of your clit and you feel yourself jerk involuntarily. He’s fond of your sensitivity. He used to want to take advantage of it.

You let a particular loud whine and he hums, lapping up every drop of your arousal. He sucks at your clit in earnest while he brings his fingers back to you, immediately reaching for the spot he knows will make you see stars.

You cum so hard that you nearly bang your head against the sink faucet. Your head is spinning from the impact of it, dizzied on the high that came from a clan head in your cunt. The alcohol wasn’t helping.

He’s quick to get to his feet and kiss you so you can taste yourself. He tugs your hair and you arch for him like a taut bowstring.

“Feel how much I want you, baby?” You can feel his dick against you, something like shame flooding your system at how much of a mess you were. Getting his nice slacks all damp with your slick.

“Please,” you beg.

He doesn’t think twice once he hears your plea. He unbuckles his belt quickly and slides down his pants. He collects your wetness in between your folds to stroke his dick.

It feels like he’s gouging your stomach when he fucks into you. Bigger than any man you’ve had, still. Gojo likes that he was your first and he’s decided now that he will be your last.

“Tight,” Gojo mutters. You know it’s a compliment but your face heats up nonetheless. His hand around your throat is only more confirmation of his want.

He smacks your ass with his other hand, looking down to admire the reddish mark he left. Brute. He grins when you squeeze him tighter after it. He notices your eyes struggling to stay open and gives a particularly hard thrust just to see your jaw go slack. Eyes in half-moons, boiled by the heat of your thumping heart. Blood pumping to every soft spot in your body, your brain.

“Satoru,” you gasp.

“Yeah, baby?”

“F-Feels so…”

You inhale sharply, eyes widening when his hand snakes down to pinch your clit. Your hair’s wrapped his knuckles now. A ribbon around a wedding gift. He liked when you used to wear ribbons around your neck. Liked imagining you all wrapped up for him.

Satoru was so beautiful when he did anything, but he was angelic when he was fucking you. Cheeks all carmine, mouth wide open. It was something you wanted to get used to.

“You keep clenching, Jesus,” he grunts. Teeth at your nape, at your shoulder. Blue eyes staring at you in the mirror.

“Satoru, I’m close,” you whine.

“Hold it.”

“I– I don’t know if I can.”

“You can. You’re a good girl, even if you are dressed like a little slut.”

You whimper at that, your cunt pulsating at his words. Muscles strung out like a wet rag. You nearly cry when he pulls out of you, manhandling you to turn. He picks you up to set you down on the cold sink counter, the porcelain soothing the bruising on your ass.

He groans as he pumps himself slowly, admiring the way his tip catches on your entrance. You squirm a little, impatient, and he kisses you. It feels invasive, almost, from how rough he plays with you, sucks on your tongue. He takes the opportunity to ram into you, enjoying the way the pitched whine rolling out of your mouth gets tasted by him.

“Missed my cock, didn’t you?” he smirks. “Still the best you’ve ever had, right?”

“Y-Yes,” you sob.

His gut fucking melts.

Your mascara was getting smudged, not smudgy like he’d see in porn, but blending in the rim of your wet eyes. Dew-drop lashes.

“Feels best like this. Wanna see your face when you cum for me,” he pants.

Your hands are on his shoulders, clinging onto him. He’s so much bigger than you, especially like this — your legs spread, his big hands gripping your thigh hard enough to hurt a little. You moan. Your voice sounds girlier than usual, wounded. You don’t recognize yourself.

“Oh, it’s too deep—”

“No such thing,” Satoru snickers. “You’re – hah – so good at this. Good girl.”

“S-Satoru, it’s too–”

“You love it. Tell me.”

“F-fuck — I,” – you struggle mindlessly, voice strained – “I love it…”

“I know, baby,” he coos. Kisses your forehead, which is hilariously domestic and gentle considering the mean pace of his hips.

He grabs your chin and makes you look up at him. You’re so fucked out. He’d ask you to take a picture if he wasn’t so focused on making you cum.

“You want to cum, don’t you?” he taunts.

“Please, please, please—”

“Okay, honey,” he chuckles. “You can cum now.”

Your moan is louder than expected as your cunt squeezes him impossibly tight. You can feel all the warmth rush out of you. You really are a sight to behold, which is why Satoru cums immediately after you. You feel like you might pass out.

He kisses you all over your face, mumbling praise as you come back to your body. It’s all most nonsensical, but you swear you hear I love you. Your half-lidded eyes close as he envelops you with his arms, mascara streaking his shoulder.

He opens his mouth to say something but gets interrupted by a succession of loud knocks.

“Other people need to piss!”

Satoru scoffs, pulling away from you to slide his pants back up and buckle them. He mouths something to you that you don’t understand and leans down to grab your underwear to give to you.

“Just a second!” Satoru yells. “My wife is sick, had a bit too much to drink. Almost done.”

“Wife?” you whisper, bewildered.

Satoru eyes soften in amusement. “Sorry. Force of habit.”

#gojo smut #gojo satoru smut #gojo satoru x you #gojo satoru x reader #gojo x you #gojo x reader #jjk smut #jjk #jujustu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen smut #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jujutsu kaisen x you #jjk x you

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hearts4chriss · 7 months

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Texas baby.

Angry!Boyfriend Chris x Needy Poc! Girlfriend

prompt: while Chris is filming with his brothers and Sam and Colby you send me a bunch of thirsty texts and images to distract him. Fortunately and unfortunately it works but at what cost?

Part 7

Contains: PURE FILTHY SMUT! humiliation, semi-public, balcony sex, ROUGH! CHRIS, degrading, hair pulling, dacryphilia, overstimulation, use of pet names, hair pulling, ass slapping, choking, photography, dirty talk, spanking, heavy aftercare

A/n: THIS IS DEDICATED TO THE AMAZING & TALENTED GIRL @luv4kozume I LOVE U SO MUCH MAMA ( my mother ) THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR ALWAYS BEING THERE IM SO GLAD I FOUND U AND IM SO PROUD OF YOU UR ALMOST @2k🤭🤭

Damnit Chris

Chris Matt and nick were here in Texas to film a collab w Sam and colby and he begged me to come along.

But since he left I’ve been feeling soooo horny for him, I haven’t been able to get him alone of course since he’s here for the collab and I wanted him to explore where I’m from ( surprise :) )

But it’s his fault, he’s been doing things in purpose.

The way he’d hug me from behind pressing his boner into my ass, the way he’d “accidently” grab my tit whenever I’d be out with him and his brothers since we got here.

Oh and his little flirty comments,

“Sorry sweetheart, my fault princess, you need something ma?, you look so pretty mama” all his stupid shit now has me wet and I can’t do anything for hours until he gets back

I had an idea. I was gonna make him pay

I knew how Chris felt whenever I teased him in public, which is exactly why I sent it. It would always end in really, really rough sex.

But we were in a hotel so I'm not sure how this would go but since he was filming with Sam and Colby I hope he doesn't get too upset.

Chris Pov

I was with my brothers and sam and colby as I had just seen the last of my girls texts.

My dick pressed achingly against my pants I swore I felt pre-cum in my boxers. those fucking pictures.

And it only got worse as I tried fixing myself when they weren't looking, just the though of her sitting on the hotel bed in a thong and a sheer black robe covering her made me almost nut in my pants.

I could not wait to bend her over the balcony and fuck her so good, let everyone know shes mine.

Throughout the rest of us filming, I began to get angry and even more pissed off with her sending me those.

She had me turned on, for hours, knowing I couldn't do shit about it.

I was gonna ruin that ass the second I got back. She wants to act like a slut? i'll fuck her like one.

1:27am

I was still awake, I had been laying on the bed before I heard the hotel room door open.

“Hey baby how filming.” I said turning around giving him a clear view of my plump breasts through the sheer material along with the thong hugging at my hips he tried to regain focus.

“You think that shits funny? Sending me that while im in public and making me hard hm?” He spoke in almost a growl his hand wrapping around my throat squeezing a bit and I shook my head and squeezed harder.

“N-no I-dont mphm think its funny-“ I choked out and he let out a scoff before releasing his grip.

“Outside, balcony, bend over.” Was what he instructed and I did so removing the robe walking outside as he followed me smacking my ass and I whimpered

“Faster, slut you wanna get fucked so bad I suggest you move quicker.” Chris said with a teasing tone as I scurried outside bending over and resting my arms on the rails the cool breeze hitting my nipples as they hardened.

“You know what's coming now baby?” Chris spoke in almost a baby-like voice rubbing his hands over the curves of my ass.

before I could speak he lays a harsh smack across my ass I jolt forward gripping onto the rail tightly.

“Don't make a sound yeah? Just be a good girl.” He speaks leaving a kiss on my neck before leaving another smack

“Your, smack, such, smack, a, smack, fucking, smack, slut, smack.” Chris said quickly through gritted teeth as I bit my lip from any groans or whimpers, also ignoring the way my pussy throbbed each time he smacked my ass.

“Fuck-“ he says under his breath fumbling with his pants undoing his belt letting his pants fall to the ground kicking them off before sliding down my thong letting his dick slap on my ass spreading the pre-cum a bit.

“You think you deserved to be fucked?” Think you deserve my cock hm? He said waiting for my answer as I tried to form the words he got irritated smacking my ass.

“You better answer me sweetheart, or you won't even get the tip.” Chris said in a mocking tone.

“P-please Chris- I'm sorry I-promise-“ I choke out my words falling out all over the place and he chuckles spreading my legs before forcing all of him inside me.

He normally would give me time to adjust but he was fucking pissed, he immediately began ramming into my pussy balls deep inside me, his hand grasping my shoulder making it easier to thrust.

“O-oh f-fucking shit Chris!” my jaw slack moaning his name loudly almost forgetting we were outside, but it felt so euphoric feeling him so far gone inside me.

“shit ma so fuckin tight on my dick, such a slut.” He grunted continuing to abuse my cunt letting it coat his cock easily sliding in and out, well pounding.

at the pace he was going, I could cum in probably a minute or two, and I knew chris was gonna make me his cum slut for my behaviour just a few hours ago, I was so fucked.

“shit shit- fuck!- feels so fucking good oh shitt!” I screamed biting my lip from my moans bound to has granted us a noise complaint but boy he did not like.

“Open your fucking mouth, you wanted this right? For me to fuck you like the whore you are?” He said smacking my ass again inserting his fingers into my mouth through my lips.

He continued his pace whilst I made a mess on his fingers from how hard and rough he was going I couldn't keep up as I drooled on his fingers, my ass slapping hard and quick on his pelvis allowing his cock to hit my g-spot every thrust, my stomach already gained the familiar sensation.

“Look at that, already about to cum so pathetic baby.” He chuckles removing his fingers from my mouth so he could pull my hair tightly thrusting harder making a clapping senation.

“FUCK im cumming f-fuck-“ cries of his name flew from my parted lips as my cum began dripping down his length allowing his warm thick load to shoot inside me, but he didn't even slow his pace allowing my eyes to shoot up from sensitivity.

“S-sensitive Chris!” I cried out gripping tightly on the balcony rails and feeling my legs already close in before he reached down spreading them apart leaning over to my ear.

“Nu-uh sweetheart, you wanted this remember?” He mocked leaving a lick on the sensitive spot on my neck making my breath hitch like he knew it would letting his cock ram deep inside me as our cum mixed creating a stick sound.

“such a dirty slut for me aren't you.” He sighs deeply allowing his eyes to roll back at the sight of me so fucked out on his cock.

“F-fuck yes yes- such a slut for you Chris-“ I cry out resting my head sideways on the rails and squeezing my eyes shut to let my mind drift away as it clouded it up from how he was fucking the shit out of me.

“Good girl, so fucking good f'me.” Chris's voice dropped an octave as he was so focused on fucking me till I saw stars it felt, thats when, The sticky sounding was replaced by a squelching wet sensation.

“Fuckk chris- I-“ I groaned my legs quivering as I began squirting over his cock and lower stomach, I could've sworn he would have stopped by now but he didn't

“oh god-“ I said feeling my eyes well up with tears as my legs nearly caved in at the overstimulation and he chuckle admiring how my wetness glistened in the faint light of the moon on the balcony.

“Love this fuckin pussy so much, fits so perfectly around me-“ chris moaned his brown locks sticking to his forehead as his arm wrapped around my torso to squeeze my tit making me whimper my legs began to shake a bit.

“come on ma one more, being such a good girl.” He praises his hand reaching down to rub my puffy clit chuckling at the heat of it as I squirmed tears falling down my face from the overwhelming pleasure.

Chris reached over to the hair grabbing phone putting it side ways and recording in front of me.

“Tell everyone how much a whore you were acting baby hm?” He said still thrusting deeply inside me.

“I-fuck- s-such a whore- for y-you-“ I said panting, almost like a dog my tears on my cheeks as I could hardly form a sentence.

Fucked her so good she can barley speak, fucked her dumb with my cock. He chuckled looking at the camera before setting it down as I could barley support my body weight at this point, my orgasm quickly was approaching.

“Oh fuck fuck I-its- so close-“ My toes curled into the ground allowing everything to entirely take over as I couldn't even process what was happening.

“fuck baby- cum, all over this dick.” He groans his teeth grazing over my shoulder as I shutter in his grasp.

“FUCK- C-cumming s-so fucking good-“ I squealed as I began to cream his dick for the 3rd time as he slowed his thrusts just enough so he could finish inside me again before slowly pulling out.

I try and hold my body up for a bit before chris pulls me into him, my chest heaving as my tears stained my face, our cum dripping out of my abused pussy and my body covered in a thin layer of sweat.

“F-fuck Chris-“ I shake against the balcony rails barely holding myself up before Chris rubbed my shoulder placing a kiss.

“Shh I got you baby.” He whispered in a comforting voice gently picking me up bridle style allowing my head to rest on his chest as he carried me to the bathroom allowing a bath to run for me.

He got a warm cloth pushing my legs apart cleaning my inner thighs first since I'd be more sensitive in between.

“You ready? let me know if it's too much okay?” Chris kissed my forehead and I nodded as he cautiously pressed the warm cloth to my heat cleaning me up being careful to not make me wince.

My bath was ready so he held me again placing me in as i sigh leaning against the back of his as He sat behind me.

“Want me to take ur hair out mama?” or do you wanna keep it in.

“T-take it out.” I sigh tiredly and he smiles grabbing the baby scissors.

He was precise and careful taking my weeve out, I made sure to teach him how to do it so he wouldn't cut my hair and he didn't

Once taken out he undid the braids underneath it beginning to givev my scalp a small massage and I rest my head in his hands.

Your hairs gorgeous baby. He says quietly and I look at him and smile.

Eventually he got me out the bath allowing me to dry off with some support, he carried me to our bed.

“Here you go.” chris smiles handing me a pair of panties and one of his T shirts.

“I'll be right back okay?” He says and I nod as he leaves the room and I’m confused but I’m honestly too tired to even think

I put my bonnet on and wait for him

around 5 minutes later chris comes back with two cokes and a bag of takis.

“I know these are your favorite snacks so.” He shrugs handing them to me before taking off his shirt climbing into the bed with me in his grey sweats.

Thank you. I smile at him

“Of course ma, come here.” He says and I get closer to him laying my head on his chest.

“Thank you for taking such good care of me baby.” I say tiredly and he chuckled.

“Oh don't thank me, it’s my job sweetheart to do that and make you feel so good and plus I think we woke everyone up anyway.” He chuckles

“Oh shit- probably.” I shake my head as we both errupted into laughter.

The rest of that night ( 20 minutes )consisted of us watching TV and eating my snacks before I drifted off to sleep 20 minutes later.

“Goodnight gorgeous.”Chris mutters leaving a kiss to my clothed shoulder turning of the lights cuddling me as we fell asleep.

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fanficsformyfaves · 7 months

Text

Or What?

Rhea Ripley x Uso Sister!Reader

WARNING: SMUT 18+, ANGST, Enemies To Lovers, Confessions, Semi-Public Sex, Use of Nicknames, Oral Sex (R Receiving), Fingering (R Receiving), Orgasm Denial (R Receiving), Degradation and Praise Kink (R Receiving), Mommy Kink, Choking Kink (R Receiving), Strap On Sex (R Receiving), Choking (R Receiving)

PREFACE: Reader has always known Rhea to be arrogant, callous and mean, so it only made sense that she despised the eradicator, especially after what she did to her brother...but what happens when they find themselves in a broom closet alone together?

A/N: Jey and Rhea are feuding in this A/U

Announcer's Dialogue In Bold and Colored!

Texts in Italic, Colored and Bold!

As I waited for Jey to finish up his match, I hear the sound of boot heels clicking from down the hall and when I turn my head to see who it was, I was immediately vexed.

Rhea fucking Ripley.

I couldn't help but roll my eyes. She was easily the most smug-faced asshole I'd ever met and not only that, she had the audacity to make my brother look stupid in front of the entire world.

I stuff my phone into my back pocket, before crossing my arms over my chest.

"Well, if it isn't little (Y/N) Uso. What's a cute thing like you doing out here by yourself?", she teased.

I simply looked away, ignoring her comment.

"Hm, never took you for the shy type", she said,

Taking a step closer towards me.

"From what I've seen, you're quiet the firecracker", she brushes a hair from my face.

I grab her wrist, staring daggers into her eyes.

"Never...touch me"

She lets out a dark chuckle, using the grip I had on her to yank me closer. Our faces were now merely inches apart.

"Or what, princess?"

"Or...I'll..."

"Mhm, use your words", she whispered,

Leaning down closer to the point her breath brushed against my bottom lip.

What was happening? And why was I not pulling away? I should've...but I just couldn't.

Just as I was desperately trying to regain my composure, the crowd outside goes wild and the speakers go off.

Announcer: And here is your winner...Jey...USOOO!

My brother's theme song began playing and I knew he was just moments away from bursting through the doors.

Shit, if he sees me causing trouble, I'm gonna be in for it. I could already hear him and some guards just around the corner. With seemingly no other option, I push Rhea and myself into the closet directly behind her and close it shut.

"What are you doing?"

"Saving both of our asses", I whispered,

Stepping away from the door. The footsteps were getting closer with each passing second and my heart was pounding so hard, I could barely breathe.

As if getting caught in the hallways wouldn't have been bad enough, I could only imagine what would happen if Jey found us in a literal closet together.

The shadow of his feet stop right in front of the door and I was panicking like I never have before.

"Have y'all seen (Y/N)? She said she'd be waiting right here"

"No, sir, not since before the match started"

"Hm", he hummed dismissively,

Before carrying on towards his dressing room.

Once he was finally gone, I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

"Jesus, that was close"

"You're telling me", she replied.

That's when I finally noticed her towering figure hunched over behind me, with an arm around my waist and her hand flat on my stomach.

I turn to face her and there we were again.

Her lips almost meeting mine, as our eyes found one another in a tense exchange. I couldn't comprehend much of anything that was happening, but mostly, I was confused at why I wasn't pulling away again.

She humiliated my brother and betrayed him. I had every right to hate her...right?

"You know", she breaks the silence,

"You're awfully adorable, when you aren't staring daggers into me"

There was that stupid smirk again, only this time it affected me differently.

Instead of becoming agitated, I felt a second heartbeat I didn't feel before. Every inch of my skin was overheating at her touch and she knew it.

"Oh...you like this, don't you?"

"What? No-"

"Such a cliche, falling for your brother's enemy"

"I don't-"

"Then how come you aren't shoving me away and telling me to fuck off like you usually do?", she questioned,

Gently turning my body to fully face her, before pinning me to the wall by my arms.

"I think we both know the answer to that question, darling", she whispered,

Ducking her head down on my shoulder, whilst trailing kisses up my neck.

"Just say it. Say you want me and put a rest to this tiring act of pretending like you don't"

Was she right?

Have I just been in denial about the attraction I felt for her and hid behind anger all this time?

I couldn't quite focus on finding a proper explanation, as she reached the lobe of my ear, nibbling on it and forcing a whine out of me.

"God, even the sounds you make are sweet. Wonder if you'll taste as sweet as you sound", she mumbled against me,

Running her hand up my thigh.

"R-Rhea"

"All you have to do is tell me to stop and I will. Is that what you want?"

I contemplated for a moment. This was wrong. Getting involved with someone like her would only ever end in chaos, especially with the bad blood she had with Jey...but in that moment, any voice of reason was no match for the way she was touching me.

"No", I ultimately answered.

"Good"

Not wanting to waste any more of the limited time we had, she finally presses her lips against mine.

They were soft and gentle, which surprised me the most.

One of her hands let off my waist and trailed up my skirt, brushing against my bundle of nerves through the underwear I had on.

I whined against her mouth, which curled up into an excited grin.

"Sensitive, are you? Let's see how long it takes till I have you cumming on my tongue"

Just then, she drops to her knees, flipping up my skirt to take a good look at the mess she was already making of me.

"God, I barely touched you yet", she mocked,

Before pulling my thong to the side and licking up my slick entrance.

"Mmm, so fucking sweet", she praised,

Throwing my thighs over her strong shoulders, so I was sat on top of her. It didn't take long for her lips to wrap around my bundle of nerves, as the grasp she had on my hips tightened with each passing lick.

I intertwined my fingers in her hair, whilst her name repeatedly spilled out of me like a prayer that would never be answered.

Eventually, I feel the tip of two digits press against my slit, before slipping themselves completely inside me with no resistance to stop them.

Her momentum immediately fast and relentless.

Already, the knot in the pit of my stomach began to tighten and threaten to snap. I could tell by the way she smirked over my clit that she knew it too.

"Not so tough when I have you at my mercy, are you? Maybe I shouldn't let you cum", she teased,

"No! Please, don't stop!", I pleaded,

"Good girl", she says,

Continuing her unletting efforts to bring me over the edge, but before she could, voices on the other side of the door interrupts us.

I immediately let out a gasp, causing Rhea to slap a hand over my mouth.

"Jey's looking for (Y/N)"

"Wasn't she just here earlier?"

"Yeah, but I don't know where she went"

The security guards eventually move past the closet and I let out a sigh of relief.

I get off of her, arranging my skirt and she eyes me up in confusion.

"What are you doing?"

"This was a mistake"

She scoffs, getting up and dusting her knees.

"You didn't seem to think this was a 'mistake' when my tongue was wearing you out", she tested,

Pushing my head up with a hooked finger.

"Now...what did you say about me never touching you again?"

I roll my eyes and push her hand away.

"Wait five minutes before I leave", I instructed,

"Whatever you say", she smiled,

Looking down at her feet.

I carefully opened the door, whilst peaking my head out to make sure the coast was clear and once it was, I step out and close it, when I turn back around and was ambushed by my brother.

"Fucking Christ, dude!", I exclaimed,

As my hand went over my chest.

"Aye, language", he warned,

"Sorry"

"Where were you? I've been looking for like twenty minutes"

"The...bathroom"

"For twenty minutes?"

"Yo, what's with the interrogation, dawg? Woman business", I snapped,

"Alright, alright. I was just asking", he throws his hands up in surrender,

"I wanna grab food on the way back, come on", he says,

Putting an arm over my shoulder and walking me out. I quickly glance back at the closet door and prayed it stayed closed till we were out of sight.

Once we got into the car, I was finally left to my thoughts.

The guilt that overwhelmed me was all consuming and burdensome. I had just slept with my brother's nemesis. The person he hated most and here I was, pretending like it didn't happen, as he went on and on about his current win.

In that moment, I get a notification on my phone and I go to see who it was. I didn't recognize the number, but once I saw the text, I knew immediately.

Unknown Number: We should talk about this

Me: There's nothing to talk about

Unknown Number: Oh please, spare me, are you really going back to being in denial?

Me: Denial about what?

Unknown Number: Whatever

Unknown Number: But, when you do come to your senses, you know where to find me, beautiful ;)

I lock my phone and shove it inside my purse with a sigh.

"You good?"

"Yeah, just tired"

"Well, you look tired", he says,

Mimicking the sweat dripping down my face, causing me to hastily swipe it off.

After stopping by at a pizza place for dinner, we head to the hotel and made our way back to the suite.

"That was scrumptious. We needa head back before going home", Jey emphasized,

Opening the door and letting the both of us inside.

"I call the shower first"

"Dude", I go to argue,

"Ah! Winners get special privileges", he mocked.

I roll my eyes and he chuckles at my response, before stepping into the bathroom and closing the door behind him.

I lay back against the bed by the window and looked over the entire city.

As breathtaking as the sight was to behold, I was still hung up on Rhea. Why? Why her? Of all the people I could've hooked up with, it had to be fucking Ripley?

As disappointed as I was with myself, I couldn't help but look back at the encounter with a certain sense of reverie.

I'd never been touched like that.

None of the people I'd been with before had ever gotten me that close...I wonder what would've happened if I had just stayed there in that closet with her.

Before I could delve any deeper into my thoughts, I hear my phone go off once again and I already knew who it could be.

Unknown Number: Can't stop thinking about you, precious

God damn it, again with the nicknames.

Me: Rhea, please

Unknown Number: Please what?

Me: We can't do this

Unknown Number: Oh yes, we can

Unknown Number: The only person saying we can't is you

Me: You hurt my brother

Unknown: Hey, he decided to attack Dom, I couldn't just sit idle and let him

Me: Yeah, after the fact he slammed Jimmy with a chair

Unknown: Listen, I have no control over what the boys do

Unknown Number: Nor do I have control over who I want

A frigid chill run up my spine.

Unknown Number: What happened wasn't ideal, I get it

Unknown Number: So allow me make it up to you

Me: How?

Unknown Number: By picking up where we left off of course

Unknown Number: When I had you on the brink of cumming, before we were so rudely interrupted

It was getting harder and harder to resist her tempting.

Me: This is wrong

Unknown Number: Did it feel wrong? When you were begging me to make you unravel on my mouth?

Me: Rhea

Unknown Number: Tell me, when did the regret set in? Was it before or after my fingers found themselves inside you?

The pulsing sensation in my center began to intensify with every text she sent.

Unknown Number: You can lie to yourself all you want, darling

Unknown Number: But we both know that you want me just as much as I want you. I'm just making it easier by admitting it first

Unknown Number: Ball's in your court now, Uso

It took all the strength I had to resist, but it still wasn't enough. I ultimately caved, needing to feel her against me again.

Me: Where are you?

I just knew she was grinning like a wildcat on the other side of the phone.

Unknown Number: Location📍

The hotel she was staying at was only ten minutes away.

Me: Room?

Unknown Number: I'll be in the lobby to let you up. See you, beautiful ;)

I facepalm my forehead.

What was I doing? Once could've been a mistake, but twice? Now, this was betrayal.

Jey steps out of the bathroom, drying off his hair.

"Shower's free"

"Actually, I gotta go. Naomi wants to have a girl's night"

"For real?"

"Mhm", I hesitated,

He contemplates for a moment, before shrugging.

"Aight, just text me when you get there"

I let out a sigh of relief, before grabbing my phone and leaving.

Besides the obvious thoughts going through my head, all I could think about was how conflicted I felt. On one hand, family meant the world to me and out of all of them, Jey was who I was closest with...but on the other hand, there was Rhea. I didn't know what could transpire from this, but I guess I was just gonna have to find out.

Eventually, I got to her hotel and tried my best to avoid any paparazzi by keeping my head down and speed-walking into the lobby. I allow myself a moment to scan the room, before my eyes finally landed on her.

She was sat on one of the couches with elbows resting on her knees and scrolling through her phone.

With one last deep breath, I made my way towards her.

"Hello, there", she grinned,

Looking up at me, as she stood up.

"Hi", I greeted,

Avoiding her piercing gaze.

"I appreciate eye-contact, whilst speaking", she says,

Using my cheek to make me face her. I was already melting into her touch and blushing a bright red hue.

"D'you enjoy the ride?", she questioned,

Causing my eyes to widen.

"The car ride, darling", she teased,

She knew what she was doing.

"How about we get you upstairs?", she suggests.

I nod, as she took my hand and lead me to the elevators.

Once we were inside and the doors close us in, she pushes my hair aside and ducked her head into the crook of my neck, leaving wet kisses lingering on my skin.

"Couldn't stop thinking about earlier. I've never tasted anything better", she murmured,

Gripping my waist.

"R-Rhea", I whined,

Holding onto her shoulders. If the elevator doors hadn't opened just then, we would've had our way with each other right there. We rush towards her room and she uses my body to slam the door shut.

My hands creeping up into her hair, as her teeth tugged on my bottom lip.

I pull my sweater over my head, leaving me exposed to the cool air.

"Goodness", she exhaled,

Cupping the bottom of my breasts and licking my hardening buds. My skin was ablaze and my jaw drops with every moan that fell past my lips.

I go to pull my skirt down, when she stops me by my wrists.

"The skirt stays on"

Fuck, was I dripping.

"But...these need to go"

She reaches up and hooks her fingers around my waistband, yanking my underwear off and helping me out of them.

"I've already gotten a taste, now I need the whole show", she says,

Undoing the buttons of her jeans and revealing the toy already strapped around her waist. My eyes widen and she chuckles at my reaction.

"Like what you see, princess?"

"Y-Yes"

She bites back a smile and carried me to bed, before laying me out against the soft comforter.

"You're such a good girl when you aren't running your mouth", she praised,

Shoving her thumb into it, as I gladly accepted.

She then pulls it away and pressed it against my clit. A gasp rips out of me and my legs clench together, to which she pushes them apart and keeps them in place with her broad shoulders.

"Don't try escaping me now, you wanted this"

As she began rubbing firm circles on my bundle of nerves, my core dripped onto her ready palm.

"You are such an easy brat. All those time of you screaming at me, when you should've been screaming for me. All I had to do was put you in your place", she mocked over my moans.

Eventually, she pulled away and left me whining at the loss of contact.

"Patience"

She trips herself of her pants and tank top and the sight before me was something straight out of my wildest dreams. From her ample breasts, perfect waist and the sweat collecting on her fair skin, I was growing more and more desperate.

"As much as I love seeing you gawk at me, I think we should switch gears"

With one swift motion, she flips me onto my stomach and drags my ass into the air by my hips.

"This ass, babe. God", she mumbles,

Leaning down to place a gentle kiss on one cheek, before biting down hard and smacking the other.

I scream out, gripping the sheets.

Just then, I feel her rubbing the tip of the toy up and down my entrance, furthering the torture.

"How badly do you want this?"

"Please, I need you", I whined,

"Oh...you need this, huh? Think you've earned it?", she challenged,

Yanking me up against her by my throat, squeezing tight.

"Y-Yes, Mami, please!"

With one more wicked grin, she fills me to the hilt. The stretch burning, as I cried out into the air.

Her pace was immediately brutal and relentless, like the grip she had on my neck.

"Such a precious little thing", she praised,

Pounding repeatedly on my g-spot and causing stars to cloud my vision.

She'd been teasing me since the night began, so it should've come as no surprise to me when my walls had already begun pulsing around her.

"So good for me. So fucking good", she growled against my ear.

"I'm gonna cum, Mami, please!"

"Not till I say so"

"Please!"

"Keep whining and I'll make you wait even longer", she threatened.

Not wanting to face those consequences, I bite my tongue and held onto her hips for dear life, digging my nails into her flesh.

By this time, the room was nothing, but the smell of sex, sweat and tear-filled moans. The orgasm that I'd been chasing was now hounding me down and threatening to overwhelm me. It was getting harder to fight it off with each of her harsh thrusts.

I was just surprised we didn't get a noise complaint.

Once she was satisfied with how weak she had me, her hands reaches for my clit once more.

"You look so good this way. Fucked out and drenched in sweat and tears for me. Cum for me, darling. Show mami just how good she makes you feel"

That was the last thing I could make out, when the knot in my stomach finally snapped and pushed me over the edge.

All I could see was a rush of pure white, before falling limp on my stomach, out of breath and gasping for any air my lungs would allow.

She then pulls out of me and discards the toy from her hips. I was then picked up and placed delicately onto her bare chest.

"You did so good, darling", she muttered sweetly,

Wrapping her arms around me and pressing a kiss to my forehead.

Maybe...this wasn't such a bad idea.

I snuggled deeper into her embrace and she welcomed me in with a satisfied chuckle.

"Who knew beneath all that cold exterior was a soft little angel?", she jested,

Making me roll my eyes.

"I'm really glad you came. Well, in that sense, yes, but also you making the trip here", I interrupt with a playful smack to her shoulder.

"I wasn't too rough, was I?"

"It was perfect", I reassured,

Craning my head up to meet her lips.

"About your brother-"

"We don't have to talk about that"

"But we do"

She sits up, as I did the same, covering myself with the comforter.

"It’s always so easy to get caught up in messes, but that doesn't excuse what I did or let happen"

"I love my friends and I'd do anything for them...but not at the cost of someone like you. I've admired you since the day we met. Your passion, your drive and not to mention your everlasting beauty, it seems"

I couldn't help, but blush at her confession.

"Though I'm used to your fiery, protective side, I've also caught glimpses of your heart when I see you care for the people you love...I couldn't deny that"

"So I thought the best way to keep myself away from you was to make you hate me", she continued.

"Because I knew letting myself fall for you was betraying The Judgment Day, when lo and behold, you felt the same all along. We were always so consumed with putting other people first, that we forgot that our own happiness mattered too"

The more she spoke, the more it all made sense.

"And at some point, I couldn't hold back anymore...so I just let it happen. You can tell me that I'm wrong and that nothing that I said made sense, but I know, by that look in your eye, that I'm not"

By the end of her speaking, I was in tears, having felt so seen and understood. I gently cup her face in my hands, kissing her once more.

"You're not wrong", I sniffled,

Pulling back.

"I don't think I would've ever had the courage to say those things to your face"

"Of course, you would've. You're braver than you think"

#rhea ripley #wwe #rhea ripley x reader #rhea ripley oneshot #rhea ripley fanfic #rhea ripley fluff #rhea ripley angst #rhea ripley smut #demi bennett

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mazikeenhyde · 28 days

Text

Oh Baby... Pain is Pleasure

Here we go again people!

POLY JUDGMENT DAY X READER (WRESTLER)

Y/W/N – Your Wrestling Name

Y/W/N/F – Your Wrestling Name Finisher

WARNING – SMUT? Kind of…, ANGST… Kind of? PUBLIC HUMILIATION, POLY THEMES AND REFRENCES, BDSM, SPANKING, VIOLENT REFRENCES, BLOOD, INJURY ETC

Oh Baby…Pain is Pleasure

The crowds’ cheers and chants echoed throughout the stadium, the floors under the feet of the thousands of fans felt like they would give way from the excitement. A completely sold-out arena had been packed full to the brim with carboard cutout signs and fandom shirts as far as the eye could see! From the millionaire front row viewers to the cheapest seats way up in the rafters, to the millions of fans watching from home, everyone had been awaiting this moment! The artificial bright and colorful lights flashed all over as the music blared throughout the stadium. The smoke and fog machines mixed together engulfing the walkway and the surrounding edges of the ring, adding to the already tense atmosphere.

This championship match had reached its peak, Women’s World Champion Dakota Kai vs Y/W/N! I had fought and clawed my way to reach WrestleMania and now I was inches away from becoming the new Women’s World Champion!

Running at each other from the ropes I swung for a clothesline, but Dakota ducked under and with a straight elbow to the face I fell to my knees, my vision blurred, and the blood began to trickle down from my nose. I knew it was broken, but that wasn’t going to stop me. Besides… I kinda liked the pain. It reminded me being back home in bed with Rhea, Damien, Finn & Dom. Our rougher nights of pain and pleasure had certainly helped prepare me for this ‘No Disqualification’ championship match tonight!

Grabbing her hands around my face she pulled my hair back and got me into a tight headlock with her arms desperately hoping I would tap out. The ref waving his hand in my face repeatedly asking if I was okay, if I was done, if I wanted to quit.

NEVER.

As my face turned a gentle crimson, and my lips turned a pale blue I gave Dakota a devilish grin and winked at her. Shimmying under her grip to gain back some movement her frustration built ever more.

“What the hell ya bitch?! Tap out! Just tap!” Her grip got tighter with fury. “Why won’t you quit?!”

I moved my head up just enough to get out a few words to her, much to the delight of the WWE management team who knew it was far too late to censor as the live camera feed had picked up each word.

“You’re cute… but Damian… chokes me harder than that in bed.” I turned my eye line to the camera and blew a soft kiss to Damian before throwing myself back and pulling up my legs to kick Dakota off and send her to the opposite side of the ring and into the post. Her anger was almost at boiling point as she saw me trying to recover.

I crawled up to my knees taking in a deep breath and shaking my hands trying to fight the pins and needles and get the oxygen moving through my blood stream again.

Running over at me Dakota lept up at once again wrapping her legs around my face this time and we hit the mat with a loud thump. She locked her legs in tight and pulled me back to get me into an almost perfect submission once again. Her thighs tightened around my head as she held her weight up with her arms screaming at me to tap out. Once more the ref waved his hand in front of my face, but he looked both concerned and surprised as a soft giggle from my lips escaped me.

“THE FUCK?!” Dakota shouted in anger, and she looked under her arm to my face smirking at her.

“Rheas…thighs…are stronger” I choked out my words knowing full well my lovers out the back would be dying of laughter watching this match. Whilst Hunter at this point would be firing this camera man who was doing his best to pick up every explicit comment that came from the center of this ring.

Dakota was done, she knew this was a no disqualification match. There were no rules! So, letting go of me she kicked out and sent me headfirst into the corner ring post and rose to her feet. Rushing out of the ring Dakota grabbed a chair from under the ring and threw it over the ropes before sliding back in.

Grabbing a handful of my hair she dragged me to my feet, slamming my face into her fist repeatedly as the blood smeared across my cheeks and down her arm. Dazed and lost she threw me over the chair headfirst positioning me with my hands to the mat. She ripped the Judgment Day shirt down from my back exposing my pale skin in the artificial light before unbuckling the belt from her ring gear costume.

Bringing the thick leather belt down across my back the loud slashes echoed throughout, and they were relentless, one after another after another. Then, kicking out the chair from underneath me I fell weakly to the mat with a heavy thud as Dakota once again tried for the pin.

“1…2…” The Crowd chanted.

I kicked out before 3 and pulling my arms up over her head I wrapped myself around her and whispered in her ear smiling once again.

“Daddy Dom would be proud, but you should get Finn to give you some advice….when it comes to a public spanking” I coughed out catching my breath and planting a soft kiss on her cheek. I dragged the both of us up to our feet before leaping in the air and pulling her face down onto my knees as my back hit the mat and Dakota stumbled back, now half in and out of consciousness.

I looked up over my shoulder to the top rope, it was now or never. The last time I had done a finisher from the top rope I had ended up on the injury bench for 6 months. But this was WRESTLEMANIA BABY! Do or die, Live or Lose! So, I set up the final move, a turnbuckle power bomb into the Y/W/N/ finisher!

Backstage the WWE stage management were frantically rushing around as the show headed towards its finishing line. Production crews, lighting technicians, camera men and more bounced off the walls completing one task after another, switching from one feed to the next, sending word to and from the announcement desk where Michael Cole & Pat McAfee were losing themselves in excitement.

“TURNBUCKLE POWER BOMB Y/W/N/F ! TURNBUCKLE POWER BOMB Y/W/N/F! SHE’S OUT, SHE’S OUT!” Michael Cole was stood throwing his arms in the air as Pat McAfee tried to climb onto the desk in front of them.

“HOLY SMOKES COLE! THROUGH THE MAT, SHES GONE THROUGH THE MAT” Pat Screamed down his headset.

“What the….” Cole paused to look up at the sky.

Suddenly, as if on cue the skies above opened and as if to add the cherry to the top of the icing of this glorious display, the rain began to pour down soaking the ring. Lighting illuminated through the sky as the thunder boomed in time with the WrestleMania theme music that was blasting through the arena. Even with the weather not one person could have felt the cold, not one person would have known the temperature had dropped. The heat from this match was powering everyone through!

“Can it be…. Lightening?! Jeez people I don’t know what could possibly happen next, we’ve seen it all tonight, here live at WrestleMania!” Cole added.

“A STORM IS BREWING COLE! DO WE HAVE A NEW CHAMPION?! DO WE HAVE A NEW CHAMPION?!” McAfee couldn’t contain himself any longer as Michael Cole held onto his leg keeping him stable.

From backstage Damien, Rhea, Dominik and Finn had all gathered around watching on the monitor. Dominik had Damien’s arm in a tight grasp as Rhea held onto Finn’s hand, all of them watching and waiting to see if their girl could do it. Each of them slightly turned on from their girlfriends’ antics in the ring.

“Go Bunny…GO!” Rhea bit her lip as her eyes fixated on the screen, she ran one hand down her tight black skinny jeans, trying to contain the pulse that was beating out from in between her legs. Dom was quick to slide his hand into her side jean pocket and nuzzle into her neck planting soft kisses and gentle nips to her skin.

“Come on baby girl...” Damien whispered under his breath, palming at his crotch in an effort to keep his hard on at bay ,until he could get Y/N and the rest of the group backstage and into the Judgment Day clubhouse.

Rhea held her breath, unable to gather in any air with nervous anxiety reaching a new high as the monitor feed lite up and they watched Y/N climb to the top rope and send Dakota through the center of the ring.

“PIN HER! PIN HER!’ Finn shouted slamming his hand against the wall behind the monitor making Dom the ever submissive jump. Damien moved to wrap his arms around the young boy kissing the top of his head and rubbing his arm gently, his eyes still firmly locked on the screen.

Dom turned his head for a moment over to the management desk who looked concerned, like something was wrong. He caught Hunters eye for a moment and the look they shared, they both knew, this wasn’t going to end well.

I dragged myself to my feet and stood only a few inches away from Dakota. My entire body was exhausted, that final power bomb had taken Dakota out, she lay motionless in the center of the ring. But at what cost, because here I was, my shoulder was fucked, my knee was fucked, I could barely see, I could barely stand.

Still, something willed me on, something moved me forward. The crowd screamed and their chants echoed around me, as if they were stood right next to me and also a million miles away. I tried to collect my thoughts to focus as I moved one foot in front of the other, falling on top of Dakota Kai to get the pin.

“THIS IS IT COLE!” Pat jumped up and down before slipping off the table from the rain residue and onto the arena floor scrambling his way back up to get a glimpse at that final pin. “ THIS IS IT!!”

The entire stadium joined in with that collective…

“1…..2…..Thr”

BLACKOUT.

The Judgment day panicked and scrambling they pushed past the crew and management staff in the dark trying to find their way to the ring.

"MOVE! MOVE!" Damian shouted launching camera men out the way as the group ran to protect their girl.

The entire stadium went pitch black. The crowds screamed, young kids cried, and every last piece of music faded out to nothing.

Every tune fell silent.

Every note.

Except one….

An all too familiar piano key played out to the arena as smoke filled the walkway and a single spotlight illuminated the ring.

Silence filled the stadium.

‘Urr Cole? What’s happening?” Pat questioned as the two presenters clung to each other like Shaggy and Scooby doo, shaking in fear.

“It’s…The Wyatts.”

#the judgement day #the judgment day #tjd x reader #the judgement day x reader #the judgment day wwe #the judgment day x reader #rhea ripley x reader #rhea ripley #damian priest x reader #damian priest #dominik mysterio #dominik mysterio x reader #finn balor x reader #finn balor #wwe #wwe raw #poly!judgement day #black fem reader #wwe x reader

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blackbat05 · 3 months

Text

Open Up

Jason Todd x Library Assistant! Reader

Plot: With a little help, you overcome your internal prejudice with an enigmatic patron.

Rating: PG-13

A/N: Had another writer’s block so really thankful for @the-slumberparty events as always! This is yet another of my self-indulgent pieces but I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for the unwavering support!❤️

************************************************

My choices:

🍧Mint Chocolate: the loner – mint chocolate is an acquired taste, so it is that one of your characters is of a similar flavour. A loner is brought out of their shell.

🥄Cherries: meet-cute – this can be fluffy or a stereotypical first meeting gone wrong

“It’s him again!” Miriam, the librarian whispers into my ear as I’m shelving back each book to its rightful place. I carefully climb down from the stool and observe the same man with a streak of white hair and an impressive physique to boot select another book from the Literature section.

Though a frequent visitor of the library, he was a lone wolf. Unlike patrons who greeted each other or strike up conversations, he was a lone wolf. No mingling, just quiet reading for two hours and he was out of the library to only be back the next day with the same routine. Not that it was an issue. He was easy on the eyes. Scary, but definitely easy on the eyes.

“If only I was single,” Miriam sighs fondly. “You have no idea what it’s doing to my woman parts.”

“Miriam!” I gasp, completely ignoring for a millisecond that I almost yelled at my supervisor. My supervisor who’s twenty years older but way cooler than I would ever be. She shrugs, “I just said what all women needed to hear.” She moves closer to me, thrusting a book into my hands.

“What is this?” I asked, afraid to hear her answer.

“Conversational material.” Miriam gently pushes me in the direction where our most frequent patron of the Gotham Public Library has disappeared to. “I got the circulation desk covered.” She winks and I’m not sure if regret ever sharing with her my relationship status that was as dead as a slug.

I walked towards the literature section and made my way further down to the sitting area beside the huge glass windows that stretched towards the ceiling, allowing natural light to give a warm glow to the area.

There he was, sitting casually on the maroon sofa, book in one hand and completely oblivious to the world around him.

I’m rooted to the ground, mesmerized at how his emerald eyes skim through each page carefully, capturing the essence of each word. I nearly fall into a stupor just watching this man when he suddenly closes the book and stares straight at me.

I give a squeak and my cheeks heat up. I must look like a creep to him. My brain tells me to get away from there and pretend that nothing ever happened but my feet are unsurprisingly stubborn. The man stands up to full height and my heart races a beat quicker with each step he takes closer to me.

Quick, come up with a good excuse so that he doesn’t chew you out and humiliate you for the rest of your life!

Before I can defend myself, he beats me to the punch. Not in the way that I expected.

“Hi, you’re the librarian right?”

I’m stunned for a second and have to mentally slap myself back into reality.

“Yeah! Actually, library assistant. How can I help you?” My words come out in a nervous blur and I bite the inside of my cheeks. So much for keeping my cool in front of a mysteriously handsome guy.

“Well, I was wondering if you had any good recommendations. I’ve blitzed through entire sections and re-reading Jane Austen for the fifth time isn’t exactly therapeutic.” His chuckle causes my heart to skip a beat.

“Oh darn, the reading block huh? Well there’s no such thing as that- I mean grammar wise, but I totally know how you feel, how about we go this way?” I direct him to the other section.

“It’s still Literature but it’s written by authors from different countries, different genders and colors.” I explain. “I always like to say that books widen your worldview.” I ramble, unaware of his green eyes piercing intensely into mine.

“Sorry,” I squeak sheepishly. “Am I talking too much? I’ll leave you to it.” I’m about to scurry away and possibly find a corner to die of embarrassment when he holds my wrist gently but firmly.

“I like it.” He gives me a smile that makes my belly do a couple of backflips. “Do you think you could recommend me one to start off?” His request is simple but so genuine that despite his intimidating appearance, I can’t help but to be drawn to this lone wolf that comes to the library every evening.

“Sure. How about Welcome to the Hyunnam-dong Bookshop?” I suggest. “I read it while I was feeling a little lost in life. Kind of a comfort book really.” I carefully pick out a hard cover book and wait with bated breath for his reaction.

He takes the book from me and I notice the scars on his hand are plenty - some superficial, some deep. I’m curious, but I know it’s not my place to pry. After all, the library is a safe place for everyone to be themselves.

Eyes quickly scanning through the summary of the book, he flips the books to the front and stares at it for a few more seconds before coming to a decision.

“It’s perfect.”

***

I learn that his name is Jason.

The next couple of days are no different. He comes in at exactly six on the dot in the evenings. He’ll wait for me patiently if I’m occupied with a patron and we’ll head to one of the many shelves for me to pick out another recommendation. Today was a children’s novel, The Boy At The Back Of The Classroom.

“The author intended to target younger kids as her demographic,” I explain. “But the way she explained the struggles of refugees in a simple yet impactful way through the lenses of a child, was beautiful to read as an adult.”

As always, Jason thanks me for the help. But this time, he doesn’t check the book out at self-help. I’m wondering if he wants more than one book when-

“When do you finish work?”

“Excuse me?” You tilt your head slightly, unsure if you had heard him correctly. Jason coughs to fill the silence and gathers enough courage to repeat his question.

“I was thinking if you don’t have any plans, we could have dinner?” He asks. “I know a place and we could read there. The owner won’t mind.”

My delayed response almost screws everything up when Miriam comes to my rescue.

“Of course she’ll love to! You’ve earned the time off! Go and enjoy your weekend!” She makes a shooing motion and when Jason isn’t looking, she winks at me.

“I’ll love to.” I reaffirm and the delight on his face is absolutely adorable for someone of his stature.

The more I get to know this enigma of a man, I discover more aspects of him that seem to draw me closer like a moth to the flame.

***

I’m usually not like this.

When a book gets my attention, I’ll blitz through chapters at one shot, eager to find out what happens next to the main character.

But I can’t seem to find the focus as I’ve been stuck on the same page of my latest romance novel for ten minutes, taking occasional peeks at the gorgeous man intently reading in front of me. I cover my face with the book, not wanting to appear like a creep when all he wanted was a reading buddy.

I’m starting to get fidgety and I really want to see how his nose scrunches up when he’s engrossed in the material in front of him. How he cracks his right knuckle after every chapter. How he smiles and frowns at the joy and injustices the character faces.

What I didn’t expect to see was Jason fondly watching me as I supposedly attempted to read my own book. My cheeks heat up at the sudden attention.

“Do I have something on my face?” I ask.

“You’re pretty when you’re reading.” Jason says as a matter of fact, ignoring my question. I’m sure that I’m flaming red as a tomato but this only causes him to break into a boyish grin. I’m at a loss so I end up putting the book back in front of my face, earning a chuckle from him.

He reaches out and takes the book out of my hands, putting it aside.

“Do you know why I’ve read Austen five times?”

I shrug. “I thought you just really liked the book. Predictability brings comfort. Knowing how the story ends.”

Jason shakes his head. “I was hoping you would come over and help a guy out. But I guess I was too afraid. I didn’t want to scare you. Most people don’t approach someone like me for a casual conversation.” He gestures and a pang of guilt hits me for immediately stereotyping him during my first encounter.

“I guess that makes two of us.” I say. “I was amazed at your extensive reading choices and I can’t deny that I’ve been trying to work up my courage to talk to the handsome patron at aisle eighteen.”

Jason’s eyes twinkles at my sudden confession. The man in front of me is no longer the big, scary lone wolf. All I see is a man who has come to seek for genuine human connection in the form of art. A man who is sensitive and hopes that someone would be able to embrace his vulnerability.

I know this because that is what I have been looking for all this time.

The owner reminds us that the cafe would be closing soon and we take our leave, walking under the cool spring breeze. On normal days, I wouldn’t be out this late but Jason’s presence is enough to lower my senses to the potential dangers that Gotham has to offer.

While exchanging more talks about books, we reach the bottom of my apartment.

“Thank you for the amazing night. I loved it.” I sincerely thank Jason.

He doesn’t move from his spot, fists jammed tightly in the pockets of his hoodie. It’s endearing that Jason doesn’t want to rush things even though he can. Funny for a man that I once considered mysterious is an open book.

For the first time in my life, I decide to take the first steps. I kiss him on the cheek, allowing myself to linger before pulling away to see Jason smiling bigger than I’ve ever seen before.

“I’ll see you tomorrow at the library?”

“I’ll be there.”

#jason todd x reader #jason todd fluff #jason todd

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hellsslibrary · 2 years

Note

hello! I hope your day is going great. so i have an idea brothers in canon have fan clubs so what happens if they find out brother is dating mc? that if they see or hear that they are especially close you know what I mean. and in the end try to kill or can eliminate him? I do not know which of the brothers, you can choose it yourself. have a good day!

♡Headcanons on brothers's yandere fan clubs and their relationship to / with MC♡

(Older brothers edition).

DNI: Minors.

!! Warnings: yandere topics(obviously), mentions of murder, violence, blood, wounds, mention of sex, humiliation and praise (Levi), affectionate names(Lucifer), semi-public/public(?) sex, dirty talk (a very subtle hint).

#!!a/n: there will be 2 parts, since the headcanon turned out to be too long. The younger brothers will be a little later.

Part 2

Lucifer.

Oh my God... He probably has the craziest fan club. Probably, the club would consist of influential / high-ranking / status / etc demons. So they definitely have the opportunity, and even more so the desire to do something with you.

I assume that almost no one (or maybe no one at all) even tried to show signs of attention to him. After all, we're talking about Lucifer. They don't have a chance. But then some person appears and just like that (it's not easy at all) falls in love with him? Not excusable.

After that, they tried to somehow attract his attention, but failed miserably Lucifer is interested in such a plan only MC. And that made them even angrier.

They began to self-suggest to themselves that Lucifer uses you exclusively for some reason (for example, sex, help with work / brothers, etc.). But just one look at him when he's with you completely kills these thoughts.

He's absolutely in love. They're losing it. They absolutely did not mind, if anything, sharing it among themselves (although Lucifer would not allow it). But with you? What the fuck? So they switched to active surveillance (as far as Lucifer's ability to notice everything allowed).

They were ready to kill you on the spot when they started seeing the two of you in more.... In more secluded places. The way you had a make out session, the way you held him and he held you, the way you almost fucked there. It was just disgusting to them.

And when Lucifer, the Avatar of Pride himself, began to come, albeit with hidden, but still noticeable, hickeys... They were on edge. But then there was another incident after which they finally realized that you need to be eliminated.

"Don't you think they're taking too long?" - one of the demons asks, peering out of the wall.

"Of course they are long! They've been gone for like one hour and twenty-two minutes!" - one of the voices whispers discontentedly.

"Should we come in?" - everyone immediately turns their head with just one glance, giving an answer to the question. - "Okay, I agree. The idea is absolute nonsense. But what are they doing there for almost an hour and a half?!"

"If this idiot is doing something to our precious Luci... I will kill him myself," - but their thoughts are interrupted by the creaking of the door, after which they fall into mute shock.

Lucifer almost falls out of it, holding on to the door, straightening his jacket, tying it properly. And you follow him out, straightening your hair and simultaneously fastening the belt on your trousers.

They look at each other, trying to squeeze closer and hear your dialogue.

"Damn, couldn't you wait until we got home? " - Lucifer asks, although he knows the answer perfectly well.

"No, you'll get bogged down in your work, and I can't stand it. Obviously not after you say such dirty things," - he lightly hits you on the chest, which makes you both laugh.

"Sometimes I don't understand how I got loved with such a pervert... It's time for you to stop talking so much with Asmo, you know, " - you just understand with your shoulders and teasingly show him your tongue.

"You like it, Lulu, anyway, it's time for both of us to go to class, so... " - you briefly kiss him on the lips and wave goodbye to him and he does the same.

He just shakes his head negatively after you with a smile on his face and moves away in the opposite direction... Limping? He's limping.

"He...him..." - and from everyone who was standing there now, only sounds of disgust and jealousy are heard.

Then they decided. MC should not exist. Only they should call Lucifer "Lulu" (or other pet names that Lucifer would not allow, to anyone but you). Only they had to kiss him. They alone should have been Lucifer's weakness. Only they had to have sex with him.

"So what? When will he appear at all... " - whispers one of them, looking at the exit from the school.

"Wait, asshole. He'll show up sooner or later. " - whispers someone in response.

They have perfectly timed the day when Lucifer and all the other brothers have lessons left, and you are free. They are waiting for you to come out of the RAD to finally carry out your plan.

Their eyes lit up when they saw your [tall/medium/short] figure walking down the road to the exit. They looked at each other and nodded, walking towards you at a brisk pace. And then there's only darkness in your eyes.

You wake up, seeing in front of you...Asmo?

"Oh my God, hon, you're awake!" - he gently hugs you and only now you notice that there is a bandage on your chest.

"What happened? " - you ask, patting him on the back a couple of times.

He pulls away and sighs, biting his lower lip, and probably thinking of a softer way to say it to you.

"You were almost killed by several demons who want to fuck with your boyfriend," - you blink a couple of times and tilt your head sideways in incomprehension. - "They wanted to take your place and do with Lucifer what you do. And that's why they decided to kill you. But fortunately they didn't work out and your precious face and body didn't suffer too much! "

"Why didn't it work out? " - you see how the door to your room opens, and then you see your favorite brunette.

"Oh!" - Asmo jumps up and immediately walks away, grinning. - "He will explain it to you in detail. Get well, dear, I'll come back! "

The door slams behind him. And you look at your boyfriend. He sighs heavily and climbs onto the bed, hugging you by the shoulders, putting his face on your shoulder.

"Luci, will you tell me?.. " - you ask quietly, to which he nods and pulls away after a few seconds.

"I'm sorry... I was really worried about you," - he sighs heavily again and looks away. - "They caught you after school, knocked you out, and then... They started... "

He silently points at your chest, continuing:

"Some random student saw it and informed me, since I was the first one he saw... Then I rushed there as fast as I could... Took care of them, and then of you, my love."

He takes your hand, gently strokes it, looking at the remnants of blood left after his care. How stupid they were, thinking that they could touch with impunity the one who belongs to him and the one to whom he belongs.

Mammon.

They don't care about him. They adore him with the fibers of their entire nonexistent soul. They are the only ones (in their opinion) treating him well. They are simply the best candidates for wifes/husbands for him.

But you show up. The one he falls in love with at first sight, but why? What is it about you that they don't have? Why exactly some pathetic, good-for-nothing person, and not they are beautiful, intelligent and strong demons and demonesses.

What the hell are you exactly? No matter how much they watched your, not yet romantic, relationship, they could not understand. They could not understand why he is so much in love with you that he is even ready to spend money, being an Avatar of Greed and even, damn it, to work if your eyes in the store lovingly fall on some trinket.

He is probably one of the three brothers to whom their fan club tried to show signs of attention. But he didn't accept them (only if it's not something that can be sold, of course) even before you, and even more so after you didn't do it(but material things are still accepted).

It annoyed them. Their senpai paid attention to them somehow, but now... He just takes it away, throwing a quiet and quick "thank you". Even though it is, even if it is the most expensive thing in the whole Devildom, he will only sell it.

But if it concerns you. Then even a stupid dandelion or clover that has just been plucked is just wonderful for him. A shiny pebble that you saw on the way and he reminded you of it, he will keep it, let him say that he will throw it away. And if it's something he wants... For example, a new collection of watches or glasses or other things, then he will probably cry when he gets it from you. Have you worked to give him what he wants? God, he's right there in a wedding dress or suit...

In general, everything is clear to you, as well as to them. You are absolutely divine to him, any sign of your attention is the same for him as you are. But they? They just give him things that he will sell. Absolutely unnecessary trinkets for him. They understand that until they get rid of you, they will not get answers to their courtship.

"Tch, where did this man take him? " - they searched corridor after corridor in search of their greedy demon.

"Stop saying that! Now we are—!? " - they are interrupted by a loud groan and they immediately run there.

They pull the door handle lightly, but it's locked, so they put their ears to it.

"D-damn, ya too rude, MC!" - he moans, grabbing your hair in an armful and pressing you to him in a hungry kiss.

Their heart literally stops for a few moments when they finally understand what is happening. You're fucking their demon. You... him... It's impossible to believe. They flinch when there is a slap and later a whimper from Mammon.

"Come on, handsome, you like it when I'm rude," - you gently kiss him on the lips, moving away from him. - "And weren't you just yelling at me to be rougher? "

"That's not what I meant, ya 'now! " - he groans and continues. "But don't stop, please... Ya feel so good inside... "

They hear your giggle, and then a particularly loud moan from their object of adoration. They feel an erection growing in their trousers or their panties are getting too wet from their juices. They immediately reach for their arousals, but pull back their hand and silently leave there.

Then they realize that they 100 percent want to replace you, they want to be the ones who give him such indescribable pleasure. Who makes him moan like that. Who makes him love you so much, your gifts, your appearance and, of course, your personality.

Well, they decided to take decisive action, although it was not easy. Mammon's original job was to protect you, after the relationship, he generally clung to you like a leech and almost never let you go anywhere alone, or escorted you to the offices and everything in that spirit. He just wanted to spend time together, as much time as possible. But! They hunted for a long time and they succeeded.

You were standing quietly against the wall, as several demons appear in front of you. You look around at them and realize that they clearly have bad intentions.

"What do you need? " - you ask, looking at them with a questioning look, realizing that no one will help you now, because everyone has started a lesson, and Mammon has not come yet.

"Your death," - they say in chorus and synchronously.

"Excuse me? " - you raise an eyebrow questioningly, but at the same moment you close your eyes, feeling a strong grip on your neck.

"You heard it all yourself, boy. You took the guy away from us, and we'll take your life. It's all the same. " - you cling to your hand, but you feel a sharp flow of air into your lungs and almost fall, but you manage to hold on.

"What do ya think approaching my man, eh?!" - he shouts, causing them to tremble and lower their eyes to the floor.- "Once again I'll see that ya at least look at him, then... "

He doesn't finish, but they understand everything perfectly and quickly run away. He immediately turns to you, examining your neck, but exhaling, not noticing anything too serious.

"Man, ya can't be left for a minute!" - he shouts and grabs your hand, pulling you along on the way to class, but gently, trying not to pinch any of the veins.

Leviathan.

They totally admire him. With all my soul and body. With all my being. Grand Admiral of the Hell Navy, one of the seven rulers of the Devildom and just probably the cutest otaku in all three worlds.

They practically don't see him in person. Only on his streams, because he studies mostly in an online school. And it's just heaven when he comes to school, although he still doesn't communicate with anyone much, of course. But it's enough for them to see him.

They are his main sims (not true, of course, but they think so). They don't miss a minute of his streams, even if they lasted several days, they wouldn't move away from the screen even for a nanosecond. Probably read and write fan fiction with him with y/n and him as a character, mostly obscene, of course. Also have a body pillow with it. From where? Think for yourself. Yes, in general, he could ask them to do anything, they would do it, there are no barriers for them.

But then you show up. And you become his best friend, player number 2, his boyfriend, his Henry... You become his, and he becomes yours. They were absolutely not satisfied with it, they certainly did not seek him at all, because his relationship with society is not very good, but you took him away so easily... No way. Never.

Although they can thank you for the fact that he began to appear at school a little more often and that they can now see his emotions, which he had not previously shown. But they wanted to be the ones who evoke these emotions and feelings. They wanted to be the ones for whom he was even ready to face normie in his life.

Their entertainment has now become eavesdropping on your conversations. Most of them were about his brothers or a recent game/manga or anime that you enjoyed together, but sometimes your conversations (on your initiative, lfmao) went to a more adult side.

"What are you?! MC, we're at school! We can't..." - he whispers softly, though it sounds more like a scream.

"So what? You'll like it... If someone sees how obedient and beautiful you are for me. And only for me... It would be very good, don't you think?" - he swallows, and you just smirk.

He nods weakly, you kiss him on the cheek, making a surprised sound out of him, and wrap your arms around him, pulling him to your chest. He waves his arms awkwardly for a couple of seconds, but then awkwardly wraps his arms around you in return.

Their heart is broken into a million pieces. He is obedient... He is not what they imagined him to be. Damn man, what did you turn him into, huh?

And when they overheard your conversation about what you want to try in your sex life a little later (well, and of course the wonderful muttering, stuttering and whining of Levi, ahem), they realized that he was clearly not the way they described him in their fan fiction and imagined in their dirty fantasies.

They were going to your conditioned place with him. Under construction, the RAD wing. No one's going to show up here, right? It's dangerous, and the builders work after the end of the school day. They searched every office with their eyes until they found you in some narrow room, probably a future storage room.

"Well, my sweet slut, are you ready? " - you ask in a gentle voice.

They open their eyes and spread out on different walls, because there was no door at the pantry.

"Yes... Yes, please..." - he whines, and the members of his fan club feel their cheeks turn bright red, and a fever is growing in the lower abdomen.

"M, m, m... well, then be a good boy and..." - he moans in pure bliss.

They can't see what's going on there, but that moan was the sweetest thing in the world they've ever heard. They wanted him to moan so much for them, so that he would kneel for them. They wanted to do it right now. The jealousy was too strong.

But as soon as they appear in the aisle, you look up at them in surprise. Your precious boyfriend also turns around and jumps up in embarrassment, hiding behind your sitting figure.

"Don't you want to leave? " - your voice is heard. - "Can't you see what we're doing here?"

They stare for a couple more seconds, but immediately run away in embarrassment. He exhales in bliss, resting his head on your shoulder. You stroke his head and kiss the top of his head.

"Levi, how are you? Can we continue?" - he stands still for a couple more seconds, but then nods. "Great, then how about you sit on my lap now and we'll do about the same thing? "

After that, they obviously didn't even try to touch you. Although they initially understood that they did not have enough strength, he is, of course, shy, but he is not a Grand Admiral for nothing, right? Yes, and your dissatisfied voice brought them to goosebumps. They are now afraid to approach you.

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powderblueblood · 8 months

Text

HELLFIRE & ICE — eddie munson x f!oc! as enemies to star-crossed lovers

CHAPTER EIGHT — SEWN UP

PREVIOUS | MASTERLIST | NEXT

summary: you'd need a hacksaw to cut the tension between you and eddie, but that's not your weapon of choice this time around. a newspaper pitch, a patchwork girl and a tasteless prank all work together to make things ever more awkward between you and the boy you keep senselessly calling your friend. content warnings: MINORS DNI, THIS IS NOT SAFE FOR YOUR PURITAN EYES - reader is an ex-bitch on a journey of self-discovery through being an even more specific kind of bitch, angst in the form of an elizabeth munson mention, miscommunication, lacy engaging non-platonically with someone other than eddie, mention of lacy's surname and dad's name, REEFER RICK CAMEO, billy hargrove slander as per, violence, a humiliating prank, smut in the form of public hand stuff (f!receiving), me feeling insane about this chapter word count: 14.3k

Dear Mom,

She hasn’t got warm hands. She hasn’t got the kind of smile that draws people to her. She hasn’t got a kind word for everyone, no matter where they come from. She hasn’t got a lot of patience. She hasn’t got a fixed sense of herself–well, she does kinda. But, not totally. Not yet.

She’s not like you.

Other cheerleaders wore ponytails and they’d bounce. But when she wore a ponytail, it swung like a sword. She used to be cruel and exacting, but now she’s just exacting. She’s honest and observant to a degree that’s, like, almost psycho. She’s a cold front, but she laughs like a lightning strike. I feel like thunder, powerless to do anything but roll after her. Can’t help myself.

She knows what she wants, she thinks. Other days she doesn’t. I keep trying to tell her that’s okay, in ways where I don’t actually have to use the words. My words wouldn’t be as good as her words. Her words burn clean through me like a lit tip of a cigarette.

But she does have your book.

Y’know, I always thought it was kind of creepy the way some guys would try and look for their mom in other girls.

So this might be a good thing. Less Oedipus-y, more ea–…

Shit. I was gonna say something I’m so sure you’d smack me around the head for. But you’re not here to do that. I might be in better shape with this girl if you were.

Anyway. I miss you.

Eddie Munson stands in the midst of an incredibly awkward aftermath.

See, for two people so purportedly self-assured, he in his freakshow roguishness and you in your prim-perfect knife-edge sharpness, you’re both entirely dogshit at acknowledging… well… anything.

You both tried to snap back to normal so quickly, with Wheeler and her science experiment pregnancy scare smashing through the ice. But the water underneath that ice is still freezing cold– and you’re both pretending you’re not gasping for air, pretending like you don’t remember gasping for each other’s lips.

This is totally cool. This is totally fine.

And then Eddie comes to see you at The Bookstore, which has become just as routine as nearly never brushing his hair, and sees you fixing your seller’s tag to your pick of the week. Your face in that arresting, self-conscious smile that he wants to melt off with the blowtorch of his mouth.

It’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

Now, he noticed that you would habitually drop writers’ names into conversation like they were your lit professors– Didion said this, Bukowski said that, Bronte yadda, Burroughs yadda. Always some genius-adjacent, formative-thinking, socio-politico-boffo brainwad, more often than not with a substance abuse kick that you romanticized from a safe distance.

But then you unearth this book, a green clothback cover yellowing with age and roughness, red and yellow inlaid titling blasting out a name he ought to know. It makes his visual memory brrrrrrring! like a bright red tomato shaped kitchen timer.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz was with Elizabeth Munson wherever she went. Her records were her plane tickets, her escape to another world, but you couldn’t take your records with you to the hospital. Escaping to Oz was a decent substitute. She must have read it a bajillion times; she even took to calling Wayne Unc Nunkie after the elderly munchkin who only ever had one word for anybody. And whenever Eddie would drop an egg when they were baking or come running through the house with his knees all cut up, she’d coo, “Oh, my li’l Ojo the Unlucky!”

The book lingered everywhere– on the kitchen counter of the house on Pennsylvania,on the vinyl seat of the booth at the now-shuttered Benny’s when she could afford to take Eddie for a treat, on her bedside table.

Up until the end.

It knocks the wind out of Eddie when he sees it on the display shelf. He does a bad job of hiding that.

“What, too shocked to make fun of me?” you say, perching yourself on the rickety stool behind the counter, and your voice betrays a little embarrassment. “That’s a first.”

“I–... huh?” He tears his eyes away from the book long enough to catch the specks of blush high on your cheeks.

“It’s not my usual flavor, I know, but I’m capable of whimsy too.”

“Why that one?” His limbs feel stony like Unc Nunkie’s, as much as he wants to languidly lean over the counter and bother you like he always does.

You shrug, but you tilt the opposite shoulder. A reverse, a peek behind the looking glass. He notices that about you, which goddamn shoulder is your shrugging preference.

“I think it was one of the first books I kept checking out of the library when I was little,” you say, glancing back at the display, “It’s about this poor little kid who has to find a way to reverse a spell on his uncle who’s been turned to stone, and the eponymous patchwork girl is–”

“I know the story.” It comes out a little blunter than Eddie was intending it to. So much so that it knocks you back a beat.

“Oh,” you say shortly, eyes flaring down at the counter. “No need to cut me off mid-stream about it.”

Eddie winces, knowing he’s coming across as weird and stilted but with no idea how to safely climb down. “No, just– I know the story, yeah. My mom…” That is not a safe dismount, dummy! “...she… liked it a lot.”

“Yeah?” your tone stays even, yanked back from him a little. He wants to be like, sorrysorrysorry. “She ever read it to you?”

“A bunch, actually.”

“No shit.” The corners of your mouth tick up. “Wanna hear something super dorky?”

Just the mere invitation of your little smile loosens him up a bit. Eddie twists a ring around his finger, head kicking to his shoulder as his foot kicks to the counter. “Always,” he says, squinting.

You straighten your spine up on your stool and clear your throat. Hand goes over your heart, like you’re about to recite the damn declaration. Your eyes shutter closed.

“Here’s a job for a boy of brains– a drop of oil from a live man’s veins; a six-leaved clover; three nice hairs, from a Woozy’s tail, the book declares; are needed for a magic spell, and water from a pitch-dark well– the yellow wing from a butterfly to find must Ojo also try; and if he gets them without harm, Doc Pipt will make the magic charm; but if he doesn’t get ‘em, Unc…” your crack one eye open. “...will always stand a marble chunk.”

Eddie is silent for… for a while. For a good handful of heartbeats, for a beat so long that makes you knit your brow up, your eyes needling into him. Eddie’s looking at you with rose-colored soft focus. His elbows are eagerly pitched on the counter now, chin in his hands. The last person to recite those words to him was his mom, her voice raspy and tired but still willing to read to him. She hadn’t smelled like herself. It was sad.

And now, your voice, with all its snippy chainmail thrown off, gone all soft and lyrical and dedicated.

He thinks about a littler you, one he could vaguely pick out of a lineup if he really, really tried, criss-cross applesauce and pouring over that book so often that that little spell jams itself into your brain.

The mage before she donned the mink coat.

Eddie is looking at you and can’t force his heart out of his throat.

Well, until he can.

“Ew,” he cringes.

“What?!” you exclaim, your eyes getting all incredulous and kind of mad.

“And they call me a fuckin’ nerd, what the hell was that?” Eddie’s laughing, mocking, not with his whole heart. But it’s enough to make you scoff, irritated with him again.

See, you thought you were being cute and he knows you thought you were being cute. He needs to put you back in a place where you’re marginally unlikeable enough to just be a friend.

Restore the natural order. Don’t think about how he wants to recite that same verse back to you in front of an ordained Elvis in Vegas. Because he would, in a heartbeat. If he wasn’t committed to not being stupid.

Christ, you’re pretty. Christ, he’s gonna do something stupid.

“You are… completely undateable, you know that?” he nods ferociously, eyes trailing you as you cross out from behind the counter and head for a box of books that need to be shelved. All uh-huhs and sure, Eddies. The bell on the front door jangles and a customer passes behind him.

He yells after you, voice traveling down whatever winding path you’ve taken through the stacks. “You with your black and white movies and your twat rock and your Wizard of Oz… baby, what crowd are you even playing to?”

“What crowd am I playing to? What crowd are you playing to?!” you seethe, shuffling the ten-tonne box of books down the aisle with your feet. “Fucking baggie-pushing, guitar-brutalizing, board-game-...maker-...upper!”

“Woah. Wit’s unmatched as usual, Lace.”

This fucking guy. This fucking guy. You try and do one darling little thing, you just recite a little piece of a book his dead mom used to read to him or whatever, and you get verbally bashed! God forbid, god forbid you let the fucking drawbridge down for half a second! This blows!

You’re trying to be less of a bitch, in case you idiots didn’t notice!

It’s kind of inexplicable, how sensitive you’re feeling about this. Could be that since you kissed and since you pinkie-swore with Nancy Wheeler in the bombed-out boys bathroom, you kind of felt as if you were standing on a blade’s edge with Eddie. Not knowing where to put your hands, not knowing how much or how little to joke around. Not entirely happy with your moment of madness at the Ecker trailer. Not entirely happy that it hadn’t happened again.

But you’re not about to apologize. Not to him. Don Rickles in a battle vest over there. Must he always just poke you like that?!

“You’re undateable!” You shove a bunch of books aside on the shelf. “Me, I’m cu–...”

Right through the shelf, a customer stares at you. Your voice dies in your throat because, unfortunately, he’s looking right at you in your flurry of annoyance toward Eddie. And unfortunately, this stranger, he’s a little…

“What were you gonna say?” he asks, closing Gravity’s Rainbow.

“Cute.”

Guy smiles, doesn’t break eye contact with you for a second. He’s wearing a sweater. He looks fresh out of somewhere stone walled with crawling ivy. “I’d attest to that.”

You forget about Eddie– just for a second. Gesturing to Gravity’s Rainbow, you say, “Gonna attempt to finish that?”

“What’s that mean?” His grin is infectious, or maybe you’re just starved for this kind of attention.

“Nothing,” you say, with a little more tongue than you need to, “Just, I don’t know of anyone that’s ever finished that behemoth.”

Well, you don’t know of a lot of people that read the way you do either. But, digression. He raps a knuckle against the cover of the book and for some reason, you feel it in your belly.

“I always finish,” he tells you.

“Do you now?”

That’s the longest you’ve been quiet in a hot minute, and that’s the kind of thing that gets under Eddie’s skin. Chain on his jeans jangling, he starts off into the creaking labyrinth of lined-up bookcases.

“What, did you expire back here or something…” he mutters, a little whine in his tone– play with me, play with me, even though I’m being kind of a dick to you–

He sees you, a book lying lax in your arms, your body swaying to and fro and you’re–

“--talkin’ to yourself, Lacy? Great look. Real honeytrap, if you’re lookin’ to catch some imaginary di–”

“Eddie,” you grit at him, and he spots the whole other human male you’re talking to through the stacks. Well, not just talking to. Not with that body language.

This dude tilts his chin to Eddie. “Hey, man. I remember you. Didn’t you used to sell dimebags in the woods outside school?”

Fire flares in Eddie’s gut. He vaguely recognizes this guy– class of ‘83 or ‘82, not remarkable enough to be hateable but now, he’s certainly collegiate looking enough to be… distracting to you. So, annoying to him.

“Why, man? You lookin’ to buy? Or just cruise some high schooler tail?”

“Eddie!” you hiss again and he scoffs like, really?! You turn back to this… whoever the fuck. “C’mon, I’ll check you out.”

“You’ll check him out, huh?” Eddie sneers, bearing over you as you pass him in the aisle. Body heat breezing right by, face a mask of sheer disgust. Impulse talks; it totally wants to just grab you and throw you behind him and– well, he hasn’t thought that far ahead yet. But he’s creative. Who the fuck even is this guy? Where did he come from?

“That you?” this guy says, jerking his head toward the staff display, toward The Patchwork Girl of Oz. “Lacy?”

“To my friends and co-conspirators,” you say, ringing up that godawful Pynchon book.

“Which one was that guy?” he asks, watching you jot out his receipt on the carbon copy pad because for whatever reason, Ivana’s cash register is from the fucking 1800s and she refuses to upgrade to anything with a thermal printer. “Friend? Co-conspirator? … boyfriend?”

You wrinkle your nose. And don’t exactly answer, but it’s enough confirmation for him.

“Good. Say, why don’t you jot down your number on this thing?” He pushes the receipt back to you. “I can keep you updated on my Pynchon progress. You can… see if I’m good enough to co-conspire with.”

You like this approach. In fact, you love this approach, because you hadn’t been earnestly picked up in… forever. And he has this certain je ne sais quoi about him, something that screams moved out of state for college. You stay grinning, biting your lip for a good breath or two after he leaves the store.

Then Eddie appears in your peripheral, like some terrible harbinger of embarrassment.

“Undateable, huh?” you say, fully aware that he was earwigging on that whole exchange because he’s a nosy bitch and he can’t help himself. Glutton for gossip.

“You don’t have to throw yourself at the first person who walks in the store just to prove a point, baby,” Eddie tells you, this big face of condescension. You want to smack it off him so bad your palms are itching.

You huff and backtrack to where that box of unshelved books sits. “Maybe I’m tired of waiting around.”

—

Ronnie Ecker and Robin Buckley are looking each other in the eye, wolf-whistling furtively when you elbow open the door of the gym.

“You’re flat. I’m telling you you’re flat,” Ronnie’s insisting, an adorable three inches away from Robin’s face.

“I can’t be flat! A mouth whistle cannot be flat!”

It’s marching band practice. You don’t know what the hell goes on in here and you know better than to ask.

“Would you two get a room already?” you call, heels clicking across the glossed wood of the gym. These dorks have all got their feathered hats and bibs on, a kind of half-assed dress rehearsal for some pep rally they’re having on Friday. You missed the bulletin– kind of stopped paying attention, actually. Extracurricular distraction is a hell of a drug.

“Excuse me, this is a closed–” that’s the voice of Miss Genovese, the band teacher, stomping down from the bleachers in these tragic little loafers with the pleather peeling off. She makes it about halfway toward you, then this exasperated look washes right over her. The teacher dashes for the double doors and you point after her with a freshly painted red index finger. New lease on looking good.

“And that is?”

“Like, the third time in the last hour,” Ronnie shakes her head, taking her flamboyant little hat off. “Biggest running theory is morning sickness.”

What, is pregnancy like, catching or something? you’re about to muse.

“It’s almost contagious, right?” Robin says, tugging at her clip-on collar, “I mean, first your whole thing and now–”

Ronnie doesn't even have a chance to gesture for her to ixnay! before she slams pause on herself, eyes wide and all shit, did I say that out loud?! Your eyes narrow in return. That’s suspicious.

“What whole thing? My whole what?”

Ever and eternally knowing when to call it, Ronnie holds a hand up before Robin can even start to scramble an apology and serve it to you. Panther versus a precious little puppy dog– the fight ain’t even fair.

“Nothing. Scuttlebutt bullshit, the usual,” she rolls her eyes, throws a sympathetic glance to Robin who winces and retreats. Huh.

“What’s going on with you two?” you ask, crossing your legs over the bottom rung of the bleachers.

This actually makes Ronnie’s expression soften a little– her eyes race back in Robin’s direction and you swear you catch a blush. “Also nothing! Compound nothing. Why, does it look like…”

Lips purse into a little satisfied grin. Knew it. Toldja. Point to Lacy. “Looks like whatever you want it to look like.”

Ronnie reaches forward and waves her feathered hat in your face– stop being so observant! You cough in protest– ew, I don’t know where that thing has been!

“Whatever! What brings you to geek church?”

“That’s what they’re calling it now?”

“Stick around, we’ll start speaking in tongues.”

“Satanic Panic bringing about a fun new turn for the pep rally! Put some God back into that wind instrument,” you croon. “No, I actually wanted your thoughts on something.”

Ronnie raises her eyebrows and you feel like you oughta mirror her. You’re not usually one to seek out a second opinion, but the more you’ve gotten to know Ronnie, the more you see that she’ll tell you how it is. Especially now that you’ve dispersed with the whole intimidating it-girl cloud and she’s stopped pretending to be shy.

“I know. I’m shocked too.”

“I’m honored,” she swings her shoulders in girlish delight, “Dish it up, Doevski.”

“Okay, so,” you clap, hiking forward on your creaking bleacher, “I’ve been seeing this guy–”

“--this is the bookstore guy?”

A blink and a beat. “How’d you know about that?”

A face that has Eddie told me with footnotes of and he was kind of jealous scrawled all over it stares back at you. “I ‘unno, maybe I overheard…”

“Doesn’t matter.” You slice a hand through the air, no time for this right now. “Facts are facts, I’ve been hanging out with this guy,” interesting change of phraseology, considering, “and he’s a college guy–”

“If they could see you now.” The royal court of Hawkins, obviously. Older guys are generally an accomplishment. But Ronnie’s half-jesting.

“--I know, shut up. But, he mentioned something that would absolutely rock my college applications is a really, really great–”

“--feature in the Streak?” you’d gasped out in the back of his Ford Cortina (how very European!). College guy’s mouth was on your neck and his hand was inching into your shirt, playing at a faux placket of pearl buttons. Boys can never tell a real button from a fake one, apparently, even if they go to an East Coast school. I mean, shit! You’d gleaned enough information from him over a shake at the diner; relatively well-to-do family that lived near the Wheelers on Maple and kind of underwhelming taste in lit for an English major.

But he maintained eye contact and listened to your witty little bon mots, even if he didn’t… laugh at them. One thing led to another and thus, the backseat college advisory-slash-makeout session.

“Yeah, yeah, they love that shit…” he’d said, moving to your mouth in order to swallow any forthcoming words. But his words had piqued your interest more than his fingers had.

“What about an underdog story?” you said, eyes kind of hazing over in the middle distance.

“Sure, underdog, great…” college guy grabbed ahold of your leg and tugged you into him, “We can talk more about it later, okay?”

“Okay–”

“–okay?”

Ronnie grimaces. “I didn’t need that much detail.”

“Yes, you did.” You stare at her. “I’m a storyteller.”

Ronnie chews the proposal over a little, cheeks kind of bunched up in confusion. Behind her, band geeks badly hide their hickeys and exhibit too-gangly, too-obvious body language. No inspiration to be tapped from there.

“An underdog story… on the society pages? Like, who could you possibly–”

You smile that awful, conniving smile, because you came in here armed. “Ye of little faith.”

“Oh, no,” Ronnie says, and honestly, you’re a little taken aback by that reaction, “Hellfire?”

A shrug pulls your shoulders right up, rapidly on the defense. “Why not, right?”

“Why not– Lacy, you almost guillotined Jeff that one time he asked you.”

True that you hadn’t had the inches of article to spare for Hellfire Club in not-too-ancient history, but, “That was then, this is now! World’s changing– and it’s topical!”

The whole Satanic panic thing really did tickle your funny bone; and you saw yourself having a little fun with that by turning the focus on Hellfire. Subverting Eddie’s cult-leader mythos to show that he is just a kid who might have a propensity for telling a good story, surrounded by other kids who want to get a word in. You’re not looking to turn the tide on his reputation or anything but maybe… y’know. You could do the admirable journalistic thing and scratch the surface a bit. Show what you’ve learned.

It’s a challenge. You love a challenge.

“And it’s a good excuse to get in Eddie’s face,” Ronnie’s voice breaks through.

There is a lonnng beat, one you hold like the last shoes in your size at a sample sale. Your mouth keeps going to make the words yeah, right or it’s not about him! or y’know, something to exonerate you from the notion.

“I know he isn’t…” Ronnie trails off, coming to sit next to you. “that he’s kind of being weird to you right now.”

Go ahead and feign that ignoramus, girl. Shoulders quirking and all.

“Oh. Is he?”

And then Ronnie says maybe the dumbest thing on the planet, regarding the abominable sitch between you and Eddie Munson.

“You should just talk to him.”

“Ecker, there’s fruitless efforts and then there’s barren wasteland,” you scoff, “Guess which category proposing this to Eddie falls into.”

“That’s not what I–”

J’excuse, Ronnie, but you don’t care! Because this isn’t actually about anything other than getting all of those dice-throwing dorks, including Miss Ecker herself, into your damn paper. Okay?

“We have to ambush him! Element of surprise, that’s it,” you smile primly and hop off the bleachers. “I’m just going to show up at Hellfire, photographer in hand and– he won’t have a choice, will he?”

Ronnie’s expression is a mask of reproachfulness. You don’t let it shake you. You’re a cat playing with a now-endless ball of yarn, and you’re unshakeable.

“He’s such a sucker for attention,” you say, tossing your hair, and it sounds a lot more like you’re convincing yourself than anyone else in this echoey gym, “He won’t be able to resist.”

—

Reefer Rick doesn’t call, unless it’s an emergency. All of his communication is inbound, or passed through a shoulder check and a goofy smile at Melvald’s, or a nod of the head across the pool table at The Hideout. He doesn’t frequent there so much, because Bev knows he’s a pool shark and ever since ‘Nam, his ears are a little too sensitive to all that metal racket, man! By all means, rock on, but by then I gotta go rock-a-bye myself to sleep, alright? Anyway, that’s how Eddie knows to ride over to his place, if it’s not through a call he’s placed himself.

You need me, kid, you come and find me.

So when Eddie gets a call that says, “We gotta pow-wow, ese,” his nerves are set on edge. Not that he wasn’t feeling bad enough, what with the fact that some douchebag in a Cortina had picked you up and dropped you off to school the last couple of days. What with the fact he had actively dogged the car down a little bit of the road from the trailer park with his van, resisting every temptation to just run it all the way off into a ditch. And what with the fact he didn’t know what to say to you about that without it coming out in an anti-missive of jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! so what he did say to you was… nothing.

You two can’t maintain a consistent line of communication to save your lives, he realizes. There’s too much left unsaid, and the both of you are too stubborn or too scared to say any of it. Or even think it, in his case! The amount of times he’d had to slap himself sober, his brain going into overdrive thinking, if I had just told her… It’s a ‘friendship’, if you can even call it that, based on barbs and bad behavior and doing things because you know you shouldn’t. For the thrill. Right?

Like. Whatever. It’s not like he’d made tapes of a half dozen Black Sabbath albums because you mentioned you wanted to ‘study up’ on that ‘monster music’ he’s making. It’s not like you’d given him an annotated copy of Still Life with Woodpecker because he wanted to throw some ‘nonsensical curveball shit’ into a later Hellfire campaign.

It’s not like Eddie missed you– he just… should have seen this coming, is all. He’s used to getting left in the dust while people move onto better things, or whatever.

God, Munson, your voice taunts him from somewhere in his hippocampus, need some help nailing yourself to that crucifix?

Anyway, fuck, Rick called him.

Rick had gotten out of lockup about a month ago– some truncated charge or another that Eddie didn’t bother asking too much about, mostly because… well, Rick hadn’t really been himself. Larger and brighter than the sun itself, the great and powerful lion of a man that oozed life ain’t shit if you ain’t havin’ fun energy, Rick had kind of dimmed. Lost a lot of weight while he was inside. Came back a little bit twitchy and fluent in Spanglish, for some reason.

Eddie was worried, because of all the adult figures in his life, Rick was meant to be the one with levity. He’d lost out on a fun uncle when Wayne stepped into his father-figure role. Al was nothing but a dangerous bit player. Rick, he could rely on.

Thinking back to that infamous day when he had gotten loaded at Lipton Landing, before he picked up you and Ronnie, before he… well, you know the rest but, Eddie had sensed that Rick could use the company. He kind of tried to poke it out of him, whatever was wrong. Didn’t work. They had just watched The Godfather in a tense-ish silence and doofed a lot of joints. Sorta freaked him out.

Eddie’s crushing gravel on the descent to the infamously slanted Lipton Landing for his summons. There’s a hum that seems to traverse the window panes, a fond plucking work that could only belong to Link Wray. He puts the van in park and jogs up the steps to the front door, bracing himself for the pungent plume of skunk smoke that always greets him.

“Eduardo,” Rick’s voice curls around the greeting like smoke curls out of his mouth and he yanks Eddie over the threshold. Door slams, arm tightens around his shoulders. “You’re here.”

Rick’s always a handsy sorta guy–not like that!–but this grab makes him seize a little.

“You rang,” Eddie says, voice lilting, “Everything okay?”

Rick clutches him by the shoulders and looks at him for a long, long time. Uncomfortably long. How has he managed to puff on that joint for this long without choking long.

“No.”

And Rick begins a shuffle toward the kitchen. Eddie follows in an awkward half-step, headache threatening to bloom someplace in the back of his skull because he does not know how much more of this vagueness he can take!

“Does it have anything to do with why you called me down here? Because, shit, I would love to get a straight answer out of someone for once!” A mirthless chuckle follows, trying to soften his desperation.

A flick of the refrigerator door and Rick places two beers on his kitchen counter, hands bracing against the surface. “Then let’s sit crooked and talk straight. It’s about your…”

Hss. Eddie takes a notoriously mis-timed sip.

“...neighbor girl.”

Ffflp– Eddie wishes, just one day of his goddamned life, he could act cool at the mention of you. Even the suggestion of the mention of you. But no, he’s got PBR streaming from his nose like a moron and a look on his face that says uh-oh, spaghettio!

“That’s what I was afraid of,” says Rick, taking a knowingly smooth drink from his beer.

With the heel of his hand, Eddie wipes away his spluttering mess and fumbles around for a crumb of nonchalance.

“I don’t know–”

“Eddie,” Rick levels. God, Eddie hates it when adults are adults, and Rick hates having to act the adult even more.

His shoulders drop. “What about her?”

“Well, when I was in the pen–local, I’ll have you know–I got approached by a very interesting man with a proposition I was powerless to refuse.”

With some trepidation, Eddie mumbles, “Oh, yeah?”

“Someone– well, let’s say me and this someone have a friend in common…”

“Rick–” Eddie’s attempting the leveling thing, but he’s not as good at it as Rick is. Or as you are, for that matter. And you’re who he’s attempting to imitate here, even if he won’t admit it.

“--a certain mutual business partner, if you will–”

“Rick.” Eddie tries to punch through the tension with the big man’s name. “It was Lacy’s dad. Right? You can just say it was her dad.”

Rick’s brow sinks into a wrinkle. “...Lacy? The fuck kind of a dumb name is that?”

“It’s a nickname.” Why does Eddie feel defensive.

“The fuck kind of a dumb nickname is that?”

“They call you Reefer Rick.”

“That is a calculated business decision, a calling card if you w–”

“Rick. Can we close in on the point, here?” Ooh! Seems to actually work this time, much to Eddie’s relief. “I only got so many if you wills left in me.”

“Si, pronto,” Rick nods with apologetic understanding; he’s such an empath, this guy, “Long and short of it is, her pops offered me a little bit of cash and some assistance, iffin’ I promised to keep an eye on her.”

“Assistance…?” Eddie murmured out of the side of his mouth. It’s all in the way Rick says it! “Like…” Hand a loose fist. Jerky-jerk.

“Eddie,” Rick chides, “Assistance gettin’ out. In prison, that is just called bein’ sociable. –anyway, I have this conflict of interest, with the whole surveillance thing.”

“And what is that?”

“You.” The way Rick drops it is obviously meant to cause some kinda ripple effect of realization, but Eddie’s still confused.

“So you… didn’t take the money?”

“Huh?” Now Rick’s all confused. “Of course I took the fuckin’ money! What kind of a chump do I look like, man? What I’m getting at is, I knew that rattin’ on her also meant rattin’ on you.”

“Wh– why would it…”

“I got eyes everywhere, man. Dig? I’ve seen what’s been happening.”

Eddie’s heart leaps into his larynx. Eyes everywhere. And the truth was, you two had been stupid enough to be a lot of everywhere, thinking your respective trailers were the only hot zones. The Bookstore, the Hawk, Main Street Vinyl, Family Video, the diner, you name a Hawkins establishment and it has probably seen Eddie Munson and Lacy Doevski good-naturedly bickering in its aisles.

He wonders if Rick even had eyes in the Ecker trailer. Ronnie could be a Lipton informant. That girl can hold a secret about as well as Wayne Munson can hold his liquor, which is gracefully.

“Nothing’s been happening, we’re just–”

“Eddie.” Like a bulldozer, this guy. “I know Ivana pretty well. You ain’t hangin’ around that bookstore for the good of your health.”

“So what, you’re gonna–,” Eddie can feel himself starting to scramble, starting to sweat, backed into a corner like a hunted animal, “...tell her dad that we went to the movies a couple of times? That I go to her job, that I– that we’re–”

“What are you?” The way Rick puts it to him– rock, meet hard place. Should this really feel like such a tough question to answer?

“Friends.”

Rick draws up to his full height (tall, mountain man) and looks at him like he just shoved a cream pie into his face.

“It doesn’t matter, okay!” Eddie froths over, like a snapping dog, “We’re barely hanging out– anymore– so you can… you’re not gonna tell him anything, are you?”

Rick’s hands slowly, slowly rise, urging him to calm the yapping. No need to get into such a tizzy. Which Eddie wishes he could believe.

“‘course not, man,” he shakes his head, “Ray Doevski only needs to know what Ray Doevski absolutely needs to know.” Eddie can feel a little more weight behind that sentence than he’d like. “No reason you need to figure into this story.”

“That– that’s it? You’re not gonna tell him about u– about me?”

“You’re in enough of a shitheap as it is, is how I see it.” A beat. Rick takes him in; really takes him in. Feels like an embrace, his stare. Concern uncrinkles the ever-present smile in Rick’s eyes.

“Eddie, you care about this girl?”

Eddie’s mouth attempts to form around an answer, but he’s just blinking into nothing. Does he care about you? Does he care about you? He wants, needs to say no, to pfft you off, but every molecule is screaming otherwise. And Rick can sense it, operating on the extraterrestrial level that he does.

“Then I’m real sorry.”

“For what?”

As if on cue, car wheels on gravel shuck Rick’s attention away from him. His eyeballs jitter in his head, heading for the door– Eddie close behind him. “Sorry for what, Rick–?!”

“Little bit for that, little bit for… this.”

Standing in the window of Rick’s living room, these two watch an offensively red muscle car skew into the driveway, making a mockery of Eddie’s beat up van. The driver’s door pops open and the first thing Eddie clocks is a blinding glint off some brand new aviator sunglasses.

The second is that trademark Munson smile.

—

“This is exciting!” Nancy Wheeler says, kind of flatly but with a conviction buried deep under her curled bangs.

On the table sits two piles of playing cards, one steadily growing and one steadily decreasing.

You two had taken to playing gin rummy when staring at paper layouts became a little too much. Technically, she actually had a say in layout and you were just nosy, but it’s a decent excuse to hang out. Though, both you and Nancy had this incredible tendency to hyperfocus on detail so hard that neither of you could pull the other out far enough to look at the big picture, so one day she tossed a deck of cards your way and said, “Deal!”

“I know,” you say, trying to focus on these melds of suits you’re making– that discard pile is looking poor, “Fresh turn for me, y’know? Less fluffy, more Didion.”

Nancy snorts softly, swapping out a card from her hand. “Who does that make Eddie? Charlie? Or Linda Kasabian?”

A smile dances across your lips and you shrug, reaching for a cigarette before you go for another card. Usually, smoking in the newsroom was prohibited, as it was prohibited on most of Hawkins High grounds, but whenever that deck came out, you felt it was appropriate for at least one of you to be smoking. Gave a kind of Torchy Blane feel to the whole scenario which fit you and Wheeler pret-ty keenly, if you did say so yourself.

“That’s not what I was talking about, though,” Nancy says, poking Fred Benson’s empty mug toward you to use as an ashtray.

Your eyes narrow; this could be a play to distract you from a winning hand.

“It’s not?”

“No…” she puffs out another soft scoff, meeting your eyes over her fan of cards, “I mean the college guy.”

“Why is it exciting?” and you do want to know why Nancy thinks so. She’s a mile wiser beyond her years, even precocious enough to keep in step with you most of the time. You’d like her take.

“Well, it’s what you wanted, right?” she tells you, watching you puff your cigarette and dig into the stock pile. “Somebody older, decidedly not a grabby high school boy– but someone with more experience, both with girls and with being outside of Hawkins. And the fact he goes to Vassar means–”

“He probably eats kitty like a maniac.”

Nancy lets out this full-bodied Merlot of a laugh, only a little color dashing over her cheeks. She’s gotten used to you being provocative on purpose because it gets a laugh out of her. So far grown out of the prude shoes you were sure she was still sporting. You’re proud of her.

“Not exactly what I was getting at but– more sensitive to the female perspective, sure.” But then she registers what you forgot you’d even dropped. “Hold on, probably? You mean you haven’t–...”

You shrug. It’s a little withdrawn on your part.

“Oh,” Nancy says, and seems to be leaning a degree or two towards unsurprised. That ruffles your feathers a little bit. Again, with the frigid thing. You couldn’t shake it.

“No,” you emphasize, shucking your pitiful melds back again. “It's not as if we haven't–done things. I've copped a handful. Time is of the essence, and I take, y'know, a little more time to get there.”

“So no return on investment...?”

"Not... yet."

Nancy almost tosses her cards at you, the way she jabs them through the air. “You? You, the one who’s been preaching Betty Friedman to me, you haven't been getting–”

“Yes, me! Did you not hear me about time and the essence?”

“I know, it’s just– a little surprising.”

There have been exactly three instances of almost you tying your panties to the rearview mirror of college boy’s Ford Cortina, so to speak, and you’ve come out of each one with this desperate echo of oh well! Maybe next time! careening around your skull. Like you’re trying to convince yourself that by virtue of him not being in your grade, this has been a worthwhile way to spend your time. And listen, no misunderstandings here, it has! At least, part of it. It usually starts like this– the two of you grab some shitty diner coffee or some shitty diner food and then he takes you around in his car for a turn or two, admiring that famous Hawkins scenery (see: shuttered businesses and if you’re really lucky, that one mangy fox that feasts on the overflowing trash can near the Big Buy). You talk (you mostly talk) books and movies and say something that should be a hook of conversation but usually ends up with him screwing his face up in amusement and saying something along the lines of, “God, you’re so beyond this place.”

Which, duh. You’ve been saying this. This is the raft upon which your whole identity floats.

The exchange dies in the air and he puts his hand on your leg and that is just… wonderful. He’s a solid B on the kissing GPA, and he’s cute and sort of funny, even if he doesn’t rally back jokes the way you’d… sort of gotten used to. Sometimes he makes a halfway-interesting observation about like, Philip Roth or somebody. But when it comes down to the minute of it, it still feels like going through the motions. Fumble bra strap, catch nail on his zipper, crank back passenger seat to climb in the back. Hey presto, you’ve distractedly jerked off a boy once again.

You are not entirely sold on the fit of his hands on your body, even if he doesn’t look at you like he’s just solved a Rubik’s cube.

In fact, he kind of looks at you like you’re precious. Virginal precious. Innocent precious. Which you’re not totally sold on either.

Nothing about him that makes you fantasize about what his mouth might feel like on you. What your fingers might feel like wound around his curls. His hair doesn’t even curl. There’s just nothing about him that calls for your full attention.

“Think there might be a reason for that?” Nancy, your annoyingly perceptive Nancy, presses. Goddamn intrepid girl reporter. She hasn’t stopped staring at you with that smug little look. You haven’t answered the question. “And it might be… living across the way from you?”

“Tch. What?” you snip. “I’m… having fun. What?”

“Nothing,” she smiles. “Just… gin.”

She lays out her dazzling melds, complete with a measly goddamned three in deadwood cards and you toss your own bullshit hand to the side. A dumb amount of spades that add up to nothing scatter across the desk. An accusatory finger jams in her direction.

“You are a fucking card shark.”

“Nope!” Nancy says, popping her ‘p’, “I just know a really great set when I see one.”

Reaching into Fred’s mug, you crush your cigarette with a little too much force. Now, how would Nancy have a read on that? you think, oblivious to your own obviousness. (Like a neon sign. Like a circus tent.)

You hadn’t even reminded her of the catastrophic events of her thirteenth birthday which led to a whole lot of this awkwardness, which, now that you thought about it, actually implicated her in the crime of you kissing Eddie Munson ‘til you were breathless in Granny Ecker’s closet.

If you hadn’t been born and had a birthday, I wouldn’t be in a spiral over some boy with a curl pattern like a fucking backwoods libertine.

“You’re not clever,” you tell her, but she’s looking at you all cleverly, “Like. You’re clever, but I need you to know that you’re not clever.”

With flicking fingernails, Nancy picks up your discarded cards and folds them neatly back in the deck.

“I’m just saying,” and the tone she takes is a little gentler now, “don’t… let yourself miss out on something just because, I don’t know, the thing you’re currently having fun with is what you think you want. What you feel you want and what you think you want are two very different–”

“This isn’t entirely about me, is it?” you realize, defenses peeling down a little bit. The Nancy and Steve of it all had been looming since your (admittedly triumphant!) visit to the war memorial that was the boy’s bathroom. Still no sign of that place getting fixed, by the by. And ever still, Nancy hadn’t told Steve about their little mission. Many a reason for that, you were led to believe. Not a lot she wanted to dissect, though.

Nancy’s face scrunches up and she stops packing the cards.

“No. But let’s pretend like it is.”

A groan escapes you as you sink back into your chair, a twinge of pain running along your shoulders.

“Nance. This is all so much more complicated than you realize.”

“Try me.”

You toss a hand through your hair, slapping your palm down on the desk.

“Fine. But if I tell you this–”

A hand rises out between the two of you– yours, pinkie extended.

“Not a word,” you press.

Nancy clamps her finger around yours in a way that enforces how super-serious she is about this. The reason your usual reserve doesn’t hold up under that x-ray stare of hers is because you can tell she actually gives a shit. She’s not looking for gossip. She cares. Which is still an entirely alien feeling to you.

So the whole thing spills out. Steve’s party, the record store, getting locked up in Eddie’s trailer and getting locked up in feelings, Roane County Quarry’s incredible acoustics, the friendship that made you fold all the neatly arranged origami parts of yourself out toward him only to realize you had no idea how to fold them back. The kiss. The subsequent awkwardness of said kiss. The college guy. The relative radio silence. The fact that…

“...I don’t feel like myself when he’s not around,” you say, lighting a fourth cigarette off your third. “Isn’t that silly? I spent all this time painting this like, fabulous eggshell of myself then this wild-eyed, smart-mouthed, catastrophic ass smashes it clean open and now–”

“All the college boys couldn’t put you together again,” Nancy nods. “You’re a very beautiful Humpty Dumpty.”

“... does Humpty Dumpty die in the end?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be teaching it to kids.”

“No. They should know. The fall comes for us all.”

There’s a suspended silence. You get this feeling like you’ve emptied your purse on the table and you still can’t find that thing you’re looking for, despite sifting through everything.

“How does that even happen?” you question, biting at the skin on your little finger. Not Humpty Dumpty, the Eddie thing. It comes out idle, but you pray that Nancy, with her feelings scalpel and surgical precision, doesn't decide to answer it.

Instead, she says, “You need a photographer for that piece.”

Thatta girl. Your dimmer switch turns up. “Fred hasn’t even okayed it yet.”

“I’ll deal with William Randolph Hearst, okay?” Nancy says derisively and tosses her eyes to heaven. She pushes her chair back. “Ask Jonathan Byers.”

“He hasn’t taken photos for us in a while,” you remark, eyes searching Nancy. She’s readying herself to leave, so totally dodging this line of questioning before you can even cast it. Clever.

“No, he has not,” she sighs, winding her scarf around her neck, “But he’d be good for this. He knows how to capture action. And his kid brother plays DnD with mine, so this’d be, like… nice for them.”

And this is just as much me making amends with Jonathan Byers as it is you, backwards as it may seem, you nearly hear her say. Or you’re making that up.

Shame Nancy is so dead set on becoming the next Nellie Bly. Under the right circumstances, she’d make a hell of a normal person.

Good thing you prefer freaks.

—

Jonathan Byers is a notoriously hard boy to get a hold of, it turns out. Nancy passed along his number (which, you actually already had but you didn’t bring that little detail up) and when you finally punched it in on the yellowing phone nailed to the wall of your trailer, it rang and rang and rang.

Which, after the fourth time, was just rude. Do the Byers have a thing about not answering the phone, or something?

“Jonathan!” you holler across the parking lot, emerging from the passenger side of Nancy’s car this time.

College guy was decidedly busy and despite the hanging tension, you’d toyed with the idea of asking Eddie for a ride. Alas, the boy in the Dio patched battle vest was nowhere to be seen. His van hadn’t been there since the weekend and he had been MIA from school the last couple of days, actually, which was itching at you.

It also made you miss when you had a goddamn set of wheels at your disposal.

Anyway, Jonathan looks at you with flaring eyes, kind of like you’ve just stuck a shotgun to his snout and there’s no hope of him making a getaway. “Um…”

Now, keep in mind that these are the first words you’ve spoken to him in a measurable high school forever, so his surprise is entirely justified. It’s just not within the beam of your patience right now.

“Hi. Can we chat?” you say, falling in step with him as you head towards the front door. You don’t bother asking for permission, and forgiveness won’t be necessary. “I was hoping you could help me out with a piece for the Streak.”

Blink, blink. Jonathan’s grasping for words– seems to be a lot of that going around lately.

You strike your hand through the air. “Let me put it to you like this– you are going to help me out with a piece for the Streak.”

“Why?” he asks, and it’s prickly.

“Becauuuse,” you draw out, “I need a photographer. And god knows whenever Nicole attempted to work a lens, those snapshots were so out-of-focus they looked like an optical illusion.”

“And, you’re not talking to Nicole right now,” Jonathan nails you, but not totally. In your mind, you revisit flashes of Nicole recounting, in gloriously erroneous detail, those photos Jonathan had taken of Nancy. You had pretended to be scandalized and rolled your eyes, thinking what’s a little peep show among losers.

“Even if I was,” you say, dogging Jonathan all the way to his locker, “I still wouldn’t ask her. This is important to me.”

That avoidant Byers reserve stands strong, with Jonathan grabbing books in hurried succession. He is trying to get away from you, but that’s not happening without an emphatic yes!

“I don’t even really–”

“Take pictures anymore?” you pfft, pointing to his messenger bag, “Twenty bucks says your camera is in there and the film’s half shot.”

“I don’t have twenty bucks.”

“Me neither,” you shrug, “Spent it on that new Echo & the Bunnymen.”

Jonathan hesitates a bit, fingers strumming against his biology textbook. A thread of something long forgotten by the listening booths of Main Street Vinyl tugs between you both, but it’s not weighed down by the prospect of will we kiss about it. He kind of smiles.

“What did you think? I haven’t gotten down to hear it yet.”

You thought it made you want a flowing dress and a place to prance. Like if the more whimsical end of Fleetwood Mac didn’t exhaust you. Those last four tracks snapped your heartstrings like suspenders, with comical aplomb.

“Grandiose! That ‘Killing Moon’ song? It’s got Jonathan Byers written all over it,” you chirp, and mean it. “I’ll make you a copy if you put that camera to work for me.”

He shrugs, but you can see you’re wearing him down. “I’m not much for shooting pep rallies.”

“Liar. Wheeler says you’re top banana in the action shots department,” you counter, “But how about players? I think I want some portraits, too. Non-corny ones.”

“What team?” Jonathan screws up his nose. The distaste for jockery runs deep, and rightfully so.

But you shake your head, face curving into an expression of near excitement.

“No team. Better, and worse, depending on what side of the cafeteria you’re sitting,” your hands splay out, and for god’s sake, you feel like Munson himself, “Hellfire Club.”

Jonathan looks like his record’s skipped. Eyeballs sort of jiggle in his skull and he mouths, oh, like the association of you between Hellfire should mean something. Suspiciously like Nancy, and just suspicious period. Your eyebrows start to inch towards one another.

“What’s that look? Does that mean you’ll do it?”

“Um,” he dillies, then dallies, “Sure. Yeah. You know, my kid brother loves DnD.”

Ah, yes. The other Byers boy, the one who’d gone missing all that time ago. You remembered. Actually, you remembered not being able to figure out how you should feel about it– how you should act, other than falling in line with the majority of people who were giving Jonathan shit at the time. You regret that now, with a chill that runs right down to your toes.

“Could be cool for him to see, no?” you try, corner of your mouth lifting, “A little niche in the midst the high school horrors. To look forward to, y’know.”

The look on Jonathan’s face is more than a little bit screaming, that’s rich, coming from you, you were the high school horror. But he shakes it off, because he’s nicer than you are, even though he doesn’t need to be.

“Yeah… whatever you say, Lacy. When do you need me?”

You tell him Friday and he agrees, much to your satisfaction. You’re just about to punch him on the shoulder like teamwork, buddy! before he saves you such a wildly out-of-character display by dodging toward his homeroom.

You sail toward your locker like the bastard that’s risen alongside the cream, only to be greeted by something… strange. Scratches, all around the maudlin gray paintwork of your combination lock. Like it’d been tampered with, or something. A blaze of paranoia burns at the base of your skull, and you instinctively try to recount where your journal is… in your bag. Phew. Fine. This could be… anything.

Fingers reach forward to twist your lock, and with the slightest touch, the door is forced open by a push from the other side. A flash of bright red, then SPLAT. Yellow, SPLAT, blue, SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT! You shriek a real ear-piercing shriek as at least a dozen water balloons spill out of your locker, hitting the floor with an obscene smack. Water dashes everywhere, and you’re barely able to move out of the splash zone in time.

“What the fuck!’

Within seconds, there’s a hubbub and a crowd’s gathering, trading sickening snickers with one another as you peer into the dark of your locker. You gingerly step through the puddle, suede boots irreparably spattered, and yank the door the whole way open. There, sat atop your schoolbooks and a stray water balloon that hadn’t made the fall, is a horribly familiar set of test tubes.

In one of them sits a squirt of blue liquid and that offensive strip of plastic. And scrawled across it in clumsy black marker?

IT’S A FREAK!

Realization hits you like Carol did, making your head swim among all the murmurs of oh my god… and gross! and told you–trailer trash and unconcealed cackles. A voice sparks up like a sizzling ember in a swathe of darkness.

“Where’s your baby daddy at, Lacy? Get tossed in the slammer with your old man?”

The languid tones of none other than Billy All-Balls-No-Brains Hargrove drift by you, sailing right past the back of your head as you stare a hole through the innards of your locker. Then, your stupid hippocampus gears up– Robin, mentioning ‘your whole thing’ while Genovese baby-barfed her guts up, Ronnie urging her to shut the fuck up, even Jonathan Byers was privy to this hot little piece of gossip.

This theory that you were up the spout with Munson Junior Junior.

How many people had seen you, stupid little you, coming out of that drugstore hiking that Advance box over your head like the championship cup? Seen you hopping into Eddie’s van– and out of it, and back in again on what now seemed like countless occasions?

Nobody could have suspected it was Nancy’s test, because nobody saw her. They saw you. That was the whole idea. You just didn’t consider the blowback.

“What’s going on out here?” the softly-coated concern of Ms Kelley rings out in the hallway, doing absolutely nothing to disperse the peanut gallery that’s set up around your locker.

“Lacy?” her voice points to you. Even the goddamn guidance counselor uses your beloved nickname.

You don’t react. You don’t even know what you’re doing until you come to a couple of paces down the hallway, feeling the thin, straining rubber in the palm of your hand. Your footsteps make heavy, wet, slapping noises against the linoleum as you follow the half-slouched shouldered swagger of Billy Hargrove down the hall.

Down, and down, and down towards the boy’s locker room and he doesn’t even register it, and you don’t even register that Ms Kelley is still calling your name–your full name, now–until she’s two dozen paces behind you, losing you in the throng of students making their way to class and you shove past half-dressed seniors in the locker room who guffaw at you in a way that feels like a knife in your gut and you yell, voice shaking–

“Hey Billy!”

And launch the water balloon, making square contact with his smug face.

“Cute fucking prank!”

His reaction, predictably, is way too slowww moooootion for your fucking liking, so you don’t even give him a shot to fully wipe his face off and mumble, “What the fuuuuck is yourrrr probbbblemmm, ssssllluuuutttt…”

You just go for him with the ferocity of a jumping jackal. Hands ball in his stupid sleeveless flannel (it’s winter in Indiana, you West Coast jackass!) and you shove him against the lockers with– well, with the strength only an ex-cheerleader brimming with suffocated rage would have.

Metal clatters and one empty unit even careens over like a big tin domino and you say, “Come up with that idea all by yourself, you fucking nimrod?”

Billy just smirks at you in half-speed, mullet sopping, as if this is a come-on. “I had a little help.”

It occurs to you that right here, right now, you could sell Nancy Wheeler down the river. You could be the you you once were, and you could say, well, primo observation skills, that pregnancy test wasn’t even for me!

But you don’t, because a pinky promise is a fucking pinky promise.

You let go of Billy’s shirt. Step off. “You’re pathetic,” you spit, but it feels more pathetic coming from you. All that molten blood in your veins makes you want to eviscerate him and whoever else was involved in orchestrating this stupid, stupid, stupid prank. But you come up lacking. Fuck!

Tears prickle at the corners of your eyes and you start to rush out of the locker room– but you’ve given Billy a reason now, and he’s gonna follow you.

“Shit, are you crying? Those hormones must have you really messed up, huh?” he faux-croons, the thunk-thunk of his poseur motorcycle boots following you to the back entrance, by the sports equipment. Your eyes are streaming freely now, lashes frantically blinking a path to vision.

But Billy isn’t letting up. And like the Pied Piper of slimeballs, he’s drawing followers– not least of which include Tommy Hagan.

“What about that college dropout you’re banging, Lacy?” his nasally tone slices through Billy’s tarry taunting. “He know you’re knocked up yet?”

“Jesus Christ, Doevski! I’m impressed,” Billy laughs, “Just how many loads are you taking?”

An abandoned baseball bat lies on the ground, having rolled out of the sports closet; instinct behind the wheel of your personal van, you stoop to pick it up and shove through the doors. You can nearly feel the breath of Hargrove and Hagan and all of these horrific, horrific boys with nothing better to do than to torture you hot on the back of your neck.

“Not yours, that’s for fucking sure,” you manage, your voice thick. The bat, at least, feels solid in your hand.

“It’s fun not being frigid, ain’t it, Lacy?” Billy goes on, and you squint against the sunlight as you round the building. “Tell me this, Munson teach you how to suck cock yet? ‘cause if not, I got a little time on my hands.”

Forging ahead, you cross the tarmac of the parking lot. The soft frost hasn’t even totally thawed out yet, sparkling atop the paintwork of Billy’s blue Camaro.

“That a fact, Billy?” you say, tears drying in quick streaks in that brisk morning air, leaving rivets in your made-up face.

You use your momentum to launch one foot onto the hood of Billy’s car, then the other. You nearly slip against the icy exterior, but steady yourself fast. Bat dangling at your side. Stomp. Stomp. You stand on the roof, and turn to face this congregation of assholes. You do not let sense set in, despite it threatening to inch through the white hot flame of your rage.

“What the fuck are you doing,” Billy outright cackles and Hagan and company guffaw along with him.

“Billy,” you sigh, a little breathless from the speed at which you’d booked it from the locker room to the parking lot, and the sheer vigor of your shock, awe and rancor, and everything else, “What the hell am I supposed to do with your limp dick in my mouth? Chew on the fuckin’ thing?”

Billy repeats himself, a touch darker now. “What the fuck are you doing.”

“I’m serious!” you say, a little shrill, a little stomp to punctuate that last word, “One thing you can say for Eddie Munson, is at least the motherfucker can get hard!”

Motorcycle boots advance towards you, and you point the bat at him like a broadsword.

“Do not. Come any closer. Or I’m gonna start doing some serious damage to this ugly piece of overcompensation.”

“She’s bluffing,” Hagan crows, and you turn your flaming glare on him. You wish you had a mirror– you wonder if crazy becomes you. Billy takes a pointed step forward and you raise the bat above your, head bracing for action– that’s enough movement for him.

“Gimme that bat, you stupid fucking cunt–!” But Billy’s cut short by a body barrelling into the side of him, knocking him askew. A jangle of denim and leather. The bat slips a little in your grasp.

“Get the fuck off of me Munson–”

“No way to talk to a lady, Billy!” Eddie gasps, tossing Billy back and letting his limbs hang. “You kiss Karen Wheeler with that mouth?”

Billy rounds on him like a triggered animal, spittle flying.

“Some fucking lady!” he snarls, “Got downgraded to that trailer park and now her snooty ass is spreading it for half of Hawkins! Desperate! Stringin’ you along like the dumb piece of shortbus shit you a–”

Activated, you throw that bat to the fucking wayside and scramble off the fucking car– nobody talks to him like that!

But you’re not fast enough, nobody’s fast enough, nobody can compete with how huge and booming and definite Eddie’s voice sounds when he says, smile glimmering, sun breaking through the bleak midwinter…

“You know what I like about you, Hargrove?”

THKUNCK. Bone to bone, fist meet fucking flesh–

“Nothin’.”

A scuffle goes up, and Eddie can’t even feel the hits of Hargrove’s hands connecting with his face, chest, ribs, wherever– all he can feel are your arms locking in vice around his waist, putting yourself in the eye of the storm in order to yank him back.

—

You got an elbow to the crown of the head, which isn’t too bad, even if you feel like a cartoonish lump should be rising there. But look at these other guys.

Billy with a black eye that’s bulging up rapidly, Eddie with a split lip and more than a couple of scratches on his knuckles. In that fray, he hadn’t exactly considered the implications of punching a guy with all his goddamned rings on. The implications being that shit hurt like hell. There is this radiating pain in his hand, not letting him unfurl his fingers completely.

There’s also this radiating feeling of dread cloaking his entire upper half as you sit three-to-the-wall outside Higgins’ office. You had, in Eddie’s estimation, incredibly bad timing.

See, considering the events of his past week, he was slowly making peace with the fact that he should probably be avoiding you entirely, even if that meant he died a little inside. He should have been doing that from the jump– but you, unbuttoned and reckless now apparently, kept requiring interventions so you didn’t get killed, or worse.

And Eddie couldn’t help himself when it came to you. Especially not when you were standing on top of Billy Hargrove’s sick Camaro, swinging a baseball bat and getting called some shit that no one should ever be calling you.

You’re out of control. Totally unsheathed. End of your rope. Unlaced.

And he’d do just about anything to keep you safe.

Even fuck up his guitar-playing hand. Which is also his…

“I can’t believe you fucking suckerpunched me,” Hargrove mumbles from your left. “With those ugly fucking rings on.”

Eddie can’t help himself, the last shred of propriety knocked out round about the time a knee to the ribs had winded him. “Aw. Billy. Don’t be so hard on yourself–”

“Eddie…,” you start, tone warning in a way that makes him want to pinch you, kind of. He leans towards Hargrove, meaning he’s leaning over you. Hair brushing across your shoulder. You notice that it smells distinctively skunkier than usual. Camping out at Lipton Landing?

“--honestly! You’re no sucker!” he implores, eyes shining in jest, “You totally had that coming!”

You hear Billy seething from his end, Eddie snickering from his and launch a well-timed arm in front of both of them before they can snap at it again.

“Cut it out, assholes! This is becoming increasingly more pigheaded.”

“And you’re the voice of perfect reason now, huh?” Eddie sneers, not giving you much breathing room. “Where’s the bat at, Babe Ruth?”

“In the parking lot, waiting to finish you off,” you grit back, nearly nose-to-nose with him, because you don’t know how to digest the guilt of his aching fingers.

“What are you mad at me for?” Eddie hisses, a smirk threatening to break his scowl, because he doesn’t know how not to provoke you.

“Knocking her up, probably,” Billy mumbles from the side.

“Shut up, Hargrove!” you both snap, eyes never leaving one another.

Higgins’ door creaks open and a quietly livid Ms Kelley says, “Lacy.” She jerks her head, motioning for you to up and at ‘em. You do, but not without one last look at Eddie, cradling his hand. Round, bottomless irises meet yours for a moment, then dart away with an impact that thickens your throat.

His poor hand, you find yourself thinking.

“He needs an ice pack…” you find yourself mumbling, Kelley shuffling you into Higgins’ office. The principal sits behind his beat-up desk, fingers steepled. You absently wonder if he’s been campaigning for a new, shinier, possibly more oaken desk because this doesn’t paint the picture of threatening figurehead that he so clearly wants you to tremble under.

You accidentally kick the thing, crossing your legs as you sit. “Sorry.”

“You should be,” Higgins declares. Here we fucking go.

“Permission to state my case?” you attempt. This hadn’t been your first time in the principal’s office; minor classroom infractions, a saccharine we’ll do everything to help that we can after your dad’s arraignment, but this time was certainly the worst.

“Denied,” he shoots you down.

“Permission to submit a plea of temporary insanity, then,” you try, patting at the sore spot on the crown of your head. “You know this doesn’t bode with my track record. You think I climbed on top of Billy Hargrove’s car completely compos mentis? Please.”

A tense silence from Higgins’ and Kelley’s end.

“You saw what Hargrove did, didn’t you? That disgusting prank?”

Again, nada.

“I’m a honor student, for Chrissake!” you exclaim, and Kelley plucks herself from the windowsill behind Higgins’ desk.

“Were an honor student, Ms Doevski,” she corrects. “Your grades have been slipping since– the events of the last couple of months. You’ve dropped cheerleading, you’ve made really puzzling false claims about peer tutoring, you…”

“Yes! Yes, the events of the last couple of months, if by which you mean familial imprisonment, then yes, I’ve been a little distracted!”

Higgins kicks back in his seat just as you hitch forward in yours, too angry to be pleading but too desperate to defy. His turn to mutter here we fucking go.

“I can turn this around,” redirected to Ms Kelley and her ever-sympathetic expression, “I can turn this around.”

“College applications deadlines are within touching distance, Lacy.” She of little faith.

“I know that!” As if your hands aren’t itching every time college guy mentions Ithaca or… wherever the fuck it is he goes. As if that isn’t a crack in the assuredness that you were going to take flight out of this town in a spectacular fashion.

“Ladies– can we dispense with the hysteria and deal with the here and now?” Higgins insists and you and Kelley, despite your opposition, share a look.

World class, this guy. Top of his field, asshole-wise.

“Two week suspension should do it,” he says, jotting something down.

You open your mouth in protest and Kelley quells you– you’re in no position to start bargaining down.

“Technically, she didn’t do anything,” and for good measure, but pressed, “Sir.”

“She climbed on top of that boy’s car with a baseball bat!” Higgins barks; now who’s hysteric?! “She had intent to do harm!”

“It was justified.” You can’t help yourself.

Kelley stares him down, and that woman’s charm is something that should be studied in a fucking lab, because he relents right away.

“Two weeks of Saturday detention, then. Christ. Am I going soft?”

You shake your head, all the knots in your body releasing just a little bit. You try to dig out what’s left of your once-famously refined charm, while simultaneously dashing towards the door before he can change his mind.

“Au contraire. You’re a paragon of masculinity, sir. Regan could take a hint. Door open or closed?”

Higgins grimaces. “Send in Hargrove. Tell Munson he’s suspended. I don’t have time for both of those pricks today.”

Eddie’s voice travels through the crack in the door. “I heard that, sir.” A beat. “I miss you, sir.”

You bite back a deeply reluctant laugh and jerk your head toward Billy. You’re up, champ.

Then, it’s the two of you. You and Eddie, Eddie and you. Alone, save for the ever watchful jam jar eyes of Janice the secretary. Eddie is still nestling one hand in the other like it’s a baby bird with a broken wing. Shit, you really hope it isn’t broken.

“You’re suspended. They told me to tell you.” It’s a statement made to turkey-stuff the silence more than anything.

The way Eddie lolls his head back makes you want to reach out and push it in the opposite direction. You don’t know why.

“You’re a regular town crier, ain’t ya.”

“Hear ye, hear ye.”

A leaden pause. Your hearts might have thumped both in time just now.

“Wanna get out of here?” he asks.

“No leaving school grounds,” Janice unhelpfully squawks.

Eddie gets up, drawing himself to his full height. Your eyelids flutter. There’s a little purple around that cut on his lip, which you bet is starting to throb something awful. You feel dwarfed beside him, and he uses his good hand to turn you by the shoulder and shuffle you past the nosy secretary’s post.

“I meant the sick bay, Janice,” Eddie pelts, giving each vowel sound a hard flick. “I’m wounded. And she’s apparently pregnant. Or didn’t you hear?”

—

The nurse’s office is tiny and cramped, smelling of bleach with a glaring fluorescent overhead. Eddie has a hard time figuring out why anyone would come here to feel better. Especially given that Nurse Lydia is barely ever present.

Eddie carpes the opportunity to slam himself down on her rolling saddle chair, gliding into your path as you try and snoop around for first aid materials.

“I don’t think you should be driving that thing,” you remark, “You could be concussed. You’re acting concussed.”

“It’s keeping me awake!”

Eddie watches you, digging through drawers and pulling out tongue depressors, your teeth making an indent into your bottom lip. Your eyes are doing that darty thing, quietly frantic in place of an apology. You don’t know how to say sorry you got wailed on by Hargrove for me. Instead, you’re acting like he’s bleeding out.

“Lace, just wait for the professional.”

The clip of your nickname makes you toss your stare over your shoulder, hardness framing your eyes like mascaraed lashes. Eddie stops rolling around at once.

“I am the goddamn professional, as far as you’re concerned.” Your little chin jerks towards the exam table that’s beat into the corner of the room. “Get on the bed.”

Whack-a-mole. Woodpecker. Other euphemisms for his cock developing a pulse. Eddie has to physically restrain his jaw from dropping.

“Yes, Nurse Ratched.”

Scoffing out a little fuck you!, you go about scrambling together supplies and Eddie obediently launches himself onto the bed, the ancient thing creaking beneath him. When you finally approach him, you seem to be holding a lot of alcohol pads.

The look before you admit to a shortcoming is one he wants framed. You always flick your eyes around like a guilty cartoon character, like Betty Boop on her way to gaining a doctorate in the pretentiousness of the English language, and pout. Lean your neck in, like you’re swearing him to secrecy.

“I actually don’t know anything about first aid. Beyond the rudimentaries.”

Eddie chuckles. “You were a cheerleader. You were getting thrown in the air a whole bunch, if I recall. Feels like you should know how to like, resuscitate.”

“Rudimentaries, I said!” and you grab his injured hand a little roughly, alcohol pad torn out and ready, “Like, I obviously know alcohol disinfects a wound, ice for a bruise… I don’t know how to, like, reset a bone. Besides…”

You inch closer to him now, wiping at his torn and tender knuckles a little too carefully. They’re just stupid cuts, Eddie thinks, his breath beginning to shallow.

“...that Cat People remake was premiering at the Hawk the day we had first aid training. Like I was going to miss that.”

He can feel heat radiating off your body, a core change for cold little you. Feel the fabric of your skirt brush the rip in his jeans. A little choked, he mumbles, “Cat People is a remake?”

“Based on the 1942 original,” you nod, flicking the tiny used pad in the nearby trash can. “I like it. But I like that David Bowie song more.”

“That song sucks.”

“You’re injured and wrong. What a shame.” Your fingers close around Eddie’s wrist and slowly, slowly press his forearm to his chest. “Keep that elevated.”

“It’s not broken,” and he’s staring at the quiet tremble in your bottom lip.

“Could be sprained,” head cast down again, tearing open another pad, and he can smell your hair, “Does it hurt?”

Eddie doesn’t answer right away, because he’s waiting for you to look back up. Because he thinks he’s going to carpe something else.

You fall for it, and your eyes sucker him in. He feels weak in the joints. You repeat yourself. “Does it hurt, Eddie?”

He just nods, boyishly. Nearly passes out when your fingertips tilt his face towards the light. Skin buzzing underneath them, you peering at his mouth like you know what you’re doing. The slit in his lip feels raw and strained.

“This’ll hurt, too,” you murmur, and he feels your breath against his jaw. A sharp prick from the alcohol against his cut doesn’t make him wince– worse. As you swipe the cotton against his bottom lip, he whimpers. Unh.

Oxygen stops short in your throat, hearing that. That noise. It sends a wave of motion through your lower body. You’re leaning awfully close to him, closer than you need to be. In fact, his knees are settled either side of your hips. How did that happen. When did that happen. How did you allow this.

How are you allowing your fingertip to trace against his lip, alcohol evaporating without a hope or a prayer. How are you allowing yourself to look at him through the fan of your lashes, his injured hand still obediently propped against his chest. His good hand pressing into your lower back.

You taste the vagueness of the disinfectant on his lips as he presses them into yours.

Jerking back, you’re not far enough away from him to create a distance that matters. All you see are Eddie’s eyes, flickering open, apologetic in themselves. About to tell you he’s sorry.

No.

Hands fly, one woven in the curls at the base of his skull as you kiss up into him, tongue an impolite peak. This is not the closet; this is arguably far more dangerous, with the nurse’s door still open a courteous gap. This is the harsh light of day. This is Eddie’s hand moving your skirt further up the curve of your ass.

He’s grabbing onto you as best a one-armed man can, and your hand travels in turn. A jagged, fevered path drawing up his thigh until, under your palm, is the hard outline of him. The pressure of your hand over the denim-bound curvature of his cock makes him groan sharply, the sound pressed against your cheek.

Face angles back for a look at him. Because this is bad, mindless, reckless, stupid. And he’s always worth a look.

You spot a tiny speck of blood on the pink of his lip from where his cut had split.

And your curious tongue flicks at it.

Eddie’s eyes flare. You, unable to unglue your stare from his, suck his lightly bleeding lip between yours. Fragile. Crushable.

He did this for you.

No one’s ever cared, or known you enough, to do something like that for you.

Desire moves you like a shockwave and your hand leaves his crotch to help you clamber onto the exam table, clamber into Eddie’s lap.

Downright idiotic.

You cast a glance to the door, Eddie’s fraught breath puffing against your neck.

Thought you were a smart girl.

You look right into his face, the poster boy for sheer distraction, pre-occupation, skin-searing annoyance, nervous charm, surprising wit, magnetism, oh my… and feel his fingers edging far past the hem of your skirt, past the binding top of the thigh-highs you’re wearing because it’s fucking laundry day and stopping at the gusset of your panties.

He can feel how wet you are.

Lips a breath away from each other, one set bleeding, one set housing a gasp. Eddie nudges his forehead against yours, the both of you blind to consequence.

“Just friends, right?” His breath is jagged and unconvinced, and your hips kick toward his hand.

You do not answer.

Unbruised fingers push the fabric covering your radiating heat aside and you have to tighten your grip around the back of his neck so as not to tumble over. Eddie is not deft, because this isn’t the moment to be deft. He plunges two fingers into the plush of your pussy and looks to you with pleading eyes. Eyes that say, is this good, eyes that say, don’t make a sound.

You nod in the affirmative to both and he drags his digits out slowly. Rhythm picks up and you’re clenching around Eddie’s hand in a matter of minutes, lower muscles seizing and het-up moans being gratefully swallowed by him. Pad of his thumb moves to create rough, clumsy friction against your clit that elicits a sharp, high, wanton ah! from you, grinding against him in an unquenchable search for more.

“Does he do this? Does anyone do this for you, Lacy?”

Eddie’s eyes keep searching you for approval and you’ve lost the ability to appease or deny him– all you know is the blind, nonsensical want that’s pouring out of you is being lapped up. Lapped up. His tongue, you want his tongue everywhere, but it’s working at your earlobe, your neck, sucking, whispering, “Just friends? Lacy?”

And when you cum, it’s fast and hard and suffocating, an achievement you’re close to angry at him for– because no one has ever been able to break you apart that fast.

Or at all.

He can never know. He’d be so insufferable about it… some bare fragment of a thought passes through your brain, synapses busy firing elsewhere.

You’re rocking against him through the crest, pressing your forehead to his with such a force that you’re frightened it’ll splinter, you’re murmuring, “Eddie… Eddie, d–hmn, fuck…”

And you can tell by the way he’s attempting to press his body against you that he wishes he hadn’t bust that stupid fucking hand of his, so he could hold you properly– and you’re right. You’re right, you’re always fucking right, but you told him to keep it elevated and he’s going to do what you say.

He’s got no choice when it comes to you.

He needs you safe. Needs you happy. No matter what.

Which is why he’s got to pull this bullshit move.

Eddie is patient and watches you regain a little consciousness, faster than he’s sure you’d like. He extracts his hand and, sticky with you still, wipes it on the thigh of his jeans. Heart thundering in his ears, he tugs you into one more breathless kiss and wonders if you can still taste the rust sharpness of his cut in between your lips. He’s strangled himself against cumming up till this point, and this doesn’t help matters. An imperceptible spot of pre-fun lies in his lap but the thing is, the really fucked thing is–

Eddie gently shoves you away, mind silently babbling for the right thing to say. I’m sorry is something you’d see right through, get off is too harsh, oopsie is too fucking whimsical–

But you, ever-perceptive you, you realize your place. Knock yourself back into reality so fiercely that he’s afraid it’ll bruise you, lovely, awe-inspiring you that just softened into his hands like that. You clumsily clamber off the exam table in a hot flash of rejection, which– no, god, no, he doesn’t mean that…

“I–”

“No, I know,” you grit, prickly all over. Thumbing at the edge of your blurred lipstick. “I know. I certainly know.”

Eddie dares to look at you and you dare to look back at him. His lips looking worse off from you, but at the very least kissed. At the very least kissed, but you could cry with the empty feeling inside you. A cavern of a girl. You nod curtly, like this is the conclusion of a particularly charged run-in of acquaintances, not like you wanted him to swallow you whole moments ago.

Slipping out of the nurse’s office, you run right into the myth that is Nurse Lydia.

She looks tan.

“He’s,” you struggle, “He’s waiting for you.”

—

Cheating out sick from school and taking a shift at The Bookstore following the latest in a series of apparently neverending aftershocks was probably not the smartest call– but hell, you’re fresh out of smart calls.

Ivana smells a rat, and she doesn’t take to rats lightly, so she gives you your space.

The morning ticks on at a pace that feels supernatural; like you’re witnessing outside of your body, like you can’t orient yourself in the right direction. You attempt to arrange and rearrange poets from alcoholic to puritan. You sell someone a copy of The Fountainhead without giving them their free blistering evisceration of Ayn Rand.

You’re at a loss. A shameful, dangling loss that almost makes you feel pious. Like you should go to confession.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned… I let my one-time best friend, current-cloudy object of my affection get beat up for me then bring me to climax in the nurses’ office.

You retread the same sentence in your over-thumbed copy of Save Me the Waltz like a table corner you keep stubbing your toe on.

We couldn’t go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.

You said it, Alabama. Something’s got to land.

And, because someone down there wants you dead, land it does.

The bell of the store’s door clashes upon opening, and all of the energy draws toward one magnetic point. A shock of silver hair, standing on end catches the lamplight, glowing almost eerily.

You feel a zzzzip of static. The air feels charged.

He doesn’t face you right away. Kind of slinks into the place, edging along the shelves.

“Say, Lacy. Ballpark me somethin’,” his Southern drawl is barely contained within the Midwestern flatlands of his accent, bursting through the baseline like a corpse that hasn’t been buried deep enough. “How long… do you think…” His fingers tap along the worn spines of the display, creeping closer to the counter, “...it would take… to read all these books?”

The lilt of his voice is so familiar that you recognize it instantly. Even the way your name falls out of his mouth. Like a funhouse mirror, a distortion of a voice you’d come to…

Well. Let’s not get into that. Let’s get into this.

A roguish smile with a couple decades of road wear on it and a tacky Hawkins High class ring on his finger. You could’ve sworn Eddie told you he dropped out.

“How many years in the big house with nothin’ better to do?” He finally stops and pivots on his heel. The way he looks you over makes you nauseous and lightheaded, like he took a long, long sip out of you. Jammed a straw in your jugular and sucked.

Lot of blood play happening ‘round these parts.

“Hello, Al.”

“Hello, sweetheart. You filled out.”

author's notes: christ alive. i mean WELCOME BACK! i really missed you guys. happy new year, thank you for keeping me on the level with writing this chapter, it was so much FUCKING harder than i anticipated! was it too much warped angst? are the feelings complicated? does the pope shit in the woods?!!!!! you betcha. anyway, be seated for today's lesson - "less oedipus-y, more ea--..." there is an ending to that joke that i felt was too crass for the moment but if you can guess it you win a prize - the patchwork girl of oz is the seventh book in the wizard of oz series by l. frank baum! obviously. it's actually a laugh riot, you should check it out. scraps, the eponymous patchwork girl, is a full tilt lunatic who's kind of a bit of me. but theoretically, the patchwork girl made out of a thousand different scraps of everything else... bit of lacy innit - the mage in the mink coat is self referential lmao we've gotten to THAT point in the story - gravity's rainbow is a book that guys i dated used to recommend to me constantly which is like infinite jest for people who are ran through - i'm really fucking with college guy at this point, making him drive a ford cortina. because i think it is ugly - the plot of the annotated book that lacy gives eddie, still life with woodpecker by tom robbins, is... interesting eye emoji eye emoji. tom robbins also wrote even cowgirls get the blues which was adapted into a feature film starring, say it with me, robin's mom - the link wray song that soundtracked the lipton landing visit in question - "charlie? or linda kasabian?" go ahead and read the white album by joan didion for me wouldja buddyroo, just like lacy and nancy already have - fun fact, i played a two person game of gin rummy with myself to get into the mindset for this chapter. i suck at it - torchy blane is another one of my pre-code wonders-- glenda farrell plays an intrepid newspaperwoman, and this character actually went on to inspire lois lane from superman - and I KNOW some of you are going to be mad at lacy for fucking college guy, but... shit happens when you're a booksmart lovedumb eighteen year old that can't face up to her feelings! i don't wanna hear it! - fred benson i love you baby! i'm almost sorry i called you william randolph hearst, newspaper magnate and all around lunatic and the inspo behind the diss track citizen kane, but i'm not! - nancy wheeler has a photo of nellie bly in her locker where a photo of her beau should be - so echo & the bunnymen's 1984 album ocean rain is obviously most famous for the killing moon (jonathan byers you ARE my donnie darko) but may i point your attention to motherfucking seven seas - OH YOU KNOW I (EDDIE) HAD TO DO IT TO 'EM. this was shameless but i've had this in my heart for over ten years babe - for the purposes of this timeline, you know eddie is keeping higgins in pills. which is why he hasn't been kicked out of hawkins high so fast his lunchbox would combust - nurse ratched, obviously from one flew over the cuckoo's nest and that ill-fated ryan murphy series....tf was that...but also from this fucking sick tune! - save me the waltz is by zelda fitzgerald! my loves, thanks for hanging in for this chapter. i know it was a wait, but i hope you enjoyed! i also know it was a little more angsty pants than my usual fare-- but look baby. we need grist for the mill, okay? as always, reblogs, comments and likes are FIERCELY appreciated! love u all so much. my little hellcats. to die by your side etc

#e. munson by powder #published by powder #in progress #hellfire & ice #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x f!reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x oc #rmr when i used to write 4k chapters.... god be with the days #anyway i love these fuckheads

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