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smallfrenchstudyblr · 9 months

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Justice as spectacle in Fontaine, or a too long word vomit from a tired PhD in Law gushing over Genshin 4.0

Alternative title: “Justice must be seen to be done”, a visual playbook by Genshin 4.0

Intro: This is a valid use of a PhD in law, actually.

I made the mistake of playing the 4.0 update of Genshin while I was finalizing my PhD in law and politics, and the result was my brain refuse to think about anything else than judicial performativity and the use judicial spectacle in Fontaine. So time to make good use of 9 years of University by dissecting why I absolutely love how Fontaine’s justice system is presented. It was initially much longer and covering why justice as a spectacle is not necessarily an issue or sign of a disfunctionning legal system, then what exactly about the Fontainian justice system is actually fucked up, but it got too long so I’m keeping that for the indeterminate future. So the pitch of this thing is: Mihoyo is basically providing us with an animated First Person POV game version of legal ethnographic works on justice and the courthouse, and it is really cool.

And since I am a nerd with both too much time to read and to play, we are making this a proper academic, with literature and all, because listen to me, LEGAL ACADEMICA IS COOL, ACTUALLY, and law and literature at large is a genuine field of study that we, as a society, need to talk about more.

[also there is non-zero chance that I edit this brainrot and submit it for publication at some point]

Warning: I am basing this on 4.0, up to and including Act IV Chapter II (hence no discussion of the prison system) and if Mihoyo thwarts the whole thing with 4.1 [oops I am late so now 4.2, since 4.1 did not thwart it] then let’s do what we do when new results contradict existing theories in academia and just collectively agree to ignore it.

TL;DR: Someone at Mihoyo read Simonett’s 1966 essay on The Trial as One of the Performing Arts [Here, just read it, it is fascinating] and decided to make it everyone’s problem

Part 0: if this was not Tumblr.com I would make a recap explaining broadly what Genshin and Fontaine are but since you are reading this I’m going to assume you already know the context.

Part 1: Ok so how does the Fontanian Justice system work, exactly?

Alright, so each area of Teyvat has 1) one core theme/value and 2)a threat to that core theme/value.

Mondstadt has Freedom and people living in fear of a dragon.

Liyue has Contracts/order and the pandemonium of having Rex Lapis killed.

Inazuma has Eternity and being virtually frozen in time.

Sumeru has Knowledge and being entirely manipulated by the Akademia.

Fontaine has Justice and… Justice being parodied into a spectacle?

WRONG.

Because the spectacle of justice, especially the way it is done in Fontaine, is not antithetic to Justice itself. Spectacle is part and parcel of Justice and of any courthouse. Sure, all the dials are turned to 11 and y’know, it is legit called an Opera, but that is more the writers being a bit on the nose and adding drama for the player. The spectacle of Justice, itself, is not that far off from reality. And, hot take but bear with me: it is not (necessarily) a problem.

Ok, let’s dive into what we know of the justice system in Fontaine.

Broadly speaking, we have seen the criminal justice system, and it is an accusatorial, or adversarial model. It’s the US-style criminal procedure: you have a defendant trying to prove that they didn’t do it your honor, and a prosecutor proving that they totally did it your honor. To avoid this becoming a fistfight, you have a strict procedure to follow outside but especially inside the Court, and in the end, a neutral third party decides on the outcome or the trial.

Ok, now let’s zoom on a few things, and why the theatrics of them are actually very common.

Furina, our cringefail darling, is the prosecutor. And they get a lot of stuff right regarding the role of the prosecutor! She decides whether or not to prosecute, based on the information that she has, and whether she likes her odds or not. Fittingly since she is the Archon, the prosecutor in a trial represents the State, the interest of the State (the judge ! does ! not!). It makes sense that Furina, the ruler (theoretically) would be prosecutor and not judge. Moreover, and as we see plenty of times during the trials, Prosecutor Furina is not concerned with the victim, and not even necessarily with the truth; the prosecutor wants to know how likely they are to obtain a conviction in the end. Her job is to be convincing enough to establish a legal truth.

Neuvillette, for his part, sometimes look terribly powerless… but friends, that is what a Judge sitting during a criminal case often is. The first part of his job is to find sufficient information for the prosecution to decide whether or not to prosecute; he is supposed to be entirely neutral at this stage. He kickstarted the investigation straight after the death of Cowell, and was also the one starting investigation on Vaughn right after Lyney is proved innocent. He gathers enough evidence, hands them over to Furina and asks “So? Are you game or do you want to leave that alone?”

And once the prosecutor has decided to move forward with prosecuting, his job is to make the procedure move along, take some decisions based on new information, ensure all respect the rules (hence Childe’s immediate smackdown when he starts to act out a bit too much at the end. My man is here to make sure the rules are enforced and that also applies to Snezhnayan gremlins). In the liminal space of the courthouse, he is the supreme authority… over the procedure. He can tell anyone, including Furina, to stfu k thx. He starts and stops the trial. He allows witnesses to be heard or not.

And the last party involved at this point is the defense, usually the Traveler and any adorable twink we befriended that day [good for you, Traveler, good for you]. They present evidence, they have to be convincing, it’s basically Ace Attorney, we know that part.

Part 2: Mihoyo makes it clear that we are all actors in the Courtroom

Ok, first moment of pause.

Even though these are the most basic parts of a criminal trial, they are ALREADY steeped in drama and theatrics, both IRL and in Fontaine.

First off, Furina plays a prosecutor, Neuvillette plays a judge and the Traveller plays the lawyer.

No but really: they play their role in the Courthouse.

The game painstakingly presents Furina for the first time not as a prosecutor in a courthouse but as a cringefail princess. When we see her initially welcoming the Traveller, going “Fight Me” at them in the streets of Fontaine, she is not a prosecutor, she is just Furina the cringefail princess. We meet Furina as Furina, and later on only, we see her with her Prosecutor face. Furina is not a prosecutor, outside of the Courthouse.

I don’t even have to explain how much Traveler plays lawyer. We are, and I cannot stress it enough, NOT lawyers (yes, even you who developed an unhealthy obsession with Ace Attorney before Genshin). The developers even took the time to develop an entire new gameplay to really, really highlight that is a behavior that the Traveler can only have in the Courthouse. Traveler is not a lawyer outside of the courthouse.

Neuvillette is a bit of a special case. We do meet him for the first time in the Courthouse, as a Judge. But once again, the moment we meet him outside of the courthouse, he is much more approachable, definitely not the same persona as when he bitchslapped my problematic Harbinger into the Meropides prison [we are so going to write something about the Meropides prison once I have played enough 4.1 my friends – update post 4.1: ok Mihoyo that was weak commentary on the privatization of prison and prison labour but I’ll take it]. Neuvillette is probably the one that is the most associated with his courthouse persona, but there is still this gap between Neuvillette-Judge and Neuvillette-reflecting-in-the-end-of-Chapter-II.

So everyone is just themselves in their daily life, but there is something about a Courthouse that turns people into their judicial role. That’s what we call the liminality of the courthouse (Hadar, 1999). And it exists IRL, in a way shockingly close to what we see in the Opera Epiclese.

Magistrates, whether prosecutors or judges, do not act in their own names, they have a role to play. Someone woke up that morning, had breakfast, swore at the neighbour who did not park properly again, spilled some coffee on their documents again ffs, stumbled a bit on the little steps leading to the courthouse, and then, they put on their costume and started to play the role of the judge. As someone who has been in what can only be referred to as “backstage” of a court , and entered the courthouse with the magistrates, I cannot stress enough how drastic the shift in person is the moment a magistrate steps into the space of the trial room.

From there on, they are a Role. Furina, like any prosecutor, is not a prosecutor, until they are The Prosecutor, and then they are not themselves anymore, in the enclosed space of the courthouse. Have you ever seen a lawyer talk in their daily life the way to talk in a courthouse? No. Someone is just some person, until their put on the robe and their Lawyer Face and start their Lawyer Movement and Lawyer Tone. Traveler cannot go all OBJECTION when they have a disagreement with a random shopkeeper in Teyvat. The game doesn’t even give you the option – because you are not lawyer, unless you are in the court. None actually plays a lawyer, unless they are in the courthouse.

And an adversarial model encourages this. You have character, but for it to be a play, or an opera, you need a narrative (murder, ok, that will kickstart a narrative) and you need dramatic tension. Drama is created by the opposition of two characters having opposite goals, confronting each other. Simonett, a former Minessotta Supreme Court Judge, has a fascinating article called “The Trial as One of the Performing Art”, which really ecapsulates how an adversarial system is built on this drama:

‘The trial has a protagonist, and antagnonist, a proscenium and an audience, a story to be told and a problem to be resolved, all usually in three acts”.

More than an inquisitory model (hello, fellow continental Europeans), parties are encouraged to bounce off each other, take initiative, undermine and interact with each other. US courthouse TV shows loooove that, and Genshin absolutely leaned into that. The potential for drama was so strong and intrinsic to the story that For the first time, we got to play a character that was not even with the traveler: Traveler was off investigating, and we played Navia in the courthouse, because the sheer drama of being in the courthouse is too good for the game to pass.

Do you see it yet? Here is more. A judicial role is a role. IRL, a lot of it is emphasized by the robes -the - sometimes complete with wigs and accessories- that judges and magistrates must wear before entering the space of the courthouse. You put them on like you put on a costume -defendant, prosecution, judge and even audience alike (Cabatingan, 2018), there is a ritual of preparing for the performance of a trial the way you prepare for a play. Genshin characters cannot change their clothes [give us a proper fancy-af-judge-robe for Neuvilette Mihoyo you COWARDS], so the game does all it can to realllllyy show you a separation between the judicial role and the actor playing I in the courthouse.

Part 3: Game designers said yes this an Opera and a Courthouse because these are the same thing and they are right

[The urge to include Foucault in this section, but I do not have Discipline and Punish with me rn, rip]

Ok, ok, why not. But what about the stuff that is not in your random courthouse, like a damn AUDIENCE and the fact that it takes place in an actual OPERA ?

Aight, we gotta dive a bit deeper into two things: the role of audience in the judicial spectacular, and studies on legal architecture/judicial space. I told you legal research was cool.

Let’s start with the most obvious one: architecture.

The architecture of Courthouse is actually really important for the delivery of justice. The building embodies the task itself, and targets evert single person that interacts with the building in any way? It matters specifically because we take it for granted, that this this is just a building, that there cannot be more to it. Or: “Law in its everydayness, banks on the usage of visual means of representation, for they seem to lack artifice, and thus enjoy high persuasiveness” (Kumar, 2017, also this is a study on the architecture of the Indian Supreme court and it is so good). But thi is, of course, on purpose.

My friends, your local courthouse looks like an opera. Recently, I went to a play which was entirely a trial, and they barely had to do anything to set-up the scene because… the opera looks like a courthouse, and vice versa. Fontaine’s Opera Epiclese is this on steroid, and also actually used for entertainment like the magic shows, but its architecture and structure are so close to a proper courthouse that once you see it you cannot unsee it. Not matter how different they might look from each other, all, ALL courtroom have the same setup:

Judges on an elevated position compared to all other parties : Neuvillette absolutely kills it here [my man is placed so high up I was close to writing something about the religiosity of justice.]

Prosecution and accused on two opposite sides, virtually separated by the judge, even putting the defendant in their own little liminal space in the liminal space (Zoettl, 2016, Mulcahy, 2007)

Audience space and trial space clearly separated, with interdiction for the audience to enter the trial space

Audience space allowing to clearly see all angles of the trial space

The architecture of courthouse is strikingly similar to that of an opera’s, both in its spatial organization and its grandiose. The entire building is an opera, not just the ground of the stage. You even have a lobby, the space right in the Opera but not the courtroom, which is very similar to the space where people mingle during the interlude at the Opera – the social settings were many legal negotiations happen (Hansen, 2008)

[Fun fact: I am pretty sure the design of the audience space of the Opera Epiclese was inspired by two Parisian Opera houses: the Théâtre de la Comédie Française et the Théâtre du Châtelet. The stage itself is almost more church-like ; I am curious if anyone knows what the inspiration for the “outside building” actually was, for the Opera Epiclese?]

Eltringham (2012) has some really cool writings about the architecture, and people interact with the structure of courts (in his case, the International Criminal for Rwanda) and how all these features contribute to making the courthouse this liminal space where people can play their role, whether they realise it or not.

But, Almost-doctor, I hear you say, what about the spectacle ?! The audience enjoying the show ?!

Ah, yes. The audience. Just as with an Opera, the audience and the actors enter through differentiated means (the “segregation of circulatory systems”), all with their own point of access to the stage or the seats, and never the two shall meet. It is so important to a court system that you will find this feature highlighted by the architects that renovated the Bordeaux Courthouse and the US courthouse design and planning guide [These are just fun and striking illustration I stumbled on while writing this, you can find dozens of others from any given country]. These differentiated access path help reinforce the liminality of the courthouse not just for the actors, but for us, the audience as well.

You could even agree, with Garapon, that the audience itself is “playing” the audience, in the Courthouse (go read Garapon’s 2004 book, if you read French, it’s so good I swear and like it fueled 90% of whatever this word vomit is)). You are not really yourself, you have new, liminal role of spectator. A trial has a “need for a public”, even a silent one. “'Performance always intends an audience”, for Kapferere. and we can indeed talk about a Performance of Justice, when talking about how justice unfolds in the courthouse, especially in a criminal trial (Sausdal and Lohne, 2021).

The audience is an inherent part of the spectacle of justice – because is there a spectacle if there I no audience? If comedians perform a play with no audience, did it really happen? In the words of our own European Court of Human Rights (I am quoting the ECtHR on Tumblr.com, what is life): “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done” (Delcourt v Belgium, 1970). For Garfinkel “Legal rituals ... depend on the outside witness to confer on them not only recognition but validity” (Garfinkel, 1956);

Or, to put it more eloquently: “The need for the presence of a validating public at trials is enshrined in many constitutions and built into the very fabric of court complexes throughout the world. (…) Tthe court as a whole requires its reflection in the bodies of validating witnesses in order that this created place will bring sufficient gravity to itself.” (Eltringham 2012).

If a courthouse was just about the truth, or the parties involved reaching an agreement on what the truth is, there would be no need for the theatrics. We could handle a trial in a meeting group like problem-solving session in any run-of-the-mill company. Put everyone around the table, have a moderator, have a decider. That actually exist, it’s called arbitration, and you may have never heard of it despite the absolutely enormous amount of money that are involved (we are talking literal Billions of dollars every year, here), because the whole point is that it is discrete and confidential. But that is not how trials are, anywhere. It does exist though. It is called private arbitration, a form of private justice that focuses on problem-solving, expediency and secrecy, often because my friends, it involves big names and big money.

But justice? My friend, it needs to be a spectacle. It needs an Opera. Because this is how it gains sociological legitimacy, and it needs sociological legitimacy to function. By having an audience, it gains transparency and accountability.

Conclusion: teaser on why the spectacle of justice is not necessarily always totally bad, but also I am too tired to fully argue that.

Now, you might that it’s a bad idea. That what Genshin is doing is denouncing this inherently spectacular aspect of Justice, that there is something inherently wrong in justice being public and publicized for the gain of legitimacy, and sure, spectacular justice can become a parody of justice or a manipulation of justice and this has happened many times in history. And yes, you could go for that (although show trials have typically been at the service of an authoritarian regime in a transition phase, rising or declining, and target political opponents, which we do not see in Fontaine) but… I have another take for you.

Justice being a spectacle is not… inherently bad.

Hear me out. Making justice into a spectacle does not have to affect its outcome. The presence of a public does not change the course of a play.

Spectacular justice brings elements of entertainment such as narrative fulfillment and catharsis. That is clearly what Fontainians want: a satisfying end to the story, the truth exposed. Justice as a spectacle help people make sense of their reality, comfort them in knowing that justice does prevail. That the guilty do not go scott-free, that the good guys win, that justice is transparent, that prosecutor need to be able to build a good story to prosecute, and there is no good story is there is not someone who caused harm, and a victim that deserves justice. And, from the information we have so far, this does not seem to lead to miscarriages of justices, or a generally biased justice system. But frankly this is too long already and I just wanted to show that the depiction of the Spectacular in everyday justice is actually present everywhere IRL, and Genshin is just providing a really handy illustration, at this point of the story.

The Fontanian system is fucked, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not about the spectacular on its own. Long story short since it be worth its own word-vomit-style essay, it’s because the jury has been replaced by ChatGPT and there is no civil court, only a criminal court, k bye.

#I have no idea what this is it just would not leave my brain until it was written #genshin impact #tagging genshin bc it is the most relevant #law and literature #Usual followers feel free to ignore #Genshin people: this is NOT my usual content #might fuck around and turn it into something publishable at some point #this is probably still full of typo but I am not proof reading a word vomit that goes on this hellsite

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astxrwar · 5 months

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drops of blood [1/4]

SYNOPSIS: Bucky Barnes has some wires crossed. He fixates on a barista at a coffee shop near his apartment, and tells himself it's fine as long as he keeps his distance. Except you keep making that distance smaller.

Rating: M

Word Count: 7k

CONTENT WARNINGS: Off-screen violence. Series will enter gray territory in later chapters; angsty guilt-ridden stalking, exhibitionism, consensual-but-not-safe-or-sane vibes all the way down. teehee.

Read on AO3

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ]

When you’re a teenager— no, not even, when you’re a preteen, in middle school— a crew of surveyors for a Russian oil company finds a plane frozen in the Arctic. You’d just finished up the section on World War Two in history class; two weeks ago you’d been sitting in a hard-backed chair with the lights off trying not to fall asleep while watching a Netflix documentary about the life and death of Steve Rogers, the prototypical American Hero, that your teacher put on presumably to get out of having to actually teach. You had to fill out a worksheet about it. You had homework asking about the ways that national ideals of heroism have changed over time. You spent a whole class period talking about that, comparing and contrasting Captain America and Iron Man. You had to write a five-paragraph essay about whether or not you thought the American Hero archetype would even exist without Captain America’s death.

Except Captain America is not dead.

Captain America is alive.

It is 2012, and a lot of things are popular. The Hunger Games. Gangnam Style. The new Batman movie, the one with Christian Bale. A type of teenage and pre-teenage girl exists—has existed, will continue to exist— and while there was NSYNC and Backstreet Boys and whatever the fuck else in the 90s; right now there’s Twilight and One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Captain America comes out of the ice. Captain America is 6’4 and muscular and blond and blue-eyed and unfailingly kind, and then he goes on to join up with a bunch of other people—superheros— and saves the world.

The end result, the one that anyone with a brain could have seen coming a mile off, the one that gets referenced by late-night talk-show hosts and poked at in grocery-store gossip rags and sometimes said outright in interviews with the guy on national television, is that Steve Rogers— Captain America— kind of ends up rounding out the “teenage girl obsessions during the ‘10s” list.

And—

Well.

You were never big on any of that.

Your friends were, though, and so you let yourself be dragged through the onslaught of new Netflix specials and you dutifully and appropriately emoji-reacted to every Battle of New York youtube compilation and Vine edit they sent to you and you even went to the movies to watch the new remastered docudrama about the life and now the not-death of Steve Rogers, and—

You never really liked blonds, so.

His friend, though—

His friend was kind of cute.

Sergeant James Barnes. Twenty-eight, dark-haired and blue-eyed and attractive, in a charming, boyish kind of way.

Fast forward ten years. There’s some weird drama with a helicarrier and some entirely anticlimactic fight at an airport and then an alien kills half the population of the world and then they all come back again, courtesy of Iron Man’s sacrifice and your middle school history teacher one-hundred-percent predicting the future with the whole “the American Hero trope is dependent on the hero’s death” shit that you totally didn’t understand at the ripe age of twelve—

Anyway. Life happens, basically. You grow up. You’re not even friends with those girls anymore. Not uncommon. And that crush on cute little baby-faced James Buchanan Barnes lasted all of something like three months— one of those fleeting childhood infatuations you have on people who are safely unobtainable, like rock stars or fictional characters or guys who are very, very dead— after which time you never really thought about it again.

And now you’re twenty-three and working closing shifts at a coffee shop in Brooklyn while figuring out what your life trajectory is even going to be, adjusting as best you can to your fucking daily customer base having quite literally doubled in the last six months, that part of you that’d read his entire wikipedia page on a phone with an actual physical slide-out keyboard at two in the morning an entire eleven years ago so far away it feels like something even less than a memory.

Except one night in April this guy walks in. He’s dark-haired and blue-eyed and wearing a leather jacket and matching gloves; he comes up to the counter and he makes startlingly unbreaking eye contact that freaks you out a teensy bit— a lot— and orders a coffee, black, and nothing else, and you stare right back kind of temporarily immune to the weirdness of it because you know him, why do you know him—

It clicks as you’re pouring the coffee into a reinforced cardboard cup and it stuns you so completely that you almost overfill it and wind up less than a second away from burning the shit out of your hand.

Sergeant James Barnes.

He looks the same, kind of, but also not at all— you sneak glances at him while you fumble for a lid, the harsher angles of his cheekbones and the wider set of his jaw, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the lines setting into his forehead and the way he doesn’t really have any of the baby fat left in his face that he had in all the photos you’d seen of him.

“Thanks,” he says, when you give him his coffee.

His smile, or his attempt at it, looks more like a grimace than anything.

You expect him to leave, then, but he doesn’t— he goes over to one of the tables in the lobby, the one by the window in the corner of the room, and he sits there and he drinks his coffee and he stares out at the street. It’s dark already; late November, almost December, the solstice approaching. It’ll be a long while before it’s still light later than 4:30.

He stays there for a long time, and the awareness of him prickles at the nape of your neck as you work, filling orders for a dwindling trickle of customers and starting the long and arduous process of cleaning up everything for close.

Sometime around 9:30 you go into the back to try to get started on dishes; the doorbell chimes when you’re about halfway through, and you grumble under your breath and rinse soap suds off of your forearms and resolve to pretend you hadn’t lost track of the hose and accidentally soaked the whole of your shirt from about the sternum down—

There’s nobody waiting at the counter when you come out, though.

And Sergeant James Barnes is gone.

You expect it to be one of those things. Everyone in New York has one of those things. They’re great party stories. One time I sat next to Denzel Washington on the subway. Michael Keaton bought a phone from me when I worked at Apple in Midtown. I ran into Steve Buscemi at this one mom-and-pop bagel place.

I served coffee to Captain America’s not-dead friend in Brooklyn.

Except next week, same day, he’s there again.

The lady in front of him is getting something stupid complicated and being annoying about it. Two pumps caramel, two pumps vanilla, two creams and two skim milk, three sugars and make sure to melt it first, if you don’t, I’ll know, Jesus Christ, make your coffee at home—

The guy who is maybe potentially Barnes laughs.

You said that out loud, apparently. Mumbled it under your breath, or something, quiet enough that the lady hadn’t heard, just shot you a suspicious look and sipped at her drink and then left without a thank-you, apparently satisfied. It’s just you and him now, your coworker off doing food prep in the back room and the lobby empty.

Somehow, he’d heard you. And he’d laughed. It was a weird sound, sharp and rough and cut short like he hadn’t meant to and like he’d tried to make himself stop; his expression is flat, and he’s not smiling, but there’s something— lighter, about it, than when you’d seen him last.

“Black coffee?” you blurt out, before he can say anything.

He blinks. He’s doing that thing again— the staring.

“Easy to remember,” you say, by way of explanation. “Simple.”

His mouth twitches at the corners, not really a smile, yet, but still— something. That lightness to his expression, impassive as it is, hasn’t faded. “Yeah, just black,” he says. “Thanks.”

You make it for him— ‘make’ is a stretch, you pour it, and that’s all, really— and he takes it back to that same spot by the window in the corner, nurses it as he looks out into the street, the sky cast that bruised purple color when the sun’s gone below the horizon but the light hasn’t faded, yet.

You try not to stare.

Same deal as the last time; he stays.

“Hey,” your coworker’s voice drifts from the back room, “You want to sweep the lobby or do the dishes?”

“Lobby,” you reply, extremely fast, thinking about last time and the hose mishap and how your shirt hadn’t dried until basically the end of your shift, but also thinking about maybe-Barnes sitting by the window and how part of you really fucking wants to know. Even if it’s not him, if it’s just some particularly uncanny lookalike, you wonder if it happens a lot. The being mistaken.

You make it through about maybe five minutes of actual lobby-sweeping before you become physically incapable of resisting your curiosity.

“I always got pretty good marks in history,” is what you tell him. Because saying “are you Seargant Barnes” seems kind of— rude.

He stiffens, and he drums his gloved fingers on the lid of his coffee cup, and he doesn’t look up or say a word.

“Your photo was in a bunch of the textbooks,” you add, twisting your grip on the broom handle, back and forth. It’s definitely him. The haircut. His face. Older, a lot less boyish, but the same eyes. “Sergeant Barnes. 107th.”

He doesn’t look at you. Speaks very deliberately. “Are you going to tell anyone?”

There’s this bright jolt of satisfaction at being right, followed pretty quickly by a pang of guilt at the thought you’d irritated him.

“Oh—um, no, definitely not, I’m sure it’s— annoying, probably, getting recognized,” you say, stumbling over the words. “I— sorry, I shouldn’t have— bothered you.”

He does look at you, then. He stares. You’d been fidgeting, still, but under the force of his gaze every muscle in your body goes tense and still, frozen solid, and nerves prickle up at the back of your neck, raising the hairs there. You have to fight back the urge to shiver.

“No,” he says. “It’s never happened before. Don’t— don’t be sorry.”

You open your mouth. Close it again. Your hands resume their twisting around the broom handle before you abruptly decide you do need to actually finish the chore you’d set out to do.

You tell him one last thing, before you go back to it. You’d always kind of felt weird about saying this kind of stuff; it gets touchy, particularly after Vietnam. Not really a great practice to get into, the whole “thank you for your service” schtick, because a lot of them don’t see it that way, and every war after that was even more complicated and your opinions on those are— similarly complicated. But World War 2– that was different. It wasn’t US military overreach. It was necessary. And he’d been drafted, you remembered that.

“Hey,” you say, very soft. “I just— Thanks. For— you know. Serving, when your numbers came up. It couldn’t have been easy, I mean.” you clear your throat, shift your weight, suddenly feeling very self-aware. “Coffee’s on me, next time, okay?”

Something flickers across his expression, like a ripple over the surface of a lake. Whatever it was, it’s gone before you can make sense of it.

You spend most of the week thinking he won’t come back next Friday. But he does. There’s nobody in front of him in line, this time, and like the time before your coworker is off in the back, which means it’s easy to slip him his coffee and conveniently forget to ring it out.

“Thanks,” he tells you, his voice a lot quieter. Softer, too.

You smile at him. His mouth twitches back, like maybe he’s not sure if he should return it, but wants to.

He takes the seat by the window again.

He keeps coming back. You try to make small talk but it feels stilted and awkward. It kind of makes you sad, a little bit, seeing him sitting there for hours, alone.

On your day off, in early January, you go grocery shopping.

You spend about 25$ in total and you make a split second decision to grab something out of the ordinary that’s on-sale. Dude was raised during the Great Depression, you guess he’s not the most experienced in the realm of the great big world of Weird Things You Can Purchase At The Modern Day Grocery Store. It’s meant to be a sort of peace offering, a look-I-can-be-normal-about-it, let’s-be-friends kind of deal, if he’s going to keep hanging around the coffee shop. You’re not sure if he, like— wants that, friends, or if maybe it’s just that he doesn’t want to be alone, but you figure it’s worth a shot.

Part of it is that he interests you. Part of it is that your job, as much as it sucks less than a lot of other service jobs, is very mundane, very normal, often very boring, and James Buchanan Barnes being a regular customer is easily the most interesting and least boring thing that has ever happened to you at work. Or— ever, honestly.

And maybe that’s selfish, to want to talk to him for that reason, but— whatever.

On Friday, like last week, you get there and you clock in and you try to casually scan the lobby, the floor littered with straw wrappers and crumpled napkins and empty sugar packets, the tables tacky with flavored syrup and coffee stains that you’d need to clean later, chairs around them arranged haphazardly and not pushed in, and—

And in the back corner, sitting low in his seat, baseball cap tugged down and shade over his eyes and fingers drumming restlessly against the side of a paper coffee cup, is James Buchanan Barnes.

The excitement you feel, then, is not really the kind you’d expected to— the last time you’d thought about him had been middle school, and even if it’d been just that three months, you remember with startling clarity that girlish, daydreamy kind of interest, how it felt, pleasant and mild and entirely harmless. Whatever you feel right now is not like that at all. It’s sharp and it’s visceral and it’s real, not a fantasy or the result of your imagination, not directed towards some fiction of a person that functioned as a safe receptacle for the things going on inside your head, but an actual individual human being.

It’s just interest, just curiosity, what you feel— you don’t have a crush on him, it’s not like you’re still in middle school and still interested, like that, in even just the general category of person that crush had represented. And the person sitting in the lobby isn’t the person– the fiction– you’d even felt that type of way about, anyways. You don’t know him, and he’s obviously nothing like the guy memorialized in every Captain America docudrama miniseries on Netflix. No, James Buchanan Barnes is a real human being, a very different human being, one that’s a stranger to you and you think— you guess— probably just as much of a stranger to that other, safer, softer, more boyish version of himself.

You keep thinking about how he looked at you, unbroken and unwavering and eerily fucking precise, how his eyes hadn’t even move at all, focused so intently that it’d made the hairs on the back of your neck raise and goosebumps prickle across the tops of your shoulders and all the way down your arms and your gut instinct yell, loudly, there is something not right about this guy!

You’d read his Wikipedia article again. It’s been updated since; lots of shit came out since 2012. You’d heard about the Winter Soldier stuff, but reading about it in detail— it’s bad. There are probably several things that are not exactly right about him, now. That’s fine, though. The way the world is these days, there’s stuff not right about everyone.

You’re occupied with a steady and annoyingly constant stream of customers until about 8:00, making coffees and sandwiches and trading on and off with your coworker in the back room, where you’re trying to get the brunt of the stocking and dishwashing done before they leave at 8:30. You’d been fucking busy, and you’re annoyed, you got cream from the dispenser machine all up one of the sleeves of your sweater so you’d had to take it off, and there’s fucking caramel sauce stuck to the hairs on the flat of your forearm near your wrist and gluing them to your skin and that grocery bag of fruit is sitting on the back table next to your jacket and your gross sweater and your house keys and it’s staring at you. Accusingly.

Your coworker leaves.

You steal a careful glance over the coffee machines at the lobby, just checking, just to make sure that he’s still—

And he is.

Cool.

It takes you a few minutes to kind of— dredge up the guts to go talk to him, another few more for the last trickle of late-night coffee-getters to start to finally taper out, and then you do it. You gather your resolve and your nerve and whatever else, courage, too, probably, and you go out into the lobby and you stand in front of his table and you wait for him to, eventually, look up from where he’s been staring, kind of sullen-looking, out of the window.

“I looked it up,” you blurt out when he does, before you can think better of it, “Online. Apparently supply chains were really small, in like. The 30s. So people could get stuff, right, but a lot more of it was— local. You know that, obviously, but, um.”

He just looks at you. Unblinking.

“Anyway,” you say, trying to ignore the weird kind of twisty feeling of your nerves in the pit of your stomach; jesus christ, he stares, a lot, “Anyway, I had this neighbor when I was a kid, right, and he was— his family, they were refugees. Immigrants. He was learning English, but I made friends with him by using my allowance to buy things at the grocery store, like, weird things, stuff that he’d never had before. So we could— try it. For– fun. And I thought– well. There was a sale, today, so.”

You gesture to your hand; awkwardly, helplessly, god, this is weird, like ice-breakers on hard mode, if the ice were less like a frozen-over pond and more like one of those miles-deep Antarctic glaciers. A tissue-thin plastic bag, the knotted top of it held in your fist, the lone fruit inside just kind of– sitting there.

He finally blinks, and then he shifts back in his chair, and he looks at you some more, his gaze unwavering and solid and heavy like it has actual, physical weight to it, like it’s pressing down on your shoulders and forcing you into the ground. “Are you— have you been trying to make friends with me?” he says, in a tone that’s kind of incredulous and a lot disbelieving and tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not he’d actually be amenable to that.

Whatever.

Fuck it, you think, and then you lift your chin and you meet his eyes and you make yourself stare right back, stubborn and deliberately unflinching. “Yeah,” you tell him. “I have.”

His expression– it’d been flat, impassive and unreadable, but something cuts right across it for a fraction of a second when you say that, quick and sure as a knife. For that one heartbeat of a moment he looks expressive and alive– you think he might even look stricken, actually, and you wonder far too late if maybe this had been a mistake, if you’d upset him. Done something wrong.

But then it’s gone, so quickly that you think you must have imagined it.

He leans back in his chair, and he looks down at his empty coffee cup as he taps it absently against the table, like he’s thinking it over. When he looks back at you the sum of his features are wholly neutral, except for his mouth, which is quirked up at the corners, just a little– not a smile, not with the way his lips are pressed together, into a hard, unwavering line, but it doesn’t look like something bad, either. It doesn’t look negative.

“Okay,” he says. “All right, shoot.” He jerks his chin towards the bag in your hand. “What’ve you got?”

You tear the side of it with your fingernails and dump the contents on the table. “Pomegranate. Had one before?”

His mouth twitches up more, and this time it does look like a smile, the beginnings of one, like he’s repressing it. He clicks his tongue and stretches his legs out under the table and shakes his head, just a little. “Yep,” he says. “Struck out on your first try.”

“No way Mr. Great Depression is more worldly than me.” You decide you’re going to interpret that as an agreeable reaction. There’s only one chair at his table, so you drag one over from nearby, the legs making this awful grinding sound against the tile floor. “I’ve never had one, so I’m taking half. Only fair.”

You fumble in your pocket for your knife to cut into it. He stares at it, when you pull it out, and then stares at you, “What do you have that for?”

Some nameless tension inside of you unwinds at the realization that he’s not just sitting there in stone-faced silence, anymore.

“Walk home after close,” you reply with an easy shrug; the conversation no longer feels like the world’s most awkward one-person performance or like actually physically pulling teeth, and that’s— pretty cool. Feels like a victory. “I usually finish at like, eleven-thirty. Not super dangerous, or anything, but better safe than sorry.”

Barnes makes a disapproving sound— what you think is a disapproving sound— under his breath when you flick the blade open, and grabs the pomegranate from the center of the table. “Too short,” he says, jerking his chin at it in your hand, “Gonna be a pain in the ass, let me.”

The knife that he pulls from what you think must be a sheath on his boot is a straight blade without a handguard, matte black and tapered to a point and without a doubt longer than four inches. Long enough to halve the pomegranate in one clean cut, sharp enough to bite into the laminate surface of the table underneath, just a little.

“That’s definitely not street legal,” you say, mostly joking.

Barnes stares at you. It takes you a second to realize that’s— new. Relatively speaking.

“New York made anything over four inches illegal, plus butterfly knives and switchblades,” you inform him. “I think in the 50s.”

He makes some noncommittal sound of what you assume is probably distaste, and stows the knife back in his boot.

“Don’t worry,” you say, “I’m not a snitch.”

He doesn’t smile, but his expression lightens a little.

On the table, the pomegranate is split neatly in half, and the little pebbled fruits inside the open skin glint in the warm light from the overhead fixtures. Like flecks of garnet. Or drops of blood.

“Could get these in the fall, sometimes,” he says, looking down at it. “Used to pick the bits out with a sewing needle. Made it last all afternoon.”

Your brain conjures up the image of the baby-faced Barnes, maybe sitting on the curb or the front steps of a building. You wonder what the details of the memory are. You wonder if little scrawny Steve had been there, or if he’d been alone.

You don’t ask.

“I don’t have a sewing needle,” is what you do say, “But—“ your nametag is clipped to your shirt, a flat slip of plastic with a pin on the back, and you unfasten it and slide it across the table.

Behind you, the door hinges creak and the bell chimes and you sigh, long-suffering, and get to your feet with an exaggeratedly affected eye-roll.

“I’ll be back,” you tell him, “Customer.”

You go to take the order and then midway through making it the doorbell sounds again. Midway through making that, same deal. This happens, at night, a trickle of customers just fast enough to keep you working nonstop, now that you’re the only person running the store. It goes on for something like ten minutes, which irritates the shit out of you despite the fact that it is technically your job. It’s nine-thirty at night and you’ve been at work for six hours and what you want to be doing is picking this dude’s brain, not making fucking coffee and bagels.

And also because a part of you is aware that he usually leaves around now.

He’s still there, though, when you come back; on the table there’s the husk of one half of the pomegranate, this pale and washed-out color like corn silk, and a neat pile of seeds on a recycled-paper napkin. Barnes has the other half and he’s poking out little grains of red with the safety-pin end of your name tag and biting the pieces off the tip, breaking the fragile skin between his teeth. He looks— calmer. Kind of wistful.

You realize this must be the first time he’s done this since he was a child, all the way back in a Brooklyn that doesn’t look anything like this one. Living alongside different people. Walking different streets. Breathing different air.

“That’s for you,” he says, nodding at the little bits of red, the empty husk, “I thought— since you’re working.”

You blink at him, and then you smile, a small, grateful one. Something flashes in his eyes, when you do; you aren’t paying much attention to it, still thinking about him, being so out of time. How strange this all must be. How much you really did mean it when you said you wanted to be his friend.

Barnes seems to realize when he brings the pin to his mouth again that it’s attached to your nametag. “Sorry,” he says, stilted and stiff and awkward-sounding, again, “I— you probably don’t want this back, now.”

“‘S fine, you can throw it out, if you want— I have so many.”You slide back into the chair and fish out of your apron pocket a blank one that you’d grabbed from the back, not knowing he’d gone and picked all the seeds out of your half already. “I forget them in my pockets, they keep ending up in the washing machine.”

His expression relaxes, a little. He catches the kernel of fruit at the end of the pin between his teeth and bites down until there’s a burst of red in his mouth. Stabs another, works it free of the shell, the flimsy little white membrane around it wilting in on itself. You watch him do that for a minute, contemplative and silent. His mouth is red. His tongue, too, when it darts across his bottom lip. Makes you think about rocket pops from the ice cream truck in the summer. Makes you wonder if they had those, back then.

“Did all that work for nothing, huh?” he says, after a while. You startle out of your thoughts and blink at him, nonplussed; he glances down at the pile of seeds on the napkin. “Thought you wanted to try it.”

“Oh,” you say, eloquently. “Oh, yeah. Duh.”

The first gem-glittering marble of fruit is softer than you’d expected and ruptures between your thumb and forefinger, staining the pads of them all red. You think about summer, as a kid, when you’d fall and scrape your hands on the asphalt hard enough that they bled. It’s almost the same color.

The second time the seed is firmer and it bursts sharp and tart and faintly sweet between your teeth. “Kind of like cranberries,” you say, taking another.

The pile is gone quickly, leaving just the napkin, the juice, like a dark wine stain. You lick your fingers clean. He’d been staring, the way he kind of always stares, but when your lips close around your thumb, he looks away.

You learn a bunch about food in the 1940s, mostly by accident.

Mangoes were a thing; they’d had some growing down in Florida, and you could get them seasonally. Pineapples used to be so rare that rich people would display the whole fruit as a centerpiece at parties and things, way back in the very early 1900s and up through the Great Depression, too; but by the time the 30s rolled around you could get the canned kind at the store. Watermelon was a thing, too, but they all had the solid, jet-black seeds you weren’t supposed to swallow; somebody’d bred those out of the commercial ones sometime after Barnes had slipped out of time.

“I gotta just go straight for the really fucking weird stuff,” you muse, mostly to yourself. It’s late and it’s quiet in the shop and it’s raining outside, the street slick and black and reflecting the light from the lampposts. He stays later, now, leaves closer to 10:30; you’re kind of proud of that. That he seems to like you, your company. Or at least doesn’t dislike it.

“You could just ask,” he says, sounding just the slightest bit exasperated, “If I’ve had something before.”

“No,” you tell him, deeply serious, “No, that fucking ruins it, Barnes, it ruins the surprise.”

He looks at you blankly. A few seconds too late, you realize you’ve never actually said that, out loud. His name. You don’t call him Sergeant in your head anymore, it seems too formal, but James seems too intimate, and you hadn’t asked— hadn’t wanted to ask, hadn’t wanted to pry— if he still thinks of himself as Bucky.

He doesn’t say anything.

Barnes it is, then.

Gooseberries used to be way more popular, all the way up into the 1920s, even though technically it was made federally illegal to grow them a few years before he was born. It was an attempt to stop the spread of this fungus that’d jump from the bushes to pine trees, killed huge swathes of them up and down the Northeast, decimated the lumber industry. He tells you his Ma used to make tarts and pies from them, in the fall when they were in-season, but eventually the farms upstate started getting shut down, and it was too expensive. The federal ban lifted in the 60s, you learn via Google, but production never really ramped back up again— they didn’t even have them at your regular grocery store, you’d had to go all the way to Trader Joe’s.

They taste kind of like green apples. He’d looked the way he did with the pomegranate, that first time, wistful and softer and like he’s remembering. It’s really the most you’ve ever seen behind whatever practiced and controlled exterior he maintains, beyond flashes of almost-smiles and eyebrow-raises and pointed looks. You want to peel that veneer off like peeling the skin from a fruit, get underneath it, get to the flesh of him; when this thought occurs to you, you bury it immediately, as deep as it will go.

“White pine blister rust,” you read aloud off of your phone, crossing the lobby to his table, coffee cup in one hand. You set it on the table for him and he reaches for it with a mumbled thanks. “That’s what it was called, the fungus-thing. According to wikipedia.”

Barnes blinks at you. He takes a long, slow sip of his coffee, even though it’s still probably a little too hot, not that it matters to him; and then he sets the cup down and frowns and says, “What the fuck is wikipedia?”

You laugh without meaning to.

The skin slips, a little, whatever’s underneath peeking out, bruised and soft and bloody, but then you blink and he’s fine. Watching you, expression light and practiced. Whole, again.

In February something happens.

Your coworker tells you before he leaves, pulls you aside in the threshold of the door to the back room to mumble, “there were some dudes out back by the garbage when I took it out before. I was getting bad vibes, I don’t know, just— be careful.”

There’d been a string of robberies through the borough, all within some convenient distance of the subway line, and the store is probably three blocks away from one of the platforms. The back door is one of those that opens only from inside the store, the other end flat and lacking a handle; you leave it propped open when you run to take the garbage out. You’re not stupid, is the thing. The guys, whoever they are— it could be nothing, but it could be that they’re waiting. Waiting for it to be just you, waiting for the door to open, waiting for the opportunity. You have a knife, but it’s a flimsy ten-dollar gas station piece of shit, mostly for intimidation and not for actual use; you’re also well aware that using knives in confrontations tends to make things worse rather than better. Bring that shit out and you’re asking to get it taken from you. Asking to have it used on you.

You could try to call the cops, but more than half of them have been requisitioned by the GRC, and you know what they’d tell you. Unfortunately at the moment we’re understaffed and can’t afford to respond to predictive calls. Please let us know if and when something illegal occurs. Practiced and perfunctory and something people joke about in your neighborhood, because there’s really nothing else any of you can do. Your coworker can’t stay, either; he can’t afford to pay the babysitter another hour, not on minimum wage.

“It’s okay,” you tell him, “I’ll be fine.”

And it is okay. You will be fine.

Barnes is there.

It’s a Wednesday, so it’s just sheer fucking luck that he’s here at all; he must be able to see it, in your face, when you come bursting through the little swinging gate-thing and out into the lobby, because his hands tighten into fists where they’re resting on the table.

“Oh my god I’m so glad you’re here,” you say, breathless and frantic and very much meaning it.

There’s a flash of something on his face that makes you think of heat lightning or splintering ice of the second right before a pomegranate seed bursts between teeth. You are not thinking enough about things that aren’t your immediate anxiety to register it.

“I need your help,” you tell him.

He grows progressively stiffer as you explain the situation, and when you’re done he says nothing, just stands up and pushes his chair in and says, real low, “I’ll go— talk to them. Don’t worry.”

The bell above the door chimes when he leaves.

You stand there at the edge of his table for what feels like some impossible amount of time, every muscle in your body wound up like a spring, jaw clenched so hard it’s starting to drive the beginnings of a headache somewhere on the top of your skull—

He comes back.

“Are you— did they—“ you break from nervously picking at your fingernails to make some vague and anxious gesture. Barnes looks fine, unscathed, cool and neutral and controlled as ever, but when he looks at you it makes something base and instinctive deep inside of you buzz with— alarm. Or— something.

“They were just— being stupid, just drunks,” he says, and maybe you’re imagining it, the thread of tension in his voice. “It’s fine. It’s all— it’s fine.”

You feel yourself visibly relax. “Oh, god, thank you so much, dealing with drunk guys is— it’s the worst.”

He flinches, when you say the first words, just a little, his eyes almost closing and the muscles around them going just briefly tense, like he’d managed to suppress most, but not all, of the instinct. “You don’t— you don’t need to thank me.”

You study him for a minute, like maybe if you look hard enough that flicker of whatever it was would come back, linger long enough for you to make sense of it.

“All right, fine, no thanks. Thanks rescinded,” you say finally, bemused. “I’m going to refill your coffee, though.”

You say it with your hand already half-outstretched, close enough that he can’t stop you even with his reflexes, and whatever entirely reactive and entirely accidental noise of triumph you make when his hand closes around empty space is— not on purpose.

His mouth twitches, the closest you’ve ever seen to an actual smile.

Something in your stomach flips.

You shove that shit down, too.

When you come back with the coffee he’s sitting back in the chair with his legs stretched out and he’s staring out the window again.

“Thanks,” he says, when you set it down.

“Oh, so you can thank me, but I can’t thank you?”

His mouth twitches again. “Yes.”

You make some entirely performative tch sound of affected annoyance as you retreat back behind the counter; you still have to take the garbage out, clear out the pastry display case, start emptying and scrubbing down the coffee pots you’re not using now that business has slowed to a crawl.

“Are you still coming Friday?” you call out to him, over the hum and hiss of the espresso machine running through the automated cleaning program, the milk foaming wands steaming in pitchers of sanitizer water, all of it loud enough that you’d never be able to hear him over it, something you realize too late, “Sorry, hold on, I should have asked before I—“

“Do you want me to?” His voice is clear and close and you startle reflexively; he’s at the counter, at the register, staring. Always staring. You thought in the beginning you’d get used to it. It’s not uncommon; those with power stare, and those without cast their eyes down and away. It’s the nature of customer service jobs in New York City. You meet a lot of powerful assholes in suits who make more money than you probably will ever handle in the entirety of your life, and they look at you and talk at you rather than to you, like you’re nothing, a rodent or an insect or something even less than that. You’ve never once flinched away from any of their stares, and never so much as felt like you wanted to, either.

James Buchanan Barnes doesn’t look at you like that at all. He doesn’t look at you like you’re lesser. He looks at you like he can see you— like he can see right through you, like you’re transparent, like everything going on in your head is out in the open, visible, vulnerable, or maybe like he just wants it to be. Like he’s looking for a door hidden somewhere in the minutiae of your expression, some way to force himself inside and pull all of your thoughts and secrets out like unraveling a spool of thread.

He doesn’t look at you like you’re not human. He looks at you like he knows, precisely, intimately, exactly how human you are, and that’s—

Kind of worse. Or maybe it isn’t. It’s definitely weird.

You realize with a start that he’d asked you a question, and you’d been silent for way too long. You tear your eyes away from him and focus on pulling all the cup lids out of the tray at the edge of the counter, sweeping the donut crumbs and sugar crystals and coffee grinds out and onto the floor.

“I mean—,” your tongue feels thick and clumsy in your mouth and it trips over the words, the syllables, stumbling and uncertain. “Not if you have plans, I— you don’t have to.”

“I never have plans,” he scoffs, scathingly self-deprecating, and then there’s the steady rhythm of his fingers drumming against the counter and you feel it on your neck, the hairs raising there, that he’s staring at you still, “I just—since I came today, I thought maybe you wouldn’t— I don’t want to bother you.”

You freeze, stack of iced coffee lids in one hand, half-lowered back into the now-spotless tray.

You force yourself to look back up at him.

“You’re not bothering me,” you say, stressing each word, like it’s important. It is important. “You’re— I like you. We’re friends.”

That thing, from before, the almost-maybe-flinch; it happens again, and you feel your own expression do something reflexive in response, your lips part and your brow furrow in the seconds before you can school your features back to composure. Whatever he does, the control he has over his affect; you’re not very good at that.

“Besides,” you say, into the silence, eyes cast back down and focused on filling the lid tray, “I found something you’ve never tried before, this time. And since I paid for it already, you are, in fact, contractually obligated to be here.”

He laughs, the same kind of laugh, the only kind of laugh you ever get from him; the cut-short one, like he doesn’t mean to, like he’d tried to stop it.

Like he couldn’t.

Barnes leaves at about 10:45, and you bring the trash out right before he goes, just in case. You wouldn’t have seen it if it weren’t for the fact that you were still kind of nervous and had your phone in hand, shining the washed-out beam of light back-and-forth across the little fenced-in area by the dumpster, trying to keep the garbage bag at arms’ length to avoid getting some disgusting coffee sludge mixture on your shoes where it’s leaking out of the corners.

The light catches on it. It glitters, captures your attention, red against the sun-bleached gray concrete. Pomegranate seeds. Shards of garnet.

Drops of blood.

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #i'm uploading all of the things to tumblr. finally.#fic; drops of blood

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beels-burger-babe · 1 year

Text

Your Own Pace

***I am academically exhausted constantly now -a-days and just cried over an essay that is a week and half late that I spent an hour on a paragraph just to find out everything in the paragraph was false. I will now vent and comfort myself with demon boys. Don't mind me.***

Summary: Sometimes, school is just really fucking hard. But that doesn't mean you have to do it alone.

Attending the Royal Academy of Diavolo wasn't easy.

You were in classes constantly learning new things that was common knowledge to everyone else in the room. You were forced to endure subjects that you had purposefully avoided in the human world because you knew that you had neither the interest nor intellect to pursue them. And with all the drama that came with living in the House of Lamentation, it felt like you were always a week behind, playing an endless game of catch up.

It was exhausting. You were exhausted. But you never thought you were this exhausted

"Are you kidding- URAAAAAAGGGHHHHHHH!!!"

Satan's head shot up at not only the sound of your infuriated scream, but the spike of wrath that just plummeted down his spine. With a frown, he sat up from his reading chair in his bedroom and poked his head out into the hallway.

Beelzebub and Mammon were in similar states, he noticed, spotting their heads also looking out towards your bedroom door.

They all looked back and blinked at each other. "Should we ..." Mammon started glancing over at the door once more.

Beel simply hummed, before making his way over to your room.

It was Satan who was voted to knock. "MC? Is ... Are you alright?" he asked with some hesitance.

The door ripped open, and the tree demons had to take a moment to process what was in front of them.

You hair was greatly disheveled with an eerily likeness to that of a mad scientist. There was a crazed gleam in your eyes, that even as you looked at them, Satan couldn't help but notice that they weren't fully focused. You chest was heaving with stuttered breaths behind your tightly, locked jaw. "What?" you snapped. "I'm trying to work."

Beel frowned. "But you screamed?"

You let out an exasperated sigh, your eyes looking up to the ceiling. "Yes. Because this essay is beating the absolute shit out of me."

Beelzebub, once again blinked. "Is your essay enchanted? Are you injured?"

Feeling anger begin to bubble up inside of you once more, Satan quickly cut off his brother. "I don't think that's what they meant, Beel. They mean they're having a hard time with it," he turned to you with a curious expression. "Talk to me. What's going on? Maybe I can help."

You huffed, arms dropping to your side. "No. I don't want help. I know I can do it on my own, but-" Another aggrivated growl ripped from your throat. "Nothing is clicking! It's so fucking stupid! This class! This fucking essay! Not to mention it's already a week and a half late! I hate it so much!"

"MC," Mammon began, his blue eyes filling with concern. "It's alright-"

"It's not-" your voice finally cracked. "Wh-What if I never finish it? This paper is worth 30 per cent! I'll fail the class a-and a-nd-"

You were suddenly engulfed by Beel's arms as he held you tightly. Your body tensed instinctively as you fought to free yourself before melting into the demon's embrace. Your eyes burned as you felt your chest grow impossibly tight.

"It's okay," Beel whispered. "Even if you fail, which you most likely won't, it's not the end of the world. It's just a class-"

You frantically shook your head. "No. It's not. I need it for the program. I need it!"

Satan moved forward and ran a hand through your hair. "You need rest. You can always retake the course another time if the worst case happens. You can go at your own pace, MC. But this isn't healthy. You shouldn't be this stressed out over a paper."

Mammon hummed as he joined Beel in the hug. "It's okay to be stressed. It's okay to cry. Just, know we don't expect you to be fucking prodigy or somethin'. Just let it out."

Suddenly, you had no say in the matter. Tears broke free from the damn behind your eyes as gut wrenching sobs, as heavy as boulders, rattled your form like a window in a storm.

The brothers didn't move. They didn't say a word. They just held you. And they would keep holding you until you were ready for them to let go.

Taglist:

@thegrimgrinningghost @henry-and-the-seven-lords @satans-beloved-riv @cosmixbun @sufzku @obey-mes-treasure @kissed-by-a-dementor @yukihaie @justtiarra @mammoneybb @poly-bi-mf @burrixino @pumpkins-mainside-blog @acousticpen @sucker-for-angst-and-fluff @itskrispy @10paradox10 @vallison-rea @ivoryclive @newfangled-artistry @pumpkinpatchkid @chirikoheina @sailboat21 @theother4 @todoroses @circus-of-freaks @mcx7demonbros @bloopthebat

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fbfh · 2 years

Text

rocks at your window pt. 4 - ricky bowen x reader

disclaimer: this series contains smut and chapter by chapter warnings, so as with all nsfw works, ricky is aged up to 18+!! ricky and reader are 18 and in their senior year

additionally, we're working towards a ricky x therapy plot so he's going to start expressing some symptoms of mental illness and bpd starting in this chapter but I promise he does get therapy eventually and has a good support system (he gets worse before he gets better yk) and obviously i'm not a professional and this is for entertainment so while I have done my research pls take this with a grain of salt!! or several!! /lh

!! contains some spoilers for season 1 of hsmtmts, and previous chapters of this fic !!

wc: 11k I know

genre: smut, slice of life/coming of age, one sided pining, fluff

pairing: ricky bowen x (afab she/her) reader

warnings: NOT PROOF READ AT ALL, more facebook messanger texts we'll politely pretend aren't facebook messanger, protecting carlos and seb during hoco (+ one use of the word homophobia), you're the dolly levi of the friend group, a LOT of hello dolly references??, TOOTH ROTTING FLUFF, ricky's falling HARD, antagonist!nina, one sided rina angst (like BIG gina angst), big red is ricky's temporary therapist, ricky has bpd, ricky kind of splits on gina??, ricky has anxiety too, dr phil and big red and natalie's emotional support hamster are the only consistant things in anyone's life, drama/general messiness, oral (m + f recieving), sneaky quiet late night don't wake up the parents sex, making out, ricky thinks you smell so good he has to bang you right now, "stay quiet or I stop", switch!ricky, switch!reader, calling ricky a good boy, praise kink, giggly sex, waking up the morning after to an empty bed but not at all on bad terms (and no ghosting)

summary: ricky works up the guts to ask you to homecoming. if you can navigate all the drama, maybe he'll get to rearrange yours after dancing together all night.

song recs: old friend - mitski, 10 minutes ago - cinderella (1997), dancing - hello dolly (1969), in love on valentine's day - paul sandrone, daniel farrant, james knight (spotify link bc it's literally not on youtube??? tracking down this song was a nightmare /lh), you turned the tables on me - billie holiday, born to be brave - nico iaciancio cover (bc that's what I think the original sounds like in canon), soulmate who wasn't meant to be - jess benko, perfume - new hope club

a/n: could I have split this up?? yes but I'm not going to. also congrats 2 me bc I'm officially in the 10k one shot girlie club!! this is the longest thing i've ever written and my eyes are burning. ricky has bpd, I knew from the moment I saw this motherfucker I was like "yup bpd and mommy issues" and I was RIGHT why is no one talking about this also go watch crazy ex girlfriend

EDIT: I FORGOT TO ADD THE LINK TO THE VAMPIRE DIARIES VIDEO YOU REFERENCE IN THE BEGINNING (obvious spoilers for vampire diaries lol)

tags: @yesv01 @afidiofobia @aliyahsutherland @hopefullhearts @afidiofobia @aliyahsutherland @matiere-detoiles @ifilwtmfc @uselesssapphickitten @nxstalgicnxbxdy @ggclarissa

There’s no reason to be nervous. Ricky has literally no reason to be nervous. You’ve been together practically 24/7 since… all this began. He ducks his head down and his eyes land on the smooth counter top of the booth you’re sitting in. Heat rushes to his cheeks as it so often does around you, as he remembers all the time you’ve spent together. He tries to pay as much attention as he can to your summary of the video essay on vampire diaries you’d watched while doing homework last night, even though his thoughts are racing, and all centered on you. On asking you something really important - but also like, totally not a big deal or whatever.

“So apparently they just regularly bring characters back from the dead,” you inform him with a laugh, and take a sip of your coffee. He didn’t think people could look particularly cute while sipping something until he met you… until he got close with you.

“Yeah, that’s pretty crazy,” he agrees, hoping he sounds normal. You glance up at him to make sure he’s okay. You can tell he seems a little distracted, and he knows he has to ask you. It’s now or never.

“So…” he begins.

“Yeah?” you lean forward, already invested in what he has to say. God, he loves that. He loves the way you care, really care about what he has to say. He lets out a small, breathy laugh, that you mirror when you hear his.

“So, homecoming is soon,” he smiles, and is pretty sure you know where he’s going with this. Your eyes widen in moderate surprise.

“It is? Already?” you ask, pulling out your phone to check your very messy calendar. “Jesus, I thought we still had a few more weeks…” you muse, and Ricky smiles. God, how can you make everything - even being a little scatterbrained sometimes - so fucking cute?

You look back up from your phone, snapping him back to attention. His breath is shallow.

“So…” he says again, and rubs the palms of his hands up and down his jeans. Why is he so nervous? He has no reason to be nervous. You’re silent, waiting for him to continue in a way that feels patient, encouraging even, instead of critical like it would be from someone else.

“...Do you want to go? To homecoming?”

His heart is in his throat.

“Like, together?” You take another sip. He’s so choked up, so worried you’ll say no. He nods. You smile.

“Hell yeah,” you lean back and pull out your phone to text your mom, who is currently at a PTA meeting, about dress shopping this weekend, biting your lip as you type. Relief turns to elation as you discuss plans, coordinate rides with your friends, and get a plan together. He bounces his leg, getting really excited for all this. He’s never been one for school dances, but with you… it’s a whole different story. He can’t stop looking at you.

“So, what color is your dress going to be? You know, so I can get a tie to match.” A light, happy chuckle dances across the table and you hum in consideration, glancing down at the scone in your hand, your favorite flavor that’s become somewhat of a signature with you and Ricky.

“Peach.”

You both giggle.

“Perfect.” he smiles. You’re going to look so pretty in a peach dress. At homecoming. With him. A burst of kinetic energy waves through him at the thought. The atmosphere is nice, comfortable. It always is with you. You finish the bite of pastry in your mouth.

“You know,” you start, “maybe you should go suit shopping with your dad. It might be nice to have a guy’s day together.”

His mom has been gone for a few weeks now, and he told you how badly his dad is struggling. He means well, it’s just… been hard on him. It might be nice, he thinks, really nice to go out and spend some time with his dad, have some fun. He doesn’t remember the last time they had a day like that together. He’d really like that, if his dad wanted to.

“Yeah,” he agrees, wondering when a good time to bring it up will be, “that would be nice.”

Around the time you’re ready to head home, your phone lights up with a text from your mom, informing you everything at the PTA meeting went great, and she’ll fill you in on the details at home, and you thank her, informing her there’s a hazelnut coffee coming her way.

It’s Friday night, and you have less than 24 hours to homecoming. You’re not sure how you were able to find a dress you actually like in the right color on such short notice, but somehow you managed. You and Ricky have been texting all day, filling each other in on how last minute shopping had been going for each of you. He was shocked at how well today went with his dad. He was bracing himself for the worst for a lot of the afternoon, but the day progressed and nothing bad happened. They even got dinner afterwards.

Now, you’re sitting at your desk, finishing some homework while you facetime each other and fill him in on the whole cast’s plan to be there for Carlos and Seb tomorrow night.

“And, like,” you continue rambling as you wrap up your science worksheet, “it’s so ridiculous that that’s even necessary, you know? Out of all the living things in the world, humans are the only ones who thought to make up homophobia.”

“Right? Worst idea ever,” he muses.

“Exactly!” you exclaim in agreement, looking up at your phone. You mutter something about how stupid people can be, eyes moving down and skimming your paper, double checking your answers one last time. Ricky watches you do this. Your desk light casts a warm glow over you, and he can see some of your posters on the opposite wall from where you have your phone propped up. He knows exactly which ones they are, too. He has every detail of your room - and of you - memorized by now.

He’s supposed to be finishing his english homework, that’s the whole point of facetiming each other this late, to keep each other company while you work. Instead his papers lay discarded on his desk as he watches you, a look of fondness dusting his face. You tap your pencil against each question on your worksheet, eyebrows scrunched, mouthing the answers to yourself as you go. Occasionally you’ll stop, turning to your book to check a chart or vocabulary word, then erase your answer and select a different one.

“And that’s why we proofread,” you mutter to yourself, and Ricky giggles. You look back up at him, smiling, then back at your paper for one last once over.

“Okay, I’m just about done,” you say, putting your homework in your bag to turn in later, with a satisfactory sigh. Ricky glances at the time. It’s getting late already. He’s torn between wanting to make sure you get enough sleep, and wanting to talk to you all night. He watches you rub your eyes, suppressing a yawn.

“We should probably go to bed now,” it’s more of a question, but you agree anyway. You pick up your phone and walk into your bathroom, grabbing your toothbrush as you say your drawn out good nights.

Ricky thought he was nervous asking you to homecoming? Turns out that’s nothing compared where he is now, waiting for you in your foyer. Somehow your house had become the unofficial get ready spot for the girls and Carlos, and meet up place for everyone else. So that’s where Ricky finds himself, barely unable to socialize or talk with his friends, all his thoughts preoccupied with you. He hasn’t seen you all day; you and the girls have been getting ready together, and he’s been trying to teach Big Red to dance all day.

Ashlyn comes down first. Her bubbly presence immediately eases some of the tension in the atmosphere from Ricky and EJ having to wait together in such close quarters. She waits with them for the others while they finish getting ready. It doesn’t slip past Ricky how nervous Big Red suddenly gets when she comes down the staircase.

Natalie is next - almost. Half way down the stairs, a snap resonates off the walls, and she freezes. She looks down at her left shoe, the heel of which has completely snapped off.

“Oh my god,” she mutters, and walks carefully back up to your room. A minute later, presumably after she informs you about her wardrobe malfunction, Ricky hears your voice, faint and bouncing off the stairwell.

“It’s okay, that’s the risk you take with stilettos,” you say, trying to calm her justified panic. He hears you say something about how Margot Robbie broke a heel at an award show a few years ago as your bedroom door closes again.

The door opens, and Carlos appears at the landing. His face falls slightly as he realizes Seb isn’t here yet.

“It’s okay, he’s probably going to meet up with us at school.” Ricky comforts.

“Yeah,” he agrees with a laugh at his own nervousness, “yeah, you’re probably right.” Carlos takes a deep breath, and Ricky notices the swirly, metallic red pattern on his suit.

“You look great, man,” He says, hoping to take Carlos’s mind off the unexpected radio silence from Seb. The comment is appreciated, but seems to catch him off guard.

“Thanks,” he replies, “dude,” he punctuates with a friendly - very awkward - punch to Ricky’s arm. It’s more of a nudge, but he appreciates the sense of comradery nonetheless.

Footsteps echo down the stairs, and Ricky looks up, stomach twisting in anticipation. Natalie emmerges, much more carefully this time. She greets everyone, then starts talking to Ashlyn about the shoe incident. Ricky is trying really, really hard not to look like he’s waiting for you, but it feels almost impossible to focus on anything else.

Finally, several painfully long minutes later, he hears the click of high heels approaching the steps. He walks to the bottom of the stairs, heart thumping as you round the corner, and all the breath is pulled from his lungs at the sight of you. You descend the stairs, hair and dress flowing and bouncing with every step, glowing under the chandelier light. Your dress, mid length and flouncy, a peachy champagne that compliments your hair and skin tone perfectly, shimmers subtly when you move, glistening like starlight.

Your makeup is understated and glowy, bringing out every beautiful feature you have - which is all of them. Your hair is perfect, glossy and voluminous. Your earrings look like little pink silk flowers, and there are matching, larger silk flowers on the side of your heels. Your nails are manicured a soft peachy pink, with little sparkling accents. You even smell like peaches, he realizes, subconsciously taking a step closer to the bottom of the stairs as you get closer. You seem to descend in slow motion as Ricky takes in every detail.

Your expression mirrors his the moment you see him. You did not expect him to look that good in a suit. It couldn’t fit better, the cut and seams of the dark fabric perfectly accentuating his physique. His tie matches your dress, the same shade of peach, and you bite back a smile. The expression on his face can only be described as a breathless wow, and it’s something you'll never forget. Your cheeks are warm and suddenly it all feels real. You find yourself very excited to have fun at homecoming with him tonight.

You finally float down to the bottom of the stairs, stopping in front of him. It’s quiet for a moment, as you take each other in, face to face. You’re both struggling to find the words, thrown off guard by the energy in the air, by each other. Behind you, Ashlyn claps awkwardly.

“Alright, everyone ready to go?”

You and Ricky both giggle at the same time, and his chest warms at how in sync you are.

“Yeah,” You confirm, smiling over at Ashlyn and grabbing Ricky’s arm in a way that makes his heart palpitate, “let’s go.”

Standing with you on the dance floor, his hand on your waist as you attempt to teach him how to waltz, Ricky is so thankful for homecoming, for an opportunity to be close to you like this.

“I told you,” he laughs, enamored with your optimistic determination, “I can’t dance.”

“Yes,” you smile, “you can. You just haven’t had the right teacher.” His cheeks flush at your words, the feeling of your hands on his, and he’s hit with the sudden memory of the last time your lips were on his neck.

“I think you’re probably right about that…” he mutters under his breath. You bite back a smile, adjusting the position of his hand on your waist. You step closer, and his heart beats faster. He watches your face closely as you explain the basics of a waltz, a box step.

“Like in ‘Dancing’ from Hello Dolly.” you smile, eyes widening at the blank look on his face. “Oh my god, it’s a musical classic! Carol Channing played Dolly in the original broadway cast in ‘64, then Barbra Streisand in the film adaptation in ‘69.”

“Wow,” he smiles. He loves when you talk about theatre and Broadway, loves the way your eyes light up. “They’re like, really famous, right?” You let out a light hearted scoff.

“Broadway legends.” You smile, “The movie was directed by Gene Kelly, too, it’s amazing. We should watch it this weekend, if you want to,” you look up at him, eyes glittering under the soft twinkling lights.

“Yeah,” Ricky laughs, “definitely.”

After a moment, you remember why you brought Hello Dolly up in the first place.

“Right,” you say, memory jogged, “there’s a song called ‘Dancing’ where Dolly is teaching Cornelius and Barnaby how to dance so they can impress these girls who work at a ladies hat shop-”

“Cornelius and Barnaby?” he asks with a laugh.

“It takes place in 1890!” you say, jokingly defensive.

“Right,” he agrees, “so a… ladies hat shop…?”

“Totally era appropriate.”

You’re both giggling, trying not to be too loud. You lean your head forward, resting it on his shoulder. The sound of your laughter, the feeling of your head resting against him brings back that warm feeling he always gets around you. It takes you a moment to regain your composure. It’s been like this all night, the conversation flowing like a river, always making each other laugh over something or other.

“So,” you begin, once again ready to dance with him, “put your hand on her waist and stand.” You recite, moving his hand from your back to your waist and adjusting your posture.

“With her right-” you hesitate, making sure you have the correct hand, then continue, “in your left hand. And…” You step back with your left foot, motioning for him to follow, then back and out with your right, then together.

“One… two… three…”

You repeat the steps.

“One… two… three…”

And again.

“One… two… three…”

You look up at him, your smile blinding.

“Look, you’re dancing!”

He looks up at you, excited, disbelieving that he got it so quickly.

“Wait, that’s it?” he asks quietly.

“Yeah,” you nod, “see? I told you you can dance.” You start to move again, and he follows, hesitant but slowly getting the hang of it. After a second, he says your name, voice quiet and still watching the ground.

“Can you keep singing? It’s making it a lot easier…” he chuckles, hoping you can’t tell how much he loves hearing your voice.

So you do. You sing quietly, just enough for him to hear, about dancing and how it’s the perfect excuse to hold someone you like close to you, as you waltz carefully around the room. An electric, intimate feeling ties you together as you weave through the room. It's like something clicked, he thinks, because it makes sense. This, dancing, makes sense. He’s pulled from his epiphany by your melodic voice.

"We should do Hello Dolly, it would be so fun!" You giggle.

"Yeah?" He asks, smile mirroring yours, "Who would you play?" You let out a light hearted huff, considering.

"I would love to play Dolly," you admit. You had always hoped to portray the classic role, dreaming of being able to follow in the footsteps of other iconic actresses like Carol Channing and Barbra Streisand. You barely get the sentence out when Ricky nods, agreeing.

"You would make an amazing Dolly." You laugh, cheeks warm, flattered by his response.

"Who do you think I should be?" He asks, that playful energy flowing comfortably between you as he raises his arm, spinning you around.

"Well," you begin with a laugh, "if you played Cornelius we’d get to waltz together. But if you played Horace and I played Dolly we'd get married at the end."

His heart squeezes at your words, imagination already taking off like a wild horse. Again, your melodic voice pulls him back down to earth.

"But playing Irene would be fun too…" you sigh, twirling in his arms again, your dress glittering under the soft lights. Your hands return to their previous position resting on his shoulder and your waist, free hands clasped together, and you begin to move in tandem. You twirl and float around the room, feeling the music wrap around you like a warm blanket in autumn.

In that beautiful moment between the two of you, he doesn’t just understand dancing, he realizes, he loves it. Like, a lot. He loves this, being close to you. He loves the connection between you, and he wants to keep dancing with you all night.

He giggles, twirling you around in his arms again. On your way around, you see Carlos behind you at your table holding up his phone, a smile on his face. You’re glad he seems okay; Seb still hasn’t shown up and everyone’s been worried about both of them. A split second later, you’re back in Ricky’s arms, and your heart soars at the smile on his face. You’d been hoping dancing together at homecoming might help him in rehearsals. Based on how well he’s doing - and how much fun he seems to be having - you can tell your hunch was correct.

After a few more songs, you begin to make your way back to your table. Ricky’s hand settles on your back, guiding you through the crowd. Two more people are seated there than when you left, and your eyes widen.

“Oh my god.” you say quietly, “Gina and EJ came together?”

Ricky glances up, gaze almost immediately turning back to you as you get closer.

“Oh, they did? I didn’t notice.”

Fighting to maintain her poker face, Gina’s stomach drops at his words. Her eyes dart between you and Ricky, the way he’s looking at you. She grips her clutch tighter. This is really, really bad for her. Gina barely had a plan for making Ricky jealous and freaked out so he’d quit the show to begin with. She definitely did not plan on you waltzing into the picture - literally - and stealing away all of his attention. He can’t get jealous if all of his focus is on you. A sinking feeling begins to invade the pit of her stomach.

Ricky’s phone buzzes with a text from his dad.

“Hey,” he says, showing you the screen, “which shirt do you like better?”

He’s been filling you in on his dad’s hot date he has tonight, and you’re both very relieved to see that he’s doing okay, putting himself out there. You look at the pictures, and consider.

“Hmm… the second one.” you conclude.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” he agrees easily. He loves how you always seem to be on the same page.

“Wow,” comes EJ’s voice from across the table. He sounds really stiff. “I had no idea you were each other’s dates to homecoming.” He states, sharing a quick look with Gina he hopes no one notices.

“Yeah, we are,” Ricky smiles, “we’re each other’s dates.” He doesn’t think it would be too far fetched to say you’re… dating.

“Yep, partners in crime.” You smile, showing off your plastic ring. Ricky holds up his, kept on a chain, sitting right over his heart.

“Aw,” Carlos says, an almost bittersweet undercurrent to his voice, “you guys are so cute.” He gestures for you to lean closer to each other. “Let me get a pic for my story!”

Ricky does not need to be told twice. He throws his arms around you, pressing a kiss to your cheek as you hold his arm and giggle. It’s the perfect shot, the sincerity of the fun you’re having evident in the photo.

Gina runs her tongue over her teeth. She really does not like that.

Across town, sitting at a table in a shitty karaoke spot, Nina scrolls through instagram while Kourtney rants about the bitch who criticized her costume suggestions. Something about a lime green sweater? She’s not really paying attention, she’s too distracted by the hideous dress that Gina’s wearing. And the fact that she went to hoco with Nina’s ex boyfriend.

“Look at this,” she says, showing Kourtney her phone. “She looks like she’s wearing a bedazzled tablecloth.” Kourtney looks at her phone, disapproval written all over her face.

“And,” Nina says, gearing up to point out the obvious jab at her, “she’s with EJ.”

Kourtney knows where this is going. Before Nini can go off about how obviously Gina has it out for her, she takes a sip of her drink.

“Is there anything on their stories?”

She taps EJ’s story and it’s just a boomerang of the food.

“No, just-” Carlos’s story plays next and Nina almost pukes. Right there on her screen is Ricky, kissing your cheek, leaning into you like a cat. You’re in an unfortunately gorgeous dress, grinning so sincerely, your nose effortlessly scrunched. Next is a video of you two dancing. Like, really, properly dancing. She can’t believe you got him to dance - he doesn’t even dance in rehearsal when he’s supposed to! She watches the two of you ballroom dancing around the gym, breath speeding up slightly at the realization that he’s actually good. The sick pit forming in her stomach grows as she rewatches the video again. She wants to know why, after all the practice, all the failed attempts and his reluctance, why it works when you do it? Why isn’t she good enough? She dwells in the feeling for a few minutes. She scrolls through a few more hoco posts before finding one that has your account tagged. It’s private.

“Kourt,” she says, showing her her phone, “you need to follow her.”

“Why?” Kourtney asks.

“So I can see what’s on her instagram.” Nina says. She can’t let you know she’s lurking, so the obvious solution is to lurk through Kourtney’s account. Kourtney sighs. She requests to follow you.

A few feet away from your table, Ashlyn gives you a look, gesturing subtly to Carlos, then to the hallway. Seb still isn’t here.

“Hey,” you say quietly to Ricky, “I’ll be right back.” you smile, eyes flicking over to Ashlyn and Carlos.

“Yeah, sure,” he says, watching you leave with them to give Carlos a pep talk. A soft smile kisses the corners of Ricky’s mouth, watching you in utter adoration. He lets out a small sigh, gaze lingering on where you stood even after you’re out of sight.

Gina watches him watch you, his dark auburn hair glowing in the warm twinkle lights strung up throughout the gym. His eyes seem to sparkle with joy when he finally tears his gaze away, staring absentmindedly at the table.

“EJ,” she says, “could you get me some punch, babe?”

“Uh,” he says, clearly unused to the term of endearment, “sure… babe.” He heads over to the drinks, the tension between them thinly veiled. This seems to snap Ricky out of whatever his train of thought was, and he scoots closer to Gina. She watches him lean closer to her and begin speaking in a low, almost strangely intimate tone of voice.

"Hey, you know EJ went through Nini’s phone before they broke up, right?”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Just… you know, be a little careful around him.”

“I can take care of myself, Ricky.” She states incredulously.

“Yeah, of course you can.” he says, head tilted to the side with a little smile, like it should be obvious, “You’re so talented and ambitious, and - honestly, way too good for him.” He mutters the last part, but she definitely hears it.

“You’re way too cool to get your heart broken by a guy who plays water polo.” He says, drawing a reflexive laugh out of her.

“Just… take care of yourself.” he concludes, locking eyes with her before moving back to his seat. It’s only for a moment, but long enough for her to commit the color to memory.

“Right.” she says, working harder than she usually has to to keep her expression neutral.

Later, between dances, you and Ricky catch your breath at the snack table. You take a sip of your drink, eyes landing on Gina and EJ, who are very obviously arguing. You nudge Ricky, motioning over to them.

“What are they saying? Wrong answers only.”

He considers, then begins to narrate in his best EJ impression.

“Ugh, Gina! Stop moving! I haven’t posted on instagram in 35 seconds and blurry so doesn’t fit my theme.”

You try to stifle the loud, beautiful laugh that brings warmth to his cheeks and a smile to his lips as your eyes lock, sharing a look so close he never wants to look away.

“I said wrong answers only…” you say through muffled giggles. He stares at you, fixated. He’s blinded by your warmth, your beauty, and he can’t look away from you. His attention is snapped back to where it had been when you gasp dramatically, shock written all over your face. He follows your gaze to EJ, who’s dripping with punch, and Gina, who’s storming away from him.

“...Oh my god.” you say, already dissolving into laughter again, Ricky following suit.

Soon you’re dancing again, pressed up against each other, swaying gently to the oldies playing softly over the speakers. Ricky can feel your body heat, smell your shampoo, and the way it mixes with your sweet peachy perfume. You smell so good, he thinks he could probably get high off you alone. His hand rests firmly on your back, holding you close to him, and his fingertips brush over the exposed skin peeking out over the straps of your dress. He traces your shoulder blades, your spine, feeling how close together your hearts are beating. One of your arms is wrapped around him, your head resting on his shoulder. Both your free hands are intertwined, and he loves the feeling of your fingers intertwining with his. He’s steeped in a hazy sort of ecstasy, spurred further on by your warm little breaths tickling his neck.

He lets out a soft sigh, more content than he’s probably ever been. He feels you smile against his blazer when he traces the outline of the back of your dress. You hum softly to the music, singing along to a few of the words. He’s not surprised that you know this song, of course you would know a song this pretty and romantic. He hopes he’ll remember to ask you the name of it later. Dancing, he realizes, isn’t just fun - it’s amazing. He loves dancing. He loves dancing with you. After a few moments, he realizes there’s not many people on the dance floor. He doesn’t get why so many guys don’t like slow dancing; when you really love someone, isn’t any reason to hold them close to you a good one? He thinks it is. His heart flutters when you let out a breathy sigh against his skin.

You adjust your head on Ricky’s shoulder, watching Carlos across the room. He looks so… melancholic. You should go check on him. And Gina. And probably EJ. Christ, tonight has been a lot. You adjust your head again, facing towards him.

“We should check on Gina,” you say reluctantly, murmuring into his ear, sending a shiver down his spine. He loves when you do that, loves how you know when people are hurting and what to do about it. But right now, he really, really does not want to let go of you for anyone or anything. Maybe it’s selfish, he thinks, maybe it’s selfish for wanting you all to himself like this, but he just can’t bring himself to let go of you yet. Maybe he deserves to be a little selfish sometimes. Maybe he should just give himself permission to do whatever makes him feel better. He holds you tighter, face burying into your neck.

“After this song,” he breathes, eyes fluttering closed in your embrace. You nod gently.

“Okay,” you agree, voice so low he can barely hear it.

Eventually the final piano chords sound, and he holds you tight as the last few, painfully bittersweet notes reverberate through the room. The song ends, and he lets go of you slower and more reluctantly than he’s done anything.

You sigh, tracing your hands on his shoulders, slowly coming out of that cozy trance like state you’ve been in together.

“Okay,” you start, “let’s split up. I’ll check on Carlos, you can check on Gina, and I’ll have Ashlyn check on EJ cause they’re cousins.”

He agrees, hit with a sudden wave of nerves about the confrontation. You can sense his hesitation.

“What should I say?” he asks, with a chuckle. He’d told you about how he warned Gina about EJ earlier in the evening, which you had agreed was totally the right move. He told you how she seemed irritable after the interaction, and wondered if he’d done anything wrong, if he could have handled it better. “I don’t think so”, you had said with a sad shrug, “some people just refuse to acknowledge the person they’re dating is kind of shitty.”

You’re right, he realized, now ready to approach this with more compassion and less confrontation. You think for a second, then reply.

“You can apologize if what you said before came off wrong, that you didn’t mean anything bad by it.”

“Okay,” he nods.

“And try to relate to her - you’re new to theatre, she’s new to east high, you gotta stick together, you know?”

“Right.”

You send him a thumbs up as you part ways, looking for Carlos. After chatting with Carlos, he left to get some water. You see Ricky approaching you through the crowd, and stand up from your table, meeting him halfway.

“How’d it go?” you ask. He seems hesitant.

“She asked for a ride home.” Your eyes go wide with understanding. He knew you’d get what’s going on, you always know just what to do.

“Oh, dude, the last thing she probably wants right now is to get in a car with EJ.” Ricky thinks that’s the last thing anyone would want. “If you want you can give her a ride, then come back and we can keep dancing.” He smiles, and agrees. Any plan that ends with dancing with you more sounds like a good plan to him. You quickly fill him in on how things are going with the Carlos/Seb situation in spite of its anticlimactic nature - no one can get a hold of Seb, and Carlos is really, really regretting this whole thing. You and Ashlyn are going to try and hype him up and turn the night around for him so it’s not a totally horrible memory to look back on, and Ricky agrees that’s a good plan.

“I’ll be back really soon so I can help you guys out,” he says, hoping to extend the conversation a little, to stand close to you and talk confidentially with you just a little more. You smile, looking relieved at his support, and it makes his heart flutter. You touch his arm, sending him a knowing look.

“We need all the help we can get, so thank you.” you state with a chuckle. He tries not to be obvious, but he knows he can’t hide his flushed cheeks and dilated pupils. He hopes you don’t notice.

You really didn’t expect to be the glue holding everyone together tonight, but you love your friends, so you’re not complaining. After a lengthy conversation with Carlos about how amazing he is regardless of who he is or isn’t seeing, and that there will be so many guys throwing themselves at him after high school, you finally get him out of his funk a little. You were about to go dance together and have a good time, because he shouldn’t let anything ruin his homecoming, when Natalie scurried over to you holding the side of her dress.

“It snagged on the back of a chair and my whole leg is out, Angelina Jolie style.” She says in a rush, clearly getting more freaked out. You and Carlos share a look.

“It’s okay,” you say gently, “I have a sewing kit in my bag and I can have you fixed up in two minutes flat.” You look over at Carlos again, making sure he’ll be okay. He confirms silently, nudging you two towards the doors.

“You go fix this wardrobe malfunction,” he says, already trying to pull out of the funk he’d been stuck in all night, “I’m going to warm up the dance floor. When you get back, get ready to dance your heart out.”

He’s not all the way there, but he’s trying. You both agree, and you send him one last encouraging look before moving carefully to the hallway, trying not to let Natalie’s dress rip any more than it already is. You look back one last time as you pass through the doors, and finally, Carlos is out on the dance floor. You smile, excited to dance with him once you get back.

“God, I wish I had my hamster right now…” Natalie mutters, and you know if she needs her emotional support hamster, it’s pretty bad.

A few minutes later, you have your sewing kit and Natalie’s dress is back to its former glory. She has on a fresh coat of lip gloss, just finished showing you pictures of her hamster, and is ready to head back out. You stay behind to touch up your makeup a little, telling her you’ll be right behind her. As you’re walking back out, someone turns the corner at the other end of the hallway. You freeze in place, eyes growing wide as they land on none other than Seb. He smiles nervously, raising a hand to wave at you. Before he can, you let out a shocked squeak, scurrying back into the gym. His heart sinks. He hopes you don’t hate him, and he’s really worried Carlos is going to.

When you enter, you see Carlos dancing his heart out. You don’t have time to be relieved, weaving your way through the crowd to Mr. Mazzara. You slam your hands on the table, avoiding the sound and light equipment he’s managing.

“Mr. Mazzara!” He looks up at you, startled, as you begin to explain in a rush. He looks at you, a pleading puppy dog look written on your face, and sighs.

“I suppose that’s fine…” he says, making a few adjustments to the switch board in front of him.

“Thank you!” you say quietly, before running onto the dance floor. Carlos is finally in his element. He dances beautifully to the music, free and expressive. Right when the beat drops, a circle of spotlights go up. One lands on him, the other lands across the room on Seb, and they lock eyes in a moment that can only be described as magical. Ashlyn looks at the scene, straight out of a movie, then over to you. You high five her.

“Nice!” she whispers. You can see it between them, the energy, the chemistry, the electricity. You look at Ashlyn, nodding toward your table. You both sit down, giving them some time to talk and catch up. You try to be subtle as you watch them talk, not close enough to eavesdrop, but watching their expressions, gaging how it's going. They're smiling, then they're laughing, and soon they're dancing together. It's going well, you think. You can't wait for Carlos to fill you in later.

Sitting in Gina's driveway, a surprisingly more comfortable energy in the air than either of them had expected, Ricky tries to think of how to say what he wants to say.

"Not quite the evil mansion with wrought-iron and gargoyles you were picturing?" She asks, a hopeful playfulness to her voice. She almost sounds nervous.

"What? No…" he says. The comment takes him by surprise, snapping him back to attention. "...Well maybe some gargoyles." His joking tone and comforting energy has her giggling. She doesn't remember the last time she giggled. She feels his eyes on her, and tries not to look over at him. She does anyway.

"You're not that bad, you know." He muses. She tries to control her breathing. She doesn't say anything.

"Also," he continues, looking back over at the windshield, "I should thank you for that night at the skatepark, keeping me in the show. It means a lot, it's… a really big deal to me." He looks up and left at the top of the car window, mind already wandering about how if he had quit, he never would have gotten close to you like this, never would have fallen in… your arms the way he had that night. He can't imagine you not being in his life, and he has Gina to thank in part for that. He feels a sense of gratitude blooming for her. They talk a little more, and the feeling grows; Gina really is not that bad. He can feel a friendly bond growing between them, a sense of comradery.

"So… now is probably a good time to ask about the whole drink thing," he starts with a chuckle. She ducks her head, equal parts embarrassed at her actions, and that he saw her at such a low moment. She lets out a sigh. The gesture reminds him of something you might do. He thinks you two would be good friends. He’s already imagining what you’ll say when he fills you in on all this, he’s excited to get your opinion.

“...My mom moves around a lot for work. Like, a lot…”

Once she starts, she can’t stop, and it’s not long before she’s unintentionally spilled her guts and her life story to him. She wishes she could stop talking, but it’s like she totally lost her filter with him. She’s always been so reserved, so calculated, and now she doesn’t even have time to think before the words are already spilling out. It’s a new feeling, being so candid with someone, and an unsettling one.

She risks a glance over at Ricky, who’s just… listening to her. Taking in what she says. That somehow makes her more nervous than if he’d just ignored her or told her to shut up already. She wishes someone would tell her to shut up, she wishes she could. She finally gets to the end of her never ending stream of consciousness, and she’s stunned as they sit in the silence, Ricky really absorbing her words, her feelings. He reaches over and grabs her hand, giving it an encouraging squeeze before letting go - a mannerism he picked up from you. Heat floods her chest, prickly and almost painful, hyper aware of where his skin just touched hers.

“You know, you-” She’ll never know what he was going to say, his words are cut short by the porch lights flashing through the windshield. Gina’s stomach sinks. She doesn’t want to go inside yet. She doesn’t want this moment to be over, but she has to listen to her mom. She reaches for the door, then hesitates. She turns back to Ricky, desperate to try one more time, to put herself out there, to plant some roots.

“I meant what I said at the skate park… about you having your own style.”

He smiles, looking down with a breathy chuckle. His leg is bouncing slightly, he can’t wait to get back to school and dance with you more, spend the rest of this magical night with you.

“Thank you, that’s-” He’s cut off again, this time by the kiss Gina presses to his cheek. She’s out of the car and inside before he can look at her face. She holds her coat tight around her against the chilly rain beginning to drizzle down, and a second later, the front door closes and she’s inside.He lets out another chuckle, different this time. ‘That was weird.’ He thinks. He barely has the thought before his stomach drops, a sick, cold fear clutching him. What if you find out Gina kissed him? What if you find out and you hate him, what if he breaks your heart into a million pieces without trying? Or worse, what if you lose interest in him because you think he likes Gina? He can feel himself panicking at the idea, unable to stop the onslaught of all too real feeling anxieties wracking his mind, creating a pit in his stomach as he peels out of the driveway and makes his way back to school.

No, no, that’s not going to happen. He’s not going to lose you because he’s not able to express how much he cares about you. He’s not going to let that happen. Trying to hold this panic at bay, he pulls out his phone as he walks through the parking lot towards the school again. How to show someone you love them. He types the words into google, skimming article titles, reddit threads, quora responses, until he finds himself at the gym doors. He sees you across the room, dancing in a group with Carlos, Ashlyn, Natalie, and Seb. ‘Oh, Seb’s here. That’s good,’ he thinks, a momentary relief that at least one or two fires had been put out tonight. He spots Big Red on the opposite side of the room, and makes his way over to him carefully, trying not to be seen by you. He can’t be around you until he figures this out, he can’t hurt you like this.

Ricky approaches Big Red with an intense energy he has trouble reading, before Ricky starts to speak.

“Dude,” he says, voice intense and hushed, “Gina kissed me on the cheek.”

“That’s great!”

“No, it’s not!” Ricky says, clearly very frazzled. Okay, that’s where this is going.

“That’s awful!” Red course corrects as Ricky fills him in on the car ride with Gina. As he tells Red everything that happened, Ricky finds himself kind of hating Gina right now. Why would she do this to him, why would she put him in this position? Does she hate him or something? He thinks she must, there’s no other reason for her to sabotage his relationship with you like this. She must hate him if she’s trying to ruin the most important thing in his life.

“Listen, I really, really like her…” his eyes keep flicking over to you, gaze magnetized by your presence, “like, a lot. How can I make sure I don’t fuck this up? Because I can not fuck up with her.”

“Woah, man,” Red starts, trying to help Ricky ground himself a little, “chill out. In all fairness, cheek kisses can be platonic.”

“Right,” Ricky nods, starting to feel assured, and Red continues.

“So, if Gina wants to date you when you’re… kind of seeing someone, she has to make that more clear to you.”

“Right.” Ricky states, agreeing. He really hopes she doesn’t.

“I think you’re okay,” Red says, sensing his energy changing already, “just make sure she knows how much you like her. Make it really, objectively obvious.”

Yeah. He just has to make it obvious.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he says to Red, his eyes locked on you as you laugh at something Carlos says, making his stomach twist and tingle, “I just have to make sure she knows how much… I like her.”

Red watches him make his way over to you, a spring in his step and a plan in his mind. Thank god for Dr. Phil, Red thinks, or else there’s no way he’d be able to help his friends navigate all their drama. He chuckles at the thought, watching Ashlyn fix the strap of your dress.

Ricky checks his phone one more time on the way over, looking over a chart of love languages one more time. He’s not sure what your love language is, so he’ll just have to try all of them and see what you seem to like best. Gift giving and acts of service aren’t really options right now, so tonight he’ll focus on words of affirmation, physical touch, and quality time. If he has to drown you in all five love languages at once to make sure you know how he feels about you, he will.

“Hey,” he starts, watching your reaction nervously, scared you somehow already hate him. You turn around at the sound of his voice, eyes lighting up.

“Hey!” you smile, “You’re back!” you grab his arm, pulling him in closer to the group.

“Seb’s here,” you say, and he smiles, relieved at your reaction.

“Hey, man,” he smiles.

“Fill me in later,” you say quietly, referring to giving Gina a ride, and he nods, a little bit ready to forget the whole thing.

Now that all the drama, wardrobe malfunctions, and late entrances are out of the way, you and what remains of your friends spend the rest of the night like you intended; dancing, laughing, and taking great pictures together. Later on into the night, everyone’s just about had their fill of fun and the party starts winding down. You split up, most of your friends piling into the Salt Lake slices delivery van so Red can drop them off. After some more hugs and laughs, you finally part ways, climbing into the passenger seat of his orange Volkswagen Beetle.

His heart is thumping as you grab his hand and squeeze it a little once you’re on your way back to his house, causing a fresh wave of heat to rise to his face, and god he's nervous right now. His mind is still screaming at him that you're going to hate him, that he has to prove his feelings to you. He lets out a small little laugh at the gesture.

“Well,” you start, tired from the night, but thriving off the energy between you, “that could have gone way worse…”

“Yeah,” he laughs, nodding in agreement. You talk for the whole drive back to his place. You’d planned on staying over tonight since Ricky was driving and you figured it would be late, plus your mom’s car is at the mechanic so she’s using yours until some time tomorrow. You exchange sleepy chuckles as he parks. He checks his phone one more time as you leave the car, opening an article of women submitting stories about how they knew a guy loved them in a new tab. He sees a text from his dad - the date went well, he hopes Ricky and you had a good time at homecoming, and he’s going to bed so try to keep the noise down when you get back.

“My dad’s asleep,” he says softly, unlocking the door. He guides you inside, hand resting low on your back, and closes the door quietly behind him. Walking quietly from his foyer to his room shouldn’t have been a problem, but standing in the darkness with Ricky, you both suddenly find it hard not to start giggling. Hushing each other, you quickly sneak up the stairs past Mr. Bowen’s room, down the hall to Ricky’s room. He barely closes the door and flicks the lock closed before dissolving into giggles. You kick off your heels, glad to finally take them off, and grab a makeup wipe from your bag. He digs through his clothes for a second before handing you a big t-shirt to sleep in.

“Thanks,” you say, throwing away the makeup wipes. He gazes at you, watching you transition from formal and made up to casual and comfortable, your beauty unwavering. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone as pretty as you before. You watch him take off his jacket and tie, and undo the first button or two of his shirt. The action sends butterflies to your stomach and heat to your core. You glance away. You stand up, seeing if you can reach the zipper of your dress. Before you can ask, you feel Ricky behind you.

“Need some help with that?” He asks, closer to your ear than you’d expected and resting his hands on your waist. You both chuckle.

“Yeah,” you state, voice low and soft. He moves slowly, unzipping the back of your dress, careful not to snag the delicate fabric. You feel the bodice loosen around you, the end of the zipper stopping at the small of your back. He doesn’t move away. You can feel his breath fan over your shoulder, hand still resting on your waist.

His face is so close to yours, and he mutters your name softly before pressing a kiss to your jawline, then another and another. He moves down, burying his face in your neck as he continues to press hot, open mouthed kisses against your skin. He breathes in your perfume, peachy and sweet and intoxicating. He nips at your neck causing you to gasp, his hands moving below the draping fabric and directly onto your warm skin. You sigh at the contact. He pulls you closer to him, holding you tight as he sucks on your neck. Your dress is slipping off your shoulders, barely on at all anymore, as he begins to feel you up, touching you and caressing you so tenderly.

“Ricky,” you sigh. Your voice sounds so pretty when you’re like this.

“God, I-” he breathes, barely catching the words before they’re out. He lets out a nervous laugh, causing you to giggle in his grasp. He shushes you through his own laughter, his hands never ceasing the way they rome over your body.

"We have to be quiet," he says, turning you around in his arms, pressing himself up against you, trying so, so hard not to kiss you yet.

"I can be quiet…" you state, a jokingly incredulous tone in your voice. You stare each other down, and he tries not to break first, tries not to smile or laugh, but god, it’s impossible not to smile when he looks at you. Before he can crack, before he loses all composure and bares his soul for you, places his heart eternally in your hands to do as you please with, he pivots.

"Yeah?" He asks, and you feel the energy change, growing electric between you. "Is that a challenge?"

His tone is dangerous and he watches your eyes get wide. A second later he has you pinned against his mattress, pressing playful nips and kisses against your skin as muffled giggles and sighs escape your pretty mouth. His hands move down, grabbing your exposed skin as he kisses you harder and harder, riling the both of you up. You tear off the little remaining clothes either of you has on and he begins to roll his hips against you, grinding his hot, throbbing member against your heat. You let out a breathy moan, louder than before, as he continues to rock his hips against yours.

“That wasn’t very quiet,” he murmurs into your ear between kisses to your cheek and jawline. Your chest vibrates against his, and a wave of relief washes through him. You don’t hate him. He loves that feeling he gets when he makes you laugh, he wants to make you do it again.

“I can stay quiet,” you insist, already swept away by his touch, distracted by the warm kisses and bites he’s planting on your neck and chest. You’re even more distracted by the feeling of his fingers making their way down, brushing against your clit as they come into contact with the arousal dripping down your folds. He smiles, realizing if he can get you this turned on, this touchy, you must like him. He pushes his fingers in, finally met again with the cathartic feeling of your cushy, bumpy walls squeezing and folding around him. Arousal gushes, dripping down his fingers as he begins to stimulate the tight, sensitive muscles stretching around his fingers. He dwells on the feeling for a moment, maybe two, before you’re moaning again. It makes him laugh.

“I sure hope you can,” he says, another dangerously playful look on his face, “cause if you get too loud…” He watches you for a split second, hanging on his words, anticipation written across your face, “I’m gonna stop.”

Your stomach flip flops, exploding with butterflies at his words. Before you can look at his face, before you can gauge how serious he is about following through on his threat, his lips are on yours again. He kisses you, mouth open, tongue already prodding into your mouth. You’re lucky, you think, that he’s unintentionally muffling your noises with his mouth. You’re really lucky, because he quickly finds your g-spot, and there are a couple moans you couldn’t hold back if your life depended on it.

Every sigh, every gasp, every beautiful heart pounding moan Ricky elicits from you sends a fresh wave of relief and reassurance through him. You don’t hate him, and you’re not going to. You could never when he’s this good, this devoted to you. It’s impossible for him not to be when you’re so good to him. You’re so responsive to his touch, you’re totally on the same wavelength.

You must know what he’s telling you through his actions, through the way he looks at you, the words he’s had to bite back from spilling out more than once. You wouldn’t be dripping down his fingers and moaning into his mouth and grabbing at him like this, you wouldn’t be in his bed if you didn’t feel the way he does about you - or even something close to it. He’ll happily take whatever you want to give him. Of course he wants it all, he wants to completely take over your heart, but just a little bit will keep him happy until he can.

“Right there,” you whine against his lips, “fuck, just like that… feels so good…” you mutter.

‘See?’ he thinks, ‘You don’t say stuff like that if you don’t like someone a lot, much less moan it…’

It’s working. His plan to not lose you is working, he just has to make you cum so hard you can’t think straight, as many times as possible. And he’s going to, because there’s no way he can risk losing you. So he brings up his thumb, rubbing it over your clit as he curls his fingers against your gummy walls. It’s euphoric and overwhelming, and you barely have time to tug his hair before you’re cumming and pulsing around his fingers.

You squeeze and clamp tight around him, and he can’t resist anymore. He needs his tongue inside you, he needs to taste you, feel you squeeze his tongue and cream into his mouth. So he pulls away, already missing the feeling of your mouths against each other, and gazes at you, breath fanning across your cheeks, eyes locked. He takes you in, thumb caressing your cheek while the other continues to fondle your clit. After a moment he’s able to break his gaze away, and he moves down, pushing your legs open. You heart thumps in your chest in anticipation as he begins to lick and suck on your heat, tongue flicking into your drippy hole.

As soon as he gets a taste, he wants more. He stretches out his tongue, going to town on your cunt. Every sigh and tug of his hair, every attempt to muffle your moans makes him more eager to have you gush your sweet sticky cum all over him. This time he has some experience, and he’s making the most of it. He finds those spots inside you that make your eyes roll back, switching between them, bumping his nose against your clit, drawing stifled moan after stifled moan from you. One slips out, for real this time, and he pauses. It takes all his willpower; your scent is intoxicating and your taste is addictive, but the look on your face when you realize he’s standing by what he said is totally worth it.

“I told you,” he murmurs against your core, the vibrations and tone of his voice sending electricity through you, “we have to be quiet…” Your hand is clamped over your mouth, and you nod. Your timing couldn’t be better, because you don’t have time to finish the gesture before he dives back in. After that, it doesn’t take much to send you over the edge.

You give him everything he’s wanted all night, squeezing and gushing all over him while he laps up everything, holding down your hips while he shoves his tongue deeper inside you. It’s always surprising how far inside you he’s able to get it. You whine and moan, choking out praise as he already begins building up another high. He’s throbbing, desperate for anything you’ll give him, and he wants to make you say more shit like that. He wants to be good for you.

“Oh god- fuck, Ricky!” you choke out in a whisper, one hand tangled in his hair, the other clamped over your mouth. You’re already close again, he can feel it. He knew this would work. He knew he could prove to you how much you mean to him. He doubles his efforts, squeezing your thighs and grinding his face against your pussy, still dripping from the last times he made you cum. His eyes are half lidded and locked on you, watching your face, the way you squirm below his touch, the way your tits bounce with every movement. You’re not sure how long it is until he has you absolutely gushing and convulsing around his tongue again, but every moment is filled with ecstasy.

“Fuck you’re good at that…” you murmur, hand now playing with his hair instead of pulling it. “You’re one of the good ones, huh?”

You probably could have knocked him out with a feather. Your words reverberate in his mind, and his cheeks flush. One of the good ones. Yeah.

He’s throbbing harder than before, almost painfully turned on. He climbs back up over you, but before he can reach into his nightstand for a condom, you flip him over, straddling him. You look down at him with those beautiful eyes that hold every star in the night sky, biting your lip in that endearing way of yours. Your hands are warm on his shoulders, and he’s stunned at the suddenness of your action, and really eager to see where you’re going with this. He could watch you like this for hours, freezing this moment in time forever, eternally content with you, the way you touch him and look at him. You lean down closer to him, breath tickling his cheeks.

“My turn.”

You smile, the words coming out in a hushed giggle. Before he can blink, you’re grabbing his rock hard cock, squeezing it in your hands and teasing the tip as you spread around the precum already dripping down the side. He watches you, eyes wide and excited as you open your mouth, wrapping your lips around him. Your mouth is velvety soft, warm and wet, and he has to try not to cum on the spot. You pump the base of his cock, taking more of him in your mouth, and he tries not to buck his hips. He tries so hard not to move at all, tries to be good for you while you work your magic on him. He lets out a long, low moan. Suddenly you freeze, popping your lips off with a small wet noise as you look up at him.

“Stay quiet or I stop…” you tease, throwing his own conditions back at him. He nods, panting at your words. “Good boy.” You murmur under your breath, but he definitely hears. Good boy. He can feel the oxytocin flooding his brain, and you barely get your lips around him and start bobbing your head before he feels it.

“I’m close,” he chokes out, and you look up at him. He watches a smirk appear at the corners of your eyes before you drag your tongue along the bottom of his cock. It’s more than enough, and he watches in utter awe as he shoots his load into your mouth, and you swallow all of it. The sight is enough to have him throbbing again. He bites back more moans, desperate for you to keep going, for you to call him a good boy again. You bob your head along his length, tongue dragging along the vein on the underside of his cock.

One hand comes down to fondle his balls, and a choked moan slips out. He never knew he could feel this good. He never knew one person could make him like this. You continue to lick and suck, squeeze and pump and rub, and soon he’s fighting another orgasm, hoping to bask in the feeling of your mouth around him for just a little longer. His prayers are in vain, he realizes, as he shoots another load of sticky, salty cum into your mouth. You have no trouble taking this one either. You continue to suck and lick, riding out the last of his high, before finally releasing him with a soft pop.

Thoroughly fucked out, he watches you climb up next to him, awestruck. You grab a blanket, pulling it over the both of you, and moving his face to press a few more kisses to his lips. Your tastes mingle as your tongues connect, and Ricky doesn’t think he’s ever tasted something that delicious. He wants more of it. It’s only when you eventually pull away that your eyes land on the clock behind him.

“Christ, it’s late,” you murmur. You blink heavily, Ricky mirroring the action, and you trace your thumb over his cheek, just looking at him a little longer. You tug the blanket up a little higher, snuggling up next to him. He holds you close on instinct, still trying to process everything that happened tonight in spite of how exhausted he is. It hits him suddenly, and he struggles to stay awake so he can appreciate the kiss you press to his jaw, the warm feeling of your hand on his chest.

He tries so hard to stay awake, to look at you for a little while, because no amount of time with you feels like enough. He refuses to acknowledge the heavy way he blinks and squeezes his eyes, trying to force them to focus on you, but he can feel himself losing the fight against the deep sleep he’s about to slip into. This night was a success, he thinks. He did a good job.

Late morning sunlight streams through his window, finally dragging Ricky back into the waking world. He looks over, missing your presence, and finds his bed empty. As he rolls over, he’s struck by the sweet, intoxicating scent of your peachy perfume. It’s all over his pillow, his sheets, his blankets. His whole room smells faintly of your scent. He buries his nose in the pillow where you’d slept, breathing it in, taking him right back to last night.

Eventually, he checks his phone. It’s later than he’d expected, but he’s greeted with a text from you, bringing an immediate, even bigger smile to his face.

He sighs, lovestruck. He doesn’t want to get out of bed, doesn’t want the scent of your perfume to fade. He just wants to bask in it.

#ricky bowen smut #hsmtmts ricky #ricky bowen x reader #ricky bowen imagine #ricky hsmtmts #ricky bowen #hsmtmts imagine #hsmtmts smut #hsmtmts #rocks at your window #also your moms pfp is lorelai gilmore cause shes cool not bc its a face claim or smth #yk

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gothicprep · 4 months

Note

even better, re: the cut: the ‘I think my husband is trashing my novel on goodreads’ article is the first of a NEW advice column by the same author of the disastrous ‘lure of divorce’ personal essay from last week.

lol i was debating talking about emily gould when that essay came out, but i figured "nobody cares about your weird interest in gawker media lore" and decided against it. but i'm going to interpret this as permission to just go crazy on main.

context for readers who don't know: emily gould, on valentine's day, published an essay that's ostensively about divorce, but it's actually about a lot of other things. not even *a* divorce, because she decides against getting divorced at the end of the essay. i wouldn't bet on anything that comes after the end of this essay, but that's a separate question.

it's probably important to establish who emily gould is for what i'm about to say to make any sense: she was a media darling in her 20s. she was one of the first people to get Very Famous from blogging, an editor at gawker, and probably the best known writer there during the mid to late 2000s. very american apparel indie hipster sleeze era personality. could probably be described as a "literary sex symbol" insofar as the literary world has those things.

there were two things that she was famous for in this era. one of them was this post she put on gawker about how she had broken up with her boyfriend and it was a massive success. if you comb through old archives, people were talking about this like it was the brangelina split. i want to say this was a dam breaking moment for a particular kind of personal branding/internet personality that involved revealing things about your personal life, which eventually took over more broadly and gave rise to the culture we have now online. the other thing was this very unfortunate appearance she had on larry king live or something after she'd been taken to task for the "gawker stalker" feature on gawker, where people would send in tips about celebrity sightings around the city. someone sent in a tip about jimmy kimmel being drunk and obnoxious in a bar, and because kimmel is the world's biggest baby, he flipped out and went on this whole tirade about how it was a threat to his safety. in reality, he was just mad that someone saw him drunk in public and said something about it. kimmel and a few other guys confronted her about this on larry king. she looked like a deer in headlights and either wasn't prepared/hadn't been prepared for what was coming. like kimmel told her she was going to hell on live television. mess. there was also some really public drama she had with lena dunham but i don't really remember the details.

she never really disappeared between then and now. she's been writing for the cut for a while, which i guess you could say is her aging into a different kind of women's journalism. she's published a few books, but she hasn't really found her footing since her breakout success in her 20s didn't turn her into the established writer she probably hoped she would be. there was a time where it seemed like she was positioned to be this generation's joan didion, but that didn't end up happening.

so that brings us up to this essay, which was preceded by the last little bit of gossip that i need to get out of the way, even though she mentions it in the essay. in her personal newsletter, she made a crowdfunding request for money to "taking an infinite hiatus from hetero marriage and monogamy. they are a trap for women, full stop. sometimes a trap can be cozy. mine was, until it wasn’t." she does mention she's having a manic episode. she's upfront about the fact that something is going on with her.

anybody who's at all familiar with gould and her financial challenges must question the wisdom of giving money to this, but she presents it very much in the spirit of "men are pigs. men are trash. divorce that man now." and as we learn later, gets money from lyz lenz, who has a book out that's basically the feminist case for divorce and being a single mom.

so gould is not just neck deep in this divorce literature, but producing it to some extent. maybe a crowdfunding request isn't truly a literary form, but it's written in a persuasive way that fits with other writing in the liberate yourself through divorce canon. but the valentine's day essay, while i don't think it's great, i do think it's interesting how it breaks from form. it's not an anti-man personal essay, and these always are. so it was nice to read something a bit different. well, maybe not different, but retro.

i've never been a fan of gould's work, but it did get me wondering "what itch are people trying to scratch when they read essays like this?" because it's like the reader wants them to be an explicitly moral fable, but they want it to be racy and spicy. like one of those mid century pulp novels with a painting of a woman on the cover looking kind of slatternly with a lot of makeup on. it'd be called something like "wild trash" and the subtitle would be "she couldn't wait for her divorce". it's smut about a woman who's sinning gratuitously and flouting society's expectations. and usually with these books, there'd be some kind of cosmic comeuppance for her where she'd get syphilis and die in a pauper's prison or whatever.

and i think people come to stories like this because they want to read something like that. you're gonna read about a woman who was debauched and all the naughty behavior in graphic, titillating detail. and at the end, you get served up a nice, neat conclusion. her husband divorces her and finds love with a kindergarten teacher from iowa. so it flouts the "rah rah divorce him" essay and the pulpy personal essay that some people want. if you're going to write a 3,000 word apology, at the very least, it is a novel take on it.

but i think what the problem is with an essay like this is that it's very... dated in its style. the expected thing with personal essays in the 2020s, the thesis of them usually boils down to something about what a great person the essayist is. most of them do this. that's why you get privilege disclaimers in them – the point of the essay is how the essayist is sensitive and kind and wonderful. even when there are flaws, they're overcome, or something systemic lead this to happen. a flawed woman is because patriarchy made her thus.

to give a better example of the kind of thing i'm talking about, you'll see an essay in the atlantic or new york times magazine and it follows the same formula. Woman Has Personal Life Grievance. Step Back. Here's Why This Is A Big Issue In Society, Bolstered With Statistics. Here's Why If This Woman Was Black Or Poor Or Gay Or Trans, It Would Be Even Worse. Back To The Personal Anecdote... you know what i mean? it's a very well established formula, but you can't have that with "also i'm a dirtbag". once you're talking about society and societal issues of which you're just a little representative – because those are the stakes. it has to be universal – you can't just be talking about yourself.

and then there's this question of personal writing more generally. you aren't a fictional character, you're yourself. and whether you want it to be or not, every personal essay is going to function like a cover letter. it's presenting you to the world. and i don't like these, but i don't want gould's style of personal essay to come back either. it straight up ruined a lot of women's lives who wanted to get their foot in the door in media, got $75 from xojane to write something lurid about their personal lives... and their career never took off. so now this is just on the internet forever.

this old piece in slate sheds a light on just how exploitative that whole thing was.

"don't make life decisions based on emily gould's writing" is useful advice for more reasons than one.

#gossipprep #this is my edrama tag now i guess

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diorkyeom · 7 months

Text

‘✷’ : CHAPTER TEN “yoon jeonghan always knows”

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chapter word count: 4.7k+

chapter warnings: none

summary: "lately, seokmin had come to a realisation. joshua hong, seokmin thought, was a little bit of an enigma." - in which seokmin has known joshua for years, but he's always been a bit of a mystery to him. and as the days go by, he finds himself falling further and further for the enigmatic man, wanting to find out who the real Joshua Hong is behind his polite smiles and warm eyes and sweet words.

notes: teehee i love this chapter actually

Lately, Seokmin had come to a realisation.

He might, Seokmin thought, be a little bit in love with Joshua Hong.

The moment he dramatically flung open the door to the literature office, Hayoung jumped in her seat before tilting her head curiously as Seokmin, without so much as saying a word, flounced across the office before collapsing at his desk, head buried in his arms.

She looked over at him for a moment, and blinked rapidly as a drawn-out groan came from under his arms. But then, ultimately deciding that it was just Seokmin’s everyday dramatics, she shrugged and turned back to the essays she was grading.

Seokmin, on the other hand, was currently in the middle of the biggest crisis of his entire existence.

He was still reeling from his realisation yesterday—he was in love with Joshua? How on Earth had that happened?—and he’d ignored the entire school for the whole morning, barely even able to focus on his lessons, too preoccupied with going all over his encounters with Joshua, trying to find how exactly he’d even managed to fall in love.

Seokmin was replaying one particular moment exactly three months and two days ago where he’d seen Joshua waving at him from a passing bus window, when Yuna and Minjun walked in, having finally gotten off their last lesson and prepared to have their lunch break, and both teachers looked down confusedly at Seokmin's devastated state.

"What's up with him?" Minjun asked, pointing in Seokmin's direction as he set his things down on his desk.

“He’s having his monthly breakdown,” Hayoung answered, while Seokmin whined into his hands incoherently. She leaned over to pat the top of his head, smoothing down the hair at the back of his neck. “Our department’s baby is having a bad day, I think.”

Seokmin whined again, lifting his head up to rest his chin on his arm. “Guys, what would you do if you found out you’ve been in love with someone for ages?”

“In love?” Yuna repeated as she leaned against Seokmin’s desk, reaching over and poking his cheek. “Who are you in love with?”

Seokmin squirmed a little, partly to get away from Yuna’s affectionate pokes and partly out of embarrassment, lips twisting shyly. “You know that new teacher in the music department? The one that came after those guys left to start their own company?”

Minjun gasped loudly. “Joshua-ssi?” His hand came down on the back of Seokmin’s seat, presumably to pull him away from the desk and finally lift his head up, but he missed and ended up slapping the teacher on the back instead, making Seokmin wheeze and cough. “Sorry, sorry. Are you talking about Joshua-ssi?”

“Oh, Mr. Hong?” Hayoung asked, wheeling her chair closer to Seokmin’s desk. They were all gathered around him now, like overbearing mothers listening to their child’s latest drama. “I thought you were already dating him.”

Seokmin, having only just stopped coughing at Minjun’s sudden attack, choked and started spluttering yet again. “Wh—what?” He waved away Yuna’s hands, and then sat up and looked at Minjun, who was smiling sheepishly. “Did you think that too?”

Minjun shrugged. “We all thought you were already dating,” he said. “Are you not?”

Seokmin’s eyes dissolved into something so devastated, as if Minjun’s question had made him unbearably sad, and he looked like he was going to cry. Eyes glistening, he shook his head sorrowfully.

“We’re not. I’m just hopelessly in love with him,” he whined, “and there’s no way he could love me back.”

Minjun’s eyes widened in utter surprise and he opened his mouth to say something when there came a knock at the door, and they all looked up as a student poked her head into the room, smiling a little awkwardly.

“Uh, hello,” she said. “Mr. Lee asked me to come by at lunch to collect my essay? I wasn’t in the lesson when he handed them out…”

Instantly, the rest of the literature teachers dispersed and went back to their own desks, attempting to look absorbed in their own work. Seokmin shook his head at their antics before beckoning in the student.

“Yes, Heejin, come in,” he said, plastering a bright look on his face. “You had a music exam that day, didn’t you? How did that go?”

Heejin blinked, surprised, before nodding with a smile. “It went well!”

Seokmin smiled again, rifling through the papers on his desk before finding her essay, handing it back to her. “That’s good to hear. Overall, you did quite well, especially with your introduction, but make sure that your line of argument is clear.” He pointed at the comments that he’d made, and Heejin bobbed her head dutifully in thanks.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling, clutching her paper. “Also, sir, by any chance, are you coming to the school’s music concert in a few weeks’ time?”

“Concert?” Seokmin repeated, having to bite the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from screaming out that he’ll probably be too busy having an existential crisis to come. He was still at work, after all. “Hmm, perhaps. I didn’t even know we were having one.”

She smiled, rocking back and forth on her feet. “It’s the Autumn Concert! We have it every year. I—I thought you might already know, since Mr. Hong is leading the senior’s choir this year. Sir,” she added, eyes shifting around the office. “You know, since you and Mr. Hong are… um, very good friends.”

Minjun, attempting to read ‘Macbeth’ upside down, muffled a snort behind the pages.

Seokmin gnawed the inside of his cheek once again, and smiled. “I’ll have to check my schedule to see if I’m busy,” he said, “but I might come! You’re going to be in it, aren’t you?” When the student nodded, he just smiled wider. “In which case, I’ll think about coming, for sure.”

Heejin giggled, smiling, before bowing in thanks and backing out of the office, the door swinging shut behind her. The moment she was gone, Seokmin whirled around to Minjun, shaking his head exasperatedly.

“Why did you start laughing while she was talking?”

Minjun turned around in his seat, eyes glittering in a way that curiously reminded Seokmin of the devious look that Jeonghan sometimes had while he knew something that someone else didn’t. Instead of answering, however, he just grinned, and before Seokmin could get the chance to whine and pester him further, there was a knock on the door and a head peered into the office once again.

“Hello,” Joshua said, ducking his head in greeting, eyes scanning the room before they landed on Seokmin, and his expression softened almost instantly. “I’m here for Seokmin.”

Seokmin barely managed to stop his thoughts from melting into a puddle of incoherent goo, smiling back at the music teacher. He had no explanation for the way his heart skipped a beat at the mere sound of Joshua’s voice.

(Actually, he did.)

(It was because it was Joshua, and Seokmin was deeply, deeply in love with him.)

As it was, Seokmin let out a little squeak at Joshua’s words, which prompted a round of silent giggling across the office. “Let me just get my stuff,” he said, ignoring his colleagues as he stood up and grabbed his phone. He smiled at Joshua. “You can wait in here, Shua hyung. These guys won’t mind.”

Joshua smiled, shook his head, and just opened the door wider for Seokmin. “It’s okay. You might want to put on your coat, though,” he said. “It’s a bit cold outside.”

“Oh, right.” Seokmin grabbed his coat from the back of his chair, tugging it on. “Be good,” he warned his colleagues, wagging a finger threateningly at them, but judging from the way Yuna just grinned and Hayoung hummed and Minjun didn’t even look up from his upside down ‘Macbeth’, none of them were really taking his threat seriously.

That was whatever, though. Seokmin was used to his department’s antics. He hopped through the door that Joshua was holding open for him, and then interlinked his arm with the elder’s as they walked down the corridor.

“You said you wanted to go to that sandwich shop for lunch today, right?” Seokmin said. “What stuff do they have?”

“Sandwiches,” Joshua said, and then laughed as Seokmin nudged him in the side. “You’ll see when we get there. I think you’ll really like what they have.”

“Really?” Seokmin said, teasingly. “What if I decide I’m gonna hate them just to prove you wrong?”

“You wouldn’t. Plus, I have faith that you’re really going to love these sandwiches,” Joshua said, smiling, all warm and lovely and Seokmin kind of wanted to melt at how pretty Joshua was.

Then Joshua tightened his arm in his, pulling him closer to his side as they exited the school, asking how Seokmin’s morning had been in that sweet, rose gold voice, gentle and genuine and Seokmin was reminded once again of how his heart resided not in his own chest, but well and truly cradled in Joshua’s hands.

───────────── ‘✷,

“—think that Seungcheol hyung is just so, so Zeus-like?” Seokmin said, eyes wide in earnestness even while Joshua laughed into his sandwich across from him. “Hey, stop laughing! Don’t you think so?”

Joshua had to take a few breaths to gather himself, shaking his head, eyes still bright with mirth. Seokmin found himself beaming too, his lips responding to the sounds of Joshua’s own happiness.

“I’m so serious,” he insisted. “Doesn’t he give off the vibes of the most himbo jock in the world?”

That had Joshua bursting into laughter once more, head thrown back, and they were getting a couple of weird stares from the other customers within this sandwich shop, but Seokmin didn’t even care, his face feeling like it was going to split into two any second, utterly delighted at the laughter he’d managed to elicit from Joshua.

“You need to stop saying it like that,” Joshua said, still laughing. He set down his sandwich, dabbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Oh, god. Wow, I don’t think I’ve laughed that much in ages.” He looked up at Seokmin again, and his irises seemed to fill with bright light as his eyes crinkled once more, cracking up. “And what makes it even better is that you’re right.”

Seokmin laughed too, bright and loud and bursting and they were definitely getting more than a couple of weird stares now. “Right? You see it too, right?”

Joshua shook his head, shoulders shuddering in laughter. “I do, I do.”

It took a long while, but eventually they calmed down, enough for Joshua to finally properly wipe his eyes and pick up his sandwich again, asking Seokmin about his Greek God allocations for the rest of their friends. Seokmin immediately lit up again, running off on a tangent in between sips of his soda, and Joshua watched him, smiling and humming at his decisions.

They’d been at it for a good half an hour now, spending most of their time talking rather than eating the food that they’d come to eat during their lunch break. It was how, usually, their lunch breaks went, and Seokmin delighted in those kinds of moments, where he and Joshua were in this little bubble, away from the rest of the world, talking and laughing like they had all the time in the entire universe.

And it was kind of nice to see how those moments didn’t change, even though Seokmin had been wracked with the realisation that he was in love with Joshua.

“—in love,” Seokmin blurted out, and then blinked rapidly, his brain finally zoning back in to what his mouth was saying. “Wait, what was I saying?”

Joshua was smiling, and his eyes were an array of colours, bright and swirling and when he laughed, Seokmin could only describe the sound as fond. “You were talking about how Eros and Psyche couldn’t have been truly in love.”

“Oh!” Seokmin beamed, nodding. “Right. So, because Eros pricked himself on his arrows when he first saw Psyche, it can’t have been real love.”

Joshua hummed, tilting his head. “But his arrows are the manifestation of genuine love, aren’t they?”

“No one can fall in love that quickly and decide to risk godly wrath to make sure she’s forever safe from harm,” Seokmin said. “Especially at first sight.”

That made Joshua smile, resting his chin on his hand. “I think you’re underestimating the strength of love at first sight.”

Seokmin shook his head. “Nah. Would you be willing to purposefully defy your divinely powerful mother for a pretty human you just met?”

Joshua’s eyes sparkled, gazing unfalteringly into Seokmin’s own. “Of course.”

A beat.

“Oh,” Seokmin said, softly. And then he beamed. “That’s so lovely, hyung! See, you’re totally proving how you’re exactly like a god of love.” He clasped his hands together, still grinning. “Whoever you fall in love with is gonna be so lucky to be loved by you.”

Joshua chuckled, looking down at his empty plate. “I just hope that they’ll love me back too.” He looked up at Seokmin again, taking a sip of his water. “So how is your end-of-semester marking going?”

At the mention of the pile of papers on his desk that he had yet to tackle, Seokmin groaned and Joshua laughed.

“Don’t even mention them,” Seokmin said despairingly. “Every semester I promise myself I’ll get more organised, and then I don’t.”

“Maybe you should promise yourself this semester, too.”

“But it just doesn’t work!”

Joshua laughed again, leaning across the table to pat Seokmin’s hand placatingly even while the literature teacher continued to lament his mountain of work. The conversation continued on like that, their comfortable back-and-forth going on until they had to leave and go back to work.

Seokmin liked it. Liked how Joshua was unwaveringly sweet, and other than the fact that his heartbeat sounded far too loud in his own ears, Seokmin was grateful for how nothing else seemed to change. It was hard, he found, to be different about Joshua. To be more awkward, or to be more withdrawn. It was hard, because Joshua’s eyes would light up gold in tandem with Seokmin’s and the smile on his lips was always devastatingly genuine, prompting Seokmin to be nothing but himself in return.

They walked back to the school, and Joshua took Seokmin’s hand in his own, wordlessly warming up Seokmin’s frozen fingers as they continued to talk about anything and everything. It made Seokmin smile, leaning further into Joshua’s side, chest swelling with something so light and sparkling gold.

───────────── ‘✷,

Seokmin's phone started ringing the moment he reached home that evening.

“Hi, Jeonghan hyung!” he chirped as he unlocked the door, stepping inside. Soonyoung looked up from where he was standing in the middle of the hallway, confused.

“I’m not Jeonghan hyung.”

Seokmin waved away his roommate as Jeonghan chuckled amusedly over the phone.

“Hello. How does it feel to realise you’re in love with Joshua?”

Seokmin’s eyes widened, and the house keys slipped from his hands and clattered onto the floor. Soonyoung yelped, darting forward in concern.

“How did you know?” Seokmin asked, giving Soonyoung the ‘ok’ sign to show he was fine. Of all the things he'd anticipated from Jeonghan’s random phone call, this had been nowhere on that list.

Slowly, he bent down to pick up his keys, mind racing. He gasped. “Does Shua hyung know?”

It was the only explanation. Seokmin hadn’t told anyone, apart from his co-workers, but none of them knew Jeonghan. Maybe… Maybe Seokmin had been more obvious with his feelings than he’d thought. And now Joshua knew, and he’d told Jeonghan so they could laugh at him together and oh God now everything was utterly—

Jeonghan laughed, louder this time. “Oh, no, no. Joshuji has no idea. He’s smart, but with stuff like this, he’s rather oblivious.”

Seokmin breathed out a sigh of relief. So no, Jeonghan wasn’t calling to laugh at him and tell him that Joshua hated him now. “I see.”

“Rest assured, lover boy, your secret is safe with me.”

Shaking his head, Seokmin took off his shoes, holding the phone to his cheek with his shoulder. “How did you even find out I was in love with Shua hyung?”

Soonyoung, still watching Seokmin concernedly, gasped so loudly and so suddenly that he made himself choke. “What the fuck?” he rasped, coughing. “You—”

“Yoon Jeonghan always knows,” was all Jeonghan said. “Everything. I always know everything.”

There was silence, then, that would have felt ominous if Soonyoung wasn't still choking on his own spit and Seokmin was busy wondering what else Jeonghan could possibly know.

“Anyway,” Jeonghan carried on. “You did realise that you’ve been in love with him for ages, right?”

“Of course I did,” Seokmin huffed. He pushed past Soonyoung, who was still spluttering in disbelief and flopped down onto the couch, whining. “Hyung is so pretty. So lovely. I’m in love with him.”

Jeonghan chuckled. “I know.”

“Alright, that’s enough,” Soonyoung said, having finally managed to remember how to form words again. He marched up to Seokmin, took his phone out of his hands and put it on speakerphone, ignoring Seokmin’s indignant cries. “Jeonghan hyung. Did Seokmin really tell you this before me? His bestest friend in the entire universe?”

“He didn’t really tell me,” Jeonghan said. “I just figured it out.”

“When?”

Jeonghan hummed thoughtfully. “A few days ago?”

Soonyoung screeched, and Seokmin managed to successfully snatch his phone back. “Seokmin. You fell in love with Joshua hyung a few days ago and didn’t tell me?”

“Um.” Seokmin blinked unsurely, at a loss as to why Soonyoung looked so distressed. “Technically, I fell in love a while ago but I only realised a few days ago?” he said. Soonyoung didn't look pleased by the technicality, so he coughed and elaborated. “But, uh, I was going to tell you?”

A beat. Even Jeonghan was silent, and Seokmin’s eyes darted around nervously, wondering if he would have to make a run for it. He still wasn’t good at avoiding Soonyoung’s grabby hands, but it was getting better. A bit. He could almost succeed if he really wanted to.

Before he could make that decision to bolt, however, Soonyoung’s face split into a grin and he pumped his fists in the air.

“Holy shit, yes! Seokmin, if you’d been one year early, then Seungkwan would’ve won the bet!” He grabbed Seokmin’s face and smacked a dramatic kiss onto the top of his head. “Thank you so much, my guy. I gotta call Seungkwan and tell him to give me all his money.”

With that, Soonyoung disappeared into his room, and Seokmin blinked.

“Weird,” Jeonghan said from where he was still on speaker, echoing Seokmin’s own sentiment. “Guess they made a bet on you, huh?”

Seokmin just shook his head. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Me neither, to be honest.” Jeonghan chuckled softly, and the sound was affectionate and teasing, in the way that only Jeonghan could be. “And I’m just glad that I didn’t have to intervene.”

“Intervene?” Seokmin repeated. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Jeonghan said, in a tone that made it sound like it definitely was not nothing. “Anyways, now you only have one more thing to realise! And then you can confess!”

Seokmin blinked rapidly, mouth falling open. “You want me to do what?”

“Confess.”

“N—Now?” Seokmin said, panicked. “Hyung, I can’t do that! You’re crazy if you think I can!”

Jeonghan laughed, bright and affectionate. “You don’t have to confess now, silly,” he said. “Not yet, at least.”

Seokmin gnawed his bottom lip worriedly. “Why is there a ‘yet’?”

“Just realise the other thing you need to realise first,” Jeonghan said, and Seokmin scrunched his nose, mystified. Like that wasn’t a confusing sentence.

“Why can't you just tell it to me?” he whined. “That'd be much easier than me finding out myself. You said you always know everything.”

Jeonghan chuckled. “I do. That's why I also know this is something you gotta realise for yourself.” There was the sound of the door opening on his end of the line, and a faint voice calling his name. “Oh, Joshuji’s back home now. I’ll talk to you later, Seokmin, okay?”

And with that, Jeonghan hung up, leaving Seokmin incredibly confused. Did Jeonghan call him solely to let him know that he knew that he was in love with Joshua? What purpose had their conversation even had?

From Soonyoung’s room came a loud cry.

“Seungkwan! I won the bet! Give me the money you owe me!”

───────────── ‘✷,

After that, though, Seokmin’s days passed normally.

He still had far too many essays to mark and not enough time, but at least the rest of the literature department was lagging behind too. None of them could laugh at each other for their lack of progress, because they were all in the same boat.

Seokmin asked Joshua about their Autumn Concert and received the confirmation that it was indeed happening and Joshua was indeed taking part. He then promised the elder that he would come to support him, and Joshua had laughed, saying it wasn’t necessary, but he’d insisted.

They met up with each other at night, though less frequently now that the two of them were busy with work, and sometimes, Joshua would bring his guitar and they’d sing together, rosy pink and cerulean blue voices blending together beautifully in the cold night air.

And throughout it all, Seokmin was still definitely in love with Joshua.

“Hello,” Seokmin said next to Joshua’s ear, and beamed as the music teacher looked up and immediately softened, lips crinkling into a smile. “I hope it’s not too much trouble if I sit here and watch rehearsals.”

There was about a week before the concert night, and the children were doing a full rehearsal in the auditorium where they’d be performing in seven days’ time. The chairs for the audience had already been set up, and Joshua was sitting in the back of them, watching the students perform and waiting for his turn.

“It’s no trouble at all,” Joshua said, smiling as Seokmin sat down next to him, in the seat closest to the walkway that ran down the middle. “You don’t need to stay, though. It’ll probably be a while before I finish.”

“I want to,” Seokmin said simply, putting his coat over his knees. “I wanna watch.”

Joshua smiled even wider, eyes creasing in happiness. “Okay.”

And so the two of them sat back and watched as the various choirs and music groups continued on with their rehearsals.

Seokmin didn’t really know much about music. The most he knew about music terminology and stuff was from whenever Jihoon became drunk enough to ramble to them all about his compositions, or from back when he was teaching himself how to play the guitar.

But it was fascinating to watch Joshua as the elder intently observed the rehearsal, watching the way he nodded in agreement with what the other teachers were advising, watching him furrow his brow and tilt his head slightly when he heard something a little off in the choir’s pitch or the wind quintet’s rhythm.

The colour of his expression changed minutely as he listened, and Seokmin was surprised to find himself able to see it, see the way the colours rippled and blended together depending on what Joshua was thinking. It was kind of amazing to see how well Seokmin had now gotten to know Joshua, someone who he'd originally thought to be hopelessly elusive. It was amazing how Seokmin could now read Joshua's masks so well.

Or maybe it wasn't a mask.

Maybe.

Seokmin didn't really know.

But he did know that it was utterly mesmerising, and Joshua looked so beautiful while he listened. This was Joshua doing what he loved best, Joshua in his element, and Seokmin found it so fascinating to watch.

“Oh, it’s my turn now,” Joshua said as the orchestra finished and began packing away their things. “The senior choir is after the symphony orchestra.”

“Ooh, fun!” Seokmin grinned. “Is this going to be the concert order too?”

Joshua nodded, standing up. Seokmin stood up too, and backed into the walkway so that Joshua could walk past him. Before he could shuffle backwards more than three steps, however, Joshua shot out a hand and grabbed his wrist, pulling him back into the seats and into his chest.

Seokmin let out a small yelp, a blush rising up his cheeks at the sudden proximity, and with his heart suddenly pounding unsettlingly loud, it took him a moment to register what had just happened.

Behind him, several of the orchestra students wheeled their large instruments out of the auditorium down the walkway, where Seokmin had been standing just seconds ago.

Joshua released his wrist once they'd filed past, and his own cheeks were dusted a light pink as he stepped back.

“Sorry,” he said, and there was something flusteredly warm in his voice. “I was worried you were going to get run over by the harp.”

He didn't look at Seokmin, gaze sliding across the auditorium instead, and Seokmin tried to mentally get rid of his own blush.

“It's okay,” he replied, and brushed at his alarmingly warm cheeks with a shaky finger, before trying to collect himself and giving a big grin. “Thanks for saving my life. Hey, you do that a lot, don't you? Like, you save me from being murdered by my roommates when we first met, and now you save me from being murdered by a harp.”

That brought Joshua's gaze back to him, and he laughed, bright and beautiful and, even to Seokmin, devastatingly and undeniably fond.

“Guess I'm destined to always come in and save your life, huh?” Joshua said, smiling.

Seokmin laughed, stepping back into the now empty walkway so that Joshua could get past. “I guess you are,” he said, a little wistfully, as Joshua gave him a small wave and walked to the front of the auditorium. “I guess you are.”

He sat down again, watching as Joshua hovered around the stage as the choir students filed in, smiling and greeting them and directing them to where they were to stand. Occasionally, he’d look to the back of the auditorium to catch Seokmin’s eye, and his expression would positively melt before he turned back to his students again. It made Seokmin feel oddly giddy, like he was watching his boyfriend from all the way at the back of a hall only for them to still somehow always find each other amongst all the other people.

Seokmin froze.

Joshua turned to look back at him again, lips curling into one last smile before he fully turned towards the choir, opening his music score and talking over the songs with them.

At the back of the auditorium, however, Seokmin had bluescreened, his mind promptly shutting down at Joshua’s smile, brain whirring, almost subconsciously finding himself going through every encounter he’d ever had with Joshua, mentally replaying every laugh and every smile and every softly spoken word.

He thought of Joshua’s endless patience, his softness, the way the colours in his smile changed and flickered with every blink before eventually, when it was just the two of them, it melted into gentle gold. He thought of Joshua accepting those flowers months ago, of silently communicating with Joshua over plates of spaghetti, of their very first meeting where Joshua had allowed Seokmin to see him at his most vulnerable and his most real.

The memories came faster and faster now, blurring together, slowly creating a picture that Seokmin hadn’t noticed before.

Joshua listening to him sing. Joshua playing the guitar for him. Joshua finding him on whatever street he’d found himself sitting in during the middle of the night and spending hours by his side.

“I’ll be your Aphrodite.”

Seokmin gasped.

With almost uncanny timing, his phone buzzed with a text from Jeonghan, asking him about Joshua’s whereabouts and whether he knew when he’d be finishing work.

He ignored Jeonghan’s text, however, and slowly typed out a message of his own.

…is shua hyung in love with me?

The three dots appeared next to Jeonghan’s icon, and then disappeared. A moment later, Jeonghan replied, and Seokmin let out a small laugh.

now you’re getting it ^^

Setting down his phone, Seokmin looked up again, gazing at the back of Joshua’s head as the elder conducted the choir, the gentle harmonies of the piece ringing around the auditorium. He laughed softly again, wondering how on Earth he hadn’t realised before.

Joshua was in love with him too.

taglist (send ask to be added): @fairyhaos @atinytinaa @my-moarmy-heart @weird-life-of-a-closet-fangirl @lilsafsafbooyah @stqrrgirle @bittersweet-folder @weird-bookworm @ultrara-re @tianakings @bangantokchy @tiinkerbell @ahuiahoe @leigh-darling

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samasmith23 · 8 months

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One of my favorite Spider-Man: Clone Saga stories has always been the 4-part "The Exile Returns" arc, which not only features Ben Reilly's debut as the Scarlet Spider, but also Benjy's first major victory as a superhero since returning to New York after 5-years when he singlehandedly defeats Venom in mortal combat. What made the fight between Ben and Venom so epic was that the story was actually a response to a previous story in Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #375, which had Peter Parker make a deal with Venom to stay out of each other's way. The reason that was done was because Marvel wanted to turn Venom into an anti-hero during the 90s, but a lot of fans and creators were really pissed off about that story, since they felt that Peter making a pact with Venom betrayed the character's sense of responsibility. And this frustration was openly expressed in The Exile Returns, with Ben Reilly being incredibly shocked that Peter would have done such a thing, basically declaring to himself, "If Peter's not going to accept responsibility and bring Venom to justice, I'll have to step in and do it myself!"

Spider-Man group editor Glenn Greenberg even commented on the writers of The Exile Returns deliberately referencing ASM #375 in the 36-part online essay, "The Life of Reilly," which extensively covers all the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding The Clone Saga:

And the way Ben defeats Venom is so clever and inventive! Instead of relying upon the symbiote's usual weaknesses of loud noises and extreme heat, Ben utilizes his own original inventions as the Scarlet Spider. Ben shooting multiple "impact-webbing" pellets down Venom's mouth which immediately expand into hundreds of little webs that get caught directly in-between Eddie Brock and the symbiote, weakening their bond as Ben then shoots his "stinger" web darts to further weaken Venom as he beats him into submission.

Seeing Ben Reilly singlehandedly take down the one supervillain that Peter Parker was never able to truly defeat up until that point was honestly one of the most badass and entertaining fight scenes that I've ever read in a superhero comic!

And its honestly shocking that neither impact-webbing nor stingers stuck around in the comics after The Clone Saga ended (only appearing in the video game adaptations), since those things are so FREAKING awesome!

From adjectiveless Spider-Man (1990) #53 by Howard Mackie & the late Tom Lyle (May he Rest In Peace...).

#spiderman #scarlet spider #ben reilly #kaine parker #peter parker #venom #eddie brock #venom symbiote #clone saga #the exile returns #howard mackie #tom lyle #marvel comics #glenn greenberg #the life of reilly #90s comics

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brunchable · 2 years

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2319 Chapter 7 - Clap of Thunder || Young!S.S x F!Reader

Word Count: 8.5K Genre: Young Love, Diary Entry, Flashbacks. A/N: Inspired by the Korean Drama 2521. I used another Kdrama scene for this chapter mehehe. Thank you for being patient guys. *I do not own the gif used*

You: Are you awake? Alex: No, I'm Alex. Who's this? You: Ha-ha, very funny. It's (Y/N). Alex: Oh I thought you're another booty call. What's up? You: A booty call? Alex: y'know, late night summon? Alex: nevermind. You: oh. . . Can I ask you a question? Alex: As long as you promise never again to start a question off with whether or not you can propose a question. You: Whoa okay then a-hole. Anyway, what did you say to my parents?

You stare at your phone for a bit, he was taking a bit longer to reply this time.

Alex: Told them you worked overtime. You: That’s it? They believed you? Alex: What do you want me to say? You got caught through a cosmic rift, and was pulled into another world? You: The shop closes everytime I finish my shift. . . Alex: Hence why I said I dropped you off the library to work on some essay after waiting for you. You: Oh. Alex: Oh. You: Thank you. Alex: You're welcome. I guess we're even now? I don't need to buy you dinner? You: Well… if you still want to you could? Alex: Gold-digger. You: Excuse me? That's rude :-\ You: It's Food-digger, get it right. Alex: xD Alex: Does that make me your Food Daddy? ;P You: srsly, you need help. Stop flirting with me.

You crack into a laugh and roll over to your side facing away from the window.

Alex: omg the audacity. where do you get it from? Alex: stop flirting back, geeze. let me sleep. You: alright, alright! Good night. Alex: So you admit you were just flirting? ;-] You: YOU WISH. BYE. Alex: hahaha ttyl. nyt nyt.

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

July 20 1999

“Dad, come on! I already agreed that I will continue training. Can you at least allow me to go on another camping trip? You saw the news about the Perseid meteor shower, it doesn’t occur every thirty-three years. I want to see it.” You chased Arthur around the kitchen while he made himself coffee and did what he was good at; ignoring you.

“Ask your mom.” Arthur glanced at Vanessa who was setting the table up for breakfast and shrugged. You then turned your attention back to your mom.

“Mom?”

“Why don’t we all take a seat and we can discuss it over breakfast?” Vanessa flashed a smile and pulled your chair out for you. She slides scrambled eggs and bacon on your plate while you sit down.

“Who invited you to go camping?” Arthur began whilst cutting into a loaf of bread.

“Donna.”

“Your friend next door? Just the two of you?” Arthur raised his eyebrows.

“Well. . .”

“No.” He said firmly.

“Oh come on! You allowed me to go last time.”

“That’s because you were a group of girls.” Arthur pauses and drops his arm on the table.

“Seriously, how do you expect me to live independently when both of you won’t even let me explore and do things? My life is so boring! You expect me to just train, go home, eat and sleep! You’re even making it hard for me despite knowing I’m applying for college!” The tone of your voice slowly increased in volume and after you’ve said your piece you slumped back onto your chair and crossed your arms.

“Are you done?” Arthur stared at you firmly before proceeding to spread butter on his bread, “This isn’t how you’re supposed to speak if you want us to say yes to you, (Y/N).”

“I tried being nice already but did that work?” You sighed, lightly rolling your eyes.

“(Y/N), you know why me and your father are reluctant to allow you to go. Don’t make us say it.” Vanessa spoke gentler compared to Arthur.

“What happened to Kirra, will not happen to me—we are not going hiking, we’re going camping on flat ground. Honestly, I’m already living the life both of you wanted for Kirra, am I not allowed to live mine? I’m not even your daughter anymore, I’m just your spare child that you think you can use as a marionette!”

“You watch your tongue young lady!” Arthur raised his voice at you after seeing Vanessa upset at your words, “You’re not going and that’s final!”

You clench your teeth and storm out of the kitchen, making sure to stomp your feet up the stairs and then slamming the door to your bedroom with full force.

"That little—" Arthur was about to get up when Vanessa stopped him.

"Leave her be, Art. I'll talk to her when she cools off."

You jumped onto your bed and screamed your frustrations onto the pillow. Why do I have to get uptight parents?! You raise your head and reach for your phone on the nightstand to text Donna that you won’t be coming with them; and by them Donna meant, the boys next door and possibly Stephen knowing Eugene.

Before you could click send, you heard Vanessa’s soft knock on your door, “Leave me alone!”

“Let’s talk (Y/N).” Vanessa comes in anyway and you don’t even argue since you know she’ll say that this was her house. You kept your back turned towards your mother and felt her weight on the side of your bed, “Do you know where the campsite will be?”

“Rosebery Creek.” you mumbled, resigned.

“That’s a couple of hours away. . . I’ll talk to your father alright? Just promise me you’ll keep yourself level-headed.” Vanessa strokes your head and instantly you feel guilty for saying the things you said but your pride prevents you from apologising.

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

"Hey Grandma, where's this photo taken?" Sasha sat in the living room while Vanessa sewed a button that popped off Linsey's pants.

"Which one, ladybug?" Vanessa lifts her eyes through her glasses.

Sasha gets up, hands splayed on an album and points at the photo she was referring to. Vanessa puts down the pants and adjusts her glasses to get a clearer look.

"Oh, that. That's the time your mother went camping with the kids next door," Vanessa glances at the girl with a small smile, "Don't you recognize anyone else?"

Sasha looks hard into the photo, looking at each one of the faces and gasps, "Dad?! What is he doing there?"

Vanessa shrugs, "You’re going to have to keep reading your mother's diary if you want to know."

"H-how—Please don't tell mom!" Sasha’s eyes widened as she pleaded, "Wait a minute. . . Have you read her diary too?"

"Yes I have. . . decades of them being in my house. Do you think I'd leave them untouched?" Vanessa laughs and winks as Sasha, "I won't tell if you don't."

Sasha giggles and nods, "It's a deal."

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

July 23 1999

“Does Alex have to come?” You complained while double checking the contents of your bag.

“His uncle owns the camp, (Y/N), and Alex knows how to get there without getting lost and your father seems to trust him.”

“Why because his Dad is my coach?”

“Because his Dad is your Dad’s friend.”

“Wait—they’re friends?”

“Were you even at dinner a few nights ago?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. . .” you shrug sheepishly. Instead of Rosebery Creek, the location changed to White Hill, all because your father trusted Alex’s family.

“You have everything?” Vanessa asks, testing the weight of your backpack. It’s almost ten in the morning, and Alex is supposed to pick you up in a few minutes. “Good lord, this is heavy.”

“That’s my portable telescope and camera.” Who knew ten pounds could be so heavy? It takes up a lot of space in the pack, so you’ve got one of the tents that’s been kept in your attic stuffed in the bottom, a compressed sleeping bag, clothes neatly rolled to save space, a couple of energy bars, peanut butter cups, and some chocolate-covered espresso beans—all the major food groups. You also brought a grid-lined journal. Just a small one. And a few gel pens.

“You have the emergency cash I gave you?”

You pat the pocket of your purple plaid shorts. They match your purple Converse.

“Pager?”

“In my pack,” you lied.

Mom inspects your arms, “Hive cream?”

“Yes, I’ve got the stinky homoeopathic cream. Where’s Dad? I need to leave soon.”

“Arthur!” she calls out towards the stairs, cupping her hands around her mouth. Then she turns back to you.

“He’s rushing to head out to the bank. He's making an increase on the credit card for your training,” she says as he jogs into the hallway. And toward the front door.

“I’ll be back in a jiff,” he says, keys in hand.

“Art, (Y/N)'s leaving for her camping trip,” Vanessa says, sounding as exasperated as you feel. He turns around and blinks at you, and apparently is just now noticing your backpack.

“Of course,” he says, smoothly covering up his faux pas with a smile. “Excited to spend time with the Strange girl?”

“Donna,” you say.

“Donna,” he repeats. More smiling. He turns to your mom and says, “Everything checked out at the campsite, right? Will the girls be safe there?”

“They have security and everything,” Mom says. “I told you, remember? Mrs. Strange talked to Alex's Uncle, and they’re going to pay special attention to their group.”

“Right, right,” Dad murmurs, nodding enthusiastically.

Then he smiles at you, starts to extend his arms as if he might hug you—which is weird, because you don’t normally do that anymore —and then changes his mind and pats you on the head. “Have a great time, kiddo. Stay in touch with Mom and take your pepper spray in case there are any boys with roaming hands.”

You can be sure that there will be boys, and you surely hope that there will be wandering hands. But there's no way you're going to tell him that, so you simply laugh it off instead, and your laugh sounds as fake as his grin does.

He nods stiffly, and it’s awkward. “Gotta get to the bank. See you when you get back,” he says, and before you can answer, he’s jogging out the front door.

When he’s gone, you vent to Vanessa, “Hello! I’m leaving for an entire week. Does he realise this?”

She holds up a hand in shared exasperation. “He knows. I told him I could take care of the bank during lunch, but he insisted it had to be now. He’s just—”

“Stressed,” you say, resigned, "Yeah."

"Hey, forget him. I’m right here,” she says, holding your face in her hands. “And I’m going to miss you like crazy. I will also worry every day, so please call or text to check in when you can.”

“Spotty cell service,” you remind her. You read warnings about it on the glamping compound’s brochure.

She nods. “If I don’t hear from you, I won’t alert state troopers. Not unless you aren’t standing here in front of me at noon next Friday. In one piece, I might add.”

“Don’t know about one piece, but I’ll be here,” You joked. “Speaking of, I’d better get outside. Need to stay on schedule.”

“I changed my mind. Don’t go.” She hugs me extra hard and then clings dramatically.

“Mom,” you say, laughing. “You’re unbalancing my life force.”

“Have I told you how much I love you?”

“Not today. But you manage to convince dad to let me go, and if that’s not a token of affection, I don’t know what is.”

“I love you, sweetheart.”

“Love you back,” you tell her. When she finally lets me go, you lift your heavy backpack onto one arm and salute her goodbye.

“Don’t pee on your shoes and try not to provoke any bears.” She advises as you leave through the door.

“If I see a bear, I’ll pass out from fear, so he’ll just think I’m dead.”

“That seems reasonable. And, (Y/N)?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t be cautious, be careful. Have a good time, okay?”

You give her a confident nod and head outside.

The weather today couldn't be any better for summer. Not too warm, not too cold. Just right. Pretty blue sky. As you trudge forwards with your bag in front of the curb, you are experiencing an odd combination of nervousness and excitement.

There was still no sign of Alex, so you made the decision to do one more trial run with your bag.You tried it on when it was empty, but now that it’s full, you’re forced to squat in order to lift it and am struggling to get it on both shoulders.

When you finally manage it, you wobble clumsily and nearly topple over backward. How am I supposed to hike a dirt trail with this thing? Feels like an overweight sloth is clinging to my neck. Maybe if you secure the strap that buckles around your waist . . .

“You’ve got it packed wrong,” Stephen calls out.

You turn around slowly, in case you actually do fall over—which is a real possibility, not kidding—and it takes you exactly one second to spot the Stephen: black Converse high-tops, black jeans with artfully ripped holes in both knees, and a black hoodie below a white denim jacket.

Stephen is sitting on the hood of Robbie’s SUV, which is parked a few yards away in front of his house. “You’re supposed to pack the heavy stuff in the centre, near your back. Let your hips carry the weight, not your shoulders. When it’s packed right, you won’t be at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

“I’m not . . .” You shift your feet and lean forward slightly, barely preventing a bodily avalanche. Dammit.

Stephen’s smile is slow and annoying. He’s wearing jet-black sunglasses, so you can’t see his eyes. Double annoying. So he’s back to being a teasing a-hole? Great.

“What do you have in there?” he asks. “Gold bricks?”

“Just a telescope I bought yesterday.”

“You fit Galileo Galilei inside that pack?”

“No, the portable one.”

“Ah. Well, it’s packed wrong.”

“And I should trust you because you’re such an expert on backpacking,” You squinted your eyes at him.

He leans back on both hands and lifts his face to the sun. “You know I am—I can help you repack if you want,” he says, still looking up at the sky, where misty trails of morning fog are drifting back out above the mountains.

Stephen Strange with his hands on my private stuff? I don’t think so, buddy.

“No, thanks.” You let the pack’s straps slide down your arms until it’s back on the ground. And then, in an attempt to shut him up, you add, “My ride should be here any second.”

“I see, I thought you were riding us. I guess not.” He shakes his head. Is he. . .annoyed?

As a dark blue SUV speeds quickly into the driveway, panic begins to spread through your body. Stephen hops from the bonnet of their car in a nonchalant manner and lands softly on his feet after the leap. He gets down on one knee to reach something that is hidden from view near the front tire. When he stands back up, he’s pulling a red backpack onto one shoulder. The top outer pocket is covered with vintage pins and retro national parks patches. A foam bedroll is neatly secured to its bottom.

Baby got back by Sir Mix-A-Lot was blaring from the blue SUV skidding as it breaks between you and Stephen, and then Alex’s brown head pops up from the driver’s door, “Camp time, bitchachos!” he shouts merrily over the stereo, “Pack up your shit in the trunk of your cars and let’s hustle!”

Stephen looks at Alex weirdly, thinking about what that boy was on before turning to you, “Blink twice if you want to swap rides.”

You look at Stephen confused, “Don’t be mean!”

“Alright! I love that energy Alex! Thanks for being our navigator.” Donna runs up to Alex’s SUV, “(Y/N) has told me all about you! This is such a coincidence.”

“Oh she has?” Alex flashes you those million-dollar teeth in a dazzling grin. You shook your head and mouthed ‘no.’

Stephen scoffs and makes his way to Robbie’s car as the shotgun. You peaked inside their SUV, Sebastian was there, along with another girl in the back seat.

“Donna, who’s the girl in Robbie’s car?” You ask, trying to be discreet about it.

“Oh that’s Paris, Robbie’s step-sister, she came yesterday to visit him. . . not trying to be mean but she’s kind of a bitch.” Donna whispers.

“Who’s a bitch?” Alex whispers while butting into the conversation.

Donna chuckles at Alex and pointedly nods towards Paris who had her hair dyed blonde and done into two side buns secured with a scrunchy. She chewing gum and texting away on her phone, “Her.”

“Oh yeah. What did you say her name was?” Alex looks over and agrees.

“Paris.”

“Mhm, Class A mean girl right there. Any girl with a city named after them? Mean. I bet she’s texting her minions about how she’s forced to hang out with a bunch of losers, right now.”

“You seem to know a lot about mean girls Alex.” Donna quirks her brows.

“That’s because I used to date one, her name was Brooklyn. Bitch ate up my self-esteem, lucky it grew back though. . .and stronger.” Alex playfully wipes his shoulders, acting cool.

“I could tell—Well should we get going?” Donna asks but then turns back around, “Can we put some extra stuff in your car?”

“Yes! Of course,” Alex notices you grabbing your stuff and swiftly steals it off of your hands, “Prince Charming to the rescue.” He pops open his trunk and carefully places your bag in and waits for Donna’s crew to pass on some things to him.

“Hey, I’m Robbie and this is Seb.” Robbie approaches Alex with a few things in hand, “Thanks for doing this, by the way.”

“It’s cool bro, my pleasure—Pleasure to meet you both.” Alex smiles until his dimple is visible and shakes hands with the two boys after fixing the extra bags in his trunk.

“Okay, we’re all here and everyone’s acquainted,” Robbie says. “Are we ready to roll?”

“We’re gonna have some crazy-ass fun this week,” Donna says, throwing her arm over your shoulder,“Right?”

“Sure will.” You smile.

“Right, Alex?” Donna wiggles her brows.

“Let’s do this,” Alex confirms, and runs towards the passenger side to open the door for you, “White Hill, here we come.”

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

As Robbie follows drives down Emerald Street, he informs his group that the drive to the glamping compound is more than at least three hours. And for the first few minutes, the car is loud and chaotic, everyone trying to talk at once. Donna was telling Stephen about the camp’s amenities while Robbie makes a commentary about a different site he’s been to. All throughout this Stephen stays quiet and focused on Alex's car.

Inside Alex’s SUV, he was jamming to Shaggy’s ‘It wasn’t me’, while doing a perfect impression of the rapper that got you laughing until your stomach was hurting since he did so unexpectedly.

“But she caught me on the counter. . .”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Saw me bangin' on the sofa. . .”

“It wasn’t me.”

“She even caught me on camera. . .”

“It wasn't me. . .”

“Is ‘it wasn’t me’ the only line you know?” Alex takes a break from singing and laughs.

“Yes and only the chorus.”

After the first hour of talking to each other, the conversation between you and Alex gets as monotonous as the view of the valley. You look out your window and see rolling countryside, fruit trees, expansive blue sky, and a few little villages here and there as you go. Long sections of roadway are broken up by rest breaks for trucks and wayside kiosks selling fresh produce.

A little over halfway through the trip, Alex points out Blackwater Bluff, a tiny historical mining town just off the highway. “They’ve got a fairly big winery,” he says. “My parents brought me once. The downtown is totally nineteenth-century Gold Rush era. I’m talking about the Old West saloon and general store. Gold Rush museum. The works. It’s schlocky, but it’s fun.”

You follow the town as you drive past it. You glance at Alex whose eyes were focused on the road ahead of him. He’s actually full of knowledge behind his chaotic persona, “You travelled a lot when you were young?”

“Yes, Ma’am. I actually lived in a yacht until my parents had to send me to school. My parents loved travelling and every vacation, we would travel nationally and internationally. You?”

“Oh. . . no.” You laughed sheepishly, keeping the answer vague. You didn’t want to ruin the mood with your sad story. Alex sends you a few glances but doesn’t press on the subject, “How many hours have we got left?”

“One hour.”

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

“This is us,” Alex reports, turning. A small, paved parking area sits at the end of a rocky driveway. A dozen or so cars are parked there, most of them luxury vehicles. He finds an open space near some wooden steps that lead into thick forest. Another sign sits near the steps, stating that the trail is private property and only for guests of the campsite.

People using the trail must fill out a form and deposit it inside a locked box. There is no road past the parking lot. Robbie parks beside Alex’s car and everyone gets out instantly to stretch their legs.

“Get everything you’ll need,” Alex reports. “Unless you want to spend all your time hiking back and forth to the car. The walk back is fine, but it’s all uphill to the compound.”

“We’re hiking to the compound?” Paris says, staring at the sign.

“Two kilometres?” Robbie gives her a laboured look. “Don’t start, Paris. I warned you about hiking.”

“How long is two kilometres?” Paris asks.

“It’s nothing,” Alex tells her brightly.

“A little over a mile,” You elaborate.

“Oh ok,” she answers, but she’s smiling at Alex. And Alex is awkwardly smiling back at her.

“Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.” Alex wiggles his eyebrows at you.

Why are they smiling so big? Did I miss a joke? Stephen’s head turns toward yours, and even though a fringe of black hair obscures one eye, a single dark brow rises in shared judgment of the stupid high five Robbie and Sebastian was doing. Or maybe he’s judging you.

All of you fill out the trail registration cards at the information sign—in case anyone goes missing or gets murdered along the way, they’ll know everyone’s name and next of kin. When the lads have finished removing everyone's belongings from the rooftop travel carrier, you are quickly brought back to the realisation that your backpack is rather heavy. However, it's not like you can just repack everything in the middle of the parking lot. As a result, you put forth your best effort to fasten it and alter your posture.

“Saddle up, team,” Alex says loudly to the group. “Luxurious nature awaits us at the end of the trail.”

It’s just two kilometres, I can do this.. You tell yourself. And the woods are pretty amazing, all shady and smelling of pine needles. Birds are chirping, and it’s not too warm. About ten minutes up the first steep hill, you begin to have doubts.

Stephen, who was behind you could see the weight of your back swivelling you around and took it upon himself to walk beside you, “Give me your bag.”

“Huh?” was the only noise you could make since you were already huffing and puffing.

Stephen snickers, “Your bag, give it to me.”

“No, I can do this!”

“You’re sweating like a sinner in church.”

“Thanks for pointing out the obvious.”

“Just give me your bag, (Y/N).” Stephen insisted, “And drink some water.”

You pass your backpack defeatedly to Stephen and take the bottle of water he was handing you, “Thanks.” you mumble.

“You’re welcome.”

Twenty minutes up an even steeper incline. By the time you reach the final stretch toward the compound, you’re just wishing you could drop into a foetal position. The sign for the campsite appears, and you nearly weep when you spot a big building inside a break in the trees.

Your head is sweating, and you’ve been walking uphill in a hunched-up position for so long. The promised land is in front of you, it may have been worth all that misery, because the compound is gorgeous.

A modern cedar lodge sits at the forefront: walls of enormous windows, fat timber beams, stacked stone fireplaces jutting from the roof. Lush forest surrounds it. Jagged mountains in the distance. The whole scene looks like something out of a dream.

All of you head inside. Warm sunlight streams through double-high windows as you tread across floors of polished river rock and stop at the registration desk. It smells so nice there, like cedar and fresh-cut flowers. And they have expensive candy sitting in a bowl for the guests.

You resist the urge to fill your pockets; Sebastian does not. He holds a finger up to his mouth and winks at you, stealthily emptying imported chocolate into a pocket on his backpack, while Alex informs the middle-aged woman working the desk who his uncle is.

You meander around the room, and Sebastian joins you while you examine a wall of framed scenic photos, “Long time, no see. How’ve you been?”

“Still alive and kicking, even though he just went through hell.”

Sebastian just laughs, easy and warmly, “I agree but at least we made it to heaven.”

Robbie calls his name, and Sebastian ducks around you to answer. Before you can open your mouth, he’s gone, laughing with Robbie about a carved wooden statue that looks like two squirrels having sex.

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

“No loud music is allowed,” Amanda says to all of you. “No loud talking after sunset when you’re inside your camp. Other guests may be trying to sleep, and your tents aren’t soundproof. Quiet hours start at ten p.m. and last until seven a.m.”

“Geez,” Paris mumbles under her breath. “This place is a dictatorship.”

Amanda points in the general direction of the lodge. “We have a small store that sells sweatshirts and rain gear. You can also rent bear canisters and camp stoves. It’s run on the honour system, so you’ll need to put cash in the bin or write your tent number and name on the sheet to have it added to your final bill. Also—”

Sebastian’s water-bottle pyramid crashes. Bottles roll across the floor. “Oops, sorry,” he says.

Amanda pauses, and her inner struggle with patience is showing in the slant of her brows, but, clearing her throat, she finishes her speech. “Evening social time starts at six. We serve drinks, then a four-course dinner. We encourage you to mingle with other guests at the nightly bonfire afterward. The pavilion closes at nine. Any questions, come see us at the registration desk.”

Since it’s already late in the afternoon, there’s no time to do anything before dinner. So the boys went ahead and built everyone’s tents, and you and Donna all unpack. You stash all your food and toiletries in the food locker outside. Then you try to call Mom to let her know you arrived intact. But there’s no service in the tent cabin.

Luckily, Paris disappears, so Donna and you set out and explore your camp section of the compound on your own. There’s a picnic table between our tent and the boys’, and a small trailhead behind it, with a sign warning that the trail feeds into the national forest; White Hill Camping Grounds absolves itself of responsibility should hikers choose to leave their property.

We avoid the screaming kids and follow a fastidiously landscaped trail: cream-colored rocks banded by the occasional flowering shrub and a steady line of path lights. The trail leads to a cedar shingled bathhouse.

“Whoa,” Donna whispers appreciatively when you peek inside, and you’re feeling the same way. It’s practically a spa, one that’s themed to match our beautiful surroundings, and even nicer in person than it was in the online photos: stained wood countertops, stone benches, pretty lanterns hanging from iron hooks near the mirrors. Unlike your tents, there’s electricity here, and a woman is charging her cell phone while she blow-dries her hair. There’s even a small sauna in the back.

“I’m going in that sauna later with Robbie,” Donna tells you as you step back outside.

“Too much information,” you say.

She laughs. “If you want to go with someone, I wouldn’t care. So what’s with you and my brother?”

You laugh nervously, “Umm . . .”

“Is there something I should know about?” A mischievous smile quirked on the corner of her lips.

What? “No!—Nothing at all.” It was just a kiss, for the love of Pete.

“You’re so easy to embarrass,” she says, grinning. “Did you know your ears turn red? That’s so cute—Hey, I was just teasing,” she says, slapping your arm playfully.

Jesus.

“If there is something then I don’t know what you see in Stephen anyway, you’re so way out of his league—but if I were to choose a girl for him, I’d pick you.” Donna nudges you lightly before hooking her arms around yours.

You were not sure how to take this. You think you understand what she’s trying to say, and maybe there’s a core of earnestness in there somewhere—you still feel embarrassed either way.

“We were just friends,” you insist. “Nothing else.”

With a shrug, Donna says, “Alright then. Did I tell you that he’s a bit of a playboy? Stephen, he's very charismatic but secretive and you might think you know him well but actually, you don't—this is coming from my experience. Unlike Alex, who seems to be an open book. If only you can see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking, my gosh! It melts my heart.”

Now you’re self-conscious about your ears flaming up, which makes you want to avoid the entire topic. You discreetly make sure your hair covers the telltale redness and don’t say anything further.

By the time you finish walking the path around your area of the camp, you spot Paris and the boys lounging at the picnic table between your tents. You’re a little worried Donna might try to tease you about Stephen in front of the group, but she just runs to Robbie, throwing her arms around him and begging for a piggy-back ride. As though the whole conversation about Stephen and Alex is forgotten.

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

“Penny for your thoughts?” a deep voice rumbles in your ear. A small yelp escapes your mouth. You punch Alex in the arm with a smile. Everyone was sitting around the campfire made by Stephen and Alex after eating dinner in the dining hall.

Stephen was playing with his guitar while the rest roasted marshmallows quietly. Paris, who seems to take interest in Stephen, hasn't left his side since after dinner.

“Ow,” he complains, rubbing his sleeve.

“Stop creeping up on me like that,” you whisper. “You’ll give me a heart attack.”

His white teeth flash in the dusk. “Sounds like a challenge.”

“Glad you’re so keen for my early demise. Where were you just now, anyway?” you ask.

“I might’ve bribed someone for a few beers and alcohol. . . and I also”—he holds up a flattened s’more—“I made this. Never turn down toasted marshmallows. That’s a sin.”

“Oh, is it really?” you whisper, irritated that your heart is racing. Because he startled you. Not because he’s sitting so close that you can smell wood smoke on his shirt. But why is he sitting so close?

“Pretty sure that’s what the preacher said last Sunday at church.”

You turn away to keep your eye on fire. Alex reaches around your shoulder, holding up half of a marshmallow.

“Want some?” His voice is dark and velvety, so close to your ear that a thousand goosebumps race down your neck.

An unwanted shiver chases them, and you pray he doesn’t see it. “No.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, voice even lower. Deeper. Seductive. No. Not seductive. What’s the matter with me? I have to stop. For the love of God, have some pride, (Y/N).

“No, thank you,” you say more resolutely.

“Your loss,” he says, sounding bored. His arm disappears. And now you do turn to look at him. Slowly. But not because you expect anything. You just want to see if he really is bored, or if . . . His eyes aren’t on yours. Of course not. He’s gazing off in the distance.

Some people had yurts, all of them the shape of circus tents. They’re eerily lovely, glowing with warm, marigold light—sanctuaries in the darkening forest, one that parts to reveal a black sky. And everywhere—everywhere—in that sky, there are stars.

“So beautiful.” You look up, seeing the bright cluster that makes up the milky way, “Looking up makes you feel so small.”

Alex copies you and looks up at the star littered skies as well then back at you, “Agreed.”

Stephen stopped playing his guitar after seeing that little glance Alex gave you. He places his guitar on the side and clears his throat, “Hey (Y/N), mind passing me a marshmallow?”

You turn your head towards Stephen and nod, “Alex, do you mind passing the packet?”

“Sure.” Alex picked up the opened packet and passed it straight to Stephen, “Stick.”

Stephen grabs the stick and pierces one marshmallow on it before placing it over the campfire, “So is anyone going to tell a story or are we just going to sit around the fire like we’re mad at each other?”

“We’re exhausted from the drive and the untimely hike, Stephen.” Donna replied while assembling her own s'more on her lap.

“Dang, I was hoping everyone still had some energy left because I got us some beers and moscato for the ladies.” Alex coos and pulls an iced bucket behind the tree stump he was sitting on.

"Oh hell yeah, now we're talking." Sebastian gets up from where he sat and comes over to Alex to grab a tall can of Guinness and is immediately followed by Robbie.

"Stephen?" Alex holds a beer for offer.

"Sure. Why not?" Stephen grabs the can and opens it.

"How about we play a game? Truth or Dare? Never have I ever? Two Truths, One Lie? Whisper game?" Donna suggested with an excited smirk.

"Really?" Stephen shakes his head.

"Well what do you want? Ghost stories?" Donna rolls her eyes at her brother.

"Let's play whispers, we have three hours until 10pm to make as much racket as we can. Let's put a twist on it though, whoever is the most curious must drink." Alex sits back down beside you with a shrug.

"Oooooooh" the group said in unison, apart from Stephen.

"That settles it then. I'll choose the first victim," Donna volunteers, eyes wandering around the circle while humming, before turning towards her boyfriend and whispers something causing him to laugh.

"Sebastian." He snorts and Donna gasps as if she's shocked by the answer.

"Oh—seriously? Me? What is it?!" Sebastian takes a drink after wanting to know the answer. He walks over to Donna and leans in closely.

"The question was. . .who is the ugliest one?" Donna whispers.

Sebastian frowned, "Son of a—come here." Sebastian chases after Robbie around the campfire while everyone else laughs, "I'm not ugly!"

After they finished with their little scurpuffle, both of them sat back down, "Alright it's my turn." Sebastian squints his eyes choosing a target and ends up choosing Paris.

"Hmmmm Alex or Stephen." She nods towards Alex and then points at Stephen with her thumb.

Sebastian gasps and cackles, "For real?!"

Donna rolls her eyes and takes a drink, while you and Alex look at each other with a smile at each other knowing that Donna dislikes the girl.

"Donna, why would you want to know the question?" Sebastian arches his brow.

"Right, it's nothing. Why would you drink?" Paris flatly asked.

Donna shrugs, "Just curious."

"Alright, the question I asked was. . . who among us boys do you find most attractive?"

Donna scoffs and shakes her head and Paris rolls her eyes.

"Well since Stephen seems uninterested I'll ask Alex. Is there anything you want to know?" Sebastian passed the turn to Alex.

"Hmmm," he taps his chin and glances at Stephen who has been quietly staring at you across the fire. Alex turns towards you and whispers, "Who has made you smile the most today?"

You shake your head with a chuckle, "You." You answered just to stroke his ego. Alex’s face lit up with a toothy grin and glanced at Stephen who was keeping a blank face.

Donna squeaks along with Sebastian, "What is it?!"

"Let's let that one slide~" you encouraged the group to whom you agreed.

"Alright, who's next?" Robbie asked to keep the game going.

"I haven't asked a question yet." Paris volunteered herself.

"Okay then ask away."

Paris moved closer to Stephen with a broad grin on her face and whispered something gently in his ear. You forced yourself to ignore the unpleasant sensation that was forming in your throat and turned aside when you saw the slightest movement on the corner of his lips. The group kept to themselves while they waited for his response.

Stephen slowly turned his head towards you and with a piercing stare he answered, "(Y/N)."

The grin that had been on Paris' lips vanished, and despite the fact that it was brief, you were sure she sent a snarky glare your way before she turned and went to get a drink.

"The hell what is that reaction?" Robbie chuckled.

"Right. Is she drinking out of jealousy?" Donna smirks before winking at you. Silence took over after an awkward tension emanated from Paris.

Sebastian cleared his throat after finishing his can of beer, "How about we go to bed early? We had a long day."

"Yeah. Good idea. . . Let's get some rest." Alex followed and offered his hand to help you up, "Shall I escort you to your tents?"

You look at him weird but take his hand anyway, "It's literally right in front of us."

"Just thought I'd protect you from mosquitoes and moths."

"You’re weird." You shook your head and got up. Meanwhile Donna approached you and hooked her arm around you.

"I'll take her. We need to go to the women's bathroom and freshen up for bed." Donna smiled at Alex who raised his hands.

"Alright. Then I'll see you both tomorrow." Alex smiles and backs off before retreating to his tent.

Before heading towards the changing rooms, you and Donna took your toiletries from your tents, "Aren't you curious about what Paris asked Stephen? She seemed annoyed after he revealed his answer."

I am.

"Whatever it is, they can keep it to themselves. Seeing her reaction, I can already tell she doesn't like me." You chuckle.

"She doesn't like me either, oh well," Donna paused, "I'm going to ask Stephen but he probably won't tell me either."

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪︎

After spending some time walking the beach trail and hanging out by the beach most of the day, you and the group came back to camp with Stephen, marching ahead on the trail. The rest of the walk passes in with you keeping quiet. When you hit the bottom of the trail at the clearing near your camp area, Stephen comes to an abrupt halt, causing all of you to trip and barely sidestep him, bumping into each other. Curious as to what stopped him, you try to follow his line of sight. You can’t see anything in the almost-darkness except the faint outline of the tents.

“What is it?” you ask.

On a grim sigh, he says, “Skunk.”

Alex walks into the clearing, toward the tents, “Stay back,” he tells everyone.

You ignore that mandate and follow him from a distance as he searches the space. When the wind shifts, everyone catches a whiff of something that’s not particularly strong but is definitely unpleasant. It’s bad enough to pinch your nose.

“Are you both sure it’s a skunk?” you ask, your voice nasally.

“No,” Stephen says, approaching his tent. “I think a little flower fairy danced through here and sprinkled her petal perfume.”

“Note to self. Stephen is a grumpy asshole after a long day.” Alex commented.

Disgust paints Stephen’s face as he walks the perimeter of his tent. “Note to self,” he says. “Stephen is always a grumpy asshole.”

“That’s not true,” Paris counters, also nasal-voiced, following him.

“Guys should we be telling Amanda about this—” Your word dies off with a dry heave. “Jesus Christ,” you gasp, turning and running far far away from where the smell is at its worst. You drop your fingers from your nose and take an experimental sniff. The smell there isn’t too bad.

“What is it?” Robbie asks.

“It’s in my tent.” Stephen answered after carefully surveying the surroundings.

Sebastian’s eyes widened. “In your tent?”

There’s a rustling sound that startles Stephen. Betraying his ninja moves, he and the rest of the guys ran towards the area in which you stood.

“Those fuckers are terrifying,” Alex says.

“Are skunks…violent?” You asked.

Stephen gives you a sharp glance, “Their scent is a violence to my nose.” he responded, you watched Stephen open the cooler where Alex had stored the alcohol and pulled out a bottle.

“What is that?”

“It’s coping.” He opens the bottle cap with his teeth, spits it out, then pours a hefty serving into a cup. “Anyone want some?” he asks.

You shake your head along with everyone else, biting back a smile.

He catches your expressions and freezes, tumbling halfway to his mouth. “Skunks are no laughing matter."

“I’ve just never seen you this worked up.” Sebastian chuckles and pats Stephen’s back.

“That ass-reeking rodent,” he says gesturing with his glass, “is crawling around my valuables, and knowing my luck, we probably pissed it off, and made it spray all over my shit, and then everything will need to be replaced.”

Donna snickers but stops immediately when she receives a cold glare from Stephen, "Where will you be sleeping tonight then?"

"He can sleep in my tent, considering I got the biggest one." Alex offered casually and shrugs.

"No way." Stephen flatly refused.

"Then would you rather accompany your little flower fairy friend?" Alex retorts, "I don't recommend sleeping outside either."

Stephen sighs, "I can't believe this. Fine."

“The only problem is, we have to get extra sleeping bags at reception and pillows.”

“Well better walk there now before it gets completely dark then.” Stephen shrugs, “Can I borrow your flashlight?”

“Sure. . . give me a second.” Alex ran into his tent to grab his flashlight.

“Do you need company?” Paris asked Stephen.

“I’m alright, (Y/N) will join me.” He replied plainly.

“Huh?” You said dumbly.

“You’re coming with me to grab extra stuff.” Stephen repeated and it wasn’t even a request, it was a command.

“Uh okay then—”

“Here!” Alex runs back out and hands Stephen the flashlight.

“Took you a while to find it. . . does your tent even have space for one more person?”

“Of course, I’ll clean up a bit for you—if you’re so worried about space.” Alex pats Stephen’s shoulder, “Well you better get going, if not we’ll meet you at the dinner hall.”

“Sure. Let’s go.” Stephen gestured his head for you to come with him and you hesitantly followed.

You don't even know what was the point of you coming with him when he wasn't going to talk to you. Stephen was being hot and then cold towards you and you don’t know how to approach him. Maybe he needed some extra hands? But he clearly doesn't need you, he carried your bag for you yesterday. Before you knew it, you were ogling his back as you complained about his actions inwardly.

"So why did I have to tag along with you?" You asked but Stephen remained quiet, "Alright, good talk."

Five more minutes of walking to the reception, both of you finally arrived. Stephen told you to wait at the porch while he asks for extra stuff for himself. You look up, seeing the sky covered with a thick blanket of clouds that flashed, followed by a clap of thunder.

"Oh great." You looked up and hugged yourself as the cold breeze crossed through your body.

"I got the stuff, let's head back." Stephen said from behind you and then noticed that you were looking up as well, "Looks like we're going to have a stormy night. Let's go before it starts pouring."

Stephen gives you the flashlight while he carries a box with a sleeping bag and a few blankets and pillows inside. Another flash of lightning lightened up the heavens and though you anticipated the thunder, you jumped afterwards anyway.

Stephen chuckles, "Afraid of a little thunder?"

"No! It's just creepy since we're also in the forest."

A drop of water went splat on the centre of the top of your head followed by another and another until the clouds couldn't hold the water it collected and poured, drumming on the ground, puddles began plinking as the rainfall became heavier.

"Take cover over there!" Stephen pointed at the large oak tree with a canopy big enough to act as shelter.

"Can't we just run back?!" You yelled through the round of heavy rainfall.

"No way! I'm not risking this stuff to get wet!" Stephen argued.

"It's going to get even more wet if we stay here!"

"Just wait for the rain to calm down a bit!"

You clicked your tongue and crossed your arms, you were tempted to go back on your own but then Stephen wouldn't have any light. I swear if I catch a cold after this, I'm going to kill him.

"May I have this dance?" Stephen holds out his hand to you.

You laugh and shake your head at him, looking at him as if he has lost his mind, "Are you insane? It's pouring down rain! We need to get back."

"Insane? Maybe. But you haven't really lived if you haven't done this before. C'mon, you look bored."

You can't help but smile at him, the butterflies swarming their way through your stomach. Only this man can make you want to do these things. You give in and take his hand. He leads you to an empty spot under the big oak tree. You're pressed up against him. The clean, woodsy fragrance of him filled your senses. The fingers on your right hand interlock with his and your opposite hand lays flat against his chest. His other hand is on your lower back holding you steady. No music. No loud traffic. The only sound was his humming of that song you heard him singing in his room and the pitter-patter of the falling rain.

As both of you sway, Stephen tilts your head up to look at him. He's already looking down at you with the soft smile that gets your stomach flipping inside you. His clear blue eyes gazing into you with nothing but adoration that you feel all the way down to your toes.

Rain crashed onto the earth relentlessly, thick drops pounding like your heart as he looked at you. He's beautiful, more beautiful than the storm around you. Your eyes were locked into his and you can't bring yourself to look away. You smile, captivated by each other's presence.

"Aren't you going to ask what Paris asked me last night?" Stephen asked, but you could barely make out what he said.

"Why? Do I have a need to know?" You asked and Stephen shrugged, "Alright what did she ask?"

"She asked me who would I kiss between you and her, and I chose you." Stephen answered quietly.

"What?!" You asked, not hearing what he said through his mumbling.

"I said, she made me choose who I would rather kiss, and I chose you!"

"Huh?!"

"Oh for fuck sake." Before he could lose his nerve, Stephen yanked you towards him. His hand hooked behind your neck and fisted your hair and tugged, forcing your back to arch. Your eyes widen at the force that pulled you towards him. His kiss was a soft, chaste kiss. Sparks consumed your skin, and the heat in your stomach flared to life. You shuddered at the sensation, your pulse beating so wildly you couldn’t hear anything else.

Stephen slides his other hand lower down your back and tuck you closer, settling it at the tender curve of your spine. You remained still, your chest rising and falling with harsh breaths beneath his tentative touch.

His tongue teases yours, slow, steady swirls that coax yours to find his. He tilt your head in his grip, slant his mouth to deepen the kiss. Rocking you against him, tangling his tongue with yours, the kiss becomes as rhythmic as the waves behind you. Slide, tease, retreat.

"Why don’t you ever tell me to stop?" He asked, his forehead pressed against yours.

Tell him to stop? A herd of wild horses couldn't drag you away. You never wanted anyone like this.

His mouth claimed yours again, and the kiss turned fierce. Wanting. Hungry. He was ruthless in his invasion of your senses, his touch so hot and possessive it branded itself into your skin, and you surrendered to him without a shred of resistance.

"Stephen you snake, since when do you kiss my friends?" someone said from behind Stephen.

You pushed Stephen away abruptly when you heard Donna's voice and pressed your swollen lips together, "We were just about to go back." You mumbled and walked past Donna and Robbie, who had his jaw hanging wide open.

Donna squinted her eyes towards her brother and handed the other umbrella to Robbie, "You share an umbrella with him, I'll go with (Y/N)."

"Okay." Robbie replies, smiling widely at Stephen.

▪︎ ▪︎ ▪

Present Day

"Mrs. Laurier? Some left these flowers for you." Your assistant entered your office after knocking and carried the box of assorted flowers.

"Who sent these? They're beautiful." You smiled as he placed the bouquet on your desk.

"It's from your husband, boss." He says and places an envelope in front of you and smiles before leaving your office.

You wait for your assistant to exit the room and close the door before opening the envelope.

Congratulations on the success of your Paris exhibition. Couldn't send flowers all the way to Paris so I thought I'll just send you one now. Will I be seeing you and Sasha at my game next week? — Alex.

Another knock at your door from your assistant, "Sorry boss but there’s another bouquet of flowers that was just delivered for you."

"Oh dear. . . Who is it from?" You asked, your hands automatically placing the card into your drawer.

"Don't say, maybe there's a card in there somewhere." He carefully places the box of flowers on the other corner of your desk and leaves once more.

You took the other bouquet and searched for a little card and sure enough there was one.

We kissed beneath the twisted trees, our lips between the stars, tiny ripples in the lake, this love, once lost, is ours.

You drop your head on the table and groan, "Ugh, my heart needs a break."

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