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bizaar · 2 months

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Cruel Summer Epilogue - Part One

Masterlist - Part One - Part Two

pairing: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+) minors DNI (you guys they go the fuck off idk what to tell you, gird your loins), pregnancy, mentions of sickness and vomiting, traumatic flashbacks, angst, swearing (please let me know if I missed anything, there's a lot going on here)

word count: 23k (oof)

a/n: tumblr is really gonna make me split this thing up more than I already was going to — oh well, it doesn't matter because it's here! Forgive me for how I had to lay this out, and for everything that follows, because part two is going to be nothing but complete rabid bunnyfucking...

Melvald’s is slow today.

Of course, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Melvald’s is always slow. You don’t think there has ever been such a thing as a morning or afternoon rush within these cluttered walls, and you’re fine with that.

You have to be, because it’s not like you have a lot of other options left in Hawkins.

After everything went back to normal again — as normal as normal can be, considering the circumstances — you didn’t dare go back to ask for your job at Benny’s. You tell yourself it’s because you’ve got too much self-respect for that (and certainly not because you’re quite sure they’ll laugh you out of the building if you tried) so now you stock shelves at Melvald’s.

The hours are long and the pay is crap, but your commute is a quick ten-minute walk, and that’s more than you can ask for. Because you never got your car back after you went sailing out the front doors at Benny’s with the singular purpose of finding Eddie, getting out of town, and never coming back – a purpose you mostly succeeded in.

Mostly.

You found Eddie, but you never managed to get around to getting out of town. You did eventually end up coming back, though only to discover that while you were away your trusty little Toyota Corolla had been towed.

Figures.

Funny how you can’t just leave a vehicle sitting unclaimed in a private lot for over a month and expect there to be no consequences.

By the time you got around to finding your car, you ended up having to sell the damn thing just to cover the impound fees, and you quickly learned that despite what all those sappy greeting cards like to say, you can put a price on your memories. Hundreds of hours of carpooling trips to and from school and the arcade and movies and innumerable Corroded Coffin gigs, all the jam sessions and make-out sessions and “you gotta hear this song” sessions that resulted in blown out speakers and deeply existential conversations and fights about nothing and everything. All the time and people, friends and lovers and emotions permeating it’s dingy cloth seats and hard plastic siding was whisked away in the blink of an eye.

Your bittersweet adolescence, gone in exchange for a measly four thousand dollars. Somehow, you’re never going to forgive yourself for letting it go like that.

And yet, for as sad as you were to part with and old friend, it wasn’t all bad, because even with most of that blood money sent off to the Roane County municipality, you still had a little left over.

Enough to get the van towed out of the ditch and back into working order, at least. It wasn’t pretty, and it needed more work than any of you could really wrap your heads around just to bring it back to its previous semi-shitty condition, but it was alive and that was all that mattered.

If selling your car meant that Eddie didn’t have to lose anything else, then you were happy to let it go.

Anyway, you like your walk to work. It’s short enough that it doesn’t give you time to think about anything that isn’t immediately in front of you. It doesn’t remind you of anything you might be mourning from back in the good old days, and it means, if need be, you can get home as fast as humanly possible.

Unlike at Benny’s, nobody at Melvald’s gives you shit if you have to go sailing out the front doors and across the parking lot to rescue Eddie from his demons.

That mile-and-back commute does not, however, keep you safe from the perils of being late for work. Not in the cold blue light of morning, when Eddie snakes his arms around you and holds you hostage, leaving sleepy, sloven kisses down the stretch of your neck and sending shivers up the length of your spine as he begs you for five more minutes, and five more minutes after that.

You find that you have a hard time arguing with him on mornings like that when the only thing that can chase away the lingering sting of bad dreams and worse memories is to lay pressed together in a heap of tangled limbs, listening to the muted thump thump thumping of his beating heart and feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.

You’re spending a lot of mornings like that lately, laying in as late as you possibly can before slinking into work a cool twenty minutes late. And if anyone on Melvald’s barebones staff cares about that, you haven’t heard about it. Even if you did, the feeling would not be mutual.

Who gives a shit where you decide to spend your mornings? Mornings are for people who never came so close to losing everything, so what’s the harm in five more minutes?

Plenty, it turns out, when you finally manage to extract yourself from that tangled mess of limbs and are hit with a wave of nausea like a speeding train the moment you sit up. You were late to work this morning, sure, though not because you couldn’t stop indulging Eddie in five more minutes, it was because you couldn’t stop your insides from turning into outsides and spent almost a full half hour with your head in the toilet.

You mostly don’t wanna talk about that.

If you have to, you chalk it up to the bizarre sickness you can’t seem to shake. You just can’t stomach much of anything these days, except for herbal tea, and that is only consumed against your will, because herbal tea is gross, despite how it’s the only thing that abates your nausea.

Well, you thought it did.

Joyce Byers is on an extended smoke break, so you’re alone in the store when it hits you.

One minute, you’re sitting behind the cash wrap, absently flipping through Cosmopolitan Magazine with a steadily cooling cup of stagnant bog water at your elbow, and then someone hits the ejector button. The next thing you know, you’re sprinting for the bathroom with a harsh squeak of Chucks on linoleum.

You barely make it to the stall in time to send your prayers to that eternal porcelain god.

Zero to sixty in half a second, just like this morning and every other morning this week.

By the time you come slinking in again from the employee’s bathroom, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand, Joyce is still not back from her fifteen-going-on thirty minute break. There are no customers, no coworkers, just you and the lingering air of your spectacular Regan MacNeil impression �� getting better and better every day – because it’s just another boring Thursday afternoon, and Melvald’s is always slow.

Your insides cramp with the threat of sustained illness as you slide in behind the cash register, ready to resume the spell of your boredom, then, you find yourself face to face with a pharmaceutical ad you don’t remember seeing when you last flipped the page.

You stare down at the image of a beautiful woman with her face stretched into a wide, open mouth smile, which is manic enough that you could easily mistake her for screaming rather than laughing.

You begin to feel a cold, creeping dread raising the hair on your neck and arms as you read the copy.

“Morning sickness? Not me!”

Jesus Christ, you think with no small amount of disgust, Somebody got paid a million dollars to write this – and yet all it takes is those four measly little words.

They fall into place one right after the other, each with a hollow boom that sends shockwaves radiating out across the expanse of your body with goosebumps. A previously darkened part of your brain slowly begins switching on as the phrase is fed through its internal processor over and over until something starts to come into focus.

A question you haven’t yet asked yourself, and the answer you’ve been subconsciously dodging, like lightning in the storm of your sudden onset illness.

Morning sickness? Not me… surely not me…

Still, you immediately begin counting the weeks on your fingers and think yourself in circles, trying desperately to remember when you had your last period. Last week? Last month? You don’t remember. You’ve never been the type of person to keep regular track of something like that, though only because you never needed to.

You were a virgin until you met Eddie and now you can’t seem to recall when you had your last period.

It takes you too long to remember, and when you do, you don’t believe it, so you count it out three times just to be certain and swallow hard against the sick feeling roiling in your esophagus.

January… February… March… March? No, that can’t be right…

You rustle a piece of scratch paper from the register to draw it out so you can visualize it, and when the data still doesn’t change, you get up to go and find the calendar in the employee’s locker room just to be certain that it really is – June.

According to your math, you haven’t had a period since March, and according to the calendar, that was two months ago.

Holy Shit.

If you were thinking rationally, you might understand how two months could pass without a person noticing, especially when they’ve been living their life by the second.

But you’re not thinking rationally, and if you were being honest, you haven’t been since last Spring.

Time stopped for you in the other place, when Eddie’s heart stopped down on the wrong side of the world, and ever since you slipped back through, it hasn’t really started back up again in a way you can wrap your head around. You live your life by the days of the week, so how were you supposed to know something was amiss when your only basis of passing time is “it’s Thursday again,”?

Something heavy settles in the pit of your stomach and you feel like you could be sick again as the facts begin to present themselves in neat little lines.

You and Eddie are living together now.

After everything that happened, when the dust finally settled on the Forest Hills trailer park, the folks from the Hawkins Lab came out from their fortress like feudal lords in lab coats. They took samples, corded things off with a mountain of red tape, performed test upon test upon test on the ruined contents of the trailer, and after all was said and done, it was deemed “uninhabitable”.

Which meant the Munsons were out of house and home. Wayne, it turns out, could get temporary housing through the Plant, but only so long as he was actively working. Someone was going to have to be the steward of Eddie’s recovery once he got out of the hospital (and that was shaping up to be a full time job in and of itself) but if Wayne took any time off to take care of him, he was going to lose his bid for company housing. Without it, he would have to move the pair of them back into the extended stay rooms in the Motel 6 out on the interstate, which he could only afford to pay for if he was earning a steady paycheck – such are the perils of selling your soul to the company store.

So, Eddie came to live with you in your icebox of a basement apartment, which seemed like the most practical, level headed idea until you were left alone and the reality of your sudden and total privacy settled in. It didn’t take long for the both of you to completely lose your minds in a haze of traumatic aftermath and unchecked hormones.

To you, it was the greatest idea anyone had ever had in the history of mankind – to your neighbors, Eddie moving in has been a catastrophic turn for the worse.

Because at the end of the day you’re just a couple of horny kids, sharing four hundred square feet of space, most of which just so happens to be taken up by a queen sized bed.

There have been noise complaints abound, but honestly, what did anyone expect to happen?

And what did you expect to happen when all either of you seem to do outside of basic human function is fuck like bunny rabbits?

You bury your face in your hands and choke on a horrified moan as you wrack your brain trying to think if, in fourteen months of domestic bliss, you ever once remembered to use protection..

The answer is a resounding no.

Who has time for condoms when you’re busy living your life to the fullest? What’s the saying? Wrap it before you tap it? Not me! You both almost died, remember? Live a little!

At least that’s been the logic for fourteen fucking months.

Jesus wept.

In the silence of the store, in between the waning notes of royalty-free Muzak and the gentle murmur of outside traffic, you can hear the tick, tick, ticking of the overhead clock. Wretched time, quietly counting down the seconds as potential disaster comes hurtling toward you like an atomic bomb.

Your stomach is cramping again as you move out from behind the cash wrap and stagger over to aisle three on stiff legs–

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God

– where you drop to balance on the balls of your feet and come face to face with the little white and purple boxes hanging there – pregnancy tests.

You think back to the way you’d so casually racked them the day before and cannot believe it never once crossed your mind.

Morning sickness.

Except you aren’t just sick in the morning, are you? You’re sick all the time, any hour of the day… so it’s probably not that, right? You probably just contracted some weird parasite at the lake or from a bad burger and now it’s wreaking havoc in your guts, right?

Right! a condescending voice tells you, It’s called a fetus.

Your mind outright rejects the notion, but now that the idea is there, the hint of nagging possibility will not be dismissed. So you sit there, eyeing the vaguely feminine graphic design, promising quick results in big bold letters.

Ten minutes or less.

You nibble your thumb and reach for the box before thinking better and stopping short.

Do you really want to know? And what are the consequences if you decide you don’t?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe big ones. Big round baby-belly-shaped ones.

You abuse your lower lip between your teeth and glance reflexively at your watch, which you discover is not there, but you’re too pressed to notice as you twist around to find the clock on the wall — half past one, and still no sign of Joyce.

You turn back to the promise on the box burning itself into your retinas — ten minutes or less — and count the months again.

The math doesn’t change. You’re definitely late, which means you are definitely—

Shut up! Don’t say it, don’t jinx it!

Then again maybe not…it’s a fifty-fifty chance, either you are or you aren’t. The answer lies in front of you, readily available in ten minutes or less.

…So, what’s ten minutes?

Joyce is still on a smoke break, so there is no one to cover for you, but what can possibly happen to an unmanned store in ten minutes? In Hawkins? On a Thursday?

Melvald’s is always slow — what are the odds you’re going to be hit with the first rush in the history of it’s time as a brick and mortar staple if you decide to pop back into the bathroom for a moment?

Ten minutes more like.

You tell yourself it doesn’t mean anything as you snatch the box off the shelf and wobble back out of the aisle on stiff legs.

Back to the employee’s restroom to take a pregnancy test – the reality of that information is profoundly disturbing.

You’ve never taken a test before — never had to — but you distinctly remember instances back in High school where you’d been enlisted to stand guard outside of a bathroom stall while Carol Perkins and Tina Burton took “just in case” tests.

You just want to sate a curiosity — just in case. What’s the harm in taking a test?

It’s ten measly minutes.

When Joyce finally comes back in, it’s been fourty-five minutes since she originally left, and you’re a vibrating ball of nervous energy. You sit, bouncing your knee erratically, fidgeting with the ring with the dark stone sitting snug on your finger – a promise, given, returned, and given again, pulling your t-shirt up and asking for five more minutes… just five more minutes – and she greets you with a tight-lipped smile.

You hardly wait for her to get through the door before you’re rounding the counter.

“I don’t feel well,” You say in a garbled rush, snatching your bag from where you’ve had it strategically stashed at your feet since you slunk back out from the restroom a second time, “D’you think it’ll be okay if I head out?”

She blinks back at you, and for a very brief moment, you’re terrified that for the first time since you started here, someone is finally going to give a shit about you leaving.

Thank God Melvald’s is always slow.

“Oh. Sure, Honey. That’s–” Joyce begins, brows tweaked together in confusion as you rush past her.

You’re out the door and headed up the street before she can finish asking if you’re alright.

You don’t think you could stand to answer that question right now, and she couldn’t help you even if you did.

You need a quiet place to sit and think. You need to be swaddled in a blanket of cloying familiarity while you watch the rest of your world come crumbling down. You need… Eddie?

No, a voice answers, startling you almost as much as what you’d learned in those previous ten minutes. You don’t need Eddie. Not right now, at least.

Right now, what you need is for it to be like it used to be. You need an adult, you need to go home, but you don't live there anymore, and your parents haven’t lived in Hawkins since the Summer of 1985. You can't even call them, because if you do, they’re just going to come down here and try to take you away again, like they did when you got out of the hospital.

You can’t have a repeat of that mess. You can’t leave Eddie, but you also can’t face him just yet. You need to be sure before you can go home, and before that, you need to get as far away from Melvald’s as you possibly can.

You briefly consider calling Wayne, just to try and get the closest thing you can to fatherly advice, but what is he going to do for you? What is anyone supposed to do for you right now besides tell you that you ought to have known better?

You don’t need to be told what you already know. You need a second opinion, and you cannot get that sitting at home, socked in to four hundred square feet of domestic bliss with the ghost that haunts those walls.

But there is nowhere else you can go … not unless you want to make that long hike up Cornwallis and bang on the Henderson’s door like it’s the good old days and you’re there to babysit.

You’re not about to submit yourself to the abject humiliation of Dustin (or, God forbid, Claudia Henderson) finding out, because you can’t just go closing yourself up in their hall bathroom for ten minutes (or less) with no explanation. You'd have to tell them what was wrong, why you couldn't use your own bathroom, and you're not ready for that kind of drama.

You can just picture the look Dustin would give you, admonishing you with a terse utterance of your name and a heaping helping of as much paternal disdain as a fifteen year old boy can manage.

“Why weren’t you using protection?” He would demand, “— that’s the first thing they teach us in health class,” followed very quickly by a not so gentle reminder that “they hand out condoms at school like candy!”

As if you didn’t know that. As if you (and everyone you knew) didn’t used to come home with those shiny little packages lining the inside of your bookbag like legal contraband. For the duration of your tenure at Hawkins High, you lived in the surety that you could open any drawer in your bedroom and be sure to find a condom there.

Not that you needed one.

You were a virgin until you met Eddie, but none of that is any of Dustin’s business, and beyond the fact that you’re not in school anymore, you’re not going to go all the way up to his house just to take a pregnancy test.

You don’t need to, the soiled plastic applicator you’d hidden way down at the bottom of the wastebasket back in Melvald’s employee bathroom has already told you everything you need to know.

Suddenly, all you want to do is go home, crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head. You want to go back to the days of everyone telling you “you’re just a kid,” and you want to revel in the frustration of it.

More than anything, you want to smack yourself in the face for ever daring to suggest you were “grown up” enough for anything.

You’re just a kid. Eddie is just a kid. How could this have happened? Why on Earth didn't anybody stop you?

You just want to go home, but you can’t go home. Not yet, so you walk. One foot in front of the other, aimlessly without really seeing, and the next thing you know, you’re sitting at the warped, termite infested picnic bench in the woods behind Hawkins High, and you have no memory of getting there.

You know you should be more concerned about that.

Your shift is technically over at three, and you really should try to get home sometime around then (just so Eddie doesn't start to worry) but time was fake before you slipped back into the eternal dark of November ’83, and now you have no use for it at all, especially when you're so patently avoiding going home.

It seems like just yesterday you were sprinting out into the parking lot at Benny’s, ready to throw caution and everything you ever thought was important to the wind to go and save the jerk who’d so spectacularly broken your heart the previous summer – fifty-four Saturdays ago, your subconscious unhelpfully informs you.

It’s a wonder you’d actually convinced yourself that anything of what followed that week could be the scariest thing you’d ever have to endure. Turns out, giant man eating bats and interdimensional wizards are nothing compared to realizing your period is two months late.

You trace your thumb across the faded carvings in the tabletop and linger over your inscribed initials x E.M. – you did that, in the summer between your Sophomore and Junior year, in the first weeks of your official attachment to Eddie.

It felt like such an important gesture back then, but you had no idea what important looked like in those days.

You think back to those stupid kids who pledged to stand together against the world without knowing what that really meant, or just how viciously people could hate, and your heart throbs.

After everything that happened, Munson Mania in Hawkins has never been worse.

The good people of Roane County had already done all the mental gymnastics to decide that Eddie killed Chrissy. It fit perfectly in their narrative about him, and it would be too much work to untangle the mess they made coming to that conclusion, no matter what the second coming of Jim Hopper said. Guilty or not, they whisper among themselves, point fingers, hurl insults, and shout accusations.

Freak. Murderer. Psycho killer – qu’est-ce que c’est? – Barbed wire candy-grams for the town pariah, hurled like molotov cocktails, even in the light of the truth. The murky, inconclusive truth.

You had to learn how to adapt very quickly to the ramped-up prejudices of all these nice God-fearing people, because for a while there, Eddie couldn’t even walk down the street without fear of being reminded that everyone in this town thinks he’d be better off dead. The bolder of the good people of Hawkins have no shame about telling him so, either.

Now, Eddie stays mostly out of sight of all your neighbors and you take care of everything that has to be done.

You go out, do all the shopping, work to pay the bills, keep your life support afloat and you bend yourself painfully out of shape to be his shield. You provide the bread and butter and all the love he could ever possibly need. You smother him in it, keep him well fed and swaddled in affection so that he never has to feel the cold touch of its absence.

You're everything to him. Friend, lover, caretaker – you wish there was room for just a little bit of help in that, but Eddie doesn't have friends anymore.

He just has you.

Anyway, how are you supposed to explain to Adam and Jeff and Gareth that the Eddie lurking in the shadows of your basement apartment isn’t the Eddie they remember? What would they say if they knew he can’t make his fingers work well enough to play the guitar anymore, or that he can barely even look at his D&D books without breaking into a cold sweat?

You know what they’d say – they’d want to know why. They’d want to know what the hell happened, because when they’d tried to visit Eddie in the hospital, they got one look at him before making a bullshit excuse about needing to leave, and he didn’t want to see them again after that.

So now, when they call (and they so seldom call, these days) you tell them he's fine, and you hold them at bay, because it's your job to protect Eddie, no matter what. If that includes keeping all his friends in the dark, then so be it.

If you can’t get around to explaining what happened to Eddie, and what is so terribly wrong with him, you can’t even imagine trying to break the news that you’re pregnant.

Christ, how are you supposed to tell people when you can barely conceptualize it yourself?

How are you supposed to tell Eddie?

He can barely hear that you’re going to be working late or picking up a shift, because it means he’s going to have to stretch his imagination to find ways to occupy his time without you. It means a change in his routine, and routine is all he has besides bad habits and nightmares.

And now you’re just supposed to add a whole other person to that? One who can’t take care of themself or tell you what’s wrong or when they need something or when they’re on the brink of death or… or or or…?

Your stomach is in knots again, because having a baby is suddenly starting to sound just like having a whole other Eddie to take care of, and you can hardly manage one of him.

You have no idea how he is going to react to hearing that your tight little twosome is about to expand.

Eddie doesn’t have a lot of things that are strictly his, and when it comes to those things he is not exactly the sharing type.

He’ll go blue in the face arguing he doesn’t get jealous, then turn around and have a conniption when you stay on the shore of Lovers Lake with Dustin and send him out in the boat with the others… dot dot dot - dash dash dash - dot dot dot…

You bite back the cloying scent of mildew suddenly filling your sinuses and dig shallow crescent moons into your palms until you feel your feet touch back down on Earth. Then, all the hideous questions you’ve been successfully holding at bay all afternoon come flooding in like the tide.

What if Eddie doesn’t want this? What if this is one of those cataclysmic deal breakers and you lose him forever… again?

And why does this all suddenly feel like your fault?

In an instant, you’re once more brimming with that irrational anger, because if this is anyone’s fault, it’s his. He’s the one who always wants five more minutes, who pulls you back into bed and paws at your clothes and does all the little things he knows you can’t resist and takes and takes and takes.

He’s the one who did all the work – what did Carol and Tina used to call it? The good ol’ pump and dump?

How many mornings have ended with Eddie taking those five minutes more, then rolling over to go back to sleep while you run around trying to clean up the evidence and pull yourself back into shape?

He’s the master behind this little ritual, you’re just the vessel – and what is the vessel for if not to carry the seed?

You need to walk, you need to think. You need to talk to Eddie.

You take the long way home, going past the haunts of your youth and all the places you don’t go anymore. All the places you’ll never go again — all the places that don’t exist like your childhood home, the Starcourt Mall, Benny’s Diner, and the cozy little double wide on the far end of town, and you think about how Hawkins is a ghost town that doesn’t know its dead.

You walk, and you think about Eddie, like you always do.

You think about how bad those first few months were, about his nightmares and how he could barely stand to shut his eyes, let alone sleep because of the monsters waiting for him beyond the hypnotic pull of his circadian rhythms. You think about how in the beginning, sometimes he didn’t even have to close his eyes to become trapped down there in the dark again.

You think about how hard you’ve worked to get him to where he is now, all the blood, sweat, and tears it has taken to curb the itch for all the bad habits that got infinitely worse in his attempt to soothe all the things that hurt. Everything you had to do to center your world around his needs, his worries, his recovery, to make him feel safe. It’s taken a long time, with a lot of set backs, and a lot of bad days, but you tell yourself that you’re happy to have them at all.

Recovery is a road, not a destination, or at least that’s what Eddie’s physical therapists liked to say before he quit on them – if all you have to worry about is making sure the rent is paid and the pantry is stocked and the door is barred against the monsters out there, you’re fine with that.

Nevermind your nightmares and all the little things you have to do to cope.

You’re only the one who had to sit there and lie to Eddie that everything was going to be okay while his lips turned blue and his eyes went dark. You’re the one who had to stand at a basin in the hospital and try to scrub his blood out of your clothes, your skin, your hair and lock your knees to stay upright while you did everything you could to try and keep your shit together.

You’re the one who had to sit at his bedside and tune yourself in to the new normal of monitored heartbeats and machines forcing compressed air into collapsed lungs, feeling so incredibly helpless to do anything but wonder how you ever told such a hideous lie.

Everything is gonna be okay… you wish you could make yourself believe that.

On your really bad days, that helpless feeling comes roaring back so powerfully you feel like you’re going to collapse in on yourself like a dying star. It's those days that you can’t pull yourself away from Eddie no matter what, where you need those five minutes just as badly as he does, because you’re the one who sat there and told him he was going to be okay and then watched him die.

And then, when the feeling passes, you pull yourself up, straighten yourself out, and you go to work, because the only thing that matters is Eddie.

He’s the only thing you can count on when the world gets too loud, the memories of that other place get too close, and you begin to feel yourself slipping away. He’s the only thing keeping you grounded, even if he doesn’t know it, and you’re suddenly so worried that introducing a third element to your duet will blur those lines again.

You think about all your progress, how on your best days it almost feels like things are back to good, and you think about how all of that hard work is about to become extremely fucking secondary to the little parasite nestled in your womb – not a baby so much as a tapeworm.

The notion causes your insides to stir with anxiety.

How could you have been so careless?

And why would you or anyone expect anything else to happen when you’re just a couple of stupid kids playing house and sharing a studio apartment, which is getting smaller by the moment.

Kids having kids.

You should have known better.

Because time isn’t real, the sun is starting to set by the time you finally make your way home, well past three o'clock.

Past Melvald’s and ten minutes down the street to the concrete stone steps and into the recessed well containing the red door, marked with a tarnished silver six. You can still see the faintest outline of the other two sixes someone recently graffitied on either side of the metal placard – just in case anyone happened to forget who lives here – and suddenly you think you can hear the distant tones of Iron Maiden playing somewhere beyond.

Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number…

It is not the first time you’ve had the misfortune of living in Apartment 666, and as you fumble with your keys and glare at the lingering shadow of permanent marker on paint, you are certain it won’t be the last.

Funny how you never used to hate Hawkins before.

Now, you’re painted red with the feeling as you plunge the key into the lock and twist it hard enough that someday you’re certain the blade is going to snap off (and then what are you going to do?) Today, however, is not that day.

As you turn the key you hear the rotor shift over with a satisfying THUNK. You twist the handle, push the door, and nothing happens.

You groan to stop yourself from screaming, because despite what you think, the door is not out to get you.

You’re just having a very bad day.

The humidity the humidity signaling the inevitable heatwaves of the Indiana summer causes your front door to swell and stick, and you have to give it a firm kick to force it open. You know this, despite how you may have forgotten under the weight of everything else currently on your mind.

And yet, today, when the door sticks, it feels personal.

You grit your teeth and shut your eyes against it as you put your foot in the door and give it one more solid push. It swings inward, taking you with it and sending you staggering across the threshold and into the apartment.

The door swings shut behind you with a loud THUMP, and all goes quiet inside your head.

Just like that, you’re home.

A singular room made up of kitchen, dining, living, and bed area, all squeezed into four hundred square feet of what the landlord had originally referred to as “cozy living”, when it was just you and your broken heart.

Now, it’s a chaotic mish-mash of all your things and what you could salvage of Eddie’s before someone went and burned what was left of the Munson residence to a smoking husk.

When you get in, he is sitting on the unmade bed wearing the same sweat-stained t-shirt and pair of ratty pants he’s been in for the last three days. His hair is greasy and hanging limply around his face, which is lined in the shadow of a patchy stubble. You try to think back to the last time you remember him showering, shaving, brushing his teeth, doing anything but laying in bed watching television.

You aren’t shocked when the memory fails to arrive.

Don’t be unkind, that gentle voice comes again. You stamp it out before it can finish. It’s hard to be kind when all you have to cling to is the way things used to be.

Eddie used to have hobbies and interests and friends. Now, he only watches television and reads the TV guide until he’s got it memorized and waits for you to get home so he can use you to chase his demons away.

Eddie’s depressed and you’re pregnant – it’s not much to go on, competition-wise, but the poison of your mood is inclined to suggest that you got the short end of the stick on that one, considering it’s his depression that got you that way.

Nothing gives such an instant boost of dopamine like an orgasm, after all.

The apartment is a mess. There are dirty clothes and dishes everywhere, mixed in with piles of the clean you have yet to put away. Socks and underwear hang draped off the backs of the two rickety dining chairs from where you’d washed them in the sink and lay them to dry six days ago. The bedsheets are pushed down and hanging off the mattress, exposing half a dozen Hostess wrappers sitting on the rumpled, stained top sheet.

And there sits Eddie in the middle of it all with a hand down his pants and a lit cigarette pinched between his lips.

Your blood flash freezes and boils.

He’s supposed to be quitting. That same gentle – nagging – voice whines from the back of your mind. And he promised he wouldn’t smoke inside.

You have to clench your teeth until your ears start ringing to shut that little voice up.

“Hey!” Eddie yelps the moment you appear, leaping up and waving his arms around to try and disperse the smoke as he kicks the evidence of his afternoon indulgence off of the mattress and steps down with a hard thump – he’s limping ever so slightly as he crosses the room to you, “Hi! Shit… um… this isn’t what it looks like,”

Which is a bald faced lie – it is exactly what it looks like, and suddenly you can’t stop the mental tally of all the things you asked him to do today, and all the things that remain undone.

It makes your skin itch, then as he gets closer, you see the holes in his socks – holes in his neck and ribs where he’d nearly been eaten alive – and you remember too late that you’d promised to pick him up a new pack of crew socks on your way home from work. You forgot.

Part of you supposes that makes you even, and you stuff it down with everything else you’re not presently available to feel.

You decide you don’t care.

You don’t care that he’s smoking again even though he’s still not fully recovered from his collapsed lung, or that he gave up on physical therapy because it was too hard, or that he never does anything he says he’s going to and still always expects you to give him five more minutes.

And he probably still expects you to let him fuck you later on, even after all that.

You don’t care you don’t care you don’t care.

And after a moment, you’re surprised to find that you really don’t, (you do, you really fucking do) you’re just trying to see where the cigarette went when he less-than-subtly flicked it away.

The last thing you need to end your shitty day is to have the apartment burn down.

Eddie mistakes your silence for anger, as he always does, and you watch him begin to fidget as he waits for you to speak.

You don’t, because you don’t have anything to say, but also because he’s not wrong. You are angry.

You’re standing there, clenching your teeth and fists and doing everything in your power to swallow the urge to yell at him, or to nit pick all the things that are out of place in your apartment – no, not just yours anymore. He lives here, too – this is his home now.

“Where’ve you been?” Eddie asks when the tense silence becomes too much. “I was starting to get worried,”

He reaches for you and you surprise yourself by letting him pull you into a tight hug that feels a tad too much like it’s meant to try and distract you from everything he evidently decided was less important than smoking cigarettes, eating Twinkies, and playing with himself.

You’re mad as hell, and if you were paying any attention you would realize that the emotion is getting stronger by the moment, but you lean into him and snake your arms around Eddie’s midsection. You bury your face in his shirt and sigh against him as you chase the comfort of his embrace, waiting for the world to fall away and the cocoon of his safety to envelope you.

Once upon a time, all you needed was a good Eddie hug to chase your worries away. Now, under his touch, all you can think is how he reeks of nicotine and smoke and days old deodorant and everything else that comes with unwashed boy.

But you have to remind yourself that you don’t care, because he says he was getting worried.

“You were?” you ask, and your voice sounds odd against your ears.

“Yeah,” he shifts back and holds you to the spot, like he needs to get a good look at you to make sure you’re still you and that nothing has changed in the few hours it’s been since you left that morning — he worries so much these days. “I went to get you from work when you didn’t come home,” He says. “But you weren’t there.”

It sounds strangely accusatory, and you aren’t exactly sure what to do with that as a solid lump begins to form in the back of your throat.

He rubs his hands up and down your arms in a soothing gesture, like he’s attempting to create friction in slow motion. It’s something he’s always done that has been comforting in the past, but right now it is only making a sore spot where he’s rubbing the skin raw.

You look from his attempt at gentle, reverent contact to where he is carefully watching you, and feel your brows creep toward one another as that irrational anger begins to rise in the pit of your belly.

This is all his fault, and part of you seems to think he knows that, even if he doesn’t know.

“Okay, I can see that you’re mad…” Eddie starts, doing his utmost to remain as diplomatic as possible so as not to set you off but also to accept no responsibility, “… are you mad?”

You don’t answer. You don’t even look at him, instead you crane your neck trying to see around him to find that goddamn cigarette before it can catch and send everything up in smoke… literally.

You feel Eddie’s fingers flex on your biceps.

“Don’t be mad. I was gonna get around to it, I swear, but then you didn’t come home from work and… and I was worried! I didn’t know where you were,” .

Anger subsides — if only briefly — and you get almost all the way around to feeling guilty about that until you clock the cigarette butt smoldering on the yellowing linoleum in front of the kitchen sink, and then Eddie finishes his sentence.

“...And I didn’t know if you were gonna be home for dinner,”

He flinches when your head snaps around and you finally level him with a poisonous look.

“So you smoked half a pack of camels and ate a box of Twinkies?” you scoff.

You want to ask where he even got those, but then you remember. He went to Melvald’s looking for you, and when he didn’t find you there, he must have figured he deserved a treat for braving the big, scary world.

He gets a treat and you get to watch your world crumble – you could spit fire.

Eddie’s mouth falls open like he’s going to say something to defend himself, but then he just laughs. You can tell it’s out of nerves rather than humor, the way he always does when he’s caught red handed and doesn’t know what to say to get himself out of trouble.

You would punch him if you weren’t half certain he would break into a thousand pieces if you did. Even then you’re not so sure you’d feel worse about breaking your boyfriend or having to vacuum him up off the floor after.

“I was worried!” Eddie insists when you turn away and throw your keys into the dish with a thunderous crash.

“You said that already.” You snap, storming across the tiny living space and stooping to pinch the half burned stock of cinders and throw it into the sink with a hiss.

You almost wish that he would have just given you that kicked puppy look, then you could have at least felt bad about biting his head off. But no, he had to go and get irreverent on you.

Hi honey, welcome home! I know I said I would clean up and do some house work and stop smoking so I don’t get lung cancer by the time I’m thirty and die, but you see, I can’t be fucked to care about anything but myself! But remember, it’s not my fault, I’m depressed!

You’d spent so much time worrying about what you were going to say to him, how you were going to break the news, but as you step out of your shoes and drop your bag onto it’s designated doorside hook, you decide that if he can’t be fucked than neither can you.

Those little pink lines say differently.

You suddenly feel ready to burst.

You cross to the bed, snatch up one of the pillows and press it to your face, then you scream as loud and long as you can. When you’re satisfied that your lungs are completely flattened, you lean forward and drop down onto the mattress with a muffled THUMP, and let the tide take you out.

It’s just one more thing that douses you in a fresh layer of red. Because your first foray into real adulthood didn’t begin with moving in together, or engaging in excessive amounts of sex just because you could, or even the unexpected addition to your lives — it began with the waterbed Eddie had insisted upon.

After he was discharged from the hospital, you learned very quickly that your mattress was too soft for his broken body, and the nice, “sensibly priced” one you’d gone out and tried to replace it with had ended up being too firm.

After all that talk and research and careful consideration, all the work you put into trying to make him comfortable in his new home, in this new situation, and the mattress was too goddamn firm.

Then came the waterbed, and Eddie’s first full night of sleep since leaving the hospital, and you didn’t dream of sending the damned thing back, no matter how badly you hated it.

You still hate it as you lie there, coasting on the waves and stewing in all the ugly thoughts and feelings and emotions that you are meant to be safe from inside the vacuum chamber of your apartment.

For a time, all you hear is the muffled sloshing of the trussed up waterballoon and the gentle murmuring of informercials playing on the half muted television. Then, you hear the slow thump of footsteps approaching and feel the mattress dip and slosh beside you.

Your guts heave and for a brief, yet terrifying moment, the nausea returns.

“...D’you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asks tentatively from somewhere not nearly close enough.

“No.” You say, knowing well enough that this is not a conversation you can keep putting off.

“Okay…” he says, sucks his teeth, then tries again, “D’you wanna hear about my day?”

“No.” You insist.

“Great. So today, I got up at a reasonable hour and totally didn’t sleep in until two-thirty again. I did everything you asked me to and ate a healthy, full balanced meal and only watched, like, half an hour of tv – don’t worry, just PBS, Babe, only the really boring, educational shit. But I swear on my life, this whole place was spotless … and then out of no where – WHAM! You’ll never guess what happened.”

He pauses for effect, and waits for you to play along, to rise to his prompting like you normally do, but he’s sorely mistaken if he thinks you’re in the mood for games. You wire your jaw shut and leave him waiting for you to answer. When you don’t, Eddie repeats himself,

“You’ll never guess what happened.”

Finally, he prods you sharply under the armpit with two fingers, and you flinch, curling into yourself with the kind of high yelp that can only come from being tickled.

“Ask me what happened.” he prompts when you uncover your face to glare at him.

You tell yourself you won’t, but you’ve never been able to resist him, even when you’re mad. Especially when you’re mad, and especially with the way he’s leaning over and looking at you, all soft eyes and long lashes. Because in spite of the smoking and the lying and everything else, every part of you loves every part of him, even when you want to punch him in the face.

“What happened.” You mutter reluctantly, not a question so much as a submission – Eddie smiles.

It’s a half hearted thing that doesn’t reach his eyes, but you know what it’s meant to convey – Good Girl. Your heart skips a beat and you kick yourself for still being so stupid for him, even after all this time. You’re supposed to be mad at him.

He shrugs.

“Killer Klowns,” He says, and you roll your eyes.

“...you gotta be kidding.”

You turn away to bury your face back in the pillow, and Eddie keeps on talking and talking and talking, because that’s all he does anymore – try to talk himself out of trouble. Funny, the way he never seems to remember how that never works for him.

“Baby? Baby – hand to God…” he says, pausing again. You just lie there and wait for him to finish, “...They were from Outer Space.”

And when his joking fails to garner any sort of joy, the sentiment goes out of him in an almost tangible wave. For a moment, there’s nothing but measured silence as the refrigerator kicks on and vibrates gently against his guitar, hidden from sight and collecting dust.

In the interval of time between your release from the hospital and Eddie’s homecoming, you went looking for what could be saved in the wreckage of the Munson trailer. Thankfully, you knew where to look for what was most precious, like the family photos and heirlooms. You rescued what you could and replaced what you couldn’t, but there are some things that are too precious to ever replace.

Things like Eddie’s guitar.

When the world came tumbling down in those last few moments of whatever the hell happened at the end there, Sweetheart had taken brutal damage, and that was before someone burned the place down. She was barely clinging to life when you finally unearthed her from the rubble – all but one of her strings had snapped, the heat of the fire had caused her resin to bubble and warp, and without its protective layer, someone had been able to stomp her body nearly to oblivion.

The violence of it broke your heart, and you’re not ashamed to admit you’d kneeled over her carcass and wept when you found her.

It made you physically sick to have to return her to Eddie in such a state, but there was only so much you could do without taking time and money you couldn’t spare to get her out to the Guitar Center in Indianapolis.

She’d once been his prized possession, the focal point of his bedroom put on proud display, the only other woman in his life, now, she’s just some forgotten thing tucked into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, hidden from sight and collecting dust.

Somehow that’s worse than any of it.

Eddie told you it was because the apartment was so small and she fit so perfectly in that alcove, but you know it’s because after all that happened, he can’t stand to look at her.

The refrigerator vibrates against her twisted body, and slowly, the room begins to fill with the muted buzz of a low E.

“I’m sorry, Sweetheart.” Eddie sighs, and it takes you a moment to realize he’s talking to you.

You feel the mattress dip as his hand comes down to rest at the side of your hip, caging you in beneath him, “I’m just trying to make you feel better… honest.”

You heave a weighted sigh and roll over onto your back, throwing your arms over your eyes and baring down until you see spots and colors and stars. He settles down over you, and when you feel his weight come down to rest on your belly, your heart briefly palpitates.

You have to stifle the urge to tell him to be careful, because he doesn’t know. How could he know? You haven’t told him.

“I’m sorry,” He says again, and you can’t help yourself.

“You’re always sorry when you get caught, but you always do it again.” You bite.

You feel the corner of his mouth twitch against you and for a long time you both just lie there, wondering how the hell you got here.

You like to think that under normal circumstances you might not stick around for so much bullshit, but unfortunately for you, your life never got back to normal after you put it on hold to go looking for the jerk last spring, and now you’re committed to him, warts and all.

And the pair of you have always existed outside the bounds of “normal circumstances” anyway.

It occurs to you now that this is exactly why you’d been so leery about coming straight home. You’d needed time to prepare before facing Eddie, to be certain before having to explain yourself, because it’s your job to protect him, but how are you supposed to protect him from himself, especially when he’s hell bent on following this path of self destruction to the end of the line?

But you’re still not certain, and you’re starting to think you really need to take another test…

“Where’d you go earlier?” Eddie mumbles dejectedly - you feel his voice rumble in the pit of your stomach and it sends the faintest stirrings of something you absolutely do not want to be feeling down through your central cortex – arousal.

“Nowhere.” You say, distantly feeling your lips move and the vibration of your voice, but not hearing yourself speak.

Before you realize what you’re doing, you shift your lower body, ever so subtly trying to move your hips up in search of a little friction.

Stop that, you silly bitch. You are not going to give him a pity fuck just because you feel bad about making him feel bad.

You sigh.

“I just needed to walk a little… stretch my legs… guess I lost track of time,” and then, “Sorry,”

Eddie says something, and you are vaguely aware of responding – him asking if everything is okay and you dismissing the question, building up another layer of that lie and reassuring him that everything is fine…

At least, you think that’s what you said, you can’t be certain because his voice is still buzzing down through your belly and stirring that raunchy little pot, and you’re still fighting tooth and nail to stop your hips from squirming.

You know if you don’t do something, you’re absolutely going to end up giving him a pity fuck, and that’s exactly how you ended up in the situation you’re in now. Because when Eddie calls, you come running, no matter what.

I should tell him.

You try to take another one of those deep, steadying breaths to banish the skittery tightness forming in your chest, and you choke on it.

Something begins to press in at the back of your eyes, welling up and crowding them in your sockets. Your vision blurs and before you realize what is about to happen, your lashes flood with hot, stinging tears.

You begin to cry.

Goddammit. It really has just been a very shitty day.

You uncover your eyes long enough to mask the motion of wiping away the wetness streaming across your cheeks by checking your watch, and you see that it is not there. A bright burst of panic sparks in your chest sending adrenaline shooting down to the tips of your fingers and toes before you remember how you’d removed it to wash your hands after being sick in the employee bathroom at Melvald’s.

Before your life came grinding to a halt in ten minutes or less.

I should tell him.

You imagine – you hope – your watch is still sitting there on the edge of the sink. And then you remember that it doesn’t matter if it is, because time stopped in November of 1983.

Time isn’t real, it’s just another Thursday.

You heave another one of those measured breaths – this one a little wetter and shakier than the last – and drop your arms to come down gently over Eddie’s shoulders.

You sniffle and sigh, and he immediately twists over to look up at you.

You look down and meet wide brown eyes – sad eyes – duller than they’ve been in months, red rimmed and ringed in dark circles like bruises. He’s so pale, his full lips are dry and cracked and raw from where you know he’s been biting at them.

Eddie’s brows come together to form a deep crease of worry and suddenly your face is bracketed in his hands, brushing at the wetness you can’t manage to stem and apologizing endlessly for everything he’s ever done wrong.

He doesn’t know what he did to hurt you, but he’s sorry for it. Sorry, sorry, always so incredibly sorry – how many times can someone say something before it loses all meaning?

Sorry doesn’t mean shit coming from Eddie – yes it does, don’t be unkind.

He’s depressed, and you’re pregnant, and now you’re crying about it and he’s desperate to take the blame for it.

To his credit, Eddie hauls himself up to meet you and pulls you into his arms, crushing you against him as you go to pieces. You can feel the uncertainty radiating off of him.

He wants to know why you’re crying, so you should just get it over with and tell him, right? You can’t make the words come out, and now that you’ve started crying, you can’t stop.

He deserves to know, but it’s your job to protect him, and so long as you keep this secret to yourself, he’s still safe from the harm it might cause. Everything is still okay, you just have to keep holding that door.

It takes what feels like a very long time before you calm down, and even after you do, you just lay there facing each other, feeling Eddie’s eyes boring holes into your forehead.

You have to tell him.

“Are you mad?” Eddie asks before you can get the chance, reaching across to thumb away one last stray tear from the hollow beneath your eye – the lump in your throat threatens to swell again.

Tell him now.

You swallow hard and try not to choke on it.

“Yes,” you say honestly, “But not at you … not really,”

The corner of his mouth twitches again as he tries and fails to smile.

“Who do you need me to beat up?” Eddie asks in his best approximation of something he might have said once upon a time. It doesn’t hit quite the way it used to, and despite the shy smile that quirks up at the corner of your lips, you feel a sharp stab of grief for the person you lost on the other side of the world.

It's not a fair thought to have. He’s still here, part of him at least, and he’s fighting to get back to you with everything he’s got.

You know he’s trying, and it immediately floods you with guilt. About biting his head off, about lying, about going missing long enough to leave him wondering what the hell could have happened to you.

That was selfish of you, but you’re not going to apologize for it, because above everything else he said he was going to do, he promised to take better care of himself.

You suppose that makes you even.

The silence that follows is unbearably weighted, like a sopping wet blanket – like the air in the other place – and you have to make yourself look at him to make sure you haven’t gone suddenly deaf, and to make sure he’s still there.

When you look, you’re not surprised to find that Eddie is looking too, like he’s had the same thought and it’s struck him with a bolt of blinding fear. You both do that a lot now, go checking to make sure the other is still there, even when you’re laying pressed against each other like this.

He’s giving you that strange hard look you’ve come to know very well. It’s the same look he had on his face every time you caught him staring at you over the course of that long, terrible week last spring – the one he gives you when he knows something is wrong, but he is too afraid to ask on the off chance that he’s right about it. It’s the way his face looks all the time, now, ever since he got out of the hospital.

Are we okay? He wants to ask, Do you still love me?

Because no matter how many times you tell him, it never seems to settle in. He always needs to hear it one more time.

He always needs five more minutes.

Just five minutes more more more more more –

Well, what about what you need? You’re the one watching your life fall apart, you’re the one who’s pregnant.

Then again, how do you know you haven’t been hallucinating the whole thing? You do have to tell him, but you really ought to take another test, just to be really, really sure before you share your findings with the class.

A false positive isn’t unheard of. What’s the harm in a second opinion? You won’t know until you know.

Eddie follows when you sit up, and quickly takes your hands back from where you’ve begun scrubbing them furiously against your face, trying to rid yourself of the cloying miasma of salt drying tacky on your skin.

“Don’t do that,” he tells you, and you don’t even bother asking him why.

He does it because you would have done it to him.

That’s how he operates now, relying heavily on what he knows you would do moment to moment, because he’s still that lost in the reeds. It’s the only way he knows how to take care of himself anymore: what would you do for him in any given situation?

The next thing you know, you’ve got your arms around his neck, squeezing him as tight as you dare, as tight as you think he needs to be held just to remember that he’s still here, and you wish like hell he would just pick up what you were putting down already. You wish he would know exactly what is going on with you without even asking, like he used to.

But you know he can’t, his mind is too clouded for the kind of clairvoyance lovers share anymore.

Eddie’s head thumps forward to rest atop your shoulder and strong arms – less strong than they used to be – squeeze you tight enough around the midsection to cause something in your back to pop. You don’t care. It’s grounding and it’s what you’ve needed all afternoon.

You go chasing the feeling as you breathe in another two-count and exhale on three, twisting your head to bury your nose into the crook of his neck.

He stinks like days old sweat and your perfume.

“I’m sorry I was mean,” you say into the filthy curtain of his hair, and you’re suddenly reminded of how you’d stood together like that in the dark of his bedroom a lifetime ago, counting down the moments you had to spare before you slipped back into the other place for the last time.

“S’okay,” Eddie slurs, and you feel the guilt of it throb painfully in your chest as you nuzzle against him, trying to slip beneath the surface and occupy the space beneath his skin.

It’s the only way he’ll ever feel close enough without being inside of you – the gentle rumbling of your prior arousal begins to stir again, and you have to remind yourself that you’re not doing that.

“I love you,”

He makes a soft sound and you feel his fingers flex against you, digging needily into your skin and pulling you up into his lap.

“Say that again,” he says, holding you against him.

The fibers of his well worn t-shirt make the beginnings of a friction burn against your cheek as you shift to compensate for this new position – it’s hard to stay tucked against him now that you’re sitting above him, harder still not to sit right down and press the seam of your pussy against the bulge you can feel forming in his sweatpants.

For the sake of your own self preservation – why? It’s not like he can get you more pregnant than you already are – you sit back on his thighs and bring your hands up to grace the curve of his throat. Eddie tilts his head back to follow and gaze up at you through his lashes.

“Say it again,” he says, and days old stubble scratches the ridge of your knuckles as you stroke the side of his face.

“I love you,” you say thickly, for all the times you said it and he didn’t believe you, and all the times he needed to hear it and you kept it to yourself.

You listen as Eddie breathes out a shaky, charcoally sigh. His eyes slide shut and he lets his head drop forward to thump against your sternum. For half a blessed second, everything feels exactly like it should. Not like it used to, but as right as it possibly can be after everything that’s happened.

It’s just you and Eddie.

You and Eddie and the sea monkey growing inside of you.

Just like that, your brief moment of perfect peace begins to crack. You curl your arms around his neck in defiance of it and squeeze him a little tighter and do everything you can to hold it in place.

He’ll be okay if you just hold him tight enough. Everything will be okay – nothing bad can happen when you’re together.

Except for all the bad that happened at Rick’s Place and Lover’s Lake and on the other side of the world and… shut up shut up shUT UP!

Everything is going to be fine.

You’ll tell Eddie your secret, and he’ll tell you that everything will be alright. You’ll figure it out, like you always do, and you’ll be happy to have whatever you end up with.

You press your lips into the crown of his head, and he makes a soft sound beneath you.

You tell yourself you ought t0 do it now. Don’t make a big deal out of it, but tell him and get it over with all the same so you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Eddie will help you – you don’t know how, but he will. He’s the only one who can help you, so just tell him.

“Are you hungry?” You ask.

Coward.

He shakes his head and breathes a deeply melancholic sigh into your collar. Of course he isn’t, he’s full of sugar and coffee and nicotine, he’s not going to be hungry until next week.

Still, you know he’s going to crash hard and be sick in the morning if you don’t make him eat something besides processed pound cake. He’s not hungry, but he’ll eat if you’re eating — the thought of food makes your insides clench and heave.

“Are you?” He asks, shifting back so he can look at you again – in another life you watch him retreat to the stove at Rick Lipton’s place.

“I made dinner,” that Eddie says, and you’re thrust into a memory of sitting with your heads bowed together over a flaking linoleum table, a sticky pot of Spaghetti-o’s and a hundred and one unsaid things between you — your stomach roils with nausea.

“No, I’m good.” you tell this Eddie, your Eddie.

That Eddie was your Eddie too, and sometimes you miss him so badly you can hardly breathe.

You shift further back on his knees so you can look at him, really look at him, and tell him – you have to tell him – and you take his hands in yours.

“Eddie, listen – there’s something we need to talk about…” You start, and feel him tense beneath you.

You know what he’s thinking, more bad news. He’s about to lose something else, and you don’t have the heart to quell those fears just yet. If you get stuck trying to make it all better before it even begins, you’ll never get the words out.

You have to tell him.

Deep breath in – the words sit on your tongue like burning coals, and yet you continue to fail to spit them out – just say it.

Two measly little words and it will be over.

I’m pregnant.

Say it, say it now … for the love of God, say anything.

It’s only when you turn Eddie’s hands up to see his palms that you are saved from your sudden onset muteness as a spot of bright blood drying tacky in the creases of his hand makes itself known.

“Oh, my God!” You gasp, wondering how in the hell you didn’t see that before, “What happened?”

“Nothing.” He mumbles, jerking his arm back to try and hide the wounded extremity. “It’s just a splinter.”

You can feel your face pulling into a frown, even if you aren’t conscious of intentionally emoting, and you reach after him.

“Let me see,” you say — Eddie says, because you’re out in the woods with two broken fingers that need setting and a black eye courtesy of Jason Carver, “Baby, let me see…”

To his credit, Eddie doesn’t put up as much of a fight as you did back then, though only because you think after all this time he doesn’t have much fight left, and gives you his hand when you reach for it back in the here and now.

Fingers in his, you turn his palm up again to scrutinize his shoddy work and feel your heart stutter.

He’s dug a needlessly ugly crater into the calloused meat between his forefinger and thumb. Sticky, semi-coagulated blood is still oozing up in a ring around the faint shadow marring his flesh, and for half a second you’re afraid he’d gone and done something stupid like try to extract the foreign agent with a pair of scissors.

When you look, you’re semi-relieved to see that it is only a pair of worn needle nose pliers balancing precariously on the bedside table. Still, you bite the pulpy mass you’ve spent the day chewing into the inside of your cheek until you taste blood to stop yourself from saying anything about it.

Eddie has always been such a boy, blundering through life and bashing his skull against problems because someone once told him to “use his head”. He always makes everything harder than it needs to be, and then wonders why he doesn’t feel any better by the end of it.

“I couldn’t find the tweezers,” he explains sheepishly.

You look up at him and gaze into those big sweet doe eyes — pretty eyes. Sad eyes.

“They’re in the drawer —” You remind him, taking gentle hold of his face in one hand and squeezing, “—where they belong,” and then you push up to stand over him, “I’ll get them.”

You turn for the bathroom and don’t let go of his hand until the pull of distance demands it – his fingers slip from your grasp, and you blink back the beating of heavy wings and gnashing teeth, wrenching you out of his touch and into the dark of your mind’s eye.

Across the room and into the little bathroom, you shut the door behind you.

You click the lock.

You don’t know why you do that, except maybe because you’ve been doing it all day, and you’re desperate for a moment to yourself in this four hundred square foot box of self pity. You tell yourself you only need a moment, but suddenly you can’t imagine that naïve girl who had been so ready to never have to bother with something like personal space and boundaries again.

What a foolish little thing she was.

Young love doesn’t have the foresight for things like the shock of falling into the toilet at three o’clock in the morning because Eddie’s never lived with someone who doesn’t take a piss standing up and you’ve never had to navigate sharing a bathroom with someone who does.

The learning curb has been steep.

You drop the toilet seat with a loud clacking thump and you upend the grocery bag of prenatal contraband you’d smuggled out of Melvald’s.

Part of you hopes Eddie didn’t see you grab your bag off the hook, but you suppose if he did, you’ll have to explain that behavior later, though at that point, you imagine he’ll have a lot more on his mind than wondering why you need to bring your purse with you to the bathroom.

You drop your jeans, pee on the stick, and gnaw your fingers to the bone as you witness a little more of your life flash before your eyes with every passing second until you count out ten minutes … or less, as the packaging so boldly promised.

And when you receive your second opinion, you decide you could stand to get a third, so you lean over the bathroom sink, guzzle as much tap water as you can stomach and you do it all over again.

Colors and shapes and stars explode across your vision in a kaleidoscopic dance as you dig the heels of your palms into the jelly of your eye sockets and you wait … wait… wait to see what will happen next.

There you sit, wringing your hands, bouncing your knees, and you wait ten minutes and ten minutes more until you get your results in thin pink lines and bright blue tabs and little green plus signs.

Positive results, which means…

“Shit.” You hiss — the plastic casing creaks and begins to tremble in your hands, “Fuck!”

A sharp rap on the door sends you leaping damn near out of your skin and the test goes clattering to the floor.

The action is followed by a cautious utterance of your name, muffled by layers of wood vinyl and hollow core.

Your heart lurches– along the bottom of the bathroom door, you can see the subtle shadow of idling movement. You forgot about Eddie, and you wonder with a start just how long he has been standing there, waiting for you.

For ten minutes or less, you imagine. You have to swallow the urge to tell him to go away.

“Are you okay?” He asks, and you suddenly feel ready to burst into tears again – goddamn hormones.

You glance down at the strip of plastic casing and cardboard bullshit, at the two pink lines standing boldly against the soiled backdrop and grinning wickedly at you for all the smart decisions you didn’t make over the course of the last fourteen months of domestic bliss.

The answer rockets to the front of your mind.

No. You’re not okay. You’re pregnant.

You swallow hard to try and banish the cobwebs blooming in your throat, and when they thicken, you swallow again.

Eddie is speaking before you can decide how to answer him.

“… are you feeling sick again?”

You just manage catch to catch the burst of bitter laughter before it can come bleating out of you, and you shake your head for no one in particular.

“Yeah – I mean no.” You say unevenly, “I’m okay, I’m just–” Pregnant. “–feeling a little bit off.”

You know between the vagueness of the answer and the discovery of a locked door between you, Eddie’s mind is bound to be spinning out with worry.

He worries so much about everything these days — just wait until he finds out about the baby, that’ll really give him something to worry about.

You listen to him shifting his weight from one socked foot to the other on the carpet, to the soft thump that follows and has you picturing him resting his forehead on the door jamb.

You brace your hands on your knees and push up to stare at your reflection, eyes heavy and ringed with exhaustion, about to get so much worse when you’ve got a tiny helpless creature screaming its lungs out at you in the inability to communicate.

You hear the tentative rasping of your name eke out from behind the door, and watch the handle jiggle in the mirror.

All you want is to go to bed, sleep this weirdness off, and wake up tomorrow to find that everything has gone back to normal.

Not the normal of this morning’s blissful ignorance, but the normal of days past. Of school days and homework and gossip and when the only thing you had to worry about not getting caught sneaking out of class just to steal five minutes behind the bleachers with Eddie.

The salad days.

You just want things the way they were — Eddie the way he used to be and you the way you used to be, sitting tucked away together in his bedroom at the old place, before anything went wrong and it was just you and your dreams for the future.

More than anything, though, you wish you could buck up the courage to tell Eddie you’re pregnant so you can drop this suffering in silence bullshit.

You carefully wrap everything back in that same plastic bag you never want to see again and stash it in the cabinet beneath the sink, tucked in behind all your forgotten bottles of shampoo and cleaning supplies, where no one will accidently find them.

Then, you push up on creaky legs and address the elephant in the other room. You don’t unlock the door.

“I’m gonna shower,” you watch your reflection say, it is a hollow, robotic sound, and Eddie doesn’t answer right away. You can hear him just outside the door.

Thinking. Worrying.

Pouting more like.

And you know he’s going to ask before he even says it.

“…D’you want some company?”

Bingo.

Never has a sentence embodied a more desperate plea to be let in — he may as well have been scratching at the door and whining like a dog who’s been locked out.

Let me in let me in let me in please let me in.

You clench your teeth and blink back another wave of those pervasive tears pressing at the backs of your eyes as a strange, misplaced resentment wells suddenly in you.

It’s a startling feeling.

Not the same as the cheap, petty anger you’d felt before but a black and violent thing that does not belong to you. It has no business existing inside of you, and yet here it is, telling you that you can’t stand it. You can’t stand how much Eddie needs you all the time. You give him everything you have and he always needs more.

Just five more minutes, please just give me five more minutes. Don’t leave me, just love me, let me in, let me in Please please please.

It’s not his fault. You tell the violent feeling. He’s depressed. He doesn’t have hobbies anymore…

He doesn’t have anything anymore — it bites back, he just has you.

You shake your head in melancholic defiance of these conflicting feelings.

He needs me. You insist.

He’s using you up. It responds. He’s smothering you.

And you hate the feeling for being right. All he does is take and take and take, and you’re nothing if not a fool for giving him everything he needs and then some. You love Eddie more than anything, more than everything, but if he doesn’t stop taking, there’s not going to be anything left for you… for this—

“—Baby?” Eddie calls faintly, startling you again.

You have to take a moment longer than is probably necessary to calm yourself enough to decide whether or not you can stomach his “company” right now.

“No,” you sigh, “I just wanna wash the day off.”

You imagine the pang of fear lancing through his chest as an invisible box is ticked off: the second sign of trouble.

Locked door. His alarm bells are ringing. Can’t get to you. You’re trapped trapped trapped. Let me in let me in let me in let me –

There is the scratching of the chewed edge of his thumbnail digging into the painted wood, peeling it — probably causing another splinter — and you have to bite your tongue to keep from telling him to stop doing that, because you’re not going to get your security deposit back.

Who cares about security deposits or contraception or personal space, you both almost died, remember? Live a little!

You turn away from the stranger in the mirror and face the door, forcing yourself to sound chipper as you make empty promises about the future to the foreign shell of the person you have to remind yourself you love.

“I’ll be out in a jiffy,” you call unevenly, “…just let me rinse off, okay?”

There is a long moment of disappointed silence before Eddie finally responds.

“...Mm’kay…”

Fading footsteps thrum a gentle beat as you step out of your abused and crinkled jeans. Oddly, you feel like you’ve spent more time out of them today than in them, and that might almost be funny if it weren’t for the circumstances.

There is a moment of peace as you continue undressing, then the rapid thump thump thump of returning steps. A sharp knock summons another one of those long-suffering sighs whooshing up from the deepest recesses of your body.

“What do you need, Eds?” You ask a little too harshly, pinching your eyes toward the bridge of your nose with your forefinger and thumb.

You tell yourself you’re not angry with him, you’re just tired and uncertain and scared of that uncertainty.

“Tweezers.”

Oh. Right.

They’re in the drawer, neatly tucked away and exactly where they belong. Just where you said they’d be.

You crack the door as far as you dare and don’t look at your boyfriend when you take his palm in your hand, despite the holes you can feel him boring into the top of your head.

Don’t shut me out — please – oh, God, please let me in! he begs you with only a few short breaths as you pluck the thick spur of plywood from his hand and douse it in rubbing alcohol for good measure.

Eddie hisses and bends to kiss you on the cheek. You let him do it, then shut the door in his face.

If he didn’t know there was something wrong before, he’s bound to be crawling out of his skin with it now.

You don’t care, and you feel terrible about it as you lean over the tub to pull the pin and turn the water on.

The shower head roars to life, and as it fills the room with noise and steam, you can barely hear yourself think – thank God.

You stand under the stream and let the water run hot on you until it goes cold, and even then you linger and accept the beating it gives you.

Eyes shut, senses dulled, body pinging with goosebumps, you feel your muscles begin to loosen and relax. The outside world goes swirling down the drain, and you finally let your hand creep up to touch your belly. You splay your fingers over the expanse of skin and hold it there, feeling for something, anything, some sign of the life lurking there among your guts. When you don’t feel anything — why would you feel anything when the baby is not even a baby yet — you try your hand at rubbing the spot, back and forth, like you’ve seen people do to their fake pregnant bellies in the movies.

The results are middling beneath pruning fingers and the shower head is pinging ice at you now, stabbing you in the scalp, so you decide with no small amount of disappointment that it’s time to get out.

Just as you expected, Eddie is waiting for you when you flick off the bathroom light and re-emerge into the bedroom/living room/kitchen combo.

You’re almost surprised to find that the room has been more or less straightened. It’s not clean, by any stretch of the word, but trash, clothes, and all manner of discarded knick-knacks have been removed from the floor and stashed in other strategic places. The bedsheets have been tidied in the best approximation Eddie can manage for making a bed, though you can’t say it looks much different than it did before. He couldn’t do it right before he had his guts ripped out, and time and practice has had no effect on that inefficiency.

He’s sitting there on the bed, trying to look casual with his long legs stretched out, ankles crossed, arms crossed, fingers crossed, and you give him a weak smile as you enter, holding your towel and heading for the chest of drawers on your side of the bed. You stop short when you notice the clothes he’s laid out for you: an oversized Houston Oilers t-shirt you’d thrifted for him before he came to stay and a soft pair of shorts – how unbearably sweet.

“Feel better?” He asks hopefully, boyishly, as you step into the shorts.

You nod, and you can’t even call it a lie, because getting the muck of the world out of your skin and hair has made enough of an impact to improve your headspace exponentially.

At least you don’t feel like you’re about to start screaming anymore – Jefferson Starship is happy enough to do that for you, howling to the elusive Jane, still playing that same old game she never can win.

Eddie’s put on the mixtape you made him in the summer of ‘84, which you’re not certain he’s ever heard the end of – if only because he can’t make it through Dancing Queen without saying something snide about ABBA and disco as a whole – but he’s trying to make it better.

You tell yourself that, in spite of everything else, you have to give him credit for that as you slip the t-shirt over your head and walk your towel back to the bathroom.

And if he’s trying, then you’re a fool for not trying too, so you do your best to put a happy look on your face when you reemerge and jerk your thumb over your shoulder.

“Okay, your turn.”

His mouth drops open, but you don’t let him protest.

“Go on – git.” You say, affecting a thick southern drawl to try and lighten the mood.

Eddie just frowns at you.

“If you wanted me to shower you shoulda let me join you,” He grouses.

You stick him to the spot with a pointed look.

“If I’d let you join me, we wouldn’t be getting clean in there, and you know it.” You press, “I mean it, Eds. You smell like a garbage truck. When’s the last time you showered?”

He snorts and does his best to make the jab to his ego look like feigned hurt feelings, but you can see the edges of his mask flickering. Not even near death had been enough to dampen that ego of his.

It’s a bizarre thing to witness what is left of the Eddie from before fighting for real estate with what has grown into the Eddie here and now. If you could capture it in an image, you’d hang it on the wall and call it “the duality of man,”, but that wouldn’t help you to get Eddie into the shower any more than your attempt at gentle coaxing.

You have to resist the urge to offer some sort of trade off, because there are scant few things that motivate Eddie these days that don’t end with you opening your legs for him. And you have to remind yourself, once more for the people in the back, that’s exactly how you wound up in your silly little predicament.

Back when you were in high school and still strangers to one another, there had been a wildly circulated rumor that Eddie would trade weed for head … funny how that has circled back to reflect you and your recent penchant for sexual bargaining chips – if you take a twenty minute shower, I’ll go down on you when you get out.

You don’t wonder how your shitty old friends would react to learning about that development in your behavior, because you rarely ever think about Carol and Tina these days.

You do wonder how you’re going to get Eddie to stop giving you that sulky look while holding your ground.

He needs to shower (on his own), and you need a little more time to yourself.

You hate to press the issue, because it makes you feel too much like his mother – and you cannot even begin to unpack the Oedipal concept of that dynamic – but you absolutely cannot spend another moment pressed against his side and breathing shallowly under a cloying musk of days old body odor.

“I’m fine,” He insists, crossing his arms and still trying to pretend like he isn’t bothered by your indictment of his personal hygiene.

“No, you’re not.” You say, “You have to take better care of yourself. I know you don’t think it’s gonna make any difference, but I promise you it will. You’ll feel better.”

Eddie offers you one of those half hearted smiles, and quirks his brow.

“You always say that.”

“Yeah, so what? I’m always right. Do it for me, okay?”

It takes him a minute more of contemplative pouting, but eventually he relents, because for as soft as you are for him, he’ll do anything for you, even if it means bruising his ego a little.

He slaps his hands on the bed and pushes up in the fading glimmer of a gesture he might have made back in the old days – your heart throbs painfully in your chest as you watch him flicker in and out of frame – then makes a show of stretching his arms high over his head.

You watch as he comes to immediately regret the motion when his bad side hitches and he quickly remembers his limited range of movement.

Eddie pretends like it doesn’t hurt as he makes his way across the room.

“Okay,” he says softly, pausing to kiss you on the cheek as he passes, “But only ‘cause yer so damn purty,”

The affectation of the southern drawl you’d used before sounds much better on Eddie, and you lean fondly in to the press of his lips, not even bothering to be annoyed when he takes a cheeky handful of your backside.

You feel your insides burn with what the touch suggests, and for half a mindless second, you tell yourself that maybe you could stand to follow him in there. Just to help him wash, of course, get the spots he can’t reach… nothing else…

Then, your rationality comes snapping back into place when Eddie strikes you hard on the ass with an open palm.

You yelp in alarm more than pain and jump. Even after every time he has done that before, you never expect him to do it, and your face is burning as you turn to watch him go, disgustingly pleased with himself and snickering.

“Wash your hair,” you call, knowing it will add at least another five minutes to his shower, and your coveted alone time. “And brush your teeth.”

Eddie acknowledges you with a dismissive wave and something grumbled under his breath as he disappears into the bathroom, leaving the door cracked in a stark contrast to the way you’d shut him out when you slipped away into the next and only other room.

Therein lies the ultimate problem of your living situation. You keep trying to build a barrier, brick by brick, because you need your space, but Eddie needs it too, so every brick you put up he takes right back down.

You feel a muted pang of guilt over that which dissipates the moment you hear the shower hiss on. Then, and only then, do you breathe a sigh of relief you didn’t realize you were holding.

Your time begins now.

Because you absolutely cannot abide the state of the bed, even after Eddie’s futile attempts to pull it into shape, you spend the full duration of Jefferson Starship’s regression back into the days of Airplane attempting to wrestle the top sheet into position as Jane fades into White Rabbit.

Then, as the first strummed notes of More than Words begins to play, you brave the tide and pull the blankets over your head, curling in on yourself protectively. In the dark, the wet sloshing of the mattress is so much worse, so much weirder, and you try not to think about how womblike your cocoon suddenly is.

You didn’t want the waterbed. You wanted a normal mattress to try and live your normal lives, but Eddie already wasn’t sleeping because of his nightmares, and you couldn’t stand to see him in any further pain, not when it was because of something you could so easily remedy.

Sure, it was a real kick in the teeth to have to send five hundred dollars you couldn’t afford down the drain on a mattress, but thankfully the retailer would accept an exchange on a product of equal or lesser value (emphasis on lesser) and that’s how you’d gone and found Eddie in some back corner of the store, starfished and riding the surf of the floor model waterbed like a blissed out Goldilocks.

The stuff of your nightmares.

“Babe, it’ll be so cool,” he’d told you when he was trying with everything in his power to convince you to say yes.

He’d spouted some bullshit statistic he’d skimmed in a pamphlet at physical therapy about the benefits of hydrotherapy, and you’d informed him that sleeping on a giant water balloon was not hydrotherapy. But you were just so glad he was getting excited about something, and because mattress shopping is an exercise in twentieth century torture, you took it home for a tentative trial.

Fourteen months later, here you lay, trying to relax, trying to sink into a quiet, thoughtless meditation, but you can’t stop your mind from spinning.

Because you hate this fucking waterbed.

You hate the way it lists back and forth when you climb into it, and when Eddie slinks in after you and startles you awake with the sudden lurch of blaring panic, like stepping off a curb in your dreams.

You hate the leaks it springs, you hate the crinkling duct tape patches that poke you through the sheets when you roll over.

You hate how it holds the cold in the winter and radiates heat in the summer.

But you don’t hate how happy it made Eddie to see it delivered, or how you’d lay awake giggling together that first night. You love the childlike glee you’d shared that night, taking turns bouncing each other on the creaking tide and whispering back and forth like kids having a sleepover.

Of course, that giddy episode of play was the only prelude to what was perhaps the worst night’s sleep you’d ever had, but you’re almost happy to ignore that.

In a turn of events which you pretend not to be shocked by, Eddie’s shower lasts nearly twenty-five minutes. By the time he shuts off the water and re-emerges, scrubbed pink, clean shaven, and reeking of peppermint, you’ve let the gentle rocking of the bed lull you into a sleepy stupor.

“How was it?” you ask, regardless of what you already know.

You don’t ask him how long he actually spent washing and how long he just stood there under the tap (you also don’t ask if he allotted any of that time to jerking off in the distant hope that he’ll be satisfied enough to leave you alone) because the subtle change in his posture is all the evidence you need to know you were right.

Like always.

He looks over at you and smiles that same goofy smile that made you fall in love with him back in high school, and his brows come down.

“Cold.” He says, “You used up all the hot water,”

Oh, whoops. He levels you with a sidelong glance which you imagine is meant to make you feel guilty for not letting him share the hot water with you, but somehow you can’t manage to get around to feeling that way.

He’s clean, that’s all you care about.

You can’t help but stare as he drops his towel in a wet heap and stands comfortably naked, pulling open drawers and looking for a pair of boxers and a clean shirt – wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles…

“Sorry,” you hum, watching with rapt, unblinking attention.

Eddie turns at the sound of your apology, and it takes a moment too long for your gaze to snap up when he comes to face you. You smile innocently, but he’s already smirking at you.

“Are you?” he asks, “...or are you just enjoying the show?”

You tilt your head down to press your shoulder to your ear.

“Maybe,”

He rolls his eyes and steps into the faded blue plaid boxer shorts.

“Maybe, she says – move over, will ya?”

You hold the blankets up for him to slide beneath. Pulling the shirt over his head, he settles in beside you and you sit together in silence, listening to the distant sounds of your mixtape playing as you wait for the bed to stop sloshing.

You know deep down he secretly hates it too, but he’s too proud to admit when he’s wrong, especially after campaigning so hard for it. You don’t care, you’re in this for the long game — you’re gonna make him say it before you do.

You curl your arm around his back and immediately go to work knotting your fingers in the tangles of his hair, tugging gently at the damp baby hairs curling at the nape of his neck and making a mental note to help him comb it out before you fall asleep.

Eddie rests his head atop yours with a contented sigh and you feel the poke of his tongue in his cheek as he swipes it over his teeth.

“So, are you ever gonna tell me about your shitty day?”

“Who said I had a shitty day?” You ask.

He breathes an easy chuckle out through his nose and you hear it rattle all the way down in his lungs.

“You and that attitude of yours,”

Before you can say anything in defense of your self, the next track begins to play, bringing with it the iconic intro to Dancing Queen. And because Eddie cannot abide ABBA, he is on his feet in an instant.

The prelude to a great disappointment begins to well in your chest, because unlike Eddie, you do in fact remember being young and sweet, only seventeen, and you cherish those days – the earliest days of your entanglement with the town pariah, before you’d finished dancing around each other.

“Eddie don’t–” You whine, but he’s already thumping across the room to the stereo sitting precariously balanced in your rickety bookcase.

When he reaches the unit, he makes the executive decision that you can neither dance nor jive, and you will not be having the time of your life. He begins agitatedly punching buttons, and the song cuts out.

The track skips, and the next thing you know, your blood is thrumming along to the beat of a crunchy baseline, and Steve Perry is crooning you make me weak, and wanna die… and you know exactly what is coming next.

The main event. The lovin’, the touchin’, the squeezin’... your insides squirm with an unhelpful reminder of your deep dark secret, and you muster every shred of self control you have.

You will not be having sex tonight, no matter how good Eddie looks naked, no matter what he does to try and sway you, and no matter how much Steve Perry insists he’s tearin’ you apart…

You cross your arms and breathe out hard through your nose with wavering determination as Eddie turns back to you, once again disgustingly pleased with himself.

“That’s better,” He says, crossing back to the bed in two long-legged strides and throwing himself down beside you.

The mattress jumps and rolls, and your muscles tense as you do everything you can to stay upright and sulking.

“Why do you hate fun?” you ask as Eddie crawls over top of you on his hands and knees.

“Hate fun?” he echoes, like he cannot believe you would accuse him of such a thing.

“You know I love that song.”

“Yeah, but, Sweetheart, this is a great song! It’s the best song on the list,”

Never mind the fact that he skipped three tracks to get there. You set your teeth and try not to take offense to his criticism of your taste in music because you’ve long since agreed to disagree.

“This is a sex song.” You correct, resisting the asking fingers he’s begun to drum along your tightly crossed arms.

When you fail to open up for him, Eddie rolls his head to the side and looks up at you through his lashes in that very specific way he knows drives you just a little bit crazy.

“It’s your tape, Babygirl,” he says evenly, “I’m just a humble disc jockey.”

You snort out your displeasure with the statement, but you can’t deny it. Because you had indeed hidden Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ among the tracks on your Summer Fling mixtape back in the summer of ‘84 in the raunchy little hope that it would inspire Eddie to do just that to you, and you know that he knows that as well as you do.

So, whose fault is it really when he slips his hands up under your shirt and starts kissing your neck?

You curse yourself for being so unbearably hot for him back in the day, and for the way that, after two long years, nothing has changed.

“Can I make a request?”

He hums out an easy laugh.

“Nope, sorry. We’re only playing mood music for the rest of the night.” Eddie says, and you tilt your head dutifully back when he nudges your jawline with his nose, “Unless you were gonna ask for Dio, ‘cause you always gotta remember to leave room for Ronnie–”

“If you try to put on Holy Diver again I’m leaving.”

He giggles then – actually giggles – and this time when he kisses you, you feel the press of his tongue on your throbbing pulse point.

You tell yourself this is as far as you’re going to go. You can stand to let him suck a bruise into your neck if that’s what it takes to make him happy but you’re not going to have sex, even if you’re suddenly squirming beneath him to alleviate the thrumming between your thighs.

With everything you still have to talk about, you can’t afford to let Eddie distract you like that.

Of course, you already know what he’s going to say, the question he’ll ask you — what do you want to do?

You don’t want him to ask you that. You want him to tell you what to do. You want him to have all the answers and put your mind at ease because you’ve been driving yourself crazy asking yourself that question all goddamn day.

What do you want to do? What are you going to do? How far are you willing to let this go?

Are you prepared to go all the way with Eddie Munson? You’d asked yourself that once in a situation not so dissimilar to the one you currently find yourself in.

Of course, that time had been significant, because it had been the first time, and even now you remember that cold November afternoon so vividly. You should have been in school, but instead, you were parked outside a record store an hour outside of Hawkins, laying in the back of a van beneath the boy you so desperately loved and letting him send you to pieces with a kiss.

It wasn’t a chaste, pretty kiss like you see in the movies — at least no decent kind of movie — it was a heavy, dirty thing, with tongue and teeth and gasping breath. He held your hands pinned above your head, and you lay there rutting up against him in desperate search of something that only your animal brain could explain.

The natural progression of things, the way of the world and of girls and boys since time immemorial.

You might have briefly entertained the thought of having his baby back then, in the murky heat of the moment. In hindsight, you’re fairly certain that was just latent Darwinism reminding you that you are a mammal and that your only true purpose on this Earth is to breed – so breed, Baby.

And then your rational human mind prevailed, and asked you that terrible question: are you ready for this?

You’d thought you’d been scared of what the question meant then, but the virginal fear of the thing lurking between a boy’s legs — between your legs back then, prodding you through Eddie’s jeans and asking for a respectful permission you could not help but deny — holds no candle to the uncertain, impending future, which you no longer bother planning for.

Pledging your undying love as a horny teen fresh out of a very close brush with death is one thing, but tethering yourself to something and someone indefinitely?

Are you ready to commit to that with Eddie Munson?

Are you prepared to love him and take care of him on good days and bad, no matter what? Through night terrors and fugue episodes and days and days and so many hard days of wishing he would just snap out of it and come back to his old self?

Are you prepared to have his baby?

“Ground control to Major Tom.” Eddie calls distantly, and you feel a gentle tapping at the center of your forehead, “Can you hear me, Major Tom?”

He guides you gently from the mire of your existential thoughts and fears, and you blink back at him as he waits expectantly for an answer to whatever it was he’d just said.

“Hmm? Oh — sorry, Eds,” you say absently, reaching up to cup his cheek in your hand, “What were you saying?”

He glares at you, but the effect is ruined by the shy twitch of his lips, quirking at the corners despite his best efforts to play mad at you. He’s still on his hands and knees, a mere inch of distance between your noses as he glowers at you in mock offense — how dare you not be fully engaged in the first steps of this stunning foreplay.

Oh please, as if you don’t do this every goddamn night.

“Only that I need you so bad right now,” he says, “But it’s not so easy getting that message to Mars. I guess NASA’s not really in the business of passing love notes.”

You scoff and roll your eyes, hooking a finger in the collar of his t-shirt. The lingering effects of the shower waft up in a puff of clean air when you release the fabric, and even through the haze of shampoo and toothpaste, you can smell the bitter undertone of all the cigarettes he smoked today.

“You need me so bad every night.” You remind him.

He grins and you feel his teeth when he tips forward.

“Can’t help it.” Eddie says against your lips, attempting to resume the stilted progress of his foreplay by ducking his head to press a less than chaste kiss to the space beneath your ear — flicking tongue, scrape of teeth – his voice reverberates against the drum and you shiver, “It’s Kafkaesque.”

You snort and wonder as he snakes his hands up under your shirt and takes your breasts in hand if that was meant to impress you.

“Pavlovian.”

“What’s that, Sweet Girl?” He asks, changing direction without missing a beat.

Eddie rocks back on the balls of his feet, and lifts your thighs over his, pulling you down the mattress a tick – your head thumps against the headboard. Ouch.

He helps you sit up straight with an apologetic hand, boring holes into you with those big dark eyes – pretty eyes.

Hungry eyes Eric Carmen might have told you, were you listening to the radio and not Journey’s endless waning call of “nah nah nah-nah nah,”.

“You mean Pavlovian,” you tell him, bracing your hands on his shoulders when he hugs you by the waist and pulls you into his lap.

“How do you know what I mean?” he asks as you settle into this new position.

You drum your fingers along his collarbones and tilt your head, smiling coquettishly as you innocently prepare to bore him to death.

“Because Pavlov trained dogs to drool at the sound of a bell by ringing one every time he fed them,” you say, “and Kafkaesque suggests that you’re trapped in an authoritarian situation that you can’t escape, so I don’t think that really applies … unless you’re trying to tell me something about our relationship.”

Eddie hums out a low, performative moan, deep from the back of his throat. It’s not so performative a sound, however, that you can’t feel the hard length of something prodding into the crook of your thigh.

“I love it when you talk dirty,” he says, baring his teeth at you in a wolfish grin that looks almost like something the old Eddie would have done.

Eddie before the trauma and surgeries and blood transfusion on blood transfusion on blood transfusion.

You roll your eyes and trail your fingers down down down his abdomen until you’ve reached the less-than-subtle tent in his threadbare boxers. He draws in a sharp intake of breath when you skim your fingers over the tip of his bulge before taking an immodest palmful of his dick.

Once upon a time you would have wilted at the thought of doing something like that, but time and practice and the way Eddie’s eyes slide shut as he nods his encouragement has turned a gesture like that into something as casual as late night television.

He rolls his hips forward and you already feel a bead of heady wetness blooming in the fabric of his boxers when you swipe a cheeky thumb over his tip.

His breath hitches, and Eddie has to clear his throat to keep his voice steady as you begin to work him in your fist.

“Go on,” He says, and you’re nothing if not happy to oblige.

“You … getting a hard-on …every night at bedtime… is Pavlovian…” You say, stroking him in a measured up and down.

Big smile, front teeth poking out, cheeks indenting with an elusive dimple, Eddie shakes his head, pulling you forward to press bodily against him, and sandwiching your hand indecently between you. He doesn’t stop moving his hips.

“You’re so smart,” he rasps, and you detect the faintest hint of a quaver in his voice when you make a ring with your index finger and thumb, encircling the broad flare of him through the fabric and squeezing.

His mouth falls open on a heavy breath, and you close it right back up with a finger on his chin.

Still moving in short lazy thrusts, he sighs against you and kisses the line of your jaw, teasing your head back once more with a gentle nudge and exposing the taught columns of your throat to him.

“It’s so fucking sexy.”

You fail to suppress a snort and are almost shocked when it doesn’t immediately kill the mood.

“Is it really that sexy or are you just horny?”

“Who says it can’t be both?” Eddie says, “You’re smart and sexy… and I’m super fucking hot for you right now,”

And because he absolutely cannot help himself when he is reminded of even the faintest hint of a song, suddenly he’s singing under his breath.

“—hot-blooded, check it and see—” Eddie’s Foreigner impression plays against the waning backdrop of Journey turning over to Pat Benatar, insisting We Belong from the competing stereo.

It’s entirely too much, and you burst into a fit of undainty laughter.

“Don’t laugh, this is important.” He says, grinning, “— I got a fever of a hundred and three,”

When you don’t stop, Eddie kisses you, and even under the seal of his lips, you can’t manage to stifle your giggling.

Of course, now you remember why it’s more fun to fool around and have sex every night than it is to be sensible adults who keep their hands to themselves. Because that’s how you get the old Eddie back – fun Eddie – the one who made you lose your mind and fall in love with him that first Tuesday night at the Hideout a hundred Tuesdays ago.

Even then, you’d loved him so bad you could have screamed. And you did scream, you recall. You’d screamed yourself hoarse even as Corroded Coffin got booed off stage because you were their biggest fan – their words, not yours – even if their name was stupid and made you giggle behind their backs.

So what if you only ever see that version of Eddie anymore when you’ve got his cock in your fist? As if to punctuate the thought, he stammers over the next lyric and gasps out a breathy moan when you give him three quick jerks.

He laughs.

“Naughty,”

You giggle along and part his lips with a cheeky swipe of your tongue, happily swallowing every little sound he makes under your touch and feeling your insides begin to quiver in turn.

You’ll keep jerking him off because it’s fun to watch him steadily go to pieces, but you’re not having sex tonight – so, why do you have to keep reminding yourself of that?

“Babe,” Eddie says, lips clicking wetly as you part, “It’s not funny, it’s a serious medical condition – you don’t have to read my mind, to know what’s on my mind – Man, those lyrics are stunning.”

“Sheer poetry.” You say, nodding and his eyes light up.

“Right? Guy’s an artist,”

You’re still giggling when you feel the scrape of Eddie’s teeth along the tender veins lining your neck, pinching just a little too sharply on your jugular.

It sends a bolt of adrenaline shooting down like sparks to sting the tips of your fingers and toes, and suddenly it’s not nearly as funny or sexy as it was a moment ago.

You gasp. Fight or flight kicks in — you freeze.

Your heart hammers in your chest, your hearing whites out, – your hands are trembling as you struggle to unwind the soiled bandage tied tight around your broken fingers. You press it to the ugly wound in Eddie’s throat, spurting blood as he tries and fails to breathe through it – he coughs and gasps against the pain it causes him and chokes on your name in a way that makes you never want to hear him say it again… help me, it pleads, don’t let me die, make it stop…

You breathe out harshly and shake your head against the intrusive image of blood turned nearly black in the dark of that place. Your hands come up to brace firmly against Eddie’s shoulders, fingers trembling as you dig them into the muscle there, and you shove him without really meaning to.

“Stop—” You gasp.

It’s okay, you’re okay, You tell yourself, the same way you tell Eddie every night he thrashes awake in a blinding terror, You’re here. You’re safe, you’re home — just breathe.

“Sorry—” He says immediately, “Too much?”

But you can barely hear him over the roaring in your ears.

You focus on what you can see — the walls of your shared bedroom/dining room/living room, all your collective things illuminated in the amber glow of the flickering table lamp sitting across the room.

And you focus on Eddie, drying curls backlit and flyaway, framing his face — his handsome face — not spattered in blood and twisted in agony, but freshly scrubbed and tweaked in alarm and a less than subtle hint of concern.

You’re okay, but more importantly, he’s okay, he’s here with you, and nothing bad can happen when you’re together — but you’d been together while he lay there bleeding to death, hadn’t you?

“Are you okay?” he asks, all traces of teasing gone from his tone.

It’s amazing how quickly he can shut it off when the mood shifts. Your sweet boy.

“I’m okay,”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” you say, “I just — I didn’t expect you to do that.”

It’s bizarre that the motion triggered you like that, especially since you’re not the one who had your throat cut down there.

Down there.

“...do you wanna stop?”

You fight to suppress a shiver and the urge to immediately agree – yes, you should stop, especially since you have no intention of letting this go any further than heavy petting, but you don’t want to be a killjoy.

You shake your head to try and disperse any lingering memory of that night – that eternal night – and absently pet the side of your paramour’s face.

“No,” You say, “No, we don’t have to stop.” But you’re painfully aware of the lack of enthusiasm in your tone.

Eddie’s brows furrow over his eyes, and you can tell he doesn’t believe you, so you tilt forward to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“Let’s keep going,” you say.

You kiss him, attempting to rekindle what has already begun to die out, and when he doesn’t reciprocate, when you try to kiss him again and he leans back, you feel your insides seize with disappointment.

“I’m fine, Eddie,” you say, and he pulls a face.

“Liar,”

“I am. I promise.”

You watch disbelief shadow his face and the muscle in his jaw flex. You can tell he’s getting impatient, not for the starting and stopping, but because he knows you’re not telling him something.

Isn’t that the understatement of the century?

After a moment, Eddie drops his head and sighs your name dejectedly, you try not to flinch or hear it forced out on a burbling bloody timber begging you to make it stop. He slumps onto his hip beside you and he walks two cheeky fingers up the length of your thigh before resting a hand at the top and giving you a gentle squeeze.

“—we don’t have to do this.” He says, “We can just go to bed.”

You wish that were true.

You rock back into the pillows and force yourself to smile, feeling your cheeks pull as your insides go tight and twisty.

Sure, you could just go to bed with a chaste kiss and a “see you in the morning,” and wake up in a few hours to find Eddie on his third cup of coffee, watching late-night television and chain smoking. Or, and far more likely, you can wake up to him thrashing and screaming beside you through the endless circadian reruns of his death and spend the rest of the night trying to calm him down.

No actually, you can’t just go to bed. You have to do something to help him relax, so that he’s too tired to do anything but sleep through the night.

And the best way to do that, you have found, is to get him off. As it turns out you can only therapy fuck your boyfriend for so long – approximately fourteen months – before it starts to have consequences, like unplanned pregnancies and his being unable to sleep without you getting him off first.

Your hesitation to answer speaks volumes, and Eddie finally shakes his head.

“Let’s just go to bed,”

“No,” you press, pawing at the front of his shirt and hating how whiny you sound as you say it, “I want to keep going.”

“Don’t just say that because you think it’s what I want to hear,” he says a little too harshly.

“I’m not.”

“You have to tell me if something’s wrong, Sweetheart. I’m not a mind reader, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”

It’s startling to hear, like the clanging of a bell. He knows something is up, and while he may not know what it is, Eddie’s not nearly as stupid as he pretends to be, and you’re a bad liar.

So, quit beating around the bush and tell him already.

You don’t know why, but you’re committed to denying it now, so you wire your jaw shut and shake your head.

“I’m fine, you just startled me. I didn’t expect you to do that,”

Eddie gives you that hard look again, and you do your best not to wilt under it.

“And…?”

“…And I’m–” Pregnant. “– a little tired…” Pussy. “…and my head hurts.” Stupid.

Oldest cliché in the book — not tonight honey, I have a headache.

When he still doesn’t let up, you throw your hands up in a lopsided shrug and catch his face to bracket on the way down, as if that’s going to do anything to soften the blow of rejection you’re trying so desperately to avoid.

Suddenly, it feels a lot like you’re the one about to receive it, and you hate how desperate that makes you feel. What are you fighting so hard for? You’re not having sex tonight, remember?

“I found out I have to go in on Saturday to do inventory,” you fib, pulling your shoulders up and fully committing to the bullshit subterfuge, “That’s why I’ve been cranky… sorry, I should have just told you.”

And then, Eddie’s shoulders drop and he relaxes under the blissful satisfaction of the truth. It makes you feel grimy,

“Ah-ha,” he says, “Melvald’s workin’ you to the bone, huh?”

You nod.

“One box of Kotex at a time.” More like one box of neatly packaged pregnancy tests — results in ten minutes or less!

Eddie's features soften, and he dips his head to brush his lips across the slope of your shoulder.

“My Baby’s just tired, huh?” He hums against you, “Poor Baby...”

You suppress a flinch and silently wish he would stop saying things like that.

“Yeah.” You say dejectedly, “Anyway, there you go. My shitty boring day. Stocking shelves, live in technicolor,”

Eddie hums thoughtfully and you watch as he begins a steady descent down your body.

“That’s hot. Think we could get it on pay-per-view?”

You push up on your elbows just as he slides down to come face-to-face with your midriff, and you clear your throat.

“Where do you think you’re going?” You say, as he slips a cheeky finger beneath the band of your shorts.

He pauses to give you a sly look.

“Down unda,” Eddie says, grinning and effecting a thick Australian accent.

Oh no, absolutely not. Jerking him off is one thing, but if you let him go down on you, it’ll be a one-way ticket to Stupidtown, and you’ll absolutely end up letting him fuck you.

You’re determined not to let that happen, so you pull your knees up and cross your ankles over his back, squeezing tightly. Eddie makes a put-out sound when you cage him in and he finds he can go no further.

“You got a passport, Crocodile Dundee?” You deadpan, quirking an unimpressed brow.

“Jeez, can’t a guy worship at his altar in peace?” he says, trying to wriggle free and butter you up in the same breath, “The goddess? My inspiration?”

You roll your eyes but you don’t let him go when he begins to squirm in earnest.

It is an effort in futility.

Back in the day, you spent many an afternoon sitting around the trailer watching professional wrestling, and those sessions typically ended with you in a headlock after boldly claiming you could beat Eddie in a fight. To his credit, he always at least let you try before flipping you ass over tea kettle and holding you pinned to the carpet until you said “uncle”. In those days, you never stood a chance, but that was then, and unlike Eddie, you actually bothered to go to your physical therapy sessions and still have full functional use of your body.

You’re not trying to hurt him, so you aren’t putting nearly enough pressure on his ribs to really hold him, but he’s out of breath before you’ve even broken a sweat.

“Release me, Foul Temptress.” He demands, struggling against you and the vice you have on him.

You cross your arms and make a show of leisurely checking your nails.

“Say uncle.” You say innocently.

“You’re evil,”

“No, I’m winning.”

When he stops moving long enough to glare back at you, you push out your lower lip in a feigned pout.

“Had enough yet?”

You watch the muscles in Eddie’s jaw flex as he contemplates all the biting retorts he could possibly hit you with before evidently decides against retaliation.

He sighs and goes slack against you, forehead dropping to knock against your belly, and you once again have to resist the sudden and bizarre urge to tell him to be careful.

He doesn’t know, how could he know when you haven’t told him yet?

Of course, it’s only lost in this brief but looming thought that you momentarily let your guard down, and Eddie finds his ace in the hole.

He presses his nose to the tender softness of your belly and makes a gentle, needy sound, and your thighs involuntarily tremble.

You unhook your ankles and let your feet drop to the bed on either side of his hips with two solid thumps that sends you rocking back and forth on a sloshing tide.

You don’t know when he started to work your T-shirt up, but suddenly your flesh is exposed to him and those damn lips.

He doesn’t kiss you, so much as part his lips and breathe out, a long, quivering breath that has your throat closing up and your knees edging open far enough to let him drop and lay with his stomach pressed flat to your pubic bone.

“I just wanna be good to you,” he says, muffled against your stomach, searching hands skittering up up up over your thighs and into the open legs of your shorts to grace the supple curve of your hip. “Wish I had something nice to say … to make it all better…”

He brushes his lips over the spot just beneath your navel and you feel something flutter there.

You can’t be sure if it’s just the phantom sensation of your secret crying out to be known, or the way you’ve noticed how he’s begun rocking his hips into the mattress. He still has a hard on, after all, and he knows how much you like to watch him get himself off like that. It causes your breath to hitch in your throat, but you manage catch Eddie’s hands before he can get your shorts off.

Under the looming threat of complete and total mental blackout, you muster your courage, and try once more to pick up where you left off.

“I – I have something to tell you … actually,” you say tentatively, worrying your lower lip and trying not to get caught on the slow, purposeful canting of his hips.

It piques his interest enough to stir him from where he’s tucked himself between your legs and turn curious eyes up at you, blown dark with needy expectation.

“Oh, yeah?” His voice is a deep and husky rasp that sends a bolt of want like lightning down to the thrumming apex of your thighs. “Something nice?”

You swallow hard and, despite your subtle hesitation, lift your hips off the mattress to assist him this time as he slides your shorts down and discards them over his shoulder.

They land softly over top of the lamp, plunging you into a sudden and deeply muted semi-darkness – mood lighting, something inside you suggests and you have to force yourself to watch Eddie work to keep from rolling your eyes.

You’re not going to have sex with him… but that doesn’t mean you’re not just a little curious to see what he has in mind.

You know exactly what he has in mind, Stupid.

You forgot to make him eat dinner so now he’s just going to have to make due.

“I don’t know if it’s necessarily nice, but it’s something.” You breathe, watching transfixed as he eases your knees open as far as they will go, exposing the thin, damp fabric of your panties to the air.

He hums, a gentle rumble in the hollow of his throat that sends goosebumps flash freezing across your arms and legs when it catches on the end.

Distantly, you see his hips jump as he catches on a fold in the sheets, and you throb in wanting commiseration.

“… good or bad?” He rasps, punching a breath out from your already flattening lungs as he skims the junction of at the crook of your thigh with the tip of his nose and moves lower … lower.

“Oh… good.” You say, voice an embarrassing octave higher than normal, “It’s good… hhmmaybe. I...uh... I-I haven’t decided yet.”

Teeth in the elastic of your panties, a sharp tug pulls his lower lip down before it snaps back into place, and he groans.

You fail to suppress a shiver as Eddie eases your legs up over his shoulders, still working his hips against the mattress at an agonizing pace. Suddenly all you want is to be the bed, laying beneath him as he rocks steadily into you, using you to chase his release, just like he does most nights.

It briefly occurs to you that if you’re having that thought, it means you’re steadily approaching the point of no return. If you had any sense at all, you’d pump the breaks while you still can, but then you can feel the smooth plane of his face nuzzling the flesh of your inner thigh. You feel the press of his lips, and your tongue goes fat and useless in your mouth. Under the gentle prelude to the way he begins to press slow, reverent kisses along the expanse of your scar, you forget how to breathe, let alone do something so pointless as speak.

The scar is the only physical thing you carry from that day you slipped through to the other side of the world. It’s a jagged, ugly thing that extends from your knee to your bikini line because while the initial wound had been expansive, the surgeon who attended to you that night last spring knew fuck all about fuck all and somehow managed to make it worse. You’re lucky, because most of your trauma is invisible, but you shouldn’t be thinking about that right now, you should be thinking about something normal, something sexy as Eddie continues with those soft, open-mouthed kisses, leaving cooling wet crescents over the length of the raised puckered skin, higher, higher…

And what’s sexy about scars and surgeons and the lingering evidence of eighty-four stitches?

Nothing, absolutely nothing, but it doesn’t stop you from reaching down to hook your fingers in the fabric of his t-shirt. You tug and pinch and gather material until you’ve made a little progress, trying to undress him while he’s busy grinding his cock into the bed, but you’re having a hard time getting it done from this angle.

Thankfully, the reverence of your touch does not go unnoticed — Eddie ceases his ministrations to push up on his knees and help you. Flushed and sweating, he reaches back and takes a fist full of the fabric, pulling the shirt over his head and discarding it in one swift movement.

And then, just like that, you can see all the punishment he took trying to save you, down there on the wrong side of the world. All his scars and the evidence of just how close you came to losing him. Your heart thumps solidly against your ribs – yours is ugly, but his are worse, and you don’t think you’ll ever get used to seeing what those nasty little fuckers did to him. You keep that strictly to yourself, however, because Eddie already hates the way he looks bad enough without the burden of your opinion. He doesn’t need to know how they make you feel.

You reach for him, suddenly desperate to touch him, and he takes you by the hand. He holds you firmly in his smoldering, blackened gaze, and you watch as he presses your index and middle fingers together. Then, he slides the compressed digits into the dark wet heat of his mouth and sucks on them until you’re flushed so hot your face has started to burn.

On the surface of your brain, the feeling of his tongue slipping up between your fingers, edging them open and flicking at the soft nook of flesh at the valley of their connection is unbearably gross, but that message doesn’t seem to make it down to the places where it matters. Nobody tells your animal brain that it isn’t the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Your fingers go sliding out with a sickly wet slurp, and you shiver.

“Save these for me,” he says, “For later,”

Later? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What’s going to happen later? You find, as he slides down the length of your body, that you don’t actually care.

What happens in an hour or ten minutes (or less) is none of your goddamn concern when Eddie is busy parting your legs in a mirror image of the way he’d just parted your fingers.

You find you don’t have the capacity to wonder any further than that when he slips back down to prop your legs over your shoulders and hook his fingers in the dampened gusset of your panties. You breathe out a long, wanton noise that something in the back of your mind tells you is whorish when you feel the first puff of air fanning your bare pussy.

That damning something in the back of your mind suggests you should be embarrassed about that, but you can’t manage to feel anything but heated as he eases your underwear down your legs and banishes them to some far corner of the apartment.

Eddie kisses the nook at the highest point of your thigh, directly to the right of where he’s begun to trace the faintest ghost of a touch over your entrance, and suddenly all you can hear is your own heart pounding in your ears. He applies a whisper of pressure and dips into you up to the first knuckle, and you lay there, barely able to take it, wringing the sheets in your fists, telling yourself that at any moment cooler heads will prevail and you’ll put a stop to this.

Stupidtown looms on the horizon, and he’s barely even touched you.

Then, on top of everything he’s doing to you, Eddie has the audacity to try and get you talking again.

“You were saying?… ‘something good, maybe’ … but…?” he says, stretching the word lyrically in a way you haven’t heard him do in a long, long time.

You don’t get the chance to revel in that before the question is followed by the sharp pinch of flesh between teeth as he bites you, just beneath your scar. Hard enough to bruise, but not enough to break the skin. You yelp and jump against him, but he holds you firmly to the spot so you can’t escape, then he soothes the offended flesh with the wide flat press of his tongue before sucking it in past his lips – it burns, and you can’t stand how much you like it.

“Hey, g-go easy with that, will you?” You try to tell him, “Easy…” but then he uses two fingers to spread your pussy open wide, exposing you to the air.

You trail off into a long, high whine, which turns sharp and loud when he flicks the blunt edge of his nail over your painfully neglected clit. The bundle of nerves screams, and your hips buck up hard enough to break the seal of the bruise he’d been busy sucking into your thigh.

When he presses his thumb flat to that howling little bitch, you blow right past the point of no return.

“Oh, fuck! – Eddie!” you gasp, and when he smiles you can feel his teeth as he gives you one last gentle nip for good measure.

“Ask me nicely,” He growls, and you lose your goddamn mind.

Never mind all of your bullshit principles. Never mind tests or little pink lines and blue tabs and green plus signs – you need him to fuck you, and you need him to do it now.

“Please,” you cry, “Please, please, please–”

“Good girl,”

#cruel summer fic #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson stranger things #eddie munson #eddie munson fanfic #joseph quinn eddie munson #tumblr really told me to fuck myself with this one didn't it?#well part two is going up anyway and it is ENTIRELY filthy smut so you're welcome i guess

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sh4wty18 · 4 months

Text

tiktok pt. 2

some of y'all have def been waiting for this one! read pt. 1 here

pairing: jake webber x reader

summary: the aftermath of hard-launching your relationship with jake through a tiktok.

cw: fluff, a little angsty, language

word count: 984 + edited

---

It’s been a couple hours since you posted the tiktok, and you’ve been petrified to check your notifications. You even kept your phone across the room from where you and Jake lie, cuddled up together in his bed. He is the big spoon, (of course), and wrapping his bicep around your tummy, pulling you in tight against his body. You fit perfectly there. Like the shape of his body was created specifically to hold yours. His head is buried into the nape of your neck, and he kisses it gently, letting you know he’s woken up from your nap.

“Good morning, princess,” he whispers through a sleepy smile. Your fingers interlace with the hand he had resting on your stomach, and you turn your head to greet him. Your lips brush against his, and you whisper “good afternoon, sweet boy” before planting your lips firmly on his.

You stare across the bed where your phone sits on the opposite side of the nightstand. Jake must notice this, because the next words out of his mouth are, “Have you checked yet?”

“No… Jake, I'm really nervous. What if they hate me? What if they’re mean and say… awful things about me… about us? I don’t know if I can do this. I’m not ready for this type of judgment!”

Jake cuts you off with a kiss, effectively halting your anxiety in its tracks– a trick he had discovered months ago. “Baby, you are the most beautiful, caring, funny, and ambitious girl I know. Not to mention you’re hot as fuck! If people don’t like us together, or don’t like you, that is one-hundred percent nothing to do with you, and everything to do with them. I’m basically the luckiest guy on the planet to even get to be with you. Plus, if people say shit to you, I’ll just yell at them on stream. They’ll know to shut the fuck up. People are gonna say shit regardless, it’s always gonna be impossible to make everyone happy. But I love you, no matter what.”

“Thanks Jakey, I love you too. You’re the best to me. What did I ever do to deserve you?”

Jake kisses your neck again, and pulls your body closer to his own, “I could ask you the same thing,” he breathes into your ear, and you feel yourself blushing. “You wanna grab your phone now, baby? We can look together.”

“I’d like that,” you pull away from him gently, and he releases his grasp on your waist, allowing you to crawl across the bed and grab your phone on the nightstand.

Jake rolls onto his back and props himself up on his pillow a bit, saving room for you to crawl back into his arms. He relaxes his arm over your shoulders and pulls you into him, so you’re propped up as well and leaning on his shoulder. You open the tiktok app to discover millions of views on your recent post. It has surpassed 2 million views, 567k likes, as well as tens of thousands of comments. You click on the comments, the top one being from Johnnie:

johnnieguilbertreal: wait you guys are dating??

He was obviously joking, and people seemed to catch on. Some even liked the fact that you were friends with Johnnie. You scanned some of the other top comments:

user1: omgggg they look so in love🥺

user2: the way he looks at her??? ok i totally believe him and tara are done forever now

user3: and if you look closely you can see me laying on the highway!

user4: noooo tara is way prettier. this better not be real😭

user5: please tell us this isnt real @/jakewebber9

This was pretty much how most of the comment section looked. There was a lot of support and love for both you and Jake, but there was also a lot of hate. You immediately turned off your phone. “I don’t wanna look anymore,” you say, tears welling in your eyes.

“Oh, baby,” Jake says sadly. He’s used to this. He’s been on the internet for years, and knows what it’s like. But you haven’t, and he knows this. “I don’t even know what to say, I hate seeing you like this. I’m starting to wish we never even posted the video. I’m so proud of you and us, that I just thought everyone would see what I see in you. I forget what a shitty place the internet is. This is all my fault.”

“No it isn’t,” you respond. “I’m so proud to be your girlfriend, and I wanted to post it. I’m still glad we did… It’s just hard to have so many people hate me. They don’t even know me.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you, princess?” he asks, he genuinely wants to help, but doesn’t know how.

“Just… be here with me?” you ask.

“Of course. I’ll always be here with you.” he slides back down to lay on his back, and pulls you on top of him, fully embracing you.

You wrap your legs around his sides, and reciprocate the embrace around his arms, laying your head against his chest. His heart beats softly in your ear, calming you. Your breaths steady, in and out, and eventually you lean up to face Jake, who peppers kisses all over your face.

He pulls away to study you with a curious look in his eye, “God, you’re so beautiful. Sometimes I look at your face, and I know. I just know there’s no fucking way I’ll ever love another person the way I love you.”

Your eyes well up again, this time from a feeling of pure and overwhelming joy, not sadness. “I love you so much,” you whisper.

You press your lips to his, and it is as if pieces of your souls are being transferred to one another. You will always be tethered.

---

i hope you all enjoyed! likes and reblogs are always appreciated <3

#sh4wty18 #original one shot #one shot #original fiction #fluff #fluffy one shot #jake webber #jake webber x reader #jake webber x you #jake webber fic #jake webber fluff #jake webber fanfic

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catcze · 1 year

Note

i know we don't know much about wriothesley but

con man reader x wriothesley tho

MANNNN that would be, like, one of the most satisfying slow burn enemies/rivals to lovers with Wriothesley ever HAHAH

(I,,,,, got so carried away with this. So very very carried away with this oh my god.)

Like imagine the reader being a con artist, but in a robin-hood esque kind? Like, they scam a lot of the corrupt nobles and the residents of the higher-end of the city that wouldn't even feel a few hundred thousands of mora leaving their pocket, all for them to use it to support the residents of Fontaine that the rich don't often bat an eye at.

And the reader is good at sneaking around and being a criminal (being an antihero, you would argue) but the authorities of Fontaine are also good at their job, and you've been caught once. For your first transgression, you had been sent to the Fortress of Meropide for just a few months. Then, Wriothesley didn't think much of you. You were just a convict under his care for a bit. Attractive, maybe, and perhaps the first time he saw you he couldn't help but think that you're his type. In your time in the fortress, you even converse with him a little bit, and he learns about you and your motivations and who you really are. He won't lie and say that he doesn't enjoy talking to you, or that he won't miss the way you both easily fall into conversation like puzzle pieces. But for your own sake, he hoped that he wouldn't see you in this prison ever again.

But then, when your time is up and you're let out back into society, it isn't even three weeks before news reaches his ears about your newest scam, and how the guards are on the hunt for you once again. When he hears the news, his hand is already reaching up to cover his eyes and massage his temples. He sighs, deep and frustrated at your antics because what the fuck.

You're caught sooner than later, and once more toted back to the Fortress of Meropide, and Wriothesley is there to chew you out for being an idiot and landing yourself back there again, this time with a much longer sentence.

("Oh, don't be so mean to me, Wriothesley. You're going to make me think you're not happy to see me!"

"Well I'm certainly not happy to see you practically on my doorstep in handcuffs. Again." )

But to his utter bewilderment, you somehow manage to escape the fortress. He doesn't know how the hell you did it, and no investigation that anyone tried to do over the coming weeks turned up any signs to how you did it. It's like you just upped and vanished out of the Fortress one day. You even managed to snag your weapon and your vision from their storage room on your way out! If he wasn't so flabbergasted that you pulled it off, Wriothesley might have actually been impressed.

You con more people, you continue to rob from the rich to give to the poor, and Wriothesley reads all about it in the paper. Then you're caught just like before, and Wriothesley is once again receiving you at the entrance of the fortress, though he can't help but think that you look much too happy with yourself to be there.

("Should I be expecting an escape attempt from you anytime soon?"

"I only just got here and you're already planning for my leave? Looks like you missed me much less than I missed you."

"Just–" He sighs. "Can you not escape again? I'm not exactly looking forward to greeting you a fourth time, you know."

"No promises, warden!")

No promises, indeed. You escape a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh. Each time, you do it without leaving a trace and without much fuss. You're just there one day and gone the next. No surveillance or maximum security measures hinders you at all.

Each time you come back, a wide grin on your face, calling out your greeting to him before he can even begin to scold you. Each time you're back, you have new stories to tell him of the things you'd done in your freedom (in-between gathering funds for those under your care, of course.) You tell him of travelling to Liyue and sampling their food. Of going to Mondstadt and learning of their culture. You're even gone to Snezhenaya, and felt the chilly air freeze you to your very bones.

The eighth time you're brought to the Fortress, however, you seem a little different. When you talk to him, it's not about how you pulled off your latest endeavor or your newest discovery in a far-off land that doesn't know your name.

("The people that I provide for... they've told me they're happy now. That I don't need to risk myself for their sake anymore."

Wriothesley remains silent, and you shoulder on. You don't look at him, eyes towards the ceiling of the fortress, gaze locked on some far-off view hidden beneath the miles and miles of ocean that traps you in.

"They told me that I should be living my life for myself now, and that I should look for my own happiness."

"And?" he asks. "Will you?"

You look at him then. You're deep in thought as you stare at him, mulling the thought over in your mind. Your own happiness. For once, the look in your eyes is unreadable. Wriothesley can't make heads or tails of what you're thinking in that moment, all he knows is that this is possibly the most somber he's ever seen you.

"...I don't quite know if i should.")

You escape again, because of course you do. But unlike every other time, there is no word of you even a week after you're gone. No mention in the papers of any of your newest schemes, no indications of anyone in Fontaine having sighted you. The only mention is how you've escaped and the authorities are on the prowl for you once more.

Even after another two weeks, then a month, then several months, you don't pop back up again, and your deeds eventually fade from the forefront of public concern. For some reason though, Wriothesley can't help but still search for your name in the papers every day. Because, and against everything telling him that he absolutely should not hold sentiments for you, he does, in fact, miss you. Quite a lot, actually. But above all else, he's glad that you're somewhere else, hopefully living a better life, hopefully looking for your own happiness now. And secretly, even though he shouldn't, he still hopes that he can meet you again one day, and that you'll regale him of even more stories of what you've been up to while you were gone.

(Years pass. Many of the Fontaine rich have forgotten about you. What you've stolen from them was easily made back, after all. Wriothesley, however, has never once stopped wondering about how you're doing.

It's during a bright spring day in the city while he passes by a new cafe. He's heard this one originates outside of Fontaine, and that had been popular enough to open a branch here. It's still early enough that no one has yet entered, and he thinks to himself that it wouldn't hurt to learn what all the fuss is about.

When he enters the counter is devoid of personnel, and he thinks that they must still be preparing supplies in the back, so he takes his time in looking through the menu.

"The Valberry Black Tea is one of our bestsellers. Just the right flavor combination of the fruity sweetness of the berries while still holding onto the mild bitterness of our black tea. I think you'd like that one."

And there you are, leaning over the counter with a wide grin that's all too familiar to Wriothesley. To his relief, you seem happy. Brighter, even, than before. These last few years have been kind to you, is a thought that brings a smile to his face and a skip to his heart.

"I made that one specifically hoping that you'd try it one day, and that it would be to your liking," you tell him, straightening up and readying all you need to make his drink. Over your shoulder, you flash him a fond smile, and he can't tear his eyes away. "Grab a seat and I'll be right with you. There is so much catching up we have to do.")

#「 🐈‍⬛ 」 strawberry.cupcakes #Wriothesley x reader #genshin impact x reader #「 🍓 」 Fave Flavor !! brazo.de.mercedes #I don't even know how this concept came to be i told myself i would make it short and it somehow became /this/ hakdjanjs

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hopefulromances · 1 year

Note

#19 with Jamie x f!reader!!

Thank you!!

19. “I could pick you out from a room full of thousands of people.”

Jamie Tartt. What could you say about Jamie Tartt? Everything the papers said about him was true, to an extent. He was cheeky, and cocky in all the right ways, but he was also incredibly caring and needy as well.

Needy for you it seemed. Especially right in this exact moment. Right now, Jamie had his arms wrapped around you tightly as he swayed his hips to the music and kissed up and down your neck and jaw. You had your hands wrapped around his neck and up into his hair.

You wished for, like, two seconds, you could turn your brain off. Stop thinking about the infinite possibilities of what it could mean. In this moment, Jamie was choosing you and that's all that mattered. But instead, you couldn't focus on anything except the other faces in the crowd, watching you. Judging you. Comparing you to them.

What did you have that they didn't And, more importantly, what did they have that you didn't that could win Jamie over. You weren't exclusive or anything. You'd barely been on two date, he could easily leave you behind for someone more beautiful, more confident, more sexy. Suddenly, it was hard to breath.

You pushed Jamie off of you, muttering something about needing to use the bathroom before turning and starting to push through the crowd of people. You turned over your shoulder in time to see Jamie, watching you leave with a confused smile on his face, and another woman appraoching him in your absence.

You made it to the bathroom line which was long, and didn't feel like waiting, so instead you made your way outside. When you broke through the door, it felt like you were coming up for air after a deep dive.

Maybe you should just leave. Would he even notice? You'd basically disappeared into a crowd of hundreds. But, to your surprise, you were quickly proven wrong when Jamie emerged from the door behind you.

"There you are," he spouted, walking over to you. "I've been looking all over for you."

"Oh! Sorry!" You waved him off. "Just getting some air."

Jamie nodded, leaning against the wall. "Yeah, it was getting stuffy in there." If he noticed anything off about you he didn't say anything, he just hooked his hand around your waist and pulled you towards him. "It's pretty cold out here, innit, though?"

You blushed under his gaze, your hands resting on his chest. "Yeah... I guess it is."

He smirked at you, his hands roaming up your back, pushing to into him. "Don't worrry, I'll keep you warm.

He started to tilt his head to kiss to again when a surge of panic ran through you. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Why couldn't your brain just shut up. Unfortunately, you couldn't find the mute button and found yourself pushing him away, much against your will.

Jamie's eyes were wide with shock, and a hint of guilt as he stood up straight. "What's wrong? Did I hurt you?"

You shook your head furiously. "No, no, I'm sorry I'm just..." You shoved your face in your hands. "I'm just stuck in my head."

Jamie placed his hands over yours and dragged them off of your face. He looked at you expectantly. "What's your head saying."

You bit your lip, chewing on your thoughts. Should you tell him? Would it be too much too soon? Would you come off as clingy? Instead of turning your brain off you decided to just ignore it.

"It's telling me that... that you deserve better than me," you admitted, feeling your hands get clammy in his. "That I'm nothing special, nothing to look at."

Jamie's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Is that what you think? that your 'nothing special.'" You nodded, unable to tear your gaze from his. "Honey, I could pick you out from a room full of thousands of people." You were shocked by his statement. You weren't sure if he knew the effect it had on you, but the smirk on his face told you he did.

"But I-I'm just... me and you're... Jamie Tartt!" You emphasized, gesturing to him. "As in Jamie Tartt doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo."

"I'm familiar with the chant, love."

"Well, then..." You let out an exhasperated gasp. "Why me?"

"Cause you cute, babe," he said, simply, shrugging. "And sweet. And funny. And that's all I want." He cocked his head at you. "Do I need to have another reason?"

You supposed not. He was just like you, wanting someone who wanted you for you. You let yourself move you hands up his chest.

"So... you don't want one of those girls in the club?"

"Nope?"

"And you really do just want me?"

"There's no just about it," he beamed, his arms making their way around my waist again. "It's everything. You're everything." You blushed again, feeling very warm in his embrace. "Now, can I kiss you again??"

You nodded, this time tilting your head to meet his lips. This time, you ignored your brain. Instead, you focused on the glorius feeling of kissing Jamie Tartt doo, doo ,doo, doo, doo ,doo.

#jamie tartt #jamie tartt x reader #jamie tartt imagine #jamie tartt x y/n #ted lasso #ted lasso show #jamie tartt fanfiction #drabble night #drabble

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aanoia · 1 year

Text

Crazy

Kaz Brekker x reader

Summary; the enemy of your enemy is your friend... unless they are also your enemy

Warnings; blood?, knives, uhhhh violence lmfao, enemies to lovers

Words; 2,000+

This didn't end the way I wanted it to but that's okay

The inspo was from the song Trouble by Valerie Broussard

I'm prolly gonna make a pt. 2 bc im cool

Btw,, when introducing the Night Scarlets, each member will have their code name like this, name (code name)

We wear red so they don’t see us bleed

Kaz Brekker hated many, many people. However, there was one group, in particular their leader, that he hated most. The Night Scarlets. Or the Cardinal, their leader. She has been after Kaz since he joined the business. She and her girls have stolen countless of missions right from under his nose, always having his Crows do the work then swooping in and taking over. She infuriated her.

Hundred dollar bills under our sleeve

We intend not to sleep ‘til we’re dead

The thing Kaz never understood was how. How did she know everything he had planned? He had thought it was spies at first, possibly he had a rat in his nest. But no. Even when he went on solo missions. The Cardinal would always know.

Drink our problems right out of our heads

Singing oh, oh-oh-oh, oh

Trouble

(Trouble)

Singing oh, oh-oh-oh, oh

Here comes trouble

(Trouble)

“Now, not a word to a single soul about this mission. Hear me?” Kaz asked lowly to his Crows. “If the Night Scarlets find out about this and ambush us I will take each of your hands and shove them down your throats. Am I understood?” The Crows nodded nervously.

“Kaz.” Inej started. “You do know we’ve never said anything before, right? I don’t know how but they always find out, whether we talk or not. She always knows.”

Kaz sighed, “I know.” He answered shortly, turning to look out the window.

Dangerously havin’ the time of our lives

These boys are just poisonous thorns in our sides

“So what do we do about them? I mean, I love the ladies, don’t get me wrong. But these ones gotta go.” Jesper said, toying with his new gun he had just stolen.

“I don’t know if there’s anything we can do, Jesper. They’re practically non existent when they aren’t in action.” Nina responded.

“I mean, there has to be a way to catch them. No one can be completely invisible forever.” Wylan said, his brain running through thousands of possibilities. “Maybe we can set a trap for them?”

Matthias snorted, “They’ll turn that into a trap against us. Bad idea.”

“Well, we need to do something. I need money!” Jesper argued.

“You don’t need it, you’re just going to gamble it all!” Wylan said, raising his voice slightly.

Starting fires wherever we go

Watching ‘em gamble everything they own

The group stopped arguing as the sound of glass breaking filled the room. KAz swung his cane one more time and a strangled bird cry came out. He stuck his hand out the broken window and grabbed the bird. Throwing it onto the table in anger.

“A cardinal.” Inej whispered.

Kaz slammed his hand down on the table, “She knows! She knows! How does she always know!” He yelled, picking up a glass and throwing it all the wall, causing Nina to flinch and Jesper instinctively step closer to Wylan. Kaz looked up with death in his eyes. “Change of plans. We’re killing the Cardinal. No matter the cost.

Singing oh, oh-oh-oh, oh

Trouble

(Trouble)

“Ready girls?” Y/n whispered into the small, barely workable communication device that her Fabrikator, Aisha (Raven), had been working on for months.

“Yeah.” Luna (Eagle) whispered back.

“Ready, C.” Patty (Hawk) responded.

“Steph?” Y/n asked as she pulled her dark red hood over her head.

A few grunts were heard before Stephanie's ( voice filled their ears, “Yep, ready boss.”

Y/n smiled as she began to climb down the walls of the building to the top window, careful to stay out of the Wraiths' sight. “Great. Let’s commit some crimes. Shall we?”

Stephanie giggles, the clicking of her guns being prominent. “Oh, we shall. Ooo, my fellow sharpshooter, my favorite.”

The line went quiet as Y/n carefully crawled through the opened window, landing silently in the office. She walked briskly to the desk, quietly rummaging through the drawers. She let out a gasp as her arm was pulled back and a familiar cane wrapped around her neck, causing her back to be flush against someone's chest.

Trouble coming in the dead of night

Trouble making everything alright

“Looking for something?” Kaz said quietly into her ear, proud as to finally catch the Cardinal.

Y/n sighed with a smirk, “Yes. I am.” She said before kicking out his leg, being sure to not hit his bad one. He grunted and took a step back, keeping the cane around her throat. She took the chance to duck out of the way and push him back against the wall, raising her dagger in between the two.

“Y’know, I was very offended to find out you killed my bird.” Y/n said, her hood shielding her eyes.

“Should’ve told it to stay away. The Crow is stronger than the Cardinal after all.”

Y/n laughed, “Oh, Kaz. You should know by now strength is not the most valuable trait of this lifestyle. It’s intelligence-” Kaz’s eyes widened.

“In which I’d have the upperhand on both of you.” A new voice said as two arms knocked the dagger from Y/n’s hands, bringing them behind her back and ripping the hood from her head. Kaz stared at her as people grabbed him as well. He had never truly seen the Cardinal without her hood, and he hated to admit how her face made his heart stutter,

It’s in your blood

It’s in your bones

You cannot sleep for

The two hostages were dragged down the stairs to see their fellow partners bound in ropes. They pushed the two down on their knees next to each other, causing Kaz to let out a grunt as his leg bent weird. Y/n sighed, disappointed in her lack to see the real trap behind Kaz’s.

“Well, well, well. Look what I have found.” Pekka said with a disgusting smile, looking at each of the criminals tied up. “A bunch of little thieves who think they are so smart.” Pekka continued on his speech as Y/n struggled with her binds. If only she could reach her ear.

“Kaz.” She whispered quietly, careful to not let the boasting man hear.

“What?” He hissed angrily.

She sighed again, “I need you to kiss my ear.”

Kaz almost looked like he was going to hurl, causing the girl to roll her eyes.

“What the fuck? No way.” He whispered back.

Whoa, oh

Tro-tro-trouble, trouble

“Do you want to get out of this?”

“How will kissing your ear help?”

“Just do it, for Saint’s sake!”

“Hey! Quiet, little bird.” Pekka said, walking over and caressing the girl's face with her own blade. She looked at him in disgust and spit in his face, causing everyone's eyes to widen. Pekka calmly wiped the spit from his face before angrily sliding the dagger against her cheek, slicing her skin.

Y/n smiled at him, “Red is my favorite color, you know?”

Pekka glared at her in anger, “Useless slut.” He said before walking back to his men, pulling them into a circle and talking quietly.

“Now!” She whispered to Kaz who reluctantly brought his lips to her ear, ignoring the water pooling around his knees. His lips met a piece of cold metal and he pulled back, actually looking into her ear to see a weird device.

“What is that?” He questioned, eyebrows raised.

Y/n ignored him, “Raven, are you there?” She whispered to nothing, before a relieved smile came across her face. “Emergency. Help. Now.”

Woah, oh

Here comes trouble, trouble

After a few moments the door of the house burst open, letting in birds of all different kinds, all flocking around and clawing at anything they could get their claws on, Pekka and his men included and targeted.

“Hey, Cardinal.” A voice whispered from behind the girl as she cut her restraints.

“Raven, good timing.” Y/n responded with a smile, taking the dagger Aisha handed her. “Free the other Scarlets. Leave the Crows for now.”

“No, you let us go. I helped you.” Kaz protested as a few of Pekkas men ran out of the house.

“No can do, Brekker.” Y/n said before pulling her hood back up and going to fight off the men that weren’t scared by the birds.

After a few moments a disgruntled, furious yell broke out, “I will get you and kill you all!” Pekka screamed as he ran from the house, scratches littering his skin.

Y/n whistled to the birds, causing them all to stop and fly out the door, their duty finally fulfilled. Her Scarlets stood beside her as she studied the Crows, still tied up and on the floor, a few adorning bird scratches.

“Free them.” She demanded her girls, who broke out in protest. She raised her hand and they silenced. “They will not kill us. They need us, as we need them.” She addressed their concerns and they reluctantly cut the ropes binding their hands. Immediately Inej stood and got into a fighting stance. Her fellow Crows followed after, other than Kaz, who simply lifted his hand to tell them to be calm.

“We need you, do we?” He asked, taking a step towards the Cardinal.

“Yes, as do we, you. Pekka Rollins is, obviously, after us both. We are small groups. Six in yours, five in mine. Rollins has dozens of Dime Lions. It is simply impossible for one of us alone to take him down. You know that, hence why you didn’t let your Crows attack. Isn’t that correct?”

“Unfortunately it is. We shall work together.” Every bird in the room protested. “Until Pekka is down.”

Y/n smiled and held out her hand, “And then you can go back to getting bested by the Night Scarlets.

“I’m not planning on it.” He said, not raising his hand, and Y/n, ever so observant, had noticed his touch aversion ages ago.

“Air shake.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“It’s not a deal unless we shake on it.”

“No.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“No.”

“You don’t have weapons.”

“No.”

“I’m smarter than you.”

“No.”

“I’m cooler than you.” Everyone laughed, even Kaz had let a small, smug smirk fall upon his lips.

“You aren’t.” He said, pretending to shake the girl's hand without touching it.

There are dogs on the loose, there are snakes in the desert (in the desert)

I’m that knife in your boot, girl, I got ya (Girl, I got ya)

I’m your number two man in a fight (In a fight)

“And then, we win. Easy peasy.” Y/n said, finishing explaining the plan to the now group of nine.

“Easy peasy my ass.” Jesper mumbled.

“Language, Jes. A kruge.” Y/n smiled triumphantly as Jesper rolled his eyes and handed the girl a kruge. In the three months the two groups had been working together they had become quite close.

“Oh, yeah. I’m so ready for this. We’re so gonna win.” Patty said with a large smile, her arm linked with Nina’s who nodded along.

Y/n laughed slightly, “We will. Now go. Get rest. You’ll need it. We have a big day tomorrow.”

We are revolutionaries tonight

Singing oh, oh-oh-oh, oh

Trouble

(Trouble)

The office emptied, leaving the Crow and Cardinal. Kaz stared at the map, thinking hard.

“Kaz, what’s on your mind?” Y/n asked, placing her hand next to his to provide comfort without actually touching him.

“We can’t do it. We aren’t strong enough.” He muttered and Y/n laughed. Kaz looked at her in annoyance.

“Kaz. We are just about the strongest lot Kerch has seen. We’ve got this. We’re the coolest bunch in Ketterdam.”

Kaz shook his head with a smile he only let out around her. A genuine, happy smile. “Yes, we’re so cool. Do cool people always talk about how cool they are, though?”

Y/n nodded, “Obviously. Have you met me?” She asked with a teasing smile.

“Unfortunately, I have.”

Trouble coming in the dead of night

Trouble making everythin’ alright

Y/n put her hand over her heart with a gasp. “I’m hurt. You, Kaz R. Brekker, have wounded me right in the heart.” He smiled at the use of his real last names initial, something she had always done once she learned his last name was truly Rietveld.

It’s in your blood

It’s in your bones

You cannot sleep for

“Oh no, Kaz, I'm Feeling light headed.” Y/n said, stumbling back towards the bed. She fell once the back of her calves hit the bed frame. “I see the light!” She said, reaching her arm up towards the sky. “Oh, it’s getting brighter! Kaz! It’s getting brighter!” She portrayed blood spurting from her chest, before spasming and falling limp, her tongue hanging from her mouth.

She failed to hide her smile as Kaz’s oh so beautiful laugh filled the air. It was like music to her ears. Compared to most people, Y/n got through Kaz’s walls rather quickly, which surprised everyone, including Kaz himself. She had provided him a safe space, free from the water and cold skin and lifeless eyes.

Y/n continued to play dead even after the laughter stopped, not failing to hear the footsteps nearing the bed, causing her heart to speed up. In just a moment, a soft hand gripped hers and pulled her body up as Kaz pulled her into a hug.

“Thank you.” He whispered, before quickly pulling away before the water rose above his head.

Heat creeped up Y/n’s neck, “For?”

“Making me look cooler by your loserness.” He simply said before walking out, pretending nothing happened.

Y/n smiled to herself, falling back onto the bed, a dreamy sigh falling from her lips. She kicked the air while giggling in excitement. Oh, how whipped the Cardinal was for the Crow.

Crazy.

Woah, oh

Here comes trouble, trouble

#aanoia #romance #kaz brekker x reader #kaz brekker x you #kaz brekker imagine #inej gahfas #six of crows #six of crows x reader #crooked kingdom #shadow and bone #leigh bargudo #kazzle dazzle #Spotify

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adidastain · 10 months

Text

moron

90s trey parker x fem!reader (y/n)

warnings: angst, indirect sexual harassment, implied alcohol & drug use, smut (vaginal penetration), virginity loss, violence (trey gets smacked for being a a perv)

notes: first person perspective (I, me, my, etc.); the beginning is kind of rough so just bear with me. also this is a oneshot but oh my god why is it so fucking long; he looks like such a faggot in the image its so funny

word count: SEVEN THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED NINETY FOUR (7194)

—

“Truth or dare?”

“Truth,” Trey responded, seemingly not wanting to risk getting any more messed up on another dare. His temples looked sweaty and his entire body was limp and relaxed, flush with the back of his chair. I, personally, was miles away. I was the only girl left at this party (if you could even call it a “party”; there were only about seven people at this point) and it was way too late for me to be awake.

“What’s your ideal type?” Our friend, Dian, asked him. “Like the woman of your dreams.”

Matt laughed, keeping his eyes closed as he too was completely relaxed and almost melting into the couch. I kept my gaze on Trey, watching his lips curl into a devilish smile as he finished his thought process and formed an answer.

“Virgin,” He said simply. Something about his tone and the way his face looked as he and the other guys laughed it out made my face burn up. Not in a good way. I wanted to shoot myself in the head.

Matt, Trey, and a few other guys all just chuckled, seemingly agreeing with each other. It was like I wasn’t even there. Granted, I barely was, and in their defense, none of them could have known that I myself had never had sex before. But I figured this was a conversation they would save for a “boy’s night.” Maybe they were too far from sober to care.

“It can’t be that good,” Dian argued. I wasn’t entirely sure if he had actually ever had sex or not either. Not that I cared. I didn’t know him that well anyway.

“It is,” Matt and Trey said in unison. My gaze stuck to my hands in my lap, trying to check out of the conversation and humming What’s Up? while plugging one of my ears. It wasn’t uncommon for the boys to be pervy like this even while I’m around, but ever since I moved in with them, it’s been happening way more often and it was starting to get old.

“It’s insane,” Matt said calmly, tilting his head back. “They get so worked up over basically nothing.”

“Drenched in like, two seconds,” Trey added.

For some reason, I felt betrayed. I didn’t really care what Matt had to say; I knew he got around a lot and I’m pretty sure he thought I was lesbian anyway. Trey’s words hit me harder. We’d been friends since we were 16 and he’d stood up for me on multiple occasions, when drunk assholes at bars or parties would try to make moves on me. Maybe he just wanted to show off. He was being ignorant at my expense.

I cracked my knuckles and tilted my head to pop my neck on either side, not getting any sense of relief or a satisfying pop in any of my efforts. I was still tense and stiff. I was still uncomfortable.

“Dude and once you get in there… fuck, man,” Matt mumbled, hitting his fist against the coffee table.

Trey nodded, grinning. “That’s the best fucking part-”

The blonde yelped slightly as my hand collided with the back of his head, causing his entire body to jerk forward and the room to go quiet.

“I’m a virgin, you asshole!” I shouted, staring down at him. His eyes held a pretty intense look of shock, fear, and anger, before subtly shifting more towards a guilty, cowardly look. “Just ‘cause I live here now doesn’t mean you guys can talk about shit like that in front of me! Wait till I’m asleep or something, fuck!”

By the time my sentence was almost over, I had tears streaming down my face. I instantly regretted hitting him, but I’d already reacted before I even thought about how I was going to react. All the nights where I went to bed irritated and just let them talk like that were just piling up and finally toppled over. My feet carried me to my bedroom before my hands slammed the door shut behind me. I paced around, waving my hands and forcing deep breaths through my nose as I cried.

The panic came from the shock of my own reaction. I can’t believe I hit him. That was so embarrassing too, the way I’d yelled and started crying right after. They must all think I’m psycho.

I let my hair out of my claw clip and threw it on the floor, taking deep breath after deep breath until I stopped crying and my eyes were puffy. I still very much felt that swell in my throat that threatened more tears. I was far from done crying, but I forced myself to stop before my makeup got any more fucked up and I looked like a pile of sad shit.

Why did I even care? I lived there. It shouldn’t have mattered to me how I looked. I could kick those people out if I wanted to. They didn’t have to see my face, red, puffy and wet from tears.

“Y/N?” I heard an unmistakable voice outside my door. I knew exactly who it was. “It’s Trey, um… Can you let me in?”

I swallowed back the remaining tears, rolling my eyes before wiping my face on the black baby tank I was wearing. I stood in the doorway as I opened the door, preventing him from taking any steps further into my space. His head immediately snapped up from looking at his feet to looking in my eyes, where he likely found the most annoyed, unamused, impatient, pissed off gaze he’d ever seen.

“M-Matt told me to apologize,” He mumbled, looking down at his hands as they fidgeted with themselves. His blonde hair was messy and hung low over his face, partially covering his eyes and eyebrows.

“Hmph. At least Matt can read a room,” I muttered. I knew that Trey could read a room too, it just was that, more often than not, he didn’t care to and liked to push people’s boundaries sometimes. Now was one of those rare situations where he crossed the line before Matt could stop him.

This only made Trey more ashamed, it seemed. He laughed slightly, his face smushed into his palms.

“It’s not funny,” I told him, crossing my arms. My heart had started beating faster since I’d stopped crying. I wasn’t sure if I was gonna cry again, if I was mad at Trey, or something else. “You’re fucking gross. All of you.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” He said, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry.”

His apology still felt fake. I knew he was shit at apologizing, since it was pretty much against what he stood for, but you would think he’d be able to apologize to his best friend of almost ten years. Then again, maybe I overestimated him.

“...Have you been crying?” Trey asked cautiously.

“No, this is the funniest thing that has ever happened to me. YES, I’ve been crying, fucking dick,” I mumbled. “You’ve been the person I trust the most for the past nine years and suddenly that feeling is long gone. It’s kind of fucking heartbreaking, Trey. I can’t even look at you without feeling gross.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Trey just looked down, swallowing harshly as he rubbed the back of his head. That reminded me.

“Bet that hurts,” I said coldly. I hid the genuine concern I felt for him behind my harsh tone, not wanting him to know that I did feel guilty about hitting him. I just hoped he knew that he kind of deserved it.

“Yeah, like a bitch,” He laughed. “Not the worst I’ve taken, though.”

“I can hit you harder,” I offered, shrugging.

“If I say something gross will you hit me as hard as you can?” He asked me, caressing his chin as he thought. Somehow he’d managed to distract me from why I was even upset. I let him in my room and closed the door behind me, nodding in response to his question as I prepared my hand.

“Okay, um…” he said. He sounded antsy and… excited. I was starting to feel a little better; maybe this was his way of entertaining me in order to stop me from being upset anymore.

He did this when we were teenagers too. He’d do stupid things to himself or make fun of himself to make me laugh. Trey rarely ever confronted me about my feelings and asked what was wrong. He would just try to fix it. We were a lot closer back then; many nights I’d accidentally fall asleep against him after crying for several hours. His arms around me, hands stroking my hair, heart beating against mine…

Now we were adults and everything had to be crude all the time. The true “man” in him really started to shine through once I began hanging out with him and Matt, and eventually started living with them. I guess the fact that I was a virgin somehow never came up between me and Trey or anybody, really. I had no girl friends.

“Hmm… You’re taking too long. I don’t wanna hit you anymore,” I stated, turning towards my door. I never wanted to hit you in the first place.

“No, no! Wait, just wait. Hold on,” he told me, holding my forearm. He was much closer to me now, having pulled me away from the door as he grabbed me and subconsciously held me closer. I felt my cheeks turn red as he leaned in, giggling slightly, and whispered, “I bet your… I bet you would… you’d feel so good, um, wrapped… wrapped around… I don’t know.”

Trey couldn’t even get through the sentence without laughing, pausing every few words to giggle. Unfortunately, his laughter was contagious and caused me to start giggling as well. His hand moved up to my upper arm as his forehead met my shoulder.

“You fucking dick,” I said, relaxing my hands. My arms slid over his waist to wrap around his torso. “I hate you. Don’t say shit like that again.”

His laughter calmed and he leaned back, looking in my eyes. “I won’t. I-I am really sorry. I’m sure Matt is too. We didn’t know-”

“I know. It’s fine,” I said, almost whispering. “And I don’t really give a fuck about Matt. It’s you that I think needs to be taught a lesson.”

Trey’s face lit up slightly, his wide eyes widening further. The blonde grew a devilish smirk. “And what lesson is that? Sharing is caring? Treat others how you wanna be treated?”

“To shut up once in a while,” I said, putting my hand over his mouth. “You might get more girls if you’re not constantly making jokes about how tight their vagina is, hm?”

Trey scoffed. “I don’t need ‘girls’. I’ll have you someday,” he stated, poking my nose with his fingertip.

My hand met his cheek in a lighter, but still harsh, playful slap, before I let go of him and took a step back. “Excuse me?” I laughed, feeling my face burn again. This time, in a good way.

“The only girl I need is right in front of me,” He beamed, clear mischief present in his eyes. “And… And I know I’ve messed up a few times but I’m still waiting for her. I always have been.”

Suddenly his tone became softer and more serious. His smile was replaced with a nervous bite of his lower lip.

Tonight was a fucking roller coaster and I felt like I didn’t have a seatbelt on.

“Trey…” I squeaked, watching as he took a single step closer to me.

He ignored me. “And I feel like an idiot around her. I am an idiot,” He laughed, swallowing harshly. His eyes darted around my face, looking for my reaction. I was frozen in shock. “And now I’m messing it up again.”

“She’s here,” I said softly, holding my arms tensely. The situation was completely foreign and completely out of left field. “She misses you. E-Even though you never really went anywhere…”

I backed up against the wall next to my door. “And she feels safe with you. Even though you’re an idiot sometimes,” I said, smiling slightly. Trey laughed and came closer to me, continuing to speak as his hands carefully caressed my waist.

“I miss her too,” He whispered, leaning closer. “And… And I wanna taste her lips so bad.”

I felt his forehead collide with mine and his body move closer, his hands softly squeezing my torso. This was not the first time we’d been in this position, believe it or not; we just didn’t go any further. That fateful night at the club after our first day at college had been blocked out from my memory for the past seven years, until right about now.

“She wants you to kiss her,” I whispered, staring at his lips. “So bad.”

Without much more hesitation, Trey leaned forward, just barely grazing my lips with his to see my reaction. More, I thought as hard as I could, hoping he’d be able to read my mind. His eyelids lowered and he smiled, kissing me again.

I exhaled, not realizing how long I’d been holding my breath. My body sort of melted as he kissed me more, his right hand moving up to caress my face while his left held tight onto me, pulling himself closer. Trey kissed me gently, but with haste.

“I guess you have a thing for virgins?” I laughed slightly, humming as he kissed me again and carefully started to lift up my shirt. I let him run his warm hands underneath the fabric and explore my body, while his mouth started to venture onto my neck and shoulders. My own hands ran through his hair, which was still slightly damp from the shower he took in the middle of the “party” he was supposed to be hosting. There was something wrong with him.

Trey lowered his voice, moving his lips right over my ear. “Sorta. Not ‘cause they're tight or anything, though,” He explained softly, tracing small circles into my hips. “If I tell you the real reason, you can’t judge me. At all.”

He pulled away from my neck, looking me in the eyes to see if I would agree. “Talk to me,” I said, twirling a strand of his hair on the back of his neck.

Trey leaned back in, pressing his nose against my forehead. “I just like the feeling of… like, feeling like I’m turning them to like, the dark side,” He said, laughing slightly at his word choice. “That’s a stupid way to put it, but y’know.”

“You like corruption,” I said simply, raising my eyebrows at him to tease him. Idiot.

“...Yes,” he said, sounding slightly unsure. “Something like that.”

“Weirdo,” I joked, pushing him off of me slightly. In reality, I sort of liked having a conversation like this with him. It made me realize how much I didn’t know about him, despite calling him my best friend for the past decade. Maybe these were the kinds of things only… more-than-friends would have.

He laughed, diving back in to kiss me while his hands worked through my hair, his teeth grazing my bottom lip.

“Have you french-kissed before?” he asked me, barely leaving me any space to answer as he kept smothering my lips with his.

“Yes, Trey. I’m not twelve,” I answered, not letting his tongue into my mouth despite his best efforts. I liked the feeling of him desperately trying to push through my lips, then giving up, then trying again.

“How would I know? A virgin at 25…” He said defensively. “You might as well be Mormon at this rate.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him. He had a weird thing about Mormons. Maybe it was related to the corruption thing. He just laughed, grabbing my jaw with his whole hand so he could stick his tongue in my mouth. Fuck. Fucking dick caught me off-guard.

I let him explore my mouth with his tongue, the muscle warm and wet; he tasted like tequila. It was fucking intoxicating.

Unfortunately, my reaction to the sensation was much more vocal than I wanted it to be. I softly moaned in bliss, his mouth attached to mine as the noise escaped me. I felt him smile and open his mouth up wider, encouraging me to take my own turn exploring his mouth. Trey’s hand slid down from my jaw onto my neck, softly grasping my throat and applying little to no pressure, just holding it. I was unsure whether he genuinely wanted to treat me like glass or if he was just holding back his violent urges and secretly wanted to choke me.

“I’m not having sex with you, by the way,” I stated, pushing him away by his chest. I tried to ignore how his lips glistened from the excessive amount of saliva built up from our exchange. His face was flushed and his eyes looked slightly sad, but tired, and definitely not sober.

“Why not?” he asked, whining. I pushed past him, taking a look at myself in the mirror. My shirt had ridden up to the middle of my ribs, my hair was messy, makeup smudged, neck and shoulders decorated with a few small bruises that I could only blame on one person. Thanks a lot, dick, I thought, scoffing.

“‘Cause you’re gross,” I stated, leaning against the edge of my bed while putting a hoodie on to cover my freshly assaulted shoulders. I pushed myself up so I was fully sitting as Trey came closer to me and got down on his knees.

“What if I let you sit on my face?” He asked, giving me puppy eyes while his hands caressed my calves. His touch was gentle and gave me butterflies.

“Tempting,” I hummed, tapping my bottom lip with my index finger. I ran my hand through his hair, as if he was about to suck my dick or something. I laughed to myself as I imagined this. Trey Parker, on his knees, sucking silicone cock. “What if you suffocate?”

“I’ll die in bliss,” He stated, tilting his head back as he reveled in the feeling of my fingers in his hair. He was really determined. I could tell that he probably wasn’t gonna give up either. Too bad, though. I wasn’t finished teasing him yet. Munch.

“You’re disgusting,” I said, raising my eyebrows matter-of-factly and flicking him in the forehead. I swung my legs to the side, standing up off the bed next to where he was kneeling. I started towards the door, waiting to hear him scramble to his feet and stop me in my tracks. He was too predictable.

“I’ve been wanting this since we were in 10th grade,” He told me, grabbing my wrist before I could open the door. “I’ll be gentle,” he added, waiting for my response. “I promise.”

“I believe you,” I said. “I trust you. You’re just not quite what I imagined for my first time.” I gave him a passive-aggressive smile of sympathy. I was full of shit, of course. Thinking about it, the only person I would ever want to take my virginity was Trey. I thought that maybe I’d been subconsciously saving it for him this entire time without even realizing.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he asked, clearly offended. He laughed it off, but his face told a different story. His cheeks were wildly flushed and his eyebrows were deeply furrowed. Was I really that convincing?

I rolled my eyes, kissing him softly. “I was joking, moron,” I said, locking my bedroom door.

It was then that he looked at me with probably the most awestruck, wide-eyed gaze I’d ever seen from him, his pupils having blown three sizes once I pulled away. I simply giggled, wrapping my arms around his neck as I kissed him again. “You have to tell me the password.”

“Password?” He asked, laughing. “Pussy password?”

“Yep. You’ll never guess it,” I stated, running my hands gently down his body.

Trey took a moment to think, looking up at the ceiling.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph McCarthy,” He guessed. My face turned red.

Fuck.

“You can’t beat me, Y/N. I’m always five steps ahead of you,” He laughed, hooking his hands under my knees to lift me up and carry me to my bed, which was a complete disaster as blankets, sheets, clothes and pillows were strewn in every direction.

“How the fuck did you guess that?” I whispered rhetorically, so shocked that I didn’t even register that he was now on top of me, having laid me down right where I usually sleep.

“You only said it like, a million times over the whole two weeks when we were reading The Crucible in English. D’you still think that’s the funniest thing ever?” He teased me, straddling my hips. I suddenly felt fatally nervous being under him. Maybe I didn’t want this. “I figured it would either be that or ‘San-Fransican Kegflip’-”

“Stop,” I choked out. “Stop for a second.”

Trey paused, confused for a fraction of a moment before shutting his mouth and moving to the side. I bent my knees, closing my legs and covering my face with my arms. I felt like I was going to cry again. For some reason, the idea of finally losing my virginity had me about ready to shit myself, I was so scared. I trusted Trey, of course, but this was just… so new. What if he sucked in bed and I was overestimating him? That would be funny, but it would probably make for the worst virginity story anyone had ever heard. You waiting ten years to fuck your best friend and it wasn’t even good? Just shoot me in the head, why don’t you.

“Sorry,” I laughed, feeling my body start to tremble.

“Don’t be, hey,” He said softly, scooting closer to me. “You don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do this. Even though I totally guessed the pussy password right on the first try.”

I could hear the boastful smile in his voice, causing me to smile too. He couldn’t see it. “Shut up,” was all I could think to say.

I could sense that he’d shut his mouth and backed off. “...Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

“No,” I answered quickly. “Please don’t.”

My body shot upward, facing him. My hands held his arms, caressing the warm skin and toned muscle as he looked at me with patient eyes. My own were welling up with tears as my entire body vibrated.

“I’m scared,” I laughed, pulling his arm as I laid back down. Trey climbed on top of me again, caressing my face and neck. I felt the lump in my throat swell as he kissed my forehead and cheeks.

“Am I scary?” He asked me, his voice soft. He didn’t make any further advances, he just kissed me a few times and held my hands.

“You wish you were,” I laughed, grinning as I found the courage to touch him again. My hands rested on either side of his neck, rubbing the soft, freckled skin of his jaw and shoulders. “I just wanna get this over with.”

“You really don’t have to do-”

“No, let’s do it,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s been long enough. I think we’re way past the point of no return anyway.”

I sat up, pulling him into a kiss, until he gently pushed me away by my waist, looking me deep in the eyes.

“Are you sure-”

“Please fuck me, Trey,” I whispered slowly. “Make me bad.”

The blonde just sat there, our faces inches apart, his eyes wide and absolutely dumbfounded. I wasn’t sure why he was surprised. Maybe ‘cause I smacked him twenty minutes ago for talking about wanting to take someone’s virginity.

“You can still change your mind,” he sighed, obliging and laying me down while pulling my hips up so my ass rested on the top of his lap. I could see the smirk he was trying so hard to contain. “Let’s get these off first.”

I lifted the humongous hoodie up and over my head, looking up as Trey got to work at my skirt and underwear. He removed them pretty easily, lifting my legs up so that my ankles were resting on his shoulders. I had to admit, the sight was something straight out of one of those movies. Him, still fully clothed in a snug gray T-shirt that did wonders for his chest and arms, and me, pantsless with my legs propped up on his shoulders and my bare fucking vagina on full display.

I thought I could see Trey’s eyes intentionally avoiding the area as his warm hands slid up the sides of my body from my freshly bared hips. He remained focused on my still clothed chest, my shirt riding up higher and higher as he massaged my torso. “Here,” He hummed, moving my legs so that they were wrapped around his hips.

My mind was pretty much blank as I stared at our hips, my naked crotch only inches away from his own clothed one. I was interrupted however, by a soft pair of lips pushing against my jaw so my head would tilt back.

“You look really pretty,” he mumbled sweetly, kissing my throat with basically no pressure. I hummed in bliss, running my fingers through his hair. I then laughed, realizing the irony of the situation. I’d basically just had a panic attack right before he came into my room, and now he was on top of me, telling me I looked pretty.

“Just ‘cause I trust you doesn’t mean you can lie,” I grinned, sliding my hands up his biceps and underneath his sleeves, lightly squeezing the muscle as it flexed at my touch.

“You’re so-” Trey started, a teasingly annoyed tone in his voice. “Just be quiet.”

I pulled him in for a kiss again, gently tugging on his hair. I heard him groan softly, causing my body to heat up. I’d gone further than I ever had with anyone at that point, especially once he took his shirt off.

He wasn’t exactly fit but he was definitely muscular. Light brown hairs covered his upper chest and trailed all the way down into his pants. I could see the waistband of his plaid boxers sticking out from under his jeans, held snugly to his hips by an old black belt. At that point I don’t think I was able to form coherent words anymore. I was too nervous to encourage him to keep going, but I was too excited to tell him to slow down.

“Are you okay with this?” he asked me, sitting up against his heels so his body towered over mine. His right hand reached up to rub the back of his neck, while his left held a gentle grasp on my thigh. I nodded, swallowing harshly. I could see him blushing, the sight giving me a little more confidence. Enough to tease him some more.

“Are you nervous?” I asked him, propping myself up on my elbows before he pushed me back down and started kissing my neck.

“About what?” he asked, huffing slightly. I held onto his broad chest, massaging his shoulders and tracing each muscle and bone.

“Taking my virginity,” I answered. “This isn’t your first time doing someone during their first time, is it?” I acted as though taking someone’s virginity was just as infamous as losing it.

Trey chuckled, pulling my shirt up. “If it weren’t you underneath me, I think I’d feel better. Sit up,” he said. I obeyed him, allowing him to pull my shirt off completely, exposing the little pink lounge bra I’d been wearing all day. He held my neck and kissed my forehead as I reached behind my back to undo the clasp and slide it off my shoulders, rendering me completely naked beneath him.

Now the nerves were back. I swallowed harshly, staring down at his hips as he undid the buckle of his belt, moving one hand to rub slowly up and down my stomach as the other pulled the leather strap out from the confines of his jeans. His head was tilted down, all of his focus devoted to the task of getting his pants off.

Suddenly, his eyes met mine, and he smiled shyly. Fucking Christ.

I remembered the night we went to prom. I wasn’t his date and he wasn’t mine; he had his own date, but he and I showed up together, since we only lived three houses away from each other. I recalled the moment I opened my front door to see him at my doorstep, wearing a white suit with black pants and dark green accents. I told him he looked nice, and he smiled shyly. I guess we were both a lot more innocent back then.

“You okay?” He asked, stroking my knees. I’d zoned out and not realized that he was just in his boxers now, waiting for my permission to proceed. I nodded, crossing my arms over my chest. Trey noticed, smiling slightly.

“Is it cool if I, um, finger you? For like, prep?” He asked me, adjusting his boxers slightly.

“What are you gonna do if I say no?” I asked, smiling.

“Fuck off, I dunno,” he laughed.

I sat up and kissed him, pushing his chest so that he’d lay back, but he just took the kiss and grabbed my hand, confused. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll be on top,” I offered. “That way you don’t have to keep stopping to ask if I’m okay.”

“That is not how it works,” he laughed, raising his eyebrows. “But go ahead.”

He laid back against my pillows, half sitting up with his head and shoulders against my headboard. Trey watched me intently as I crawled on top of him, unsure of what to do with my hands as I moved. I felt like I was put in a spotlight, shyness overcoming me as my eyes met his. He just stared at me with a soft, awestruck gaze, his hands lightly stroking my thighs.

My hair fell in front of my face as I leaned down to kiss him, my shoulders tense as I propped myself up with pin-straight arms to keep my weight off him. I felt him smile in the kiss, chuckling as his hands moved up to my hips and caressed my ass ever so slightly.

“You can sit on me, you know,” he said, looking up at me. Trey pulled my hips closer, lifting his own up slightly to shift his position and make himself more comfortable, holding in part of a grunt. “Just relax. Stop if you need to.”

“You’re not making me very bad right now,” I stated, kissing his throat. “Are you stalling?”

“I think you’re stalling, sweetheart,” He countered, tugging my hips into his again, harsher this time. My heart skipped a beat at the action and the fire in my stomach practically exploded. “I would have finished with you twice by now. Maybe three times.”

He was finally starting to get impatient. For some reason, deep down, I liked the idea of him rushing me. Just imagining it caused my adrenaline to kick in and my heartrate to pick up.

I took a deep breath, nerves building up again. Without looking, I held my breath, pulling the waistband of his boxers down just enough for his cock to slide out and present itself to me. I heard Trey gasp, seeming genuinely surprised.

This was happening.

“I-I don’t have condoms,” I said, swallowing harshly.

“I do,” he huffed, his breath having picked up in pace. “In my bedroom.”

Fuck. I didn’t want him to have to go get them and I certainly wasn’t going to go fetch them myself. I weighed my options as quickly as my brain would allow; either risk getting caught and interrogated, or risk getting pregnant. Humiliation, or bearing my best friend’s child. Only one of those options could be truly reversed.

“It’s fine,” I shook my head, fixing my hair. I stared at his stomach as he breathed rapidly.

“You sure? I can go get them real quick-”

“I trust you,” I told him, tracing small circles in his hips. His body shivered, before he sat up, causing the muscles in his abdomen to flex. Trey leaned in close, his lips grazing my ear.

“I’m dead fucking serious, Y/N,” he whispered. “Are you sure? 100% sure?”

I nodded quickly. I really was. I really wanted him. The past nine years had been taunting me all night. “I trust you.”

Trey looked in my eyes, searching for any twitches or other movements that might hint at me lying, but he found none. I gave him a look of longing, my eyelids low as I looked from his eyes, to his lips, to his body, and back up again.

“Let me get on top,” he whispered.

Without hesitation, I listened to him, holding his torso as he crawled on top of me once again, his hair tickling my face. His head was tilted down, staring intently at his piece which he took so much care to prepare, stroking it slowly.

I knew what was about to happen. I knew how it was going to feel, and I dreaded it. I’m sure this wasn’t new at all, either. According to him and Matt, this was the best part.

“It’s gonna sting,” He said, swallowing harshly. He looked incredibly nervous. Possibly more than me. Why? “I’m gonna try to be gentle.”

I just nodded. Holy fucking fuck shit fuck holy fuck. It was finally happening. For real. Literally. It was actually literally happening. He was about to be inside of me. What the fuck.

I put my hand over my eyes, holding my breath as I felt him shift, waiting for the pain to start.

Trey lowered my hand, placing it on his arm. “I want you to see,” He whispered, kissing my forehead. “Breathe.”

I felt like I could cry and I wasn’t even in pain yet. Maybe it was the fact that the man I trusted so much and felt so safe with was making me feel extra safe in such a dangerous, foreign situation. Then I started to feel it.

A wince left my throat pretty much immediately after he started pushing in. It felt like I was being ripped in half by the legs. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, kissing my neck and all over my cheek.

He paused, giving me a bit of a break to adjust. I held my palms over my face as tears welled up in my eyes. No wonder I waited till I was 25.

It wasn’t long before he started moving again, slower than fucking molasses, until he bottomed out. Trey propped himself up on his elbows, kissing my neck again.

“I bet you’d feel so good wrapped around my cock you pretty virgin whore,” He said in a dumb voice. I laughed, partially crying through it. It still hurt to move, despite Trey’s efforts to soothe me through gentle kisses all up and down my neck while he traced circles into my hips.

“I definitely would have smacked the shit out of you,” I said, my voice breaking.

“Well, I was right, so,” He bragged, grinning like a cocky piece of shit. Douchebag.

“Don’t test me, Parker,” I warned him. “Once I can move without splitting in half, you’re a dead man.”

He cocked his head to the side, furrowing his eyebrows. “I’ll keep that in mind later when you’re begging me to stop teasing you,” he mumbled, kissing me.

I stopped arguing, just reveling in the feeling of his lips on mine. That was a much better feeling than the sharp pain in my hips, which actually, was starting to feel a little less intense. I opened my mouth for him to slip his tongue into once again, hoping he would start moving by himself without me having to ask him to.

Trey groaned slightly, kissing me harder. My legs wrapped carefully around his waist, attempting to pull him closer without fucking up the more comfortable position I was already in. My prayers were answered and the idiot took the hint, slowly drawing his dick out, and even more slowly, pushing it back in.

“Pull my hair,” he mumbled quickly, leaving my lips for my neck. Now his nose was right up against my ear and I could hear every single breath he drew in and pushed back out. They were strangled, like he kept holding in inhales and exhaling in short, harsh breaths. My fingers worked their way from the base of his neck, moving upward to gather as much hair between them as I could, and clenched my fist as tight as possible. Trey whimpered; it was high-pitched and almost girly. If I didn’t hear it again in the next few seconds I would die.

Without telling him, he had already sort of picked up the pace, burying his mouth into my neck and shoulders. I felt his hand press flat against the lower part of my stomach, applying light but very noticeable pressure to the area as he continued to fuck me.

“If you were any tighter I think my dick would lose circulation,” He huffed, looking at me. I could see his temples glistening from sweat.

“If you were any bigger I think I would fucking die,” I countered, resting my head back to look at the ceiling. His lips had left damp spots on my neck that started to feel cold, giving me chills.

“I think you might be the best I’ve had,” he whispered, mumbling into my neck. His voice carried so much passion. I felt like crying again. No surprise there.

“Same,” I grinned. “You’re the only one I’ve had.”

“Can I go faster?” he asked, ignoring me.

I nodded, holding his head close to me. I stared at the ceiling, my entire body rocking slightly as Trey’s hips collided with mine again and again. My eyes fell shut as he started moving faster, and inevitably deeper.

He was a lot less vocal than I’d hoped. Likely because he didn’t want us to get caught and/or interrogated. Plus, I knew how loud Matt could be at times… in fact out of the two I only ever recalled hearing Matt.

Without even realizing, my back arched upward as the most electrifying wave of pleasure shot through my entire body, causing me to gasp and moan at an unfortunate volume. Trey had sent a harsh, pointed thrust into me, hitting that infamous spot with great force and friction.

“Mm-hmm,” He hummed, acting like he knew I would react that way. Embarrassment washed over me at the vulgar noise that had just erupted from me, but there wasn’t much I could do to protest except bite the back of my hand while Trey fucked me harder and harder, pushing similar sounds out of me.

“Fuck, fuck… fuck… Trey- mmnh,” were just a few things among the obscenities that erupted from my throat as he just pushed me closer to the edge.

“You’re doing so good,” He whispered, kissing a spot under my ear that gave me goosebumps.

I pulled his hair again, hoping to earn another one of those ridiculously pathetic sounds that was burying so deeply within him. His hair was soft and slid so nicely between my fingers; the feeling and scent were almost enough to make me cum right then.

I tugged on a chunk of his hair, causing him to whimper again, then causing me to arch my back as I felt my orgasm rushing through my body, and then causing him to fuck me faster still.

I think I saw my entire life flash before my eyes once I felt his middle and ring fingers dip between my legs and rub circles against my clit, pressing on it and pinching it ever slightly. The high hit me like a bus and I shoved my wrist into my mouth, crying out his name as my body twitched and the knot came undone within me.

“So… pretty… fuck-” he groaned, his rhythm faltering to a stutter as he started to get close too. A sharp pain struck my lower half as he quickly pulled out and came all over my hips and thigh. That worked out nicely, except now my sheets are fucking sticky and I’m covered in this fuckwad’s children.

I thought it was incredible how, even though this guy managed to make me scream his name in a way that you’d only hear in special types of movies, I still managed to think of him as a worm. No brain and no spine (occasionally). I still loved him, of course. No matter how much I hated him. He was still my Trey.

“Aren’t you just the tidiest?” I said sarcastically, catching my breath. I ran my fingertip through some of his spill, rubbing it between my fingers. It was hot and sticky, but sort of… silky. It was weird and I liked it a lot. Especially since it was his.

“Shut up, woman. Jesus,” he huffed, laughing.

There was a knock at my bedroom door. “Y/N? Trey? You guys okay?” It was Matt, inebriated.

I looked at Trey, fear in both of our eyes, until I spoke up, “You know what, fuck you! You’re a piece of shit pig! I don’t even know why I moved in with you in the first place!”

Trey’s face only read as pure shock as I spoke, but it worked, and Matt walked away. “Wow, okay. I guess not,” He’d said.

“You’re a good actor,” Trey told me, brushing my hair out of my face.

“Hmm, I guess. But you don’t want me anymore, do you?” I said jokingly, pouting.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, grinning.

“‘Cause I’m not a virgin anymore,” I said, giving him the biggest doe eyes I possibly could.

“Oh, oh, right. Yeah, that does change things,” He said, biting his finger. “I think I’m about finished with you know. Goodbye!”

He sat up to leave the room, until I whacked his arm and pulled him back down next to me. I knew he was joking. He knew he was stuck with me forever.

“You can’t go bragging to everyone just yet,” I told him. “Slow down.”

Trey scoffed. “I’m not telling them jack. All they’ll do is ask questions that I won’t answer.”

“They have to find out eventually,” I said.

“Says who?”

“Says God,” I shrugged in a nothing-I-can-do-about-it sort of manner.

“God is dead,” Trey said, grimacing.

I grinned, leaning forward to kiss him. “You’re never getting rid of me, Trey Parker.”

“That’s fine with me,” he said, pulling me in for another kiss.

#i can write a 7k+ word long trey fic in 1 day #but i can’t write a 2.5k word long matt fic in 5 days #what the fuck #trey parker #trey parker x reader #x reader #fanfiction #fem reader #fluff #smut #baseketball #cannibal the musical #south park #matt stone x reader #angst #mattrey

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xccentriktigress · 1 year

Text

Below the cut is a clean verbatim transcript of the StaffCon2023 “Live With the CEO” stream. Featuring the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg [@photomatt], and the Tumblr COO, Zandy Ring [@zingring].

Built from the videos by @secondbeatsongs [x] and @chainswordcs [x]. Additional thanks to my fellow archivists, @eiimblr, @sharksfood, and @fokron.

The stream was about an hour, so there's a lot of dialogue. There are timestamps next to the questions and important statements if you want to skim.

A true verbatim transcript is available by request.

[archive 1]|[archive 2]

PhotoMatt: This is Zandy Ring. Zandy’s the Chief Operating Officer of Tumblr and I’m the CEO of Automattic. We’re here, trying out this experiment where we’ll do a live broadcast and take questions from users and talk about it. And I'm here in the room, actually. This is like the, kinda first ever, in a really long time since… What year was the last big Tumblr meet-up?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PhotoMatt: 2018? *chuckle* Yeah.

ZingRing: Yeah.

PhotoMatt: So, since 2018. So, basically in five years, the first time the vast majority of the Tumblr team is together and so you got a lot of us here in this room. And so pretty much everything there is to know about Tumblr is known in this room. *laugh* So, hopefully, we can answer pretty much anything. Any questions coming in so far?

ZingRing: We have some questions from earlier, and one of the big questions has been one that we just did during our trial run which was uh-

PhotoMatt: I can try this one, the one- what was that, FantastiCait?

ZingRing: Ok, great

[1:08] PhotoMatt: Says, “Why are we making changes right after people left Reddit and Twitter because of their changes?”

PM: *chuckles* I totally get why change is scary. *chuckle* Right? But also if things don’t change, if services don’t evolve I’m certain it’ll die.

ZR: Right.

PM: Now, if we change it, we could mess it up or we could make it better. The good news is that as we change things we’re listening to users, we’re looking at usage, we’re learning. And so we’re learning by doing.

[1:42] PM: Says, “Are you planning any drastic changes to come?”

PM: I mean, kind of? You know. A hundred and something people working on Tumblr *laughs* that’s their job *chuckles* is to change it and make it better. You know, we try to make changes that you all ask for, we try to do changes we think you'll like and we get it right sometimes we get it wrong sometimes, but we just always learn.

ZR: Thank you for the pizza.

PM: Thank you for the piz- ? Oh yeah. Nice *chuckles*

[2:08] PM: “We asked for a better search function.”

PM: Yeah. I agree.

ZR: That’s being worked on.

PM: Search is being worked on, right?

ZR: Yup.

PM: Actually, who is working on Search here?

ZR: There they are.

PM: Okay, we got two people here *laughs* How’s it going?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PM: It’s going well.

ZR: It’s going good.

PM: Is there anything that’s launching soon that we could preview for folks?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PM: Oh, oh yeah. Getting reblogs in search. Ought to be a pretty big one.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: But a good way, if you have ideas for Search, a great thing to do is post it to your Tumblr. *chuckles. Send us a link. We'll check it out. You know, we definitely read a lot of that stuff, and we share it in our Slack channel and things like that. So, we’re always reading Tumblr and listening to users.

ZR: Yeah. It’s a great job, we just get to use Tumblr all day long.

[3:09] PM: “Have you seen the 44 thousand note poll about the algorithm changes?”

PM: Yes. *laughs* I don’t know what it’s about though because we haven’t really changed anything. *laughs*

ZR: Yeah, we’re not getting rid of the chronological feed.

PM: Yeah, chronological feed will always be an option for people. So just, tell your friends. *chuckles* Because there seems to be a lot of misinformation. There’s things people get mad at us that we do and there’s things people get mad at us that we’re actually not doing. *chuckles* And have no plans to do, so figure that out.

PM: How many people do we have on the stream so far? Kind of curious.

[3:52] PM: “Allow us to snooze Tumblr Live indefinitely.”

PM: But then you wouldn’t be here right now.

ZR: Hmm *chuckles*

[3:57] PM: “Can we add stories to our blogs like Instagram?”

PM: Yeah. And we actually developed a story feature over on the WordPress side of things, Jetpack side. I was kinda wondering why we did it there instead of on Tumblr. *chuckles* It does seem to be like a social primitive that users expect from different networks. So yeah, would love to support something like Stories. It’s not currently on the roadmap though, so, I should be *indistinct*

ZR: We have a question that I think already scrolled by. It’s actually from one of the people we talked to yesterday when we did our trial run. BirdRhetorics.

[4:32] ZR: “How do you know that Tumblr is hard to use as discussed in the product direction post?”

ZR: *to Matt* How do we know Tumblr is hard to use?

PM: Oh! *laughs*

ZR: Because it is. It’s something that is-

PM: Thank you for the crab *laughs*

ZR: Oh! *laughs* Thank you.

ZR: We talk with a lot of users and we talk with users that have returned, people who left the site. The reason they’re leaving the site is because they couldn’t find the communities they wanted. They couldn’t figure out Search, they don’t understand trying to follow people or blogs so that their following feed actually will fill up with great stuff. So we’re just trying to make that process much easier for them so that they can have the experience that long-time users have as well.

ZR: I love these crabs.

*laughter*

[5:28] ZR: Thank you Tumblr for giving me crabs.

*laughter*

[5:33] PM: Someone says, “Would you make Live more accessible? I would stream my art but I can’t.”

PM: We’re trying to. We’ve got the OBS stuff now and you can do it from desktop.

PM: I saw kind of a bug report there go by. Did anyone catch that? Something about links to audio posts? Did someone see that go by? Do we know what this bug is?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: What was that?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Oh, no no no. This was about links to audio posts or something. He just reposted it? Oh, go to the bottom maybe. He just reposted-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: I don’t know if I understand that one. Who was that? Tyote? If you could do a post about that and just tag Staff in it. And tag PhotoMatt *chuckles* as well, we’ll take a look at that.

PM: Oh yeah, we should say our Tumblr usernames by the way.

ZR: We should.

PM: I’m PhotoMatt. P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T

ZR: I am ZingRing. Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G

PM: Cool.

[6:46] PM: Someone says “If you don’t like Tumblr Live, click around on people. Find people you vibe with”

PM: I agree.

[6:51] ZR: We have one here. “Is Tumblr Live gonna be going international?”

ZR: Yeah, that’s part of our plan. We just recently put into place some of the steps we need in order to roll it out in other countries so…more people will be able to have access to it if they want.

[7:11] PM: Someone says “Does Tumblr Live support OBS?”

PM: Yes, it does.

ZR: Yes, it does.

PM: Woohoo.

[7:15] ZR: Here's one. “Will you be fixing the fact that you can't zoom in on images?” Who can answer that? *inaudible, off-screen* It's already fixed.

7:32 PM: What platform’s the chip on?

[7:38] *off-screen staff member* Sorry they're probably talking about the new Lightbox feature where some zoom capabilities were different and they should now be able to pinch to zoom, tap to zoom, just as they're used to. It just rolled out, so update the app.

PM: Awesome, so if you update your app, hopefully, zoom might be working.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: And definitely run your app updates. I do it every morning, it's the first thing I do.

ZR: *chuckles*

PM: Like, I look at how I slept on WHOOP, because obviously, I don't know how I slept, I just woke up. Then I update my apps. Ah, these are going by kind of fast.

[8:12] PM: “Will there be a filter to determine bot Lives from real users”

PM: Yeah, hopefully, there's no bots. So the moderation team should pick that up if there's bots.

[8:24] PM: “Could you say why 18+ content is not allowed on the site when it does so well on other platforms?”

PM: Actually, since November of last year, we updated our guidelines so a lot more artistic presentations of the human form are allowed now. So, check out the updated guidelines. They’re a lot more in line with other services

ZR: Yeah.

PM: It's still not everything, so there's definitely other sites if you want a particular type of more hardcore content. That's probably still going to be on Twitter or Reddit or PornHub or whatever but yeah. Because Tumblr, we want to be about art and artists and stuff like for Arts. More artistic stuff, we definitely want to allow that.

[9:08]ZR: Yep. Here's one. “Is it difficult to handle a lot of incoming users, such as the ones from Reddit or Twitter?”

ZR: No, because we don't get huge influxes. People have this perception that we have massive growth right now and we really don't. So we welcome everyone with open arms. I think the thing that we need to do is improve our onboarding experience so that those new users find traction right away which is part of what that very long core product post on Staff was talking about but no. That is not an issue we currently face. What a great problem to have.

PM: By the way, I do want to recognize there was the penguin person who said Tumblr staff are heroes so…

ZR: Aw.

PM: Yay. Thank you.

ZR: *to audience* That’s you all.

*Applause*

[10:02] PM: One thing I hope you all get from this, who are watching. One, we want to correct some misinformation. For example, chronological feed is staying. It's not going away. And two, also just show that, like, there's real people behind the screen, building Tumblr, with families and feelings and dreams and ambitions and all sorts of things.

PM: And so yeah. We're trying to do more stuff in public. It's been a little challenging because a lot of it's getting misinterpreted and stuff, but we're just gonna keep trying to make things more public. We even just open-sourced our stream builder so like, how the main feed gets built. So hopefully we can open-source a lot more in the future. We want to engage with the developer community, third-party people doing things around Tumblr, and yeah, make it better and better.

ZR: I haven't been saying usernames as I've read some of the questions that are being sent to me from the feed so I'm really sorry about that. I'm gonna try to say the usernames.

[11:01] ZR: Tyote said “Could a grid view for the dashboard be implemented on desktop Tumblr like the search page has? I have all this extra screen space.”

ZR: We are doing some experiments with the different *chuckles* Better resourced, I guess, view of the dashboard that looks pretty great which I guess is not out to users yet. But more to come there for sure.

PM: Let's see, how many people do we have now? I can't see the number.

*off-screen* 302.

PM: 302, cool. Okay.

[11:45] PM: “We need hardware-level encryption.”

PM: I don't know what that means *laughs* But, okay. *laughs* Maybe we need it too, wow.

[12:02] PM: “How do you intend to help users trust the Lives, if we are keeping them?”

PM: I'm not sure if I know what that means.

ZR: I think it's a question about feeling safe using Tumblr Live. Perhaps? With data?

*chuckles at crab*

[12:23] PM: “Let's toggle off Live without a timer”

PM: Well, Live is…we're trying it out. *laughs* And in theory, this could be something that- You know, when people send gifts, we get a portion of that revenue and so it's something we're trying to help make Tumblr sustainable and allow us to invest more into the site. For, you know, getting servers, making things faster, having staff to fix bugs.

[12:51] PM: By the way, I want to address another thing that people always say whenever we do a post.

[12:56] PM: I forget what the username was but they said “Ban the Nazis.”

PM: *chuckles* Yeah. Nazi-like hate speech is definitely against the terms of service so if you see a Nazi tell us *chuckles* and we'll ban it. The Trust and Safety team on Tumblr has done a really monumental effort over the past few years to clean things up quite a bit. There is some backlog, always, but like yeah. Please report sites if you see hate speech or anything that would be against our terms of service. Which I think literal Nazism is. *chuckles*

ZR: Yeah.

[13:36] ZR: Yep, we got another question about the algorithm style Post Feed so probably bears repeating that we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. It will be its own tab, so do not worry about that.

[13: 57] ZR: Then we had another one about moderation, more transparent. And I've seen another question about this previously, too. Posts that should be fine under the new policies are still being tagged. That's from Yansie.

ZR: Yeah, and that shouldn't be happening. But humans do make mistakes so we try to fix them. It does take time, we do have a backlog, so bear with us. Stick with us, we'll try to do right by everybody.

[14:27] PM: There's a question being asked a lot about LGBT content being flagged?

PM: Yeah, Tumblr is super pro-LGBT. I think it's actually like 25 or 30 percent of our user base. So if there's a mistake in the flagging… You know, again, this is humans. So, definitely mistakes are made. Please let us know, specifically, and have to take a look at it. I wonder what the flag could have been there.

ZR: Not sure.

PM: Yeah.

[15:02] PM: So people are asking to mute Tumblr Live permanently.

PM: How much would you pay for that? *chuckles* Maybe-

*laughter*

PM: Maybe we'll make it an upgrade. Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? Like, make me an offer. We might launch that in the Tumblr mods.

*more laughter*

PM: Okay, we got 25 there.

ZR: Going once…

PM: 500, wow! We could definitely make it giftable too. You can gift people. *chuckles* It's like an auction. 500 going once, going twice, yeah, wow.

[15:38] PM: They say “Pay streamers”

PM: Streamers can get paid actually, yeah. So, you can make money by streaming on Tumblr Live. So, that's part of the reason we were excited to try out this feature. Yeah, we launched Post Plus and other things. We're very interested in things that can get creators paid. In fact, even as we initially acquired Tumblr and during the turnaround, we actually prioritized the features that got users paid above the features that just got us paid.

[16:06] PM: Let’s see “Why can't we take usernames from older inactive accounts?”

PM: Anyone have an answer there? *silence* Sometimes we recycle usernames.

ZR: Yeah, there is a process to recycle usernames. We just need a request or we don't know that you're trying to use that username.

PM: You're “going to request Karen.” Okay, good luck.

*Laughter*

[16:40] PM: “Let Live direct stream from OBS.”

PM: OBS is supported for Live so maybe- Do we just need to like-?

ZR: On web.

PM: On web. Yes, so you can use OBS. Again hopefully, this system gets a lot more people knowing what actually is the reality.

[17:00] PM: “Why is Live stuck in portrait mode?”

PM: I think that's just how it's designed. It's a portrait experience, right?

ZR: Yeah, that's right.

[17:15] PM: “You can only use OBS for your virtual webcam on the web, not directly.”

PM: Does anyone know about that? Yes.

*Gary, offscreen* OBS can set up a virtual webcam but then you tell Live to use that webcam. But… the better way to do it through OBS is through using RTMP which I think- *indistinct*

PM: Yeah, so this is Gary. He was saying RTMP would be better and I think that's on the roadmap.

Gary: I think it's on the roadmap. Somebody who works on Live would perhaps know better when it's coming but they're working on it.

PM: Cool, and in the meantime, use the virtual webcam feature.

17:51

PM: You want the pretty-haired lady on screen, all right. That’s you, Zandy.

*Applause, Laughter*

ZR: Thank you. Thank you. Oh my God, I love it, I love flowers. Thank you.

PM: And you do have great hair.

ZR: Yeah I do.

PM: Thank you for the compliments. Thank you.

ZR: I didn't mean to say ‘I do,’ I meant to say ‘thank you.’ Here's a good one from VampSprite.

[18:26] “Can you make merch like a normal company?”

ZR: No, because we're not.

*Matt laughs*

ZR: We can make merch like Tumblr.

PM: I think we're definitely leaning into the weird,

ZR: Yeah. For sure.

PM: We're trying to be even weirder than we have been.

ZR: Let's see, uh…

[18:44] PM: People are saying “Can we keep custom themes?”

PM: Yes, custom themes are staying, so don't worry about that.

[18:53] PM: Someone's saying “Don't touch the chronological dashboard” so we'll just say it again, chronological will always be an option for y'all.

ZR: Yep.

PM: Yeah.

[19:05] ZR: Here's one, StormBlessed-Fool “It seems really difficult to appeal staff decisions such as shadowbans, content removal, etcetera. Can that be improved?”

ZR: Yeah, definitely. We are working really hard to make sure that people's content is not removed if it's not violative but we do make mistakes and we have a backlog so it takes us a while, sometimes, to realize that we have made a mistake. That's on us and we're getting better. We have a really amazing Trust and Safety team that's been working really, really hard over the last couple of years to operationalize and improve and make this a better place for Tumblr users so bear with us. I am sorry.

[19:52] PM: I don't know who Peggy is. *laughs* I guess a lot of people don't like- Peggy seems very polarizing but we don't know who she is or who they are. It's a spam account? “Peg is a troll. It keeps coming back on here on Live.” Oh.

ZR: Oh.

PM: Well I bet we can fix that.

ZR: I bet we could fix that.

PM: *chuckles* Watch out, Peggy.

*Laughter*

PM: By the way, I think I'm gonna just move my chair closer to yours then they don't have to pan the camera as much.

ZR: Okay

PM: The pretty-haired lady can be in everything.

ZR: Ooh

[20:33] ZR: “Mind if I ask” This is from WarriorPrincess666 which is a really great username “Mind if I ask why the group chat room was deleted two years ago?”

ZR: And you all have really great usernames. I am sorry for singling one person out.

PM: Just own it, that's a cool username.

ZR: It's a good username. I do not remember why we unwound-

PM: Because no one was using it. *chuckles* I think we had really high expectations for that feature and it was used a lot less. We do try to deprecate things that aren't used a lot to just, like lower the technical debt so… Yeah, now we're both in there.

ZR: Hooray

PM: High five.

ZR: We moved a chair.

PM: We moved a chair.

ZR: We can move mountains.

PM: *chuckles* Yeah. So, one thing about products and code is that every bit of code you have kind of requires maintenance and updating and, you know, sometimes things break. Or interacts in different ways. So the more complex the code base is, the harder it is to maintain. We're not great about this but- Yeah, streamlining the product you know… Someone always uses something but if something's used by just a really really really small percentage we sometimes streamline it. But I think Group is really the only thing we've done that for in a while, right?

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: Can y'all think of anything else we've turned off or gotten rid of? Mostly we add things.

ZR: Yeah

PM: That's why the Tumblr code base is so big.

ZR: And complex.

[22:06] ZR: Re-bee-key asked about merch. “Is there any way Tumblr could team up with more artists? I'm sure people would be more open to buying merch.”

ZR: Yeah, absolutely, and not everybody knows about this but we have this program called Creatrs. There's no O at the end, it's T-R-S at the end, Creatrs. That is where we look to artists within the Tumblr Community when brands want to work with us. We try to find people within our own Community who would like to work directly with that brand, get their work out there, build a relationship, and then we try to foster that connection. So, that is a program that not very many people know about and it's been kind of small running over the last couple years, and we want to build it back up and connect artists with brands, those who want to work with them. So, definitely want to amplify the artists on our site in ways that will work for them.

PM: Yeah. People are asking about search and we addressed that a little bit earlier. We do have some folks working on search and there's fixes coming.

[23:23] PM: There was someone named Anon that's, you know, saying that we're missing LGB tags or something like that so could someone message Anon? Like, DM them? Raise your hand if you could do that.

PM: Yes? Okay, over there? Thank you.

ZR: Thanks, Josh.

PM: Thanks, Josh. So Josh is gonna reach out to Anon and we'll try to get some more details there so we can yeah see what's going on.

ZR: That- that might be coming from the Humans account. It may, just so you know.

PM: Maybe also message TittyInfinity *chuckles* who's also reporting this. I can't believe you all just got me to say that. *laughs* I hope my mom’s not watching.

ZR: Here’s one from WormPool. Another very good username.

[24:14] “How much is coming in the way of future monetization and how will it affect the average user.”

ZR: Well, we must monetize Tumblr in some way. We have to either get to revenue neutral, where we make enough to just pay for itself. It would be nice if it made money but we're gonna do what we need to do. We don't want to do things like sell user data or make the site unusable with tons and tons of ads. So, we're going to keep experimenting with different ways to provide value to users. Matt mentioned earlier that we're trying to do more in terms of getting artists paid on the site, like Post Plus. And you know, you can give people gifts through Tumblr Live if you like what they're doing with it. So we're trying to do more things that sort of fall into that area where we can have a revenue share sort of thing. But we're also doing merch and we're selling domains. We have an ad-free subscription, we sell badges, other digital goods. We'll kind of look at everything but there's some rivers we just won't cross because we don't agree with them.

PM: And, to be honest, it has been a little tricky. A lot of the upgrades we launched, just not as many people have subscribed as we were hoping to.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: Like, we thought the no-ads upgrade, which is 30 bucks per year, would do pretty well but how many subscribers do we have for no-ads?

*offscreen* Almost 25 thousand.

PM: About 25 thousand so when you think of the millions of people that use Tumblr only 25 thousand buying the upgrade is pretty low. You can buy it for yourself, you can gift it to people. That definitely helps. To be transparent about the financial gap I think maybe David knows this. Like, what's our current- What would get us to break even? It's like 20, 25 million or-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.

ZR: Yeah, we've got one here that I really like.

[27:12] Somebody write it down, from VForVincente. “Re: merch. Make socks that come in trios instead of pairs.”

*audience enthusiasm*

ZR: Let's do that.

PM: *laughs* Triple socks. Oh, that is- that's an idea.

ZR: It is. It is an idea.

*off-screen* It’s a backup sock.

PM: It's a backup sock.

ZR: It’s a backup, you always lose one.

[27:38] Anonymous asked, “Any plans for next April the 1st?”

ZR: Yes, but we won't know until, like, February.

PM: *chuckles* Someone registered PhotoMattsMom and said “I heard what you said.” That's funny. Y'all are funny. I can't believe you just created an account. Thank you for helping our registration numbers.

[28:01] ZR: *chuckles* Well, people are asking if the Live stream can be recorded.

ZR: You actually can't do that, they're totally ephemeral. That might be something that we can work on in the future but it actually isn't even possible for us right now. We don't store them they're just-

PM: Are we recording this one though? No? So this is- yeah.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: This is ephemeral.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: So it's just for y’all. Just for the 500-ish people here. Whoa, what's that say? Boujee?

ZR: Oh.

PM: Ooh. Bling bling.

ZR: *chuckles* That’s a weird gift to give.

PM: We probably just should have had someone record this on their phone or something *chuckles* Next time. This was just an experiment. Well, we might do this again.

[28:54] ZR: ArialErendeair asked “Is your plan to remain as open about future decisions that you're making for the Tumblr experience so we can provide feedback?”

ZR: Yeah, we do, we want to work in public a lot more. The core strategy post that went out yesterday is a step in that direction. In retrospect, we see how we could have improved on that messaging so it wasn't terrifying to everybody. Because we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. And could have made it a little bit more, like, punchy and maybe short. But, yeah, we're gonna try to keep doing this and do it more in public because Tumblr only exists because of the users. That's it, so we want to be in this journey with you.

PM: Yeah. Please tell your friends that chronological feed will always be an option. So yes, a lot of people- Oh thank you for the kiss there *Matt smooch sound*

ZR: I think it was for me.

PM: Oh. *laughs* Yeah, probably.

[30:03] PM: “How much are we paying the boys that come here and post emojis?”

PM: Nothing.

ZR: No.

PM: Unless they use Post Plus or something. Then they can get paid.

[30:14] ZR: DimensionalAbyss. I'm really sorry for butchering all these “How long is this going on? Please do a sleep stream.”

ZR: Absolutely not.

*laughter*

PM: What's a sleep stream?

ZR: It sounds like you stream yourself sleeping.

PM: Huh.

ZR: You can do it. I'm not doing it.

PM: I actually talk a lot in my sleep. That would be weird.

[30: 38] ZR: I'm not gonna choose this one just for the username but IntergalacticBoner asked “Any plans to expand the Help Desk? It can take more than a week to get a response from support.”

ZR: We are working all of the time to improve our processes. We have an amazing customer support team. We have amazing folks from within Automattic that help us with public support so we are trying to cut those SLAs down. An SLA is a Service Level Agreement. That's like what we promise to users as a response time. So we try to cut those response times down as much as we can. A week does seem like a long time. We can improve on that. Yeah, thank you IntergalacticBoner.

[31:34] PM: “Can we keep reblogs as they are and not condense them?”

PM: We're gonna just do some experiments with the different reblog formats and everything like that. I know that sounds scary but we also use Tumblr so if it doesn't work we'll roll it back or try something new. Everything's always a process, everything's always an experiment. Yay, Pride.

ZR: Yay.

[32:02] ZR: Trydianth asks “I buy the ad-free subscription. Can that also include other options like turning off features not like” which I think is ‘that I don't like.’

PM: Maybe, yeah. I mean, one thing that's tricky is when you add options for things it can add a lot of complexity to the app but, if you notice, a lot of the things that we've launched, we have given toggles for settings for so, in general, we're trying to be the most sort of user-controllable social network out there. And just, if we can, yeah. We'll keep trying that but, like we said, our previous approach is not working. *chuckles* I mean that Tumblr’s growth isn't where we want it to be and the revenue is not, you know. Like I said, we're 30 million below where the revenue needs to be so that's why we're trying different things to see what works.

ZR: Mm-hmm.

[32:58] ZR: “Re: Custom domains.” This is from transientURL “Do we expect to be able to host a Tumblr blog on the same domain as non-Tumblr site content?”

ZR: Salty.

*Matt chuckles*

ZR: I'm not sure I'm parsing that question.

PM: Can you embed a Tumblr blog and something with other stuff probably? Or maybe it's custom domains um-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Second-level domains? What would be a second-level domain? Like a sub- like a subdomain? *indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Like blog dot M-A dot T-V or something? Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, definitely domain features are something we're working on and investing in.

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: It’s probably gonna be paid. Just so you all know.

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: We charge for domain mapping everything on WordPress dot com and I think we have like 300 thousand map domains so we definitely think that's going to be a good revenue stream.

[34:09] PM: “Tumblr Live is banned in Europe”

PM: It's actually not banned in Europe. We just haven't launched support in Europe yet so it's not banned that's misinformation

ZR: Yeah. And to be clear we collect the absolute minimum amount of information. We collect birth date, because you need to be over 18. And location, so that we know if you're in the US or not. And I think that's it. That's the only thing that we collect in terms of Live. We let you stream from the back camera so you never have to show your face. All the streams are ephemeral, so we don't save them. There's a lot that we try to do in the best possible way for our users' safety and health rather than just collect tons of things that get stored or that we might have to delete or be worried about.

PM: Whoa. Eagle thing, cool

PM: Very patriotic.

ZR: It's very something.

[35:18] PM: Someone’s asked why we need location.

PM: Zandy just said it. We need location because right now it's restricted to the United States so we need the location to tell between the United States.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: But hopefully that should be broader in the future. Also, sometimes that data that we collect helps us fight spammers and bots so that's another reason you sort of have some of that.

[35:43] ZR: WormPool, repeat question asker. “Would there be a way to directly donate occasionally, similar to AO3 or Wikipedia, rather than buy merch?”

ZR: We have talked about this, yeah. I thought for a while we couldn't legally because we're not a non-profit but we can, legally. So that's an option that we may look into in the future.

PM: In the meantime though, like buy the no-ads upgrade, yeah. Probably a good one.

ZR: And you can, if you really like the ads, you can turn off the no-ads upgrade

PM: Yeah.

ZR: After you buy it.

PM: That's how much we believe in user control, you can buy the no-ads upgrade and then turn the ads back on. Or you could just turn Blaze post on, which I really like. So I have the no ads upgrade but I actually turn ads on because I want to test them. *chuckles* Make sure they're good.

[36:36] ZR: Here's another one that's interesting. This is transientURL again “I've seen a lot of people worrying that, like Reddit, Tumblr has external investor pressure to monetize. Want to refute or talk about that?”

PM: Yeah, of course, we have investors. We’re a company and if we didn't have investors we wouldn't be able to spend 30 million a year *chuckles* on Tumblr. It's not just about the investors though. When we work on something we want to see the returns on it, and we want to make sure it's sustainable so that we can make sure that Tumblr’s around for many years to come. So, that's really our main focus.

[37:19] ZR: Mm-hmm. ShadowGirl7, this is one for our ads team “Can you please not have ads be super vibrant? It's really an eyesore for epileptics like me especially when there's no way to stop it” So take note, yeah.

PM: And maybe buy the no-ads upgrade. *chuckles* Because then you won't see them at all.

ZR: Or ask someone to gift you.

[37:40] PM: A lot of people are asking about multiple dashboards. And I do think account switching, which I guess would give you multiple dashboards, different following, being able to do actions with different accounts is definitely pretty high on my personal list for things I'd love to see Tumblr support. Pretty big feature, pretty complicated. But yeah. We just need to bite the elephant there. Was that a metaphor? Maybe I just made that up.

ZR: I don't think you should bite an elephant.

PM: *laughs* Would they notice?

ZR: Probably not.

[38:13] ZR: Oh, FeetAreUnderrated asked, “How large is the Tumblr staff?”

ZR: We have nearly everybody here with us this week and we have 192 people here this week so it's about 200. That's it, yeah.

PM: Yeah, that's a much better answer. I was going to say, you know, it ranges from extra small to extra extra large.

ZR: *laughs* You literally posted, like, yesterday about how many people we have.

PM: Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah, wow. Yeah, so I think we have 192 people here together in person, which is pretty exciting. For 59 percent of the people that are here, they've never been to a large meet-up like this so it's our first time getting to see each other.

For those who don't know, Automattic, which is the parent company of Tumblr, and Tumblr are fully distributed so people work from wherever they are in the world. And we mostly coordinate online. But getting together a few times a year is really key to sort of working, knowing each other better, developing our culture, making plans, learning from each other.

You can actually be hired at Automattic with never actually talking to someone. Actually who here was hired purely on text? *chuckles* Yeah, so that's a good chunk. It was like about a quarter of the audience was just chatting on text.

ZR: Mm-hmm

PM: Which is pretty interesting and I actually did kind of the first thousand final interviews. We called them MattChats. But then we were hiring a lot of people and I became a *indistinct* so I had to stop doing that.

Although, I had an idea the other day actually inspired by a donut shed I had for… missing the name but who was it? Well, he was telling me that, I guess he read about the MattChat and he was really disappointed he didn't get one. So I thought that for existing Automatticians we put up something in announcements. You could leave an emoji if you want to MattChat. *laughs* Don't worry, doesn't actually- *chuckles* You're already hired, so it doesn't change that. But I thought we could do two options. It could just be, like, more of a donut where we just hang out and, um. Or if you want a classic-style text one, I still have all the questions I ask and everything. I kind of had a little bit of a format. I would vary it but I had some sort of standard questions I like to ask people.

One of my favorites was ‘If you could require all of Automattic to read a single book what would that be?’ And they got so many different answers and I actually used it to read a bunch. So the books that people would recommend, I would often check out, and really led me down some really interesting things I never would have read otherwise. That's how I read the ‘Bhagavad Gita.’ There was a sort of an interpretation called ‘My Gita,’ which I really learned a lot from that. And, so yeah. It's been kind of a fun thing. It's always been on my to-do to, like, actually collate all the answers. There were some common ones. What was it ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ was a really common one. Who's that guy, the author? David Allen or something or-

ZR: Yeah.

PM: Covey. Yeah, Stephen Covey.

[41:54] ZR: Here's a question. JasmineFlowers or maybe Yasmin Flowers “Are all of you new to Tumblr?”

ZR: No.

PM: No, I was actually a super early Tumblr user.

ZR: Yeah, we have a lot of people here in the audience, that you can't see, who have been users of Tumblr for as long as there's been a Tumblr.

PM: Yeah. Can someone look up my user ID, actually? I'm kind of curious. David, of course, is user id1 *chuckles*

ZR: Right.

PM: David Karp, the illustrious founder of Tumblr, yeah.

*offscreen* Today it's five.

PM: My user number is five?

*indistinct, offscreen*

PM: Yeah, yeah, my WordPress user ID is five.

ZR: That makes more sense.

PM: I think Danica is number one. But yeah, look me up in the Tumblr panel.

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: What was that?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: So I was the 2007th user of Tumblr. *chuckles*

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Oh year 2007. 72078. Yeah, so seventy-two thousand. Yeah, so one of the first that was definitely pretty early. Because Tumblr launched in 2007, right? Yeah. Actually, interesting fact. Tumblr used to have a blog on WordPress. Which I thought was pretty cool for its first X number of years. Even though Tumblr and WordPress used to be competitors, we always had a lot of respect for each other. I always took a lot of inspiration from Tumblr and I'm really glad to be able to work on it now.

[43:33] ZR: There's one addressed directly to you. UnadulteratedPenguinCreation says, “Hey Matt do you read fanfiction?”

PM: Oh no. Sorry. Sometimes, I've been linked things and I'll browse it and sometimes there's memes and I'm always trying to figure out what they are. You know I only get so much time to read books so I definitely have a pretty huge backlog. Right now I'm reading Alain de Botton’s uh ‘School of Life’ which is really nice. Probably next I'm gonna read the next book in the ‘Silo’ series, Hugh Howey’s.

ZR: I read fanfiction, not that anyone asked me.

PM: Any favorites? Anything you want to suggest?

ZR: No. No, I'm not gonna suggest anything. That is for me, on my time

[44:37] ZR: From Maiosx “What is the best blog on Tumblr?”

ZR: Oh, there's so many good ones.

PM: I really like @everythingfox.

ZR: Oh yeah, that's so cute.

PM: Yeah, cute animals.

ZR: Yep.

PM: I don't know if it's the best one but yeah. I actually would love to have, like, folders or ways I could have different lists of things I follow because my feed is a little schizo. It definitely bounces around a lot and I do really appreciate some new features. Like, ‘Things You Might Have Missed’ or other things because I would find I would actually miss a post from my friends who might only post once every week or two or something and so I really appreciated that I-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Sorry, what was that? How much money am I willing to pay for not missing my-? Well, 30 million so far *laughs* per year. Paying a lot for it. *chuckles*

[45:33] ZR: We've been getting a question here that's surfaced “Can we talk about the reblog chain thing?” “Can the removal of reblog chains be an optional feature rather than a permanent one?”

ZR: We made some changes to the reblog chain so that things were more consistent across all platforms and would work more like you would expect them to work. Unless you have used Tumblr for a really long time. So, everything we do is an experiment. We try things, we see how well they work, functionally, if people actually will use them. And then we make changes and adjustments and some you can see right away and some you can't see right away. Some we have to put on the shelf and revisit later, as other priorities come up. But any change that we make, I wouldn't consider 100 percent set in stone. Except that we are not getting rid of the chronological feed. As a reminder.

PM: I'm gonna actually open Tumblr. I'm kind of curious what the banner looks like for this. Live with the Tumblr CEO, cool. Oh, joining stream.

ZR: Uh-oh

PM: Inception

[47:03] ZR: LMFAO said, “Do you see streaming to become the main part of Tumblr going forward?”

ZR: I don't know, it's another experiment. If it was insanely popular and people were doing really cool things with it very consistently at a high quality, sure. But it doesn't have high usage right now so it's probably just gonna be something that we continue to play with and experiment with until it either clicks or we go a different way.

PM: By the way, I saw someone said I casually used a slur. Was that schizo?

ZR: Oh, I bet it was.

PM: I apologize, I mess up sometimes. So I won’t do that again.

ZR: Thank you.

PM: Thank you for pointing that out to me.

[47:50] PM: “Are there any LGBT people or neurodivergent folks helping make decisions”

PM: Oh yeah *laughs* We have a ton.

ZR: Yeah.

[48:02] ZR: The-Trans-Fiendling. “Are you going to fix your algorithms so they don't disproportionately target trans users to flag them as mature?”

ZR: We will check into it, make sure that isn’t happening. Or, if it is, that we’ll make changes. We definitely do not want to marginalize trans people, push them off the site, make them feel like this is not the place for them. That's not what Tumblr is about so wherever we have screwed up we'll try to fix it and make sure that perception matches reality as well.

[48:50] PM: “It's basically a stockholder update, it's not going to be entertaining.”

PM: Huh, that's funny.

[49:00] PM: So, I saw someone ask an interesting question. Sorry, I missed the username, but “How do we balance attracting new users versus supporting features that other social network sites support?”

PM: This is actually a really interesting product to design because I do think that there is an expectation. Like, obviously y’all probably also have or have used Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snap, all the other social networks. And I do think there is an expectation around certain things, like maybe messaging or following, liking, whatever that we need to support. Tumblr has always been sort of on the forefront of innovating, actually, for social networks. So a lot of things that we launched first are later adopted by other social networks. So, I think that's just kind of how technology works, right? Sometimes, we come up with a cool new idea and other people copy us. Sometimes, other people come up with cool ideas, and we can be inspired by that. Maybe we implement it like they did or maybe we riff on it and sort of do our own take on it. It's part of the fun.

[50:05] PM: “What's your favorite XKit feature?”

PM: Do we have April here, actually?

*off-screen* No.

ZR: No.

PM: No? Aw, she couldn’t make it. Yeah, April, one of the XKit- there's multiple versions of XKit, right? Which one does she do? I forget the name but, yeah, actually one of the developers of XKit now works on Tumblr. So I think that's pretty cool.

[50:30] ZR: HomemadeMonsterPants, killing it. “What's the best method of sending feedback?”

ZR: If you have an actual like you found a bug or something is broken, which is the same as a bug, uh send a ticket to Support. If there's things that you just want to give us feedback on you can ping our Work in Progress, WIP group. There's our Humans- @humans blog. You can send me stuff, you can send Matt stuff. When I get stuff that's particularly hateful, I do ignore it. So, if you have a point you really want to make, try not to skew too heavily into how much you hate me personally, and then I'll try to address it publicly.

PM: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, is that the saying?

ZR: That's- I don't know why you want to catch flies at all.

PM: “Can you remind us of your usernames?” Sure PhotoMatt P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T

ZR: And I'm ZingRing, Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G

[51: 47] ZR: LiveThrowaway, “Have you considered improving the way you orient new users to Tumblr's unique features.”

ZR: Yes, that's something we want to do. We want to keep what's special about Tumblr and what makes it so great, enhance those things. Which is not code for making Tumblr like every other social media site. Enhance those things, but also make it super easy and obvious for new users to get going really quickly with the communities that they care about and the content they care about.

[52:20] PM: Someone said why we're focusing on new users versus existing users?

PM: We focus on both.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: Retention is just as important as new user acquisition. Anyone will tell you that.

ZR: Yeah. Yeah, we look at churn, we look at how many users are coming back, you know, at two days, three days, seven days, thirty days. We want the experience to be really good for both those groups, including the people who have been here with us since the very beginning. I don't think that improving things for new users is mutually exclusive. Like, we can make things good for existing users too, and improve that experience as well. Or give them more options to enjoy Tumblr the way that they would like to.

[53:07] PM: “…be a badge for people who've been here for a certain amount of time?”

PM: Yeah, I think we'll definitely do badges for tenure. I think that's pretty cool.

ZR: Actually I think that's, well…

PM: What's that?

ZR: More to come.

PM: More to come, yeah. Excited for more badges, yeah.

[53:23] PM: “Are custom themes staying around?”

PM: Yes, they are. Chronological feeds and custom themes are staying around. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. *chuckles*

[53:35] ZR: Karennnnn said, three, four Ns at the end of that “I would like to have music play in the background of my blog, kind of like Myspace.”

ZR: Right on.

PM: You can do that on a custom theme, right? If you do some HTML, you could autoplay some music.

*offscreen* Yes

ZR: Yes.

PM: Yeah.

[53:58] ZR: WolvesAndVisions, “Have you all considered going to conventions to advertise in the host booths?”

ZR: We have.

PM: Yeah, weren’t we just-? Didn’t we do one?

ZR: We were just somewhere. We were at Vidcon. I think we’re going to ComicCon

PM: Ooh.

ZR: New York ComicCon, we'll be there.

PM: Nice, I saw some thumbs up over there. Yeah.

ZR: Our amazing team.

PM: You “would love to host a Tumblr con?” Cool, I'll go to it.

ZR: Yeah, what's your address? *Laughter* We'll be right there.

PM: I do want to do more events in our office space in New York City. Yeah, try to host happy hours, Tumblr meet and greets. There's also a really cool coffee shop downstairs called Cafe Lyria and I think that I want to do some sort of integration with them. Or, like, if you've posted to your Tumblr the past day you get a 10 percent discount or something.

[54:54] ZR: SpectralVulture asks “Where is the ball pit?”

ZR: You can't see it, it's in a room just off stage that way.

PM: Oh, really? It was on stage a minute ago. It's kind of small though. It was kind of a-

ZR: It was a nod. It's a nod to a ball pit.

PM: It was a nod to the ball pit, yeah. I think Gary might be getting it. Someone maybe hold the door for him.

[55:18] ZR: Catboy-Dysphoria. “Are there any changes being considered for side blogs? Ideas for improving them or just changes.”

ZR: We know that side blogs and that whole experience is really uneven and not that great so that is something we would like to improve. Make them more like first-class citizens on the site rather than-

PM: You asked for it. Tada!

ZR: There it is.

*Applause, laughter*

PM: That's a ball bucket. Yeah, it honestly is. Maybe I can juggle.

ZR: This is making me very uncomfortable.

PM: Not so much. Sorry, we're not real entertainers. We just make software.

ZR: Yeah, we are not good at this.

PM: We should also show them the Tumblr blankets. Can someone grab me one of those or hold it up? We have some super cool swag just for people who are here at the meet-up. They're out? There's some in here. But I don't wanna- then the balls might fall down. Anyone have a spare blanket on them? No. We'll get one.

ZR: Oh there's some, if you look at the #staffcon2023 tag, some people have posted their blankets that they got here. We're at time, but I want to do one more.

PM: Sure, yeah, and then we'll wrap it up there. By the way, thank you everyone for joining. Oh gosh, I guess we're up to 765 now. Wow, so cool.

[56:56] ZR: That is really cool. It's a streamer, Tumblr Live question from Tyote. Sorry if I'm saying it wrong. “Could it ever be possible for streamers to share one Tumblr Live instance to collaborate?”

ZR: Maybe not the way you're thinking. I'm not sure. We do have an option for two streamers to be on screen at the same time so that does exist. If that's what you're looking for, yes, we have that. And, if you're thinking of something else, then you might need to send in a more detailed request.

PM: Cool, well thank you all. Also, thank you for all these gifts.

ZR: Yeah, they’re very fun.

PM: Okay wow, UFOs now.

ZR: Yeah

PM: Was that a- wow! We just abducted a fox or something.

ZR: More crabs.

PM: *chuckles*

ZR: *gasps* Oh

PM: A turkey-

ZR: That's dark.

PM: -In the oven *laughs* I guess it’s escaping, yeah.

ZR: Yay, I like that one.

PM: Thank you all for joining. This was an experiment.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: We might do it again, I don't know. We’ll see. We'll talk about it afterward. What do you all think? Should we do one of these again?

*applause*

ZR: Alright, sounds good.

PM: And also, we'll figure out how to record it so we can post it for people who couldn’t be here and other things that are-

ZR: Not in this country

PM: Cool, yeah. Thank you all for using Tumblr. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for being passionate about it. Thank you for the feedback and we will do our darndest to make the best possible product for y'all.

ZR: Yeah. Keep caring.

PM: Alright, bye-bye.

*applause*

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