#moral tales

[ehj3]

SEWERS AND LADDERS

“Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.” —Heraclitus What you see here is a lifelong version of the game of “Chutes and Ladders” going back from the 1943 americanized, infantilized version of a 19th century British game board game “Snakes and Ladders” to the ancient Indian game Moksha Patam when the “chutes” or “snakes” represented the consequences of…

[marlowe1-blog]

"A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear" (The Stories of John Cheever)

Oh this is a weird one

Meta-fiction. Fiction about fiction. The kind of stories that are all about writing the story. These are actually very hard to pull off. Most of the time you see these glimpses of meta-fiction in the story where the writer suddenly breaks the fourth wall and starts addressing the audience.

But the very rare story is the story which is just the writer talking about writing. The only other story I can think of that is like this one is "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood where she outlines the plot of a story six times and it gets more convoluted and chaotic the farther she goes in it. The ending is just "in the end everyone dies but the story is really about the people" which is kind of a refutation of the whole thing.

This one is a series of jokes about the kinds of stories that Cheever either writes or reads. One of the entries is "anyone that Brando plays" while another entry talks about all these homosexuals in modern fiction (this was in 1960 so not sure how many homosexuals were showing up in the fiction. I mean we had the beats and Truman Capote but most of the gay fiction came in anonymous mail to keep the post office from confiscating it. Including Spring Fire by M.E. Kerr (or her lesbian pseudonym).)

The pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth rugby game gets a paragraph that is practically a story in itself. Meanwhile other entries are not taking aim at characters so much as literary tropes like ruined America or sex scenes that might as well be auto mechanic guides.

Then there are points where he just contradicts himself. Maybe he's making a promise to himself. Like the entry for "all lushes" is an entire story in three paragraphs with the advertising guy (yep, there's that Mad Men reference) dreaming of work, losing a job and then going to Cleveland for a job interview only to come home with a blackened eye and no hat or tie. Cheever claims that all lushes are just not interesting.

The paperback copy of The Stories of John Cheever is 800 pages. I think if Cheever actually kept his promise not to write about lushes, we'd have a pamphlet.

The whole thing ends with an anecdote about Royden Blake, a fellow writer (who might be based on a real writer but I had to google) who had four periods of writing - bitter moral anecdotes, snobbishness, bad sex stories and then stories about rich people. He ended up trying to tell a story or the beginning of a story to Cheever (or the narrator) that ended with him dying and the three characters never got to do anything.

So we have Cheever talking to himself and throwing up most of the kind of story ideas written in notebooks or half finished. Since I'm working on a story that begin as a crappy micro-story where a guy tells his son about how they came to live in a cave and - PLOT TWIST - turns out to be a Nazi, I can see the appeal. Hell, I got a pair of stories that made up my early sales (so I got paid like $5 at most) called "The Literary Career of Nancy Sullivan" and "Obituary for a Children's Author" which were mostly excuses to write messed up ideas for stories. I'm still proud of the children's book idea "Your Brother Stepped on a Landmine".

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The girls are plottinggggg

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[miabrown007]

Félix: kidnapping is a love language Kagami: you have no social skills, idiot

*two weeks later*

Félix: okay, so when Marinette's at her most vulnerable, I'll gaslight her into thinking I'm her boyfriend, so she'll follow me into an abandoned building where we can put her in an altered mental state and present to her my family's life story in the imaginable most cryptic play of theater she has ever seen, which will reveal to her our horrible secret and the fact that her abusive father-in-law is also her arch-nemesis Kagami: you're so big brained, bae 🥰

[jazzymarie1006]

Five black characters I adore and their dimensional counterparts.

[tropes-and-tales]

🤮 FINALLY

Day 9:  Exhibitionism (Frankie "Catfish" Morales x F!Reader)

(For the 2023 Kinktober event that I created on my own because I am boring and basic and am trying to keep it simple this year...found here!) 

CW:  Light angst, kinda; idiots in love; enemies to lovers but not really; smut (fingering; exhibitionism; PiV, unprotected); 18+ only.

Word Count:  5553

AN:  This was requested by @elegantmusicdragon!

The cabin is small:  it only has two bedrooms.  The Miller brothers claim the loft bedroom on the second floor, the steep eaves of the roof leaving barely enough room for Will and Ben.  Pope, as the group’s resident planner, helps himself to the slightly larger bedroom on the first floor.

It leaves you and Frankie in the living room.  There’s a lumpy couch; there’s a thin, rolled-up mattress for the floor.

There’s also a fair amount of antagonism between the two of you.  It’s not complete hatred:  it’s love-hate, maybe.  Begrudging respect.  Admiration, but only if someone put a gun to your head and made you admit it.

You just irritate each other.  Too similar in some ways, too different in others.  Polar opposites in some aspects, the same person in others.  It’s been the same as long as you’ve known each other:  there’s a low-simmering annoyance with each other that eventually blows up in a fight, then cools off in a period of niceness until it cedes back to annoyance.  It’s been that way for as long as you’ve known each other—for years.

The hooking up is new.

The hooking up is so new the guys don’t know about it.  You haven’t been hooking up long enough to get caught.  Hell, it’s so new that even the two of you can barely fathom it.  Each time a dalliance ends, you both have the same stunned, sheepish expression, like neither of you can believe it happened.

But it keeps happening:  Frankie shows up at your door in the middle of the night.  You turn up on his porch on a Sunday afternoon.  You call each other; the other comes over eagerly enough.  The two of you sneak off at a group hang-out, and you reappear long moments later to the larger group one at a time, flustered or overcompensating by being too casual.

“We can’t keep doing this,” you told him the last time you hooked up.

“Obviously not,” he agreed.  “This is insane.”

Neither of you really meant it.

-----

The cabin is a thing Pope is trying to do.  It’s a tradition he wants to start in the wake of Tom’s death.  A way to keep everyone together, even if just for a long weekend every fall:  the gang may drift apart, but they can reassemble once a year at least, for good food and drink and sitting around the campfire.

Thursday, and everyone rolls into the rental property where the cabin is perched along the shore of a lake.  The Miller brothers turn up together; Frankie comes alone.  You catch a ride with Pope since he flew into your hometown.

Thursday, and it’s just take-out pizza and beer from the nearby village.  It’s stocking the cabin with provisions, unpacking, settling in, claiming where you’ll each sleep for the weekend.  Pope builds a fire in the massive fire pit outside just as the sun is setting, and Frankie feels a calm settle over his nerves.  He’s been clean now for over a year, but the cravings come and go.  He glances across from him and studies where you sit between Will and Pope:  the firelight casts you in an orange light, throws your features in sharp relief where shadows fall.  You’re quiet tonight—maybe your nerves are bad too.  Frankie knows you have your own anxieties.

Thursday, and when it’s time to turn in, you don’t even bother to fight Frankie for the mattress on the floor.  You take the lumpy couch, and you fall off to sleep within minutes, leaving Frankie to lie awake with his own thoughts for a long while.

-----

Friday, and everyone is back in their groove with each other.  There’s the usual laughter, the usual ribbing.  Pope knocks Frankie’s hat off his head.  Ben feigns a series of punches at Pope.  Will wraps his arm around your waist and spins you until you slap at his arm and shriek for him to release you.  It’s easy and familiar, like slipping into a faded old t-shirt washed to velvety softness.

Pope organizes a hike to the summit of a nearby mountain.  The weather is so crisp and the air so clean it hurts Frankie’s sinuses to breathe.  At the summit, the views are spectacular, stretching for miles in all directions, the hills and dales and low-slung mountains of this patch of Appalachia.  Frankie is reminded that not everything is so complicated:  there are swaths of wilderness where life is simple, where his problems seem small and inconsequential. 

You all settle on a flat stretch of rock and eat lunch, sandwiches and apples from a farmstand in town that you packed in for the hike.  Frankie watches you peel out of your boots and socks and stretch your bare feet against the sun-warmed rock.  The conversation flows naturally; everyone shares their latest life updates, their hopes for the near-future. 

If Tom is with you, his ghost rests lightly between the five of you.

On the hike back, there’s a tricky stretch of the trail, a switchback that was easier to climb up than it is to climb down.  Frankie is behind you, taking up the rear, and he loses the rhythm of his hiking cadence when you suddenly balk.  He pulls up just in time to not run into you.

“C’mon,” he grumbles, exasperated.  With Pope at the head of the group, Frankie has just been on auto-pilot, his feet leading him forward, but now he’s been yanked out of his reverie by your sudden stopping.

“Ground’s covered in scree,” you reply.  Frankie watches as you take a tentative step forward, reach out a steadying hand along the outcropping of rock.  You do this sometimes, he knows—you have sudden moments of freezing up, afraid to fall, afraid to stumble and jam up a wrist or twist an ankle.  Frankie watches in exasperation as you suddenly transform from an assured hiker to a bumbling newborn foal, all shaky legged and trembling hands.

“C’mon,” he repeats.  “Move.”

“Don’t rush me.”  The words come out tense, pushed out between clenched teeth.  You hate being weak, sure, but you hate being weak in front of others—especially Frankie.

“Don’t be a baby.”

“I’m not.”  You take another careful step forward, your toe knocking some of the scree loose. 

“It’s not even that steep here.”

“I’m going as fast as I feel comfortable.”  You turn your head, glance at him, and Frankie sees the animal panic in your wide, unblinking eyes, your nostrils flaring as you take shallow breaths.  “Go around if you have to.”

He doesn’t have to go around you but he does.  He heaves a sigh, edges around you on the trail, and he doesn’t miss the quiet little whimper of fear as you press yourself against the face of the mountain to make room for him.  He doesn’t glance back to see that you’re fully frozen now, not moving at all—until Ben notices and reverses back to rescue you.

“Overthinking it?” he asks.  Frankie can’t make out your reply, but it makes Ben chuckle, then add, “well, let’s get you off this part then, yeah?”

Friday, and Frankie learns that there’s an ugly streak of jealousy in him.  Ben manages to peel you off of the mountain face with gentle teasing and good humor, and Ben is the one to wipe away the couple of shaky tears that squeezed out during your crisis of courage.  The group rearranges itself:  Pope then Will, then Frankie, and you and Ben at the rear, and Frankie seethes the rest of the hike back to hear the two of you joking and teasing.

Friday, and Frankie learns that he can be jealous over you.  He’s quiet over dinner as he turns over this new intel about himself. 

Friday, and when it’s time to turn in, you take the couch again.  Frankie lies awake and watches you in the faint silvery moonlight streaming in through the curtains, and he berates himself for letting Ben step in where he could have intervened.  Frankie could have been kinder, could have helped you.  You’ve never been cruel to him about his own struggles.  A little episode of panic on a low-stakes hike would have cost him nothing in terms of kindness.

Frankie does something he’s never done before with you.

“Hey,” he whispers.  “You awake?”

You huff out heavy breath, a low groan.  “I am now.”

A long stretch of silence passes.  Frankie can’t quite get the words out; his tongue feels like it’s glued to the roof of his mouth.  Enough time passes that you sigh again, roll over on the squeaky couch.

“Sorry,” he manages to mutter.  It comes out gruffer than he’d like, more mean-sounding. 

“What?”

“I said I’m sorry.”  Now he sounds defensive, a bit petulant.

“Oh.”  A beat, then, “for what?”

He rolls over on the mattress and faces where you lie feet apart from him, slightly higher than him on the couch.  “For being a dick on the hike.”

“Ah.”

There’s another long beat of silence, and then the room lights up as you turn your phone on.  He hears you tapping on it, and he asks what you’re doing.

“Just marking the date and time.  Latitude and longitude.”  In the white light cast across your face, Frankie can see your smirk.  “Need to know where to put the memorial plaque when the time comes.”

“Huh?”

“You know.”  You lock your phone and toss it aside, and Frankie hears you roll over to face him.  In the scant light from the moon, he can just make out your face, still smirking.  “The commemorative plaque.  On this place and on such-and-such date, Francisco Morales offered the first apology in his life.”

Frankie bristles.  “Funny, but I’ve apologized lots of times before.”  He thinks of his ex-wife, his mother, Tom’s wife.  He’s apologized plenty:  for his bad behavior, for his poor choices, for all the ways he’s lacked as a son or a husband or a teammate.

“Not to me you haven’t.”

“Bullshit.”  He rolls onto his back and stares up at the rough-hewn boards of the cabin’s ceiling.  “I probably have.”

“Bullshit,” you retort.  “You haven’t.”

“Well now I have, and I damned well regret it.”

You laugh softly, but it doesn’t have its usual bitter edge to it.  You don’t add anything for so long that Frankie’s eyelids start to get heavy, but just as sleep starts to lap around his ankles, he hears you say, far softer than before, “I appreciate it, Fish.”

Friday, then:  Frankie learns he has a jealous streak for you, and he learns that he can feel ashamed of how he sometimes treats you.  Both revelations pale in comparison to how he feels to own up to his less-than-stellar behavior…and how he feels when you accept his apology rather than retaliate with your own less-than-stellar behavior.

-----

Saturday, and the day starts promising:  sun in the blue sky, bird song, the wind rustling through the leaves.  Storm clouds gather after noon, low and fast-moving, blotting out the sky, and the evening turns into a torrential storm.

You and Pope go into town to pick up more beer, a bottle of wine for dinner.  Frankie and the Miller boys stay behind.  Ben gets a headache and goes to nap it off, which leaves Frankie and Will alone on the cabin’s porch, watching the rain disturb the mirror surface of the lake as they nurse a couple of longnecks.

“Good to have everyone here,” Will offers after a while.

Frankie grunts in agreement.  He doesn’t mention Tom, and neither does Will.

Will handles the bulk of the conversation, which is really just gossip about you and Pope and Ben since you’re all absent.  It doesn’t come across as especially catty, though, since Will spins everything in his motivational lingo.

Then Will touches on you and Frankie’s rocky relationship.  He takes a sip from his bottle and gives Frankie a sidelong glance, says, “heard the two of you talking last night.  Surprised it didn’t end in yelling.”

Frankie snorts and takes a drink of his own beer.  “First time for everything.”  He shakes his head, rueful, and adds, “we’ve just never got along.  You know that.”

Will nods in that irritatingly sage way he has now.  “Well, you’re both crabs.”

“She makes me crabby.  I’m usually fine otherwise.”

The man chuckles and shake his head.  “Nah, I mean you’re both crabs.  You’ve both got tough shells.  Even if you could get out of your own shell, you’d have to get past hers and vice versa.  Double walls up, whatever you want to call it.  Makes it tough to connect.”

Frankie bites back the obvious response:  that you and he connect plenty, in a carnal way, and that Will’s dumb analogy would crumble the moment Frankie mentions that the two of you fuck often, and that you don’t have a tough shell when he’s balls deep in you.  Instead, he snorts again and says, “okay,” heavy on the sarcasm.

“The problem with a crab’s shell though,” Will adds in that faux-wise tone of his, “is that if you don’t shed them once in a while you can never grow.”

Frankie almost wishes you were here to hear this bullshit too.  You’re irritating, but as a fellow crab, you’d tell Will to fuck off, to go play shrink with someone else.

-----

You and Pope return, and the two of you handle dinner together.  Pope sears the steaks on the grill outside; you make fresh pasta and sauté late-season vegetables.  Ben is pulled from the loft bedroom by the scent of the food, headache gone, and everyone circles up around the table to eat and drink. 

The fire snaps in the fireplace and the rain drums against the roof, and Frankie hasn’t felt so relaxed since South America and the scramble over the Andes that ultimately claimed Tom’s life.  He glances around the table, and it occurs to him that aside from his parents, the people he loves best in the world are all right here with him.  Even you, he supposes.

He lets the good food and drink and warmth of the fire work against his anxiety.  He feels the snarls and tangles of his tight muscles—those perpetually tense shoulders hiked up near his ears—unlock.  He feels all those bad feelings, the constant self-doubt and low-level depression ebb into the distance.  He is lulled into a drowsy state as he eats, as he sips at his wine, and he rejoins the conversation in process and finds himself jolted by its subject.

It's Pope needling you, and the man is clearly picking up a thread from earlier between the two of you.  He’s asking you about some guy, some guy named Paolo, and Frankie feels an uncomfortable prickle along the back of his neck.

“Just call him sometime,” Pope tells you.  “Grab a coffee or something.”

“Nah, Santi.”  You push a bite of steak around your plate and don’t look up.  “I don’t think so.”

“I think the two of you would get along.”

“I’m not really interested.”

“Why not?” Will interjects, catching up faster than Frankie.  Then to Pope, “you trying to set her up?”

Pope nods at Will’s question as you shrug and mumble something about being out of the dating game for too long, and Frankie stares at you, wills you to look up at him, but you don’t.

“Which is why this is perfect,” Pope replies.  “Paolo is coming out of a long-term thing.  He needs a gentle reintroduction to dating too.  C’mon…what would lunch hurt?  Or dinner?”

“You should think about it,” Will adds.  He glances over at Frankie, catches his eye.  “Might help for you to get out of your shell.”

You laugh at that.  “I think I’m good, William, but thanks.”

Then Ben gets in on it, Ben and Will and Pope cajoling you into dating this Paolo guy.  The Millers point out your paltry dating history, your lack of serious relationships—you’ve never even lived with a guy, let alone edged up against an engagement or marriage.  Pope tells you about Paolo, some coworker in his contracting work with a failed marriage, something about cheating, the man is hurting, blah blah.  Frankie is shocked to find that his jealous streak isn’t just wide but deep—it feels like a bone-deep ache, a cold searing in his gut as the guys egg you on, try to convince you to just meet the dude.

“What do you say, Fish?” Pope asks, and Frankie glances up and finds your eyes settled on him.  There’s a question there, but Frankie can’t see beyond his own tough exterior to know what it is.

“Sure,” he replies with a shrug he hopes looks nonchalant.  “I’m sure this Paolo guy would love to be disappointed by you.”

Which earns him a punch in the shoulder from Ben, who’s sitting beside him, and rolled eyes from Pope, and a disappointed tsk-ing from Will.

Frankie doesn’t see how his barb lands with you, though.  As soon as he launches it, he looks away, looks down at his plate, so he can’t see if you are hurt or not by him.

But he hears your reply to Pope.  He hears you say, “you know what?  Sure.  Give him my number.  I don’t have any better prospects.”

-----

The rest of the evening is a blur.  There’s a robust game of poker, low stakes, and the beer flows steady as the conversation.

Frankie goes mute, only mumbles out monosyllabic answers when the conversation turns to him.  His thoughts turn maudlin.

He always felt a step ahead of the guys.  More mature.  More of a man.  Him and Tom, both:  making the adult choice to marry instead of drifting around in the chaos of the post-army bachelor life.  Where Pope and the Millers lived in bland beige apartment complexes, strung together short-term relationships and hook-ups, Frankie had a house with a wife.  He felt a smug satisfaction when he’d meet up with the guys back then, like he and Tom were the sage elder statemen of the group.

You had been there too, of course, but it was different with you.  Back then, Frankie used to compare you against his wife—you were the other woman in his life, so you were a handy comparison to his wife, Sophia.  You were prickly where Soph was sweet.  Opinionated where Soph wasn’t.  When Frankie held the two of you up, it made Sophie shine brighter.

But now hindsight is twenty-twenty.  Because Frankie always compared the two of you, he can’t help but craft an alternate universe where a marriage to you had faltered and then fell apart.  With Soph, it had been ugly:  she never spoke up, never held him to account for his increasingly bad behavior as his addiction took hold.  She merely left one day—Frankie came home to an empty house and instructions to not reach out to her, that her lawyer would be in touch.

You’re the one who had confronted Frankie.  You’re the one who arranged for the intervention, who chased him when he stormed out, who grabbed him by the arm and shook him, told him he had to get his shit together and get help.  You’re the one who handled everything:  packing his bag, getting him on the plane to the rehab.  You found him a place for when he got out, you and Pope salvaging as much as you could from his marital home before it was sold as part of the divorce.

And now he’s back to square one, but even more so.  He’s divorced.  He’s a recovering addict.  He’s got a bad back and a suspended pilot’s license.  He’s nobody’s bargain, as the song goes, but he wonders how much his low mood right now is linked to you.  Pope and the Millers talk you up, gas you up for this date with Pope’s buddy, and Frankie feels worse and worse the more he realizes you may slip away from him. 

It's a startling revelation that he even cares.  If asked, he’d lie and say he doesn’t, that you can date whoever you want, move away to wherever.  That if he never sees you again, he’ll be perfectly okay, because the two of you have never gotten along and the hooking up has just been two bored, lonely people mutually using each other.

But he remembers a million little moments of you being…not kind, maybe.  You’re prickly with your kindness, you sigh and roll your eyes when you do nice things for him, but you’re the one who started him on the path of recovery.  You’re the one who stood in front of him at Tom’s wake and told him in a low voice that it wasn’t his fault, it was no one’s fault but Tom’s own greed.

Hell, he bets you’ve even taken the couch this whole time in the cabin because of his bad back.

Frankie feels like he’s close to some world-altering revelation, but it’s just beyond his grasp.  Instead, he just stews:  his memories circle around his failed marriage, how he was never further ahead than the guys after all.  His memories shift to you then, circle around you:  the most irritating person he’s ever known, yet the one who probably saved his life.  The frustrating woman who has had his back for years, who squabbles with him and argues with him and (lately) has been fucking him with equal aplomb.

-----

When everyone turns in for the night, Frankie waits a long while before he hisses out your name.  You don’t sigh or groan like he’s woken you up; you answer him by saying his name back with a questioning lilt.

“You can take the mattress if you want,” he whispers.  “If the couch is uncomfortable.”

“It is, but I’m fine.”  A beat, and you confirm his suspicion by adding, “your back.”

“Mattress is wide enough for both of us.”

He hears your quiet snort of laughter.  “Nice try, Fish.”

“What?”

“You know what.  If I lie down with you, you’ll get all handsy.”

Frankie smiles in the darkness.  “You don’t mind my hands usually.”

Some spring deep in the couch squeals as you roll over.  “We said we weren’t doing that anymore.”

“We say that every time,” Frankie points out.  “And then you call me at two in the morning because you need it so bad.”

You snort.  “I never need it.”  You’re silent for a long moment, then add, “and anyway, I’m actually looking forward to meeting Pope’s friend.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m serious.”  Your voice does lose its snarky, insouciant tone—you sound uncharacteristically somber.  “I need to get my shit together.  I’m tired of being alone all the time.”

That stings Frankie a little, like all those moments with him don’t count, even though he knows they don’t.  You’re talking about being alone, all those times you need someone to talk to or cuddle up with or just be with.  Frankie and your hooking up isn’t any of that; it’s a lone moment of physicality without any of the intimacy.

“And you think Paolo is the one then?” he asks, and the name Paolo drips with disdain that he doesn’t bother to hide.  You hear it, too.

“You sound jealous, Fish.”

“’m not.”

“Because I thought I was just gonna disappoint him anyway, so why would you be jealous?”

“Said I’m not.”  He’s not jealous.  He isn’t.  The bloom of hot acid in his gut is something else entirely.  Maybe Pope didn’t cook the steaks thoroughly enough.  Maybe it was too much red wine.

Now your voice turns faux-casual, conversational, like you’re just gabbing with a girlfriend.  “Do you think Paolo is hot?” you ask. 

“Probably looks like a troll doll.”

“I bet he’s big.  Huge.”

“Gross.”

“Bet he’s slinging a real hog around.”

Frankie scoffs.  “Pope said he’s divorced because his wife cheated on him.  He’s probably tiny.”

“Ooooh, you’re definitely jealous.”  Another rustling of your blankets, and then Frankie feels it—your bare foot reaching down and out to where he lays, your cold toes kicking him lightly in the side.  He swats at you, but you pull your foot back at the last minute with a laugh.

“Fuck off,” he grits out.  “I’m not.”

Another playful kick that clips him in the shoulder.  “Aw, Fish, did you fall for me?  Are you in love?  Are you—”

He’s quicker this time, and he catches your foot, catches his hand around your ankle and tugs you towards him.  You squeal; he gets you halfway off the couch but not entirely and there’s a moment of tug-of-war.  Frankie doesn’t release your ankle, and you try to break his hold, but Frankie (who knows how strong you are, how good you are at self-defense) doesn’t think you really fight him that hard.

Instead, you let him pull you the rest of the way onto the floor.  You let him tug you across the short span between the couch and the mattress, and he’d smirk and gloat at how willingly you come to him, but within a second you are beside him.  You smell smoky, like the snapping wood fire of the evening has burrowed into your hair, and you smell like the wet, washed-clean earth and loam, and you smell like the slightly-metallic water of the lake, and Frankie’s mouth finds yours, seals over yours, steals away any other teasing or arguing you may do.

Part of him hates how well the two of you fit together.  For as much as you squabble and irritate each other, in these moments, you are perfectly in line with each other.  On the same wavelength.  Frankie kisses you deeply, tastes you beyond the mint of your toothpaste, and he still—even after all these moments, all these stolen interludes—gets a fluttery swoop in his gut when you slide your tongue against his.

He maneuvers you underneath him and you go willingly.  Eagerly.  He wishes sometimes he could read your mind.  He wonders what you’re thinking in these moments.  Have you been lying beside him the past few nights, wanting this to happen?  Or are you only riled up and slick to his searching fingers because of the idea of this Paolo, a man who could theoretically assuage your loneliness?

The thought makes that deep streak of jealousy pulse inside him, so he breaks the kiss as his fingers slide into you.  He feels how wet you are, always wet and hot for him, and he hisses into your ear, “this for me?”

“Fuck off, Fish.”  You whisper it back, and in the wan moonlight, Frankie can see you glaring up at him. 

He pulls his finger out, adds a second, pushes both into you.  He catches how your eyelids flutter, how your lips part at the stretch of his digits.  He studies your face as he pulls out, pushes back in a handful of times.

“Tell me,” he demands.  He keeps his voice low, aware that the Millers are asleep in the loft above you and Pope is asleep in the bedroom just beyond the small galley kitchen.

“I said fuck off.”  You enunciate the fuck clearly, catch your lower lip between your teeth as you hiss out the eff.  As guilty as Frankie feels to compare you to his ex-wife, the differences are never more stark than here:  Sophie had been completely soft, completely submissive in the bedroom, never quite willing to do more than a handful of positions or situations.  Fucking you is like wrestling a wild cat sometimes, and you make him work for it, and Frankie kinda loves it.

He clucks his tongue in mock sympathy.  He pushes his two fingers into you as deep as he can, then crooks them inside you, strokes your inner wall until you gasp underneath him.

“There it is,” he croons.  He dips his head, drags the slick muscle of his tongue along your pulse point where your heartbeat jumps and thunders away.  “Knew I’d find it.”

“Fish—”

“Always find it.”  He moves his thumb, presses it lightly against your swollen clit.  “Pope’s dumb fucking buddy could never.”

You laugh but it’s breathless as he works his hand against you.  You tangle a hand in his hair and tug against him, steer his head back to you.

“Knew you were jealous, you asshole,” you whisper.  You surge forward and nip at the side of his neck, and he bites back his own groan, hushes you, reminds you that the guys are nearby and you have to be quiet.

Frankie reaches down and shoves his sweatpants down enough to free his aching cock, and he doesn’t even bother to get you out of your sleep shorts.  He only shoves them to the side and then removes his hand, guides his cock to replace his fingers.  He hears the low groan you give at the contact, so he reaches up a hand and covers your mouth and pushes into you in one firm, deep thrust.  His hand absorbs your moan as he mounts you, but he looses his own groan to be back inside your clenching heat.  You both freeze for a long moment—his cock twitching inside you, your cunt bearing down on him—but none of the guys make a noise, so you proceed as quietly as you can.

You’re not nearly quiet enough.

*****

Pope is woken by the sound of a thump, like a body hitting the floor. 

That’s exactly what it is:  Frankie yanking you off of the couch, and just as Pope starts to wake up, starts to swing around and put his feet on the floor, he hears a moan.

Ben sleeps like the dead and hears nothing:  not you and Frankie squabbling in whispers, not you and Frankie fucking, and not the furious clicking of Will in the other bed, texting back and forth with Pope.  He’s only woken up later.

Will hears everything.  He never fell asleep at all, only drowsed a bit, so he heard you and Frankie talking down below.

Then he hears the same thump as Pope, then the same moan.

His first thought is that Frankie has made you cry, that Frankie has said something mean enough to break that tough dam that holds back your emotions.  But then he hears a gasp (yours), a low chuckle (Frankie’s) and he realizes what he’s hearing.

“Holy shit,” he breathes out.  “No way.”

His cell phone, silenced, lights up with a message.  Will unlocks it and sees that it is Pope.

Please tell me I’m not hearing what I think I’m hearing, the text reads.

Will responds.  Not sure, he types.

Pope:  You got eyes on them???

Will:  No way

Pope:  Sounds like she’s crying. Need confirmation.

Will:  NO

Pope:  Ur in the loft.  Confirm.

Will sighs, mutters “fuck.”  It does sound like you’re crying and trying to hide it, breathy, bitten-back moans that could be crying or could be…you and Frankie fucking.

The former seems unlikely.  Will’s never seen you cry, and he thinks he’s only heard you once—a similar gasping sound, through a flimsy motel room wall in Central America as you made your way back to the States with Tom’s body.

The latter—the thought of you and Frankie fucking—seems even more unlikely.  Yet when he freezes, when he holds his own breath so long he hears his heart beating in his ears, Will swears he can hear the quiet rustling of fabric, heavy breathing that sounds more like Frankie.

He moves as slow as if he were on a mission.  He turns around on the trundle bed and crawls to the edge of it, a millimeter at a time.  He reaches the open doorway of the loft; there is no door, and it looks down at the first floor, and when he peers over the railing, he sees the two of you awash in silvery moonlight.

Frankie, on top of you.  Your knees on either side of Frankie’s hips, one hand gripping his curls at the nape of his neck, the other hand reaching down and grasping his ass, guiding him where he fucks into you in slow, deep strokes.

Will doesn’t know why he never saw it before.  This can’t be the first time between you—you move too well together.  The two of you have always grated against each other, but no one ever really thought it was hatred.  You and Frankie love each other in your own way, Will guesses, and maybe this is just a facet of that.

You helping Frankie get clean:  another facet of that love.

Frankie going silent at the thought of you dating Pope’s work buddy:  another facet of that love, perhaps?

Will retreats just as slowly.  He doesn’t want to ruin the moment, though he thinks he’ll need therapy to erase the vision of the two of you fucking from his mind.  He climbs back into bed carefully, then texts Pope.

She’s not crying, he types out. 

She’s not??? Pope replies.

Yeah, dude, Will types.  She and Fish are fucking.

Pope responds with a puking emoji first, but then he adds, FINALLY.

[sentigabrielapologist]

hyperfixations page

[ravencromwell]

Fuck, just had a hell of a Holland realization, which everyone else probably realized years ago but indulge my horror: The Danes have their stone statue garden of traitors. And the only thing we've ever seen in WL that can turn people to stone is As Staro. The command Holland used to kill his fucking brother. The idea of him having to replicate that kill over and over with the traitors the Danes wanted to make sharpest examples of, and then walk past those kills every fucking day? I have nothing else to say except it's a fucking crime Holland didn't get the same sort of triumphant, bloody fight against the Danes Lila got against the earth mage who tried to kill her in the tournament, because to say he deserved it so much more is the flimsiest possible understatement.

[cherrylimepine]

My favorite part of barbie movies is the moment barbie is presented with a clear way out, an option that lets her avoid the plot with little negative impact on her own life and instead she chooses to stay and make whatever difference she can. The most obvious to me as a kid was in Mermaid Tale when she refuses her wish from the dreamfish and accepts responsibility as a princess. She could easily walk away and live her life as a human, but makes the choice to care about the merpeople. In Princess and the Pauper, Erika doesn’t have to help Julian and pretend to be the princess, in fact her life would be much easier if she didn’t. But she accepts that responsibility and risks her life because of the connection she feels to this girl she barely knows. It’s not exclusive to barbie’s roles either. Aidan in Magic of Pegasus has no real stake in Annika’s quest, especially not at the start. But he hears a person talking about how they need a second chance and he chooses not to walk away. And this happens over and over again, in 12 Dancing Princesses, Diamond Castle, Three Musketeers

Often in children’s movies I feel like the plot is their life, like there’s no other option here they must deal with whatever is going on. And as a kid who felt like her life was very quiet, it meant a lot to me to watch characters choose the harder path for the sake of helping others, make a decision to care about someone else’s problems, and live out their own magical adventure because of that act of compassion.

[nemeliis]

Cursed!Lord Oyster AU

Spoilers for all chapter's of A Mermaid's Tale!

In this AU, Lord Oyster accidentally absorbs White Pearl's curse (NOT her power's, JUST her curse)— instead due to him clutching her pearl so dearly—because of this, when he returns from his voyage, seemingly unscathed despite the raw reckage and death of Abalone Cookie along with his entire crew, with a very odd smile on his face: almost like he knows something we don't, something has to be up. And because the curse seems to be fueled by rage, or the fact that it's supposed to be a Mermaids curse rather than a Cookies, his body takes the toll and he gets a serpent/mermaid half.

Which he hides via magic he also acquired during his curse. All of the rage he's been suppressing for decades comes broiling over in the worst way, and the leader of House Urchin has to deal with it before he's next on the chopping block. From a reclused, soft spoken Cookie with a humble heart—to a sadistic, conniving and unfeeling one filled with blinding rage overnight, Roasted Urchin isn't sure about the rumor's: or if he wants to believe them. The disappointment of House Oyster would never do something so vile as eradicating the entire Abalone House in cold jam in less than a day...right...?

___________________________

Here's some fun facts about him!

In Lord Oysters original concept, before he was even drawn or sketched out—he was going to be a harpy-like creature with wing's and a tail. But that was scrapped because I can't draw wing's to save my life, and it wouldn't make since considering he's from the land. I was supposed to represent how deep his curse went, but I opted for color pallette changes instead.

Though Lord Oyster can hide his serpentine lower half, he can't hide his hair changes or eye color. If you're wondering why no one questions it (except for Roasted Urchin Cookie)—it's because there too focused on the Abalone House's demise to realize what's going on.

He likes terrorizing House Urchin in his spare time—particularly Roasted Cookie, like little kid and his uncle fights but actually dangerous and sadistic.

He has a HUGE form, similar to Black Pearl! But he prefers to keep in his smaller one unless prompted.

Fiercely protective over House Oyster, and got more fortune than in the original timeline due to some.. interesting scheme's (killing other house's to get to the top faster so he could feed his family). He really does justify that one in his head.

When a family member of House Oyster reaches there 10th birthday, Lord Oyster meets them on the sea side and blesses them with his protection —this is why Oyster Cookie always had nannies up until that age, it's protocol. It's a family secret, and everyone see's Lord Oyster differently. But one thing that stays true: you can have faith in him, for if you have a pure heart, someone shall watch over you.

A “pure heart” just means like. An okay person since Lord Oyster brushes Oyster Cookies political game's off.

Lord Oyster gained the following power's from his curse:

Super strength (like. Throwing around ship's type strength)

Night vision

Sharp teeth...(not even a superpower but..teeth,,,)

Enhanced senses

Weapon summoning/water control

Immortality, can only die from unnatural causes. (He outlived his entire family ☹️..)

[talesandtrolls]

I can go into heavy detail

[saturnniidae]

Some changeling & troll!Jim headcannons

Morgana had been considering making changelings for years, it wasn't a sudden idea; it was something she'd been planning for a long time

She even discussed it with Merlin at one point (under the guise of wanting to better 'unite' humans and trolls), and he proposed the idea of humans turning into trolls instead of vice-versa.

This is where the concept for the half-troll potion came from. What Jim became was essentially a modified version of a failed recipe for changelings that Merlin kept around in case it ever became useful.

Jim wasn't the first half-troll, he was just the first successful one. There was a chance it could've gone horribly wrong (as it has in past attempts) but Merlin took the risk anyway since he saw it working in his vision.

The reason Morgana's version always ended with better results was due to dark magic and Merlin's outright refusal to go there.

Because they were on a time crunch, Merlin substituted some of the rarer ingredients common in transfiguration potions with material from a preexisting changeling.

All they know about the bone used in the potion was that it came from a changeling. They never learned who, or what kind of troll they were, And subsequently have no clue as to what species of troll Jim was partially turned into. And Merlin didn't ever feel like helping them figure it out even though he probably could've with relative ease.

If they had more time for him to work on the potion, and if Merlin actually measured his ingredients instead of throwing them all in a blender, Jim probably would've come out less wonky (an even amount of fingers, among other things).

[ectoplasmbender]

Danny Phantom is a strange show in a lot of ways but chief among them is the fact that it's soooo moralizing in that rly corny 2000s way where it wags its fingers at the audience to say things like "Cheating is bad! Bullying is bad!" and Danny has to be told to like not pull pranks or abandon his friends for more popular ones, but all of these lessons are so disproportionate to his extraordinary situation and the scope of his power. He has to constantly be scolded for acting like a normal 14 yr old human boy, but there's a shocking lack of attention on anything further than that. Like this is a show where Danny's whole family and his friends are killed in a timeline where he cheated on a high school test, but that same episode has him viewing a future version of himself ripping a city apart with an incredibly destructive inhuman ability, and his only reaction is essentially "oh wow cool, wonder when I'll get that power!!!"

[baltharino]

Across the Spiderverse / Miraculous Ladybug

[zexal-club]

Hello @punkeropercyjackson !

You have no idea who I am. I kinda noticed you from our shared mutual yukii0nna, so I checked out your blog for some time, and you seem pretty cool! One of the things from your blog I noticed was the crossover shipping of Miles and Marinette that I thought was pretty cute, and it inspired me a bit, so as a kind of offering, here's a Gacha Marimiles/Strawberries and Sunflowers!

[tropes-and-tales]

Alone Time

Day 13:  Masturbation (Frankie Morales x F!Reader)

(For the 2023 Kinktober event that I created on my own because I am boring and basic and am trying to keep it simple this year...found here!) 

CW:  Frankie is mildly creepy and a thief; pining; smut (masturbation, male; Frankie's imagination; a pinch of voyeurism); 18+ only.

Word Count:  2415

AN:  This was requested by an anonymous person!

It’s not rock bottom, but it’s damned near close.

Other men Frankie’s age have so much more:  family, a mortgage, a steady job.  What does Frankie have?  An ex-wife, a suspended pilot’s license, and a shaky year’s worth of sobriety.  He’s got a head full of bad memories—his time in the service, Tom’s death, the implosion of his marriage.  He’s got a tricky back that aches in bad weather and pinches his sciatic nerve if he breathes the wrong way.

The sum total of his personal belongings are stored in your garage and in your spare bedroom, where Frankie has been crashing since…well, when he sits and counts out the months, it makes him feel like the world’s biggest asshole loser, so he doesn’t dwell on it.

It was supposed to be a temporary thing.  It’s been ten months.

Hell, it takes less time for a baby to be formed and born.  Frankie Morales?  Ten months of crashing at your place and he’s no closer to launching on his own.  Rent is too high, his credit is abysmal, his mechanic job pays next to nothing, and he’s so damned broke that he’s technically owed alimony (though his pride will not allow him to accept it).

But if he sits and ticks off all the reasons why he hasn’t left your guest room yet, there’s a couple of reasons he won’t voice. 

That you stopped calling it your guest room and started calling it his room almost immediately after he moved in.

That you integrated his stuff into the wider home—his chipped coffee mug in your kitchen cabinet, his beer in your fridge, his scuffed work boots lined up neatly beside your shoes in the entryway—so he’d feel at home.

That you cook for him, that you wheedle his favorite meals from him and have an uncanny ability to know when he’s having a rough day and needs the comfort of a good meal.

That you eat his paltry attempts at cooking for you, a poor stab at repaying you, that you smile and thank him and pretend not to wince when something is burnt or too heavily salted.

That the casual intimacy of living with you—even platonically—has knocked something loose in him.  That seeing you early in the morning, mussed hair and sleepy eyes, rumpled pajamas as you get the coffee started…or seeing you before bed, after you shower, your skin soft and damp and smelling like your herbal soap.  It all makes something warm unfurl in his chest, and when Frankie starts to think on it, it makes him feel out of control.  He has no right to develop feelings for you.  You’ve been nothing but generous with him, and he cannot repay your goodwill by being a creep.

So he doesn’t dwell on it.

-----

He doesn’t dwell on it, and he doesn’t give it voice. 

He sits on the couch and listens as you dart between your room and the bathroom, getting ready for a work holiday party.  He listens to your muttered curses, your bathroom mirror pep talks you give to your own reflection.  He listens to the patter of your bare feet as you bounce between dressing and doing your makeup.

A moment later, you appear, a clutch in one hand and a pair of heels in the other.  You stand in the doorway and fix him with a nervous smile before you ask, “do I look alright?”

Frankie has a beat to study you—the dark green dress, the tasteful amount of cleavage, the skirt that flares just above your knees.  He looks closer and sees that you’re in stockings, subtly patterned, and as he watches, you brace yourself in the doorway and slide your heels on one at a time.  You usually don’t wear much makeup, but for this party, you’ve gone all in:  dark lashes framing your eyes, velvety red lips.

You look beautiful.  You look like a damned present just begging to be unwrapped and ravished, and Frankie clears his throat roughly before he answers you.

“Yeah, you look alright.”

You snort, shake your head.  “Jerk.  Seriously, is it too much?  Not enough?  Give me something to work with here, Francisco.”

“You look nice.”  He swallows hard, amends it by adding, “you look beautiful.” 

“Alright, nice, beautiful,” you laugh as you pull on your coat.  “Good adjectives.  Thanks, Frankie.”

He gives you a mock-salute.  “Anytime.”  And because he feels like a sulky asshole now—he can never strike the right tone with you, tries too hard to hide his feelings and so swings too hard the other way into sullen indifference—he adds, gentler, “no, you look great.  Seriously.”

That earns him a hug.  You walk over to where he sits, and you lean over to wrap an arm around his shoulders.  Even the brief press of your body against his is enough to fuel a month of fantasies, because you look feminine as hell—dress, heels, deep red lipstick on your kissable mouth—but you’re wearing a warm, almost masculine perfume.  You smell like tobacco and rum, undercut with the sweetness of vanilla, and the juxtaposition makes him perk up at a cellular level.

“Be good,” you tell him once you release him from the hug.  You walk towards the front door and gift him one of your sweet smiles.  “Enjoy your alone time.  I’ll be back late.”

“You be good,” he replies.  “And drive safely.”

-----

You leave, but your presence haunts Frankie.  The ghost of your perfume lingers, as does the click of your heels as you walked out.  The image of you in that dress feels like it’s burned on the back of his eyelids.

He tries to settle.  He tries to relax.  He orders in, puts on a mindless movie.  He picks at his food, drinks a beer, then a second beer.  Hours pass and he still feels jittery, and it’s like the early days of his sobriety, but he’s not craving cocaine.  He’s craving you, which is stupid because he’s never had you, so it’s all conjecture—pure imagination, pure pining.  Pure want.  But the fact remains:  he’s not hard, exactly, but he’s at the point of near-arousal, the ghost of you just in his periphery.   

Frankie puts his picked-over food in the refrigerator.  He cleans up a little.  He should go to bed, try to sleep, and so he makes his way back to his room.

But in the hallway, he pauses by his doorway and glances towards your bedroom.  The door is cracked.  Frankie has been in there before, has sat on the edge of your bed once when you were sick with a migraine and he nursed you back to health.  Alone, with you out of the house, your bedroom feels like something in a gothic novel:  the forbidden chamber, your sanctuary.

Be good, you told him, and Frankie wants to be good, but his feet lead him the few steps to your door, and his hand pushes your door open wider.  The scent of your perfume is stronger here—the incongruously masculine scent that reminds him of a dark-lit jazz club, even though he’s never been to a dark-lit jazz club.  The scent curls around him, fills him up, and he steps inside your bedroom.

You’re neat but not painfully so.  A neat stack of books are on your bedside table.  A basket of freshly folded clothes sits on the bench at the foot of your bed.  He steps further inside and studies the top of your dresser:  the little dish that holds some of your jewelry, a half-burned candle, a row of lotions and perfume bottles.  He leans against the dresser and looks at your bed, and of course he pictures you lying there, which leads to him imagining more.

You lying on the bed.  Naked.  No, in that green dress.  He imagines unzipping it, pushing it off your shoulders, dragging his nose along your warm skin and smelling the perfume on you, your fingers threaded through his hair as he—

No.  He rewinds it in his head, starts over.  You lying on the bed.  In the dress.  He imagines pushing up your skirt, imagines you in garters, imagines shoving your skirt up—

No.  He shakes his head, goes back to the first scene.  Stripping you slowly.  Yes, that’s better.  Frankie was always the kid who unwrapped his Christmas presents slowly.  His mother saved the paper, so it was a contest between him and his brothers to see who could unwrap it the best while saving it for future Christmases.  He could strip you just as carefully, his fingertips dancing over your skin, making you twitch at too much sensation, moaning out his name—

No.  It’s still not right.  He switches the two of you in his mind, imagines himself on the bed, you perched over him.  Your hands undoing his belt, his zipper, grasping his cock and stroking it before lowering your head, wrapping those red fucking lips around him, your dark-fringed eyes gazing up at him while you—

“Fuck,” he breathes out, aware of how he’s passed the threshold of near-arousal into outright excitement.  He’s hard just from imagining it, and his erection presses painfully against his jeans.

He turns to leave, but his gaze falls on your basket of clean clothing.  Christ, he could swipe a pair of your panties, and the thought tempts him but it’s going too far…so he reaches out and swipes one of your t-shirts instead—a soft cotton one you wear around the house.  He’s still crossing a line but it doesn’t feel quite as bad, so Frankie flees to his own room with your shirt clutched in his hand.

But not before he pauses, hesitates.  He snags your bottle of perfume and spritzes your shirt with the scent. 

He has no plan; he’s operating on lust alone, but he figures he can just wash it on the sly and give it back to you, give you some tame lie about it getting mixed in with his own laundry.

-----

In his room.  Door locked, just to be safe.  Lights off, naked in his bed, the soft scented cotton of your shirt clenched in one hand and held up near his nose.

His other hand gripping his cock, stroking himself.  Eyes closed.  Pretending it’s your hand and not his own.

Frankie tries out the fantasies from in your room.  You on the bed, you in the dress, you with your skirt hiked up around your waist.  He tries out other fantasies he’s entertained in the past:  taking you against the kitchen table, taking you on the couch.  A million positions, a million scenarios, and he can’t settle on one.  His orgasm feels far away, unattainable.  He’s never been good at just imagining things, has usually relied on a handful of tried-and-true porn clips he’s saved on his laptop, but he doesn’t want that now. 

He wants to imagine you.  He sighs, refocuses.  He reaches over to his nightstand and squirts a fresh dollop of lotion into his palm, then grips himself again.

You….you wouldn’t rush it.  You’d go slow.  If it was your hand and not his own, you’d go slow, so Frankie goes slow.  Strokes his cock slow and steady, imagines you pressing those kissable lips to his neck, his chest.  You’d leave smudges of dark red lipstick on him, a trail marking him as yours.

“Good boy,” you’d whisper to him.  “Such a good boy for me, Francisco.”

“Yes,” he whispers in the silence of his room.  “Always for you.”

“Such a big cock,” you’d whisper to him.  “So thick I can barely get my fingers around you.”

Frankie tilts his head back, brushes his nose against the bunched-up t-shirt.  He takes a deep inhale, feels the answering throb in his cock as he strokes a bit faster.  He imagines you whispering more to him, imagines you telling him how you can’t wait to feel him inside you, his big, thick cock splitting you open, your pussy molding to the shape of him, how wet you already are for him just from jacking him off—

“Always wanted to do this,” you’d breathe in his ear as you stroke him faster, harder.  “Touched myself at night thinking about you, Francisco.”

His orgasm, so far away initially, takes him by surprise.  He feels the hot coil of anticipation snap, and he groans out your name over and over in the darkness of his room as he comes, spurts of cum painting his belly and thighs, coating his hand.  He lays there a long moment, his blood and heartbeat roaring in his ears, his harsh panting slowly calming.

Frankie lays there a long moment, and the post-orgasmic bliss fades too quick.  Masturbating is a release, but it always leaves him faintly sad afterwards.  He’d rather have the real deal, obviously, but he’d rather have all of it.  He wants the afterglow of sex with you, wants to fall asleep beside you.  Wants to wake up too early and take you again.  Wants to know how that smoky, whiskey-tinged perfume of yours pairs with the scent of sex.

Frankie wants all of it, and when the post-orgasmic bliss fades, he despairs that he’ll never have it.  That he’ll be stuck contenting himself with these pathetic moments, jacking off to the smell of you, your soft shirt laid against his skin.  That he’ll be stuck at rock bottom.

But the nice thing about rock bottom, as they cliché goes, is that there’s nowhere to go but up.  Frankie has hit his bottom and is on an upward trajectory—he just doesn’t realize it yet.  It’s the final moment of him not realizing, of feeling maudlin about himself.  When he stands up and reassembles himself enough to leave his room and clean up in the bathroom, he’ll run directly into you:  standing outside his door, high heels in hand, eyes wide at what you’ve just heard.

You’ve heard everything.  Frankie and the obvious sound of him masturbating.  Frankie and the sound of him groaning out your name over and over as he came.

Frankie so wrapped up in his fantasy of you that he failed to hear your car in the driveway, the click of your key in the door.  Frankie so wrapped up in his own world that he hasn’t realized that hours have passed; that it is late and you’re home when you promised.