#she really is divinely beautiful

[nomedaaaa]

lowkey questioning my bisexuality again

[thedeadthree]

— WHAT GREEK GOD IS YOUR OC?

the darlings @chuckhansen, @leviiackrman, @dihardys, @adelaidedrubman, @belorage, and @multiverse-of-themind to take this cutest uquiz for a few dears! ty so much! <3

TAGGING: @griffin-wood, @risingsh0t, @queennymeria, @florbelles, @dihardys, @jackiesarch, @yennas, @roofgeese, @unholymilf, @marivenah, @shellibisshe, @belorage, @pearlcscent, @stormveils, @aartyom, @arklay, @swordcoasts, @jacobseed, @aceghosts, @confidentandgood, @loriane-elmuerto, @bloodofvalyria, @rosebarsoap and you!

HECATE

double, double toil and trouble. yeah you don't really get much facetime in the myths but you're literally the god of magic and dogs so stay winning. mysterious goth energy, does she really do complete dark rituals or is that just her vibe. no one knows and you're not telling

DEMETER

so all the gods like to let off some steam in not the healthiest ways, but you kind of take that to a whole new level. what with inventing winter and famine and everything. However you're only like that when you're stressed, but then when you're not stressed you're equally mysterious. i mean you literally invented mysteries (go you). some people think you're cold but thats presumably because you dislike them, you can be very warm and loving when you choose

HERMES

you literally were born and then invented mischeif. like you were a newborn and you immidiately inbented theivery and then lying. go you. you are the living embodiment of chaotic neutral. Yes people are so annoyed by you sometimes, but you are so unbelievably charming that you get away with everything. who doesn't love a charming rogue

APOLLO

honestly im much kinder in all the other ones but you have... such bottom energy. I mean really. you've got the whole homosexual tragic romance thing going on. Its not bad! its just i feel like you invented tragic relationships. congrats on being good at literally everything though, its totally fair that you get music, poetry, culture, truth, prophesy etc etc etc. oh yeah and the epitome of beauty. leave something for the rest of us huh?

ATHENA

ok yes you know everything. and you're a bit arrogant about it. and sometimes when you're confronted with the fact that you don't know/aren't the best at everything... you have a little meltdown. its fine. we all do it. If you chose any of the train themed answers you should've got athena, lets face it she'd go wild for them.

[blujayonthewing]

not too long ago I asked Nyssa's DM what deities her flock might tend to worship or whether she was gonna leave that up to me (mostly just asking, like, which relevant deities exist and are known in that part of the world at all) and she never responded, which is probably because she overlooked that message, or meant to think about it and respond but then forgot-- but a part of me can't help wondering, based on some of the stuff that's happened in campaign so far, whether she'd forgotten that Nyssa's archfey patron is explicitly not supposed to be a god of any kind

[harmonizewithechoes]

.

[princesssarisa]

In the past I've shared other people's musings about the different interpretations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Namely, why Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, even though he knows it means he'll lose her forever. So many people seem to think they've found the one true explanation of the myth. But to me, the beauty of myths is that they have many possible meanings.

So I thought I would share a list of every interpretation I know, from every serious adaptation of the story and every analysis I've ever heard or read, of why Orpheus looks back.

One interpretation – advocated by Monteverdi's opera, for example – is that the backward glance represents excessive passion and a fatal lack of self-control. Orpheus loves Eurydice to such excess that he tries to defy the laws of nature by bringing her back from the dead, yet that very same passion dooms his quest fo fail, because he can't resist the temptation to look back at her.

He can also be seen as succumbing to that classic "tragic flaw" of hubris, excessive pride. Because his music and his love conquer the Underworld, it might be that he makes the mistake of thinking he's entirely above divine law, and fatally allows himself to break the one rule that Hades and Persephone set for him.

Then there are the versions where his flaw is his lack of faith, because he looks back out of doubt that Eurydice is really there. I think there are three possible interpretations of this scenario, which can each work alone or else co-exist with each other. From what I've read about Hadestown, it sounds as if it combines all three.

In one interpretation, he doubts Hades and Persephone's promise. Will they really give Eurydice back to him, or is it all a cruel trick? In this case, the message seems to be a warning to trust in the gods; if you doubt their blessings, you might lose them.

Another perspective is that he doubts Eurydice. Does she love him enough to follow him? In this case, the warning is that romantic love can't survive unless the lovers trust each other. I'm thinking of Moulin Rouge!, which is ostensibly based on the Orpheus myth, and which uses Christian's jealousy as its equivalent of Orpheus's fatal doubt and explicitly states "Where there is no trust, there is no love."

The third variation is that he doubts himself. Could his music really have the power to sway the Underworld? The message in this version would be that self-doubt can sabotage all our best efforts.

But all of the above interpretations revolve around the concept that Orpheus looks back because of a tragic flaw, which wasn't necessarily the view of Virgil, the earliest known recorder of the myth. Virgil wrote that Orpheus's backward glance was "A pardonable offense, if the spirits knew how to pardon."

In some versions, when the upper world comes into Orpheus's view, he thinks his journey is over. In this moment, he's so ecstatic and so eager to finally see Eurydice that he unthinkingly turns around an instant too soon, either just before he reaches the threshold or when he's already crossed it but Eurydice is still a few steps behind him. In this scenario, it isn't a personal flaw that makes him look back, but just a moment of passion-fueled carelessness, and the fact that it costs him Eurydice shows the pitilessness of the Underworld.

In other versions, concern for Eurydice makes him look back. Sometimes he looks back because the upward path is steep and rocky, and Eurydice is still limping from her snakebite, so he knows she must be struggling, in some versions he even hears her stumble, and he finally can't resist turning around to help her. Or more cruelly, in other versions – for example, in Gluck's opera – Eurydice doesn't know that Orpheus is forbidden to look back at her, and Orpheus is also forbidden to tell her. So she's distraught that her husband seems to be coldly ignoring her and begs him to look at her until he can't bear her anguish anymore.

These versions highlight the harshness of the Underworld's law, and Orpheus's failure to comply with it seems natural and even inevitable. The message here seems to be that death is pitiless and irreversible: a demigod hero might come close to conquering it, but through little or no fault of his own, he's bound to fail in the end.

Another interpretation I've read is that Orpheus's backward glance represents the nature of grief. We can't help but look back on our memories of our dead loved ones, even though it means feeling the pain of loss all over again.

Then there's the interpretation that Orpheus chooses his memory of Eurydice, represented by the backward glance, rather than a future with a living Eurydice. "The poet's choice," as Portrait of a Lady on Fire puts it. In this reading, Orpheus looks back because he realizes he would rather preserve his memory of their youthful, blissful love, just as it was when she died, than face a future of growing older, the difficulties of married life, and the possibility that their love will fade. That's the slightly more sympathetic version. In the version that makes Orpheus more egotistical, he prefers the idealized memory to the real woman because the memory is entirely his possession, in a way that a living wife with her own will could never be, and will never distract him from his music, but can only inspire it.

Then there are the modern feminist interpretations, also alluded to in Portrait of a Lady on Fire but seen in several female-authored adaptations of the myth too, where Eurydice provokes Orpheus into looking back because she wants to stay in the Underworld. The viewpoint kinder to Orpheus is that Eurydice also wants to preserve their love just as it was, youthful, passionate, and blissful, rather than subject it to the ravages of time and the hardships of life. The variation less sympathetic to Orpheus is that Euyridice was at peace in death, in some versions she drank from the river Lethe and doesn't even remember Orpheus, his attempt to take her back is selfish, and she prefers to be her own free woman than be bound to him forever and literally only live for his sake.

With that interpretation in mind, I'm surprised I've never read yet another variation. I can imagine a version where, as Orpheus walks up the path toward the living world, he realizes he's being selfish: Eurydice was happy and at peace in the Elysian Fields, she doesn't even remember him because she drank from Lethe, and she's only following him now because Hades and Persephone have forced her to do so. So he finally looks back out of selfless love, to let her go. Maybe I should write this retelling myself.

Are any of these interpretations – or any others – the "true" or "definitive" reason why Orpheus looks back? I don't think so at all. The fact that they all exist and can all ring true says something valuable about the nature of mythology.

[autolenaphilia]

Edit: as hoshi9zoe pointed out, the original version of this post needlessly berated other transfems like Jennifer Coates, for which I do apologize, and I have toned it down in this edited version. The original version survives in reblogs.

Some months ago, I was searching through this transandrobro blog to see if they posted a callout of me, and i found this reblog, which I couldn't really write about for months, because what do I even write. I recently wayback machined it for posterity, and I guess this is my attempt to write a post about it.

It's saint-dyke himself, the coiner of transandrophobia, saying that the infamous (at least for me) article "I am a transwoman. I'm in the closet. I'm not coming out" is what made him coin the fucking word. It's literally bolded and underlined: "Reading this article is what made me coin “transandrophobia”.

The reason I put off writing this post is that reading that article makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. And it is poison, make no mistake, it's internalized transmisogyny brainworms dripping out of the writer's brain and onto the page.

It's a justification for why the author, known by pseudonym Jennifer Coates, doesn't want to transition, despite knowing she is a trans woman. And it's the exact kind of internalized transmisogyny that keeps trans women in repression and not transitioning. "I'm not going to pass, i'm forever going to be an ugly freak who will at best be humored by other women, the closet is uncomfortable but at least it's safe"

It's the same exact bullshit a lot of represssed trans women tell themselves because it's what society tells us about trans women, that we are freakish parodies of women, that we will never pass, and if we don't pass we have failed and are ugly freaks. It's all to scare us into staying in the closet and make others hate and fear us. Transmisogyny permeates our society, and the majority, maybe all transfems will absorb and internalize some of it.

Coates says that it all is just applicable to her, but again so many transfems believe this shit before transitioning and realizing it's a pack of lies. If this bullshit was in any way valid, a lot of trans women shouldn't transition, because before we actually transition many of us believe it word for word. And "it's only true for me" is how we justify it to ourselves. We tend to be way harsher on ourselves than others. This kind of self-hating transfem tends to think: "Other trans women are beautiful graceful goddesses, earthly manifestations of the divine feminine, always destined to be women, while I'm an ugly forever male ogre who just has a fetish."

It's all bullshit, it's poison, it's internalized transmisogyny.

And the rest of the article is bullshit too. It is not some insightful mediation on gender as some people say, it's the author confusing and mixing up actual transmisogyny with an imagined problem of misandry. She does this because she has gone full repression mode, and decided she has no other choice to live as a man, so her dysphoria and experiences of transmisogyny are actually men's problems.

It's a bad article, excusable because as Coatas points out, it's "essentially a diary entry." that was meant to be a way to "vent frustration" and she "did not intend for anyone else to actually read it." It is clearly not the product of a healthy mind.

I hope the author sometime in the past seven years eventually did transition, and that for whatever reason she didn't want to publicly repudiate her own article. Maybe she lost access to the medium account so she can't delete it.

Far worse than the article itself is the response to it. I've seen it passed around as some insightful commentary on gender by the "feminists are too mean to men, misandry is real" crowd. I have argued against this before. And other people have made insightful comments about it.

And learning that saint-dyke claiming that he was inspired to coin the word "transandrophobia" because of this article is the cherry on top of this shitcake of transmisogyny. For my thoughts on "transandrophobia" theory and how transmisogynistic it is, see here.

Of course, Saint-dyke absolutely could be bullshitting here. Claiming that Coates's article is what inspired him to coin the word might be a lie to claim that transandrophobia theory is not transmisogynistic because it came from listening to trans women.

This is why "listen to trans women" doesn't work. Because TME people will always choose a trans woman who confirms their prejudices. Blair White has made an entire career out of this. And Coates article is popular because it says that misandry is real and trans women's issues are partly caused by it, misgendering herself and other trans women.

And it's popular for another reason. Coates has thoroughly internalized transmisogyny, and thus her article presents a trans woman that is exactly as transmisogynistic patriarchal society wants her to be. She is suffering, but ultimately accepts her assigned role. She truly believes that her biological sex dooms her to forever be male. She literally "manages her dysphoria by means other than transition" as conversion therapy advocates want us to do. She never makes an social claim on womanhood by actually transitioning, so she doesn't invade the sacred women's spaces. Yet she performs the role of woman perfectly by serving men, by defending them from supposed feminist misandry. And she fulfils the ritualistic role that the rhetorical figure of "trans women" sometimes serves in progressive spaces, of giving a blessing to TME people's pre-existing views and actions, all while actual flesh-and-blood trans women are destroyed by those same deeply transmisogynistic spaces. This time it's a blessing for the same "misandry is real" soft-MRA bullshit that has infested the online left and created the transandrophobia crowd.

That is why this article and the positive response makes me sick, makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. This is what its fans want trans women to be like. I'm acutely aware this kind of self-denial is exactly what transmisogyny wants from me and tried to indoctrinate me into doing it. And I want none of it. I want to live, I want to be a woman.

[majorblinks]

DOWNRIGHT ICONIC (aespa karina)

(smut, male reader, screenwriter you, stranger karina, public sex, rough sex [choking/slapping/biting/spanking/hair-pulling etc], oral, anal, facefucking, titfucking, facial, bondage, degradation, name-calling, other weird stuff, 26k words, it's been 1 million years..., BUT WE'RE SO BACK BABY <3)

Hey, turns out the critics really are onto something:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this.

You aren’t surprised when the nominations are announced. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’re this up-and-coming screenwriter, this newly-minted visionary, and - cue the applause - you’ve just made the movie of the year. Clips go viral everywhere; the reviews are calling it extraordinary. They all want to know how you - a relative nobody - managed to pull it off. What’s your secret? What’s your inspiration? Where’d you get this billion-dollar box office idea? 

And here’s one version of the truth:

“Well,” you’re quoted saying in every single interview: “honestly, it’s about a girl.”

Everyone eats this up, of course. It’s so fucking romantic.

You’ll tell an abridged version of this story for the rest of your life. A blip in time in early January - a certified slow-motion movie moment. You’ll say things like she was the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen. You’ll say things like, I know it sounds lame, but that’s how it went. She took my breath away. She fascinated me. I saw her and I don’t think my life has ever been the same. 

You’ll never once say her name. 

“It’s weird, actually,” you’ll say in an interview after the news of the nominations drops. “Making this movie about her. She’ll last forever there, you know? She’ll always exist in this film, in this one moment in time. She’s in all of it, basically - every scene, every line. It’s all her.”

“You make it sound like she’s dead,” the interviewer will say, all open-mouthed melodrama.

You’ll laugh. “Oh, God, no,” you’ll say. “She’s alive and well.” As if it hasn’t been years since you last saw her face, watching you from down the corridor, looking lost and torn apart and very, very small. “She’s okay. I mean - I think - yeah, she’s okay.”

As if you’d know. 

Because here’s another version of the truth:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this. You’re going to stand up on that stage and thank your family and your friends. You’re going to stare at all those faces until they swim together into one golden, glittering blur, and then all you’ll see is her - her dark eyes, her glossy hair, her wrist in your grip, her throat between your fingers - her in your sheets, her smiling in your doorway, her shivering in your shower, her sobbing into her hands, her bleeding in your bed, her walking away. Her, her, her. Immortalized forever in this perfect thing you made, winning awards off the reconstruction of a memory. Art imitating life; reality warped into something magnificent, and beautiful, and better. 

And the only thing you’ll feel like doing is throwing up. 

Sure, you’ll bask for decades in the thrill of it: the fame, the fortune, the glory; the adoration, the worship, the attention; the eternal, endless love. You’ll be able to look back on your life when you’re decrepit on your deathbed and know that you - brilliant you, utterly superior you - were divinely blessed with earth-shattering success, and no one will ever be able to take that away from you. You made your mark. You meant something. You were the best, for fuck’s sake, and you have the accolades to prove it - you really, really were. 

So here’s the full truth - the final bottom line:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this. You’ll live the kind of life people beg God for. You’ll get everything you ever wanted. 

It won’t be worth it at all. 

-

First, though, there’s this. 

-

Disturbingly enough, you’re in the romance section of a bookstore when everything starts. 

This is really not your genre - that’s the funniest part. Historically, you’re bored to death by the cartoonish pastel covers; you don’t get your kicks from seeing the same delightfully quirky heroines fall for brooding bad boys, or whatever the fuck goes on in those books. You have your standards. You prefer your art a little gritty, a little fucked up, a little more interesting - the kind of thing that can leave you shellshocked in a movie theater, overcome with the sort of full-body, lightning-struck epiphany only truly good work can manage. It’s not a judgment call - you’re not trying to be pretentious. It’s just that you prefer something with some fucking bite.

The second funniest part is this: 

You’re pressed against the shelves, surrounded by the cutest, chastest love stories ever told-

“Are you serious?” 

-and Karina’s on her knees, about to take your cock down her throat. 

Maybe this is what your contemporaries call cinematic irony.

That’s gotta be the only phrase for it, really. The scene itself dripping with classless, crude, erotic filth - the way she ducks her chin to spit on her hand, the slow pump of her fist around you, the rough hum in her mouth at how achingly hard you are - nasty and irredeemable, too fast and too loud. The gross lack of subtlety in her sex appeal: all pale thighs and porn-star tits, the wet pink flash of tongue. Seductive in a way that screams at you. It’d be so easy to write this off as some deliberately controversial opening scene, gory shock value, horror-film suspense - starring you and the slut you’re about to ravage and ruin and potentially leave for dead. 

“Baby - are you sure?” 

It’d be so easy, if Karina didn’t look like an angel incarnate.

“I mean, you-” You’re stammering. You’ve got both hands in her hair, fingers sliding through the glossy black in petting, soothing motions - your clumsy attempt at reassurance. “You don’t have to, if you don’t - we’re in public - I’m not expecting you to - I don’t need it-” 

Karina’s fine, sculpted eyebrows twitch upwards. Her lips are a twist of scarlet, distinct and amused. She doesn’t quite smirk, doesn’t give a voice to the sarcasm, but the sentiment is the same - yeah, right. 

And then she lowers her mouth to lick. 

“Jesus fucking Christ-” 

Scratch that, then. This is the funniest part. The most inhumanly beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, debasing herself in public like some sort of desperate common whore - come on, bring in the laugh track. 

Not that anyone’s laughing now. 

You’re no poet - they’re a few sections over, Plath and Yeats and Dickinson - but Karina’s the kind of thing that makes you understand the motivation completely: only capable of being captured in metaphor, without context, painstakingly interpreted hundreds of years from now by people who will never get this right. All carved-out cheekbones, fluttering lashes; tight fuckable body clad in a little low-cut dress, feet tucked neatly behind her like she’s simulating worship. Dirty and religiously devoted in how she stretches her full glossed lips around your cock and lets your grip tangle in her hair and- 

“Karina,” you get out, but her only response is to blink sweetly up at you and suck. 

Well, who gives a shit about the poets, anyway? You doubt any of them ever got to fuck a mouth like this. 

There’s an unfamiliar caution to the rut of your hips, a wincing fascination every time she gags - and she gags loud, choking and heaving, saliva dripping slick around you and down her chin - that seems to both entertain and confuse Karina. A skeptical crease in her forehead, saying everything she can’t: you don’t wanna fuck me up? Ruin me? Cloudy spit falling in strands to her tits, seeping into the crimson fabric of her dress; she’s wearing a worn black sweatshirt that’s slipping off one shoulder, exposing the clean line of her collarbone. The hollow of her cheeks, the obscene painful sound of your cock clogging her throat - it’s subtext, explicit suggestion. A preternatural understanding. I know what this is. I know what you want from me. 

Which - she couldn’t possibly. 

“Baby.” You sound so wretched that it’s humiliating. Karina’s sharply lined eyes seem to flash with humor, smug and lazily self-satisfied. “You’re gonna make me fucking cum.” 

The thick, sloppy, choked noise she makes is the closest she’s gonna get to a laugh. 

Oh, sure, whatever, it’s not like you’re not thinking about it: digging your fingertips into her scalp and really fucking her face, relishing in the way those eyes would go wide and glassy with unshed tears; refusing to let her have control, to let her lick and lap and breathe. You’re scripting it in your head already. You’d strip her bare and make her sob. You’d wreck her throat and cum all over her face and force her to walk out like that: coated in the sticky, filthy evidence of everything you’ve made her - look at this, you’d say, look at what I have. Look at what I did - all this, all me. 

“God.” Your thumb braces against Karina’s temple, like the gentle stroke of a brush, like you’re painting her right into existence. “You’re just-” A harsh gag; a fall of dirty, drooling spit. “You’re really enjoying this, huh? Getting on your knees in public for a fucking stranger?” 

That’s why the fantasy of fucking her into brutal submission is actually so understandable. You don’t know her. You don’t owe her shit. You could destroy her and it’s not like she could do anything to fight back - not when she’s already below you, looking up. When she asked for this. 

Except-

“Karina.” You can’t stop saying her name. “You’re - fucking perfect.” 

And it’s true.

So you cum. 

Karina swallows it all with the same amount of sultry grace she seems to do everything - how she laughs and walks and talks and takes your cock like a fucking professional - languishing in the practiced bob of her throat, the preening flicker of her eyelids, her face shiny and pale. It tugs the same feeling out of you as a flawless shot in a film, a well-timed bit of dialogue: watching an expert at work, pulling out all their stops. One hand through her hair. Her nails the same rich color as her mouth and her dress. Nasty, slutty, impressive attention to detail - Christ, get this girl in front of a camera, get the moon to be her limelight - you’re breathless, you’re enthralled, you’re so fucking far gone. 

Then: the sticky retreating glide of her pouty mouth, lipstick smeared badly down her chin, stark and arresting as blood. 

“In my experience,” Karina says, finally, “being perfect’s never gotten me anywhere good.” 

She pulls the sleeve of her sweatshirt up and wipes her face with her wrist. 

“You’re unbelievable,” you say, dizzy.

“Thank you,” Karina says, sweet like she means it, and sits back on her heels. 

You can’t help yourself; you’re petting back her hair again, cupping her face softly in your hand, caught on the dark glint of her irises. Angel was an understatement. She looks more than that - looks like something holy and all-powerful, something omniscient and blindingly beautiful, something who knows exactly what you need and knows exactly how to follow through. Something worthy of mythology. Something like a god.

And any sort of rough, ruthless, fucked-up fantasy - it’s never going to happen. 

You just can’t ruin a girl like her. 

“So?” Karina’s voice is a smoky bombshell lilt, like she’s just stepped out of some film noir from the 1950s. Hands folded primly in her lap, fingers interlocked like a lady. She could be a pop culture icon, an eternal sex symbol - a Marilyn, a Bond girl, a timeless universal beauty. “What now?” 

You think your brain actually short-circuits. “Sorry?” 

Head tilted, lids dropped low. Smirk still sharp and scarlet. “Are you gonna take me home?” 

You open your mouth to respond, but then a customer walks by the aisle. 

You’re a panicked flurry of motion - zipping up your pants, turning away, frantically patting down your clothes - but Karina just stays kneeling on the floor, little chin on an incline, utterly incriminating. It doesn’t matter. The customer passes you by. The world returns to the way it should be: just the two of you.

“Karina,” you say, flabbergasted by her composure. 

Karina’s lips quirk. “What?” 

You shake your head and offer your hand to help her up, but Karina laughs instead - actually laughs. It’s peculiar, beautiful: raspy like a chronic chainsmoker, as though there’s something foreign she’s trying to dislodge. The raw, gravelly aftermath of a skinned knee, a grisly scrape over skin. 

“Wow,” she says, and stands all on her own, tugs the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fingers. “That’s a yes to taking me home, then?” 

“What are you doing?” You’re laughing too - you can’t help it - reaching for Karina’s tiny waist to pull her in. “What are you - what do you want?” 

When Karina smiles, it seems to set her eyes aflame. Bright and dancing, lashes like a shroud of smoke. “What do you mean?” 

“You just met me.” It sounds feeble, somehow: a thin, useless excuse. Nothing against the way her body slots between your hands, a smooth effortless fit; nothing compared to how she kisses you between sentences, so quick and easy it already feels like a habit. “You don’t - you don’t know me.” 

Karina’s mouth puckers, coy. “No?” 

“No,” you shoot back, grinning, but it doesn’t sound convincing at all. “Come on, baby, seriously. What do you want?” 

There’s gotta be some motive, you’re thinking. There’s gotta be a reason. Karina is so still, so soft and pliant under your hands, all the carved porcelain perfection of a marble sculpture but with none of the cold stiffness. Spine curving under your fingertips, jaw tilting into your touch. 

A complete stranger, maybe - but every part of her body is begging to be known. 

“Don’t you get it?” Karina says. “I want whatever you want.” 

It’s so simple and earnest it takes your breath away. 

“I - Jesus.” You’re biting on the inside of your cheek, drinking her in. “What if I told you I don’t know what I want?”

Another rasp of a laugh, sound like the serrated edge of a blade. “I’d say fine, okay.” Karina’s voice is low, conspiratorial. “But I’d think you’re lying.” 

And here’s the thing you know for sure:

The very second you saw Karina you swear you saw the next hundred pages of a manuscript unfurling in front of you, lines and themes and gorgeous dark-eyed heroines, tragically beautiful endings and stunning cinematography - infinite narratives in the glossy sweep of her hair, in the seductive stretch of her legs, in the way she looked at you in a crowded room and smiled a lovely, secret smile and told you she’d follow you anywhere. She’s worth making art about. She’s worth devoting lifetimes to. The most honest thing you could say to her right now is baby, I’m writing a movie about this one day, and I think you’re really gonna like it.

Karina couldn’t possibly know any of this, but it still feels like she does - impractical knowledge in how she loops one arm around your neck and kisses you again, no hesitation. Like she actually knows you. 

“I want to fuck you,” you murmur against her mouth, because it’s the next most honest thing. “Is that enough for you?”

You’re a screenwriter. You know your horror movies. A small part of you recognizes that this is precisely how they start: fanged vampires, wicked succubi, femme fatales out for blood. Karina’s so gorgeous she can’t be human - teeth so sharp there’s no way her intentions are pure.

“Sure,” Karina says, smirk glimmering like starlight. “Then I want that, too.” 

It’s a murder plot waiting to happen. 

You take her home anyway. 

-

(Oh, and about your Oscar-winning script-

In theory, this is how it begins.

It’s classic. There’s a stranger and there’s a beautiful girl and they’re both sitting at a bar, talking for the very first time. The girl has a rose tucked behind her ear; it matches the crimson color of her lipstick perfectly. The stranger had asked her what the deal with it was, but she’d said something vague and nonsensical about it being a gift, so now they’re talking about normal, average things. Jobs, names, flirtatious pickup lines. It’s obvious because it’s meant to be, like a set-up to some predictable porn - everyone watching knows they’re going to fuck. 

She keeps getting closer to him. At one point he thinks she’s going in for a kiss.

Instead, all she does is pluck the rose from behind her ear, and hand it to him. 

It’s okay, she says. No thorns. 

He stares at the rich furled petals and the whittled-down stem. 

Thanks, he says, amused, charmed. He thinks there’s something odd about her. He likes it, though; if she were as beautiful as she is - which is very beautiful, exquisitely fucking beautiful - and she behaved like most people do, he’d find her terribly boring. 

He takes it from her. Turns over the rose in his hands absentmindedly as she keeps talking. She’s got all this hair: wild and glossy black, pouring over her thin shoulders, her ribs, her tiny waist. After a moment he feels the sharp prick of a thorn against his fingertip and releases the rose in surprise. 

You said there weren’t thorns, he tells her, laughing. Ow. 

Whoops, she says. Then: Did it get me too? 

She turns her head, pulls her hair out of the way. There’s a scarlet bead of blood trickling down the side of her perfect pale neck. He can’t quite tell where the point of entry was, where the thorn had dug in and broken skin. It’s bleeding a bit too heavily. Covering its tracks. 

She swivels, slightly. She sees the look on his face. Is it bad? she asks.

No, he says, though he can’t really tell. But - couldn’t you feel it, though? The thorn? 

The girl presses her hand to the side of her throat. It comes back bloodstained, a neat smear of red along the lifeline of her palm. 

No, she echoes, though this can’t possibly be true. Hey, you wanna get out of here or something? 

Alright, he says, smiling. They both stand. They leave the rose where it is. Let’s go. 

He cups her cheek instead of her neck when he kisses her for the first time, so he doesn’t have her blood on his hands.

It starts simple like that.) 

-

Karina’s so out of place in your apartment that it’s almost laughable - or it would be, if you were capable of thinking about anything but her mouth and her hands and her tits crushed up against your chest as you pin her to the doorframe. She keeps making these little sounds into your mouth: low and throaty, almost agonized. You swallow all her moans off her lips - oh, baby, you’re okay - and you only kiss her harder. She doesn’t belong, among your carpet worn-down from pacing and your laptop still open and idling and the mess of incoherent colorful post-it notes pasted to your fridge. She doesn’t fit here. Here kissing your mouth, here in your arms, here on fucking earth with the rest of you heathens-

“You wanna fuck me so bad,” murmurs Karina, chin on an incline, staring up at you, “then do it already.” 

She doesn’t squirm or fidget; she doesn’t get needy or start begging. She stays pinned down by your body, lips parted, and stands completely still. 

It’s like she’s telling you to make your move. Waiting for something inevitable. 

“What happened to patience?” you say, anyway. 

Karina’s mouth curls. She palms your cock through your pants. “What the fuck is that?”

You try to laugh, breathless and turned on, but all she does is kiss you again.

You’re a creative - you’re ready to attribute meaning to every movement - but there’s nothing so profound about it when you get Karina on your bed, all that thick black hair fanned out on your sheets, her hands grasping to get your shirt off - off, she murmurs, off. Even that comes out measured. She never shakes. She’s so sure. You kiss her everywhere you can reach, her face and her neck and her collarbone and her tits, drunk on the soft, humming sounds she makes when you do. You’re so fucking gorgeous, you can’t stop saying, and Karina keeps laughing that same raspy laugh, like it’s the most hilarious thing she’s ever heard. 

“You told me you already know that, right?” You’ve got her face cupped in one of your hands and your other one at the neckline of her scarlet dress. “So what’s so funny?” 

“Everything.” Her teeth glint the way fangs would, a deliberate trick of the light. She’d be villainous if she weren’t so content to be trapped underneath you. “All of it.” She presses her palm to the side of your neck. “You’re too nice.” 

“Fuck.” Your thumb accidentally digs too hard into her cheek. She doesn’t wince, but you feel it - the stomach-turning thrill, the possibility of leaving a bruise. Your hand drops low - lower, down her throat and her tits and her flat midriff - and slips between her thighs, up her dress. It feels safer, somehow. “How do you manage to make the word nice sound like an insult?” 

“It’s not,” she says, simply, and spreads her legs. 

And it must not be - because Karina’s so wet. 

She makes another low velvety sound when you first touch her, seems to melt into the stretch of your finger in her cunt - just one finger, and her back arches faintly, prettily, hips lifting to take more. “Jesus,” you mutter, but Karina’s not looking at you: her eyes are shut tight, lashes fluttering black, tits heaving in her dress with each draw of breath. You’ve fucked girls who’ve seemed unsure of themselves - embarrassed by their own wantonness, how wet they are, how bad they want it - but all Karina does is wrap her hand around your wrist and tug, once: a clear soundless plea for more.

For a second you’re actually, positively certain that you’ve lost it. 

It’s abject fantasy. It can’t be real. You in your apartment with the dream girl - the personal Aphrodite - the muse; God, if anyone was ever made to be a fucking muse, it’s her - underneath you with her ridiculous tits and her tight little pussy, face like a Hollywood dream. Ludicrous. Impossible. Bucking as she tries to fuck herself deeper on your fingers, all the way to the knuckle - slowing down only to say you wanna fuck my cunt open with your big fat cock or what? 

“I,” you try to say, strangled - her mouth’s so fucking filthy. “I was - I mean - we could take it slow-”

“How romantic,” says Karina - and this, too, sounds like a heinous insult coming from her - but she drags your wrist to her lips and sucks her own slick off your hand anyway. 

You choke on your next breath. “Karina-” 

She looks up at you, unflinching, tits half out of her dress and cunt dripping down her thighs. Lipstick worn-down, kissed-off. All over your mouth, or your throat, or your shirt. Mouth chapped from the cold and stained marvelously pink. There’s something in the way her smile forms slight and crooked every time you say her name, as if there’s some private joke you’re not in on. 

“You’re such a gentleman,” Karina purrs, all syrupy-sweet condescension. Then: “You really don’t have to be.” 

She licks the pad of your finger. She’s so completely shameless. You feel monstrous on top of her, in this sick, superior way, like she’s just too small to be so sopping wet and slutty and fuckable - too beautiful to be anything but treated just right. 

“If you want me to fuck you like a whore, baby,” you tell her, half-joking, “then just say that.” 

It’s a mistake the moment it leaves your mouth - a line crossed. Because all Karina does is cock her head, your wrist gripped delicately in her hand, her legs parted underneath you, and stares. Almost droll, bemused. Like you’re so goddamn predictable.  

“Didn’t you hear me?” That perfect face sears right through you. You’d nearly fucked that face. Not quite. Not yet. “I want whatever you want.” 

She’s even tinier than you originally thought she was. You only realize this now, tracing her stomach under your fingertips, feeling the sharp relief of each rib straining beneath her skin. You don’t know it until you touch her, but you can span the width of her thigh under one hand. It sends a strange shiver through you: mapping every jut of bone, every startling edge. She’s tiny. Breakable, practically. Men meaner than you have probably thrown her around, fucked her up against walls, used her like a toy. 

“So,” says Karina. “What do you want?” 

Your fist clenches tight in her grasp, right in front of her face, knuckles going horrifically white.

Like you - like you’re going to-

An accident. A primal sort of gesture, like you’re less than human, turned under her touch into some feral hot-blooded animal who can’t control itself: carnivorous, predatory. You stare at your own hand and then the sharp scythelike curve of her mouth and feel revolted embarrassment crawl straight up your spine. 

It’s abhorrent. 

It also doesn’t even seem to matter.

Karina doesn’t go wide-eyed and nervous; she doesn’t look at your wound fist like she’s scared of what it could do to her. She clicks her tongue, once. Like this, too, is something she already saw coming.

“I thought so,” she says, anyway. Maybe this is it, what does it for her; looking the devil full in the face and begging to be burned. “Then do it.” 

“I can’t do that to you,” you mutter, but you tug her dress up, and you fuck her anyway. 

-

She’s a stranger. This is the point of fucking strangers. To do things to them that you’d never do to anyone else - to take out your worst impulses and tell your best lies and know that none of it matters, in the end. Because they’re nobody, and because you’ll never see them again. 

But you just can’t. 

She’s too indulgent and stunning and soft, with her low moans and the addicting drenched heat of her cunt, hand gentle and careful on the nape of your neck so she can keep pulling you into a kiss. She’s made up of curves, delicate edges - those hips and those tits you can’t keep your hands off of and her lips in a dreamy smile - and you find yourself stroking her hair back from her face so you can drink it all in: the blush in her cheeks, the almost serene way she lets her eyes slip shut and her mouth drop open, slack and enticingly wet. So good, baby, you keep telling her, because she is, her entire body warm and wanting and so easily fucked open, little pussy swallowing your cock right up. She doesn’t fidget or plead. She’s so sweet, such a perfect fit, humming into your mouth as your cock eases her open; so wet you can hear it, the sloppy squelch of her cunt when you bottom out. Your voice comes out coaxing. You like that? That feel good? Taking my cock so nicely, huh?

“Mmm,” Karina breathes, in an exhilarating moan, right into your mouth, against your tongue. “Mm, mm-”

She never quite manages full sentences. Never finds it in herself to make any more obscene demands. Just gets all small and soaking underneath you, licks messily at your bottom lip, and lets you do all the talking - lets you draw a careful hand through her hair and drop your other one between her thighs, clenches tight around your cock when you rub at her clit, keens low in her throat and listens. To the good girl, to the I got you, baby, to the that’s it, there you go, this is what you wanted - I know, honey, I know, you just needed to get this cunt fucked right, you just needed to cum real bad. I know what this is. I know what you need. 

“Fuck.” She’s flushed pink to her chest, delightfully ineloquent. “Yes-” 

Well - good thing you’re decent with your words, when it counts. Let Karina blush and drool and slick up your cock with every stroke. That’ll work just fine with you.

It’s the kind of juxtaposition you’d really lean into - the kind of thing you’d write just to get so self-indulgent with, a personalized note to the director, a wink and a nudge to every audience member. Look at that. Look at her eyes like something straight out of poetry. Look at her body like a pornographic fantasy. Look at how she gets so tamed and docile and compliant when she gets her tiny pussy stuffed full, creaming all over that cock, huge tits bouncing - look, that’s art, isn’t it? What else would you call it? What else could it be?

“You gonna cum, baby?” She’s so fragile underneath you. Color staining her cheeks apple-red; lips swollen and begging to be kissed. Fictive little fairy tale. “You gonna cum for me?”

“Yeah.” It’s breathy and barely-there. Her chin trembles, jerks in a weak nod. “I’m - I - fuck-” 

See: you just can’t rough her up. It’d be blasphemous. Sacrilege. Taking one single look at the stained-glass windows of a church and tearing it all to the ground.

Still, you’re mesmerized by how utterly vulnerable she looks: the glossy shine to her irises; the way she inhales all slow and shaky, body slipping from some sort of precipice. Not just like she’s near-tears, but like she’s stunned - struck dumb from a violent blow, mouth wide open in the aftermath. And it’s just sex - and, fuck, you’ve said it, you see things the way every obsessive artist does; sex is never just sex. Every one thing means something more. A metaphor. An allegory. You get nasty and debauched and dirty because you know exactly what you can spin it into. Put the entire scene in a silent film and everyone can swoon about the things you might be saying to her, this impossibly captivating stranger in your bed with her graceful name, her dizzying moans, her shuddering frame in her orgasm. Don’t you get it? you could be telling her, hand brushing gently over her sweat-damp hairline. Don’t you feel that? You’re a stranger to me, baby, but you don’t have to be. There’s a reason we met. There’s a meant-to-be here, somewhere. I’m not a believer, sweetheart, but you could make one out of me - I swear you could, I promise-

But that’s the reason why these things are best left to the imagination, anyway. 

A million scripted sweet nothings - and none of them manage to make it out of your mouth. 

“Karina.” Your hips jerk hard. You sound half-possessed. “So pretty, cumming all over my cock like that. Such a perfect little cunt, baby - so fucking good-”

Her eyes suddenly shut tight; her body arcs into your touch, lips parted in a silent gasp. And for a second it seems like such a snapshot of innocence, like she’s brand-new to getting fucked quick and rough and dirty - though you know this can’t possibly be the truth, not with the way she flirts and whines and drips for more like she’s made for it - but she’s trembling under your fingertips, and you can dream. She’s your beautiful stranger, your pristine muse; you can pretend she’s whatever the fuck you want. 

“God,” Karina murmurs, so soft and weak it makes your head spin. 

Before you know what you’re doing - before you can even think twice about it - you’re pulling out, and cumming all over her stomach. 

You can’t help it. You shouldn’t have had that thought about innocence. Jesus. This is what you mean, about you and your own painful humanity; you’ve got all the same vile desires. When you see a pure thing - all that porcelain skin, all that thick glossy black hair, all those gleaming white teeth in her open mouth - your very first instinct is to fuck it up bad.

You’d do worse, if you were worse - you’d make a real fucking disaster out of her. 

“Baby,” you say, breathlessly. “Are you…”

And Karina, then, does something truly evil: 

Sighs luxuriously, stretches her arms above her head, eases those gorgeous eyes open, and smiles. 

As if she’s reveling in it. The scent of sex - the defiled tautness of her tummy - the way you’re not sure where her little red dress or her shoes or her panties are, how her cunt’s dripping wet onto your sheets, her hair a glorious mess. Grinning in the face of utter filth. 

“You,” you exhale, running your palm down her side. “You’re so…” 

Karina’s mouth pulls up at a corner, like she’s daring you to finish the sentence, but you never do. 

You can’t stop staring at the stretch of cum-covered skin before you. Coating her belly, pooling into her navel. You realize with a start that there’s a new bruise blooming on her chest, a vicious sort of bite mark. You can’t remember when you did that. You’d been kissing her - of course you kissed her - her mouth and her neck and her tits, but you’d been so gentle, sucking light and soothing her skin with your tongue after-

“You didn’t want to cum inside me?” Karina asks, hoarsely. 

You blink so hard your vision blurs. “What?” 

“Right.” Her eyeshadow’s smudged dark underneath her eyes, making her look deliciously used up. “You did want to cum inside me.” 

“Karina,” you warn - or, at least, you mean to make it sound like a warning - but her name comes out too faint. It’s horrific. Your hand traces her hipbone so reverently. You’re no match for her. 

Karina arches a brow in unhurried challenge, ghosts her hand across her tummy. Takes two fingers and drags them through the cum you spilled, pulls back with it clinging thickly to her skin. Drifts down, down, down. 

“Karina,” you try to say again, even more pathetic than last time. “Jesus-” 

But you saying her name holds no weight here; she’s made that more than obvious. Nothing to stop her as she smears her cum-slick fingers across her glistening pussy, gaze locked amusedly on your face, tracking your reaction. She’s still so fucking wet - she rubs your cum in circles across her clit - tossing her head back a little, chest heaving and falling, fingertips just barely dipping inside her cunt-

“I can’t.” Karina lifts her hand to pop her fingers in her mouth, sucks them clean. Pointedly flashes her too-sharp nails at you like she’s unsheathing claws. “If you want it, you’re gonna have to do it yourself.”

“You,” you say, though your hand’s already pressing hard into her ribs, “are fucking cruel, baby.” 

“And you,” replies Karina, head tilting, “just want to see my cunt all filled up and leaking your cum.” 

Oh, she hasn’t been wrong about you all night. She certainly won’t start now. 

“What?” A sly, languid smirk tugs at her lips. “Afraid you’re gonna knock me up or something?” 

Your breath halts right in your lungs.

You’d been right about her too, it seems. Succubus. Vampire. She must be; she’s bloodthirsty. Tits gleaming with sweat, the scarlet stain of that bite mark you can’t remember leaving, cunt all dripping wet and desperately empty - body like a fatal fucking blow. 

Karina’s eyes glint. I want what you want, she’d said. 

With the way she spreads her legs, she’s gotta be ready to prove it.

So you never stood a chance. You give in and scoop up cum with one finger and sink it deep inside her aching cunt, feeling as she clenches down, as she takes it so well; like a good girl, you tell her, letting me do whatever I want with this needy little cunt; that’s my good girl. Karina lifts her hips - goes so still and so obedient - and lets you repeat it over and over again, fucking into her with your fingers until the plane of her stomach is bare and sticky and her cunt’s dribbling your cum onto your sheets. It’s completely nasty. It’s hot. It’s Karina craning her neck back and shutting her eyes as you bury three fingers inside of her and fill her with your cum, every part of her in utter surrender, entirely at your mercy, breathing out hard through her nose until your thumb rubs at her clit and she’s cumming again, all over your hand. She gets this look on her face, afterwards - exhausted, every line of her face gentle and lax - staring up at you like you’re the only person still left on this planet. Adoring, almost. As if you’re something out of another world. 

It’s an expression too sweet for a scene like this - and it’s exactly what men like you make art about. 

“There,” you say, soft and mesmerized, wiping your hand across her chest. “Satisfied?” 

Karina laughs her strange, gravelly, gorgeous laugh. 

“No,” she says, shamelessly. “But that’s not your fault.” 

Your fingers curl around the curve of her jaw. “No?”

She barely looks like she belongs in your bed - she must be something divine, lit from within, god-blessedly gorgeous. She’s a fucking fever dream: stunning eyes and the bob of her throat and her tits and her curves and all that hair. Stay, you think of telling her. Let me see what I can make of you. I don’t know you yet but I could, baby, I really could. 

“Nope.” Karina smiles, and somewhere, soliloquies are writing themselves. “I always want more.”

“Okay,” you say, mouth hovering over hers. “Then stay.” 

-

So she stays.

-

(An update on your script:

The stranger and the girl are back at his place. They’re sitting on his couch. Nobody has cleaned off her neck. He’s been too busy pawing at her: at her face, between her legs, at her tits in her tight dress. I need you, he’s been murmuring to her, and it feels like he really means it: like he’ll die if he doesn’t get her desperate and whining underneath him, his cock stretching her tight little cunt wide open. He doesn’t feel too bad about it. She’s a dirty slut. She’s said as much. She’s got her own needs, too. 

What happened to your window? she asks, suddenly.

He pulls back from her chest, his spit clinging shiny to her skin. 

She isn’t looking at him. He has the sudden, unnerving feeling that she hasn’t been looking at him the whole time. Not like she’s had her eyes closed in blinding, overwhelming pleasure - but like she’s deliberately been trying to look at anything else. 

But his hand falls between her thighs, and he realizes she’s already wet. 

A bird flew into it, probably, he says. That happens, sometimes. 

They’re talking about the stain on the once-clean glass of his window. The backdrop of the night sky behind means it’s barely visible, but the suggestion of it is enough. Implicit gore. Tiny little black feathers, caked in blood from the impact, dark and dried. It’ll be scrubbed off soon enough, he knows. It’ll be all gone eventually. 

Oh, she says. She doesn’t apologize for potentially killing the mood. She hasn’t, anyway, not really. She’s still wet and small underneath him, begging for it. Poor thing. 

Yeah, he says. 

She turns back to him. Her hair’s everywhere, all over the arm of his couch, wayward strands beneath his fingers. She’s clearly expecting something - to be kissed, to be fucked hard, to be called baby and angel and good girl. It doesn’t really matter either way. Those are the only things he can give her. 

He stares at the blood on her neck. 

Let me clean that off for you, actually, he says, and goes to the kitchen to get a washcloth.)

-

Much, much later:

“I admire you,” Karina says, all tucked up in your bed, underneath your sheets, half-buried into your side. Moonlight bleeds into the room. Her eyes gleam like galaxies. “For showing some self-control.” 

“What?” 

Karina’s hair pours over your pillowcase. She takes your hand and brings it close to her face, working your fingers into a tight fist. 

“Fucking bitch,” you mutter, and then regret it immediately. It lands too harshly, too strange and serious. “Sorry. I didn’t - that came out weird. I don’t think you’re a bitch.” 

Karina’s lips brush your knuckles. “Not the meanest thing I’ve been called.” Her voice twists with humor. She shouldn’t be so comfortable curled up with a man she doesn’t know in the middle of the night. You think of kissing her hard, of scraping her neck with your teeth, of warning her about self-preservation - sweetheart, you could tell her, this is how people end up dead. “Not the meanest thing I’ll be called, either.” 

You shift. Your fist, unconsciously, goes tense in her hand. “What’s your deal?” 

Her mouth tilts. “What’s yours?” 

You huff out a laugh. “You’re unbearable,” you say softly, which feels much kinder than calling her a bitch. “What are you - what do you mean?” 

I’m not hard to figure out, you want to tell her. I’ll let you in if you ask me to. But you - you, you imagine saying, cupping Karina’s face in your hands and saying her name like you’re praying to her, drafting scenes in your head with each whispered syllable - you. Look at you. I’d fill a thousand pages trying to find a way to understand you. 

“If you want to hurt me,” Karina says, “then hurt me.” 

Your throat dries up. Your fist falls open. “What?” 

“I wouldn’t blame you.” Her voice is matter-of-fact. You see her tongue dart over her bottom lip, the slick glimmer of spit. “If that’s what you wanted.” 

You stare at her, hard. 

It’s not difficult to make out her silhouette in the dark; she’s illuminated so distinctly by the moon, like it’s her own on-set spotlight, professionally arranged - she’s got the cosmos calling her shots. You think about how careful you’d been with her: doing what she wanted and making her cum and kissing her like you have history and maybe fucking her like you love her, just a little.

You think about that bruise you left on her chest, her skin between your teeth, the feeling of biting down. 

“It’s not,” you say, and the lie tastes acrid in your mouth. “It’s - it’s not, Karina.” 

“You fucked my face in public within like an hour of meeting me. And fucked me and came on my stomach. And fingered your cum inside of me.” It’s far past midnight. She sounds more alert than she should. “You’re gonna start being polite now?”

It sends an odd knot to your gut, the way she puts it. Equating all of that to hurting her. Laughing in the face of your clenched fist - not because she thinks you won’t do it, but because she knows how bad you want it. 

Hurt me. She says it like it’s so easy. Fuck me. Let me stay the night. Hurt me; you’ve earned it. 

“I’m not polite.” The truth doesn’t taste much better. “I just have, you know, common fucking decency.” 

“Hm,” Karina says, a nonchalant little noise, and nothing else.

You brush her hair off her neck and your fingertips graze the hollow of her throat. You feel her swallow under your touch. You open your mouth, though you’re not sure what you’re about to say - Karina, like a chant, like she’s consumed you in a matter of moments, Karina - but she shuts her eyes delicately, and curls close to you, and just like that the moment is over. 

I have common decency, you’d said. I won’t hurt you. I promise. I can control myself.

So maybe you weren’t right about everything. You’re not the devil. That’d be a delusion of grandeur - the idea that you’d ever have that kind of power over a girl like her. 

Not for long, she’d replied, in the knowing tilt of her smile. Not if I can help it.

-

In the morning, it’s a picture of crime-scene proportions. It takes a little work to piece it all together.

Karina’s not in bed when you wake up, but there are traces of her everywhere - telltale, incriminating bits of evidence. Strands of her hair on the pillow. Blood-red lipstick stains on the fabric. Her crimson dress crumpled on your bedroom floor, sporting a tiny tear in the hem that you don’t remember leaving; you can still smell her perfume all over your sheets, like a calling card. If this was a TV drama - a clichéd police procedural - she’d probably be dead in your living room right now, blank-eyed and beyond saving, rigor mortis deforming her perfect body into something grotesque. 

This is also probably not a thought you should ever relay to Karina, but you do anyway.

“Sorry to disappoint,” she replies. She’s perched on your kitchen counter, dressed in one of your t-shirts, bare legs swinging. “I’m very much alive.”

“I was being dramatic,” you try to say, gesturing with your hands to set the scene - the lighting, the fake blood and the special effects, the potential pallor of her face. “I’m - I’m a screenwriter. It’s in my nature. I didn’t mean I wanted to find your fucking corpse out here-”

“It’s okay if you did.”

You choke. “What?”

“I’m right with you, babe.” Karina leans forward conspiratorially. There’s a sharpness to the dark glint in her eyes that kind of makes you think she really does understand: that she has the same tendency to jump to the worst possible conclusions. A kindred, morbid spirit. “I get it. I’m pretty devastated that I’m still breathing, too.”

She says this all in a scratchy, sultry voice, hoarse as though she’s been sleeping for years instead of hours. Lashes fluttering like she’s just told you something very adorable and sweet.

“God,” you say, desperately charmed, and laugh until you feel light-headed. “You’re sick.”

Karina’s mouth curls. “Right.”

“I’m serious.” It’s surreal: her wearing your clothes and sitting on your counter like this is an everyday occurrence, indulging every fucked-up thing you say to her. Maybe you’re still caught somewhere in a dream, just waiting to wake up. “You’re, like - not normal.” 

“Hey.” A light, careless shrug; her palm rests over the back of her neck. “No arguments here.”

You rub a hand over your eyes, smiling like an idiot, and take a breath. 

It’s late January, and cool sunlight drips into the room, over your furniture and your floors and the angel right in the middle of your kitchen. It should wash her out, blur her at the edges; it doesn’t even come close. Turns her to a freeze frame instead, carefully color-graded, every hue just a bit too intense: skin ghost-pale, lips pouty and pink, hair jet-black and tangled to her waist. Your shirt hangs off of her slender frame like it aims to swallow her up. You thought you’d been stunned by Karina before, lulled by the late night, the electric rush of touching her - you’d assumed you could blame it on the alcohol, the slutty dress and the sultry makeup and the long-held habit of artistic romanticization-

But it’s nothing compared to seeing her now. 

Karina crosses one leg over the other, and waits as though expecting a rating: to be starred out of five like a film. 

Face scrubbed clean. Bone structure a study of faultless symmetry, delicate in a way that feels both inhuman and invulnerable. She’s so classically breathtaking - a miraculous second coming of a tragic, iconic movie star, a phenomenon back from the grave; jaw and nose and mouth all clean lines, aesthetically precise art - but God, those eyes. Enormous without the thick liner, suggestive only of impossible innocence. Like some darling baby animal, some long-lashed lamb to the slaughter - something pristine and completely untouched. 

The morning after, the direct light, the exposed behind-the-scenes - she’s still beyond beautiful. 

And somehow she’s still here with you. 

“That’s insane, by the way,” you say, unable to stop yourself. “That you stayed.” 

There’s a loud cracking sound. 

You squint, disoriented. “What-” 

Karina blinks at you, wide-eyed; her jaw shifts. The sound echoes again, startling and sudden. “What?” 

“Are-” You step closer. “Are you chewing on fucking glass or something?” 

“Or something,” Karina replies, smile’s tiny and closed-off. She gestures to the cup next to her. “It’s just ice.” 

She’s so calm watching you approach her. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the freakout, for the breakdown - or, at the very least, the scrambling excuses before the walk of shame. Here’s the truth: she doesn’t know you. Here’s an even worse truth: judging by her hickey that looks like you might’ve tried to rip her throat out earlier, she’d have every right to take one look at you and run. 

Karina doesn’t do any of it. Just raises her cup to her lips and tips it back, the arc of her neck so inviting. 

“That’s so fucking bad for your enamel.” You’re laughing again. You’re in front of her now, settled between her legs. “You’re gonna break a tooth.” 

Karina sets her glass down. Wipes the corner of her mouth with her wrist, eyes locked amusedly on yours - heavy-lidded enough to seem lazy, but pupils blown enough to be a siren call, a deliberate suggestion.

“Oh, no,” she says, all smoky sarcasm. “Who’d ever want me then?” 

She parts her thighs the second you touch them; her body’s so obedient under your fingertips, like a doll’s, something to be dressed up and posed and played with. Daring you to do everything you’re already thinking about doing. 

“You’re ridiculous,” you murmur, and give in completely.

So:

Look, you know exactly how the movies would frame this. Pandering to the wide-eyed teenagers and hopeless romantics; adding the swell of strings every time your eyes or hands or lips meet, each motion accompanied with unsubtle cues - there’s the meet-cute, there’s the moment, there’s the love-at-first-sight. It’s ridiculous to drag any of that into your real life, of course. It’d be like believing in God. Giving up logic to put your faith in something silly and mythic and implausible - to follow true love like a religion, expecting it to save your soul; to pray to the one like a healing property, a benevolent higher power. 

You can’t believe in that. You can’t. 

But-

Karina pulls back the barest amount, eyelids fluttering open like a new day dawning, and smiles when she sees the look on your face. So sweet and gorgeous; so struck and adoring. So comfortable wrapped up in your arms.

“Hi,” she murmurs. 

And - as though it’s some bone-deep instinct, saturating your bloodstream - you just have to kiss her again. 

Don’t you feel that? you think of telling her again, your hand slipping to cup her cheek - the sentiment always seems to come back around. You swear you can see scenes flashing behind your eyelids, the beginnings of a creative epiphany; it must be seeping through your fingers, staining her skin with ink, every possible action depicted neatly between brackets. A laugh, a look, a touch. A version of Karina projected across the silver screen to a wild, wanting audience. Don’t you see what you could do for me? What you’re capable of becoming? 

You can’t believe in any of this, but it’s gotta be something close. 

The feeling doesn’t end when the kiss does: only intensifies, made tangible somehow. Sculpted into the spit-slick curve of her lips, the flinty gleam in her eye. Like she feels it too. Like she knows. 

“And it’s not insane that I stayed,” Karina says, belatedly. “You asked me to.” 

For a moment you just stare at her, seconds from her mouth and speechless. 

It’s the truth without difficulty. It’s a confession with no strings attached. It’s the fucking dangerous way she says it - as if whatever you want extends to a lot more than sex. 

“And you don’t-” Your throat closes over a swallow; you find your eyes darting between hers, searching for anything but honesty. “You don’t think that’s insane? Doing whatever a stranger tells you to?”

Karina only laughs her strange laugh, gritty the way good music is, demanding to be heard.

“Nope,” she says, like this is all so simple. “That’s just what I do.”

It’s unbearably filthy in its implication - and it’s exactly what you need. 

The room seems to fill with potential, fantasies pouring in from the ceiling, enough to bloat any manuscript to its breaking point. You let out a breathless laugh, loud and unabashed. You think of pushing for even more, pressing your nails in and digging deeper - why me, why this, why now - but Karina leans in close before you can and slots her mouth to yours, and you’re no fool: there’s no line of questioning worth giving that up. 

Seems like you’ll have to come up with this character motivation all on your own. 

-

“Look at us,” she murmurs against your lips - meaning this very minute, the chemistry, how every glittering star must’ve conspired to get you here. “Kinda feels like this was meant to be, huh?” 

She’s clearly kidding, because it’s too soon and too fucking crazy, but-

Well, the way you kiss her then is absolutely your version of a yes. 

-

Here’s something people should probably know about artists like you:

You’re rather enamored with the idea of a magnum opus. 

It’s a natural thing to reach for, to visualize - the concept of your one great masterpiece. Something you can pour years and years into, water into roaring reckless oceans; time transforming the things you make into something worth remembering forever. Everyone you know - your sculptors, your songwriters - has their own version of this, somewhere. When I finally create this one perfect thing I’ll be - go on, fill in the blank. Fulfilled. Gratified. Happy. When I finally do this, I’ll feel whole. 

It’s strangely fantastical. A lifelong dream a kid would have - a childlike, storybook aspiration. 

Yours - as far as you’ve figured out - looks a little like this:

“It’s not as romantic as it should be,” you admit, now. “I’m not really into that as a theme. True love, I mean. Or optimism. Or hope. I want something more…” Something rougher, you mean. Something with pain. Something with blood and bruises. “Nuanced, you know? Complicated, messy.” 

“I get it,” replies Karina. She has her hands twisted in her lap, watching you very closely. You’re obsessed with the way she looks at you - like she’s drinking every word in with those smoldering dark eyes, greedy for more. For you. “All the best art is about pain, huh?” 

You snap your fingers, pleased to be understood. “Exactly.” 

Karina smiles, small and knowing, and gestures you on. 

In your vision, your magnum opus is always about a girl. Like you said, it’s the way it goes with all the best films ever made: not about love, but the futility of it lasting. Think of all the famed examples - think of the filmmakers and their obsessions, sneaking the great loves of their lives between each line: there’s something she said, there’s a dress she wore, there’s a conversation they had in the middle of the night, tangled up in sheets and whispering against skin. Your future muse will be just like that. A reincarnation of the infamous women who haunt all the greatest artists - an amalgamation of their bodies contorted into narratives and replicated in loving, graphic detail. Someone with skin like marble, a statue you could take a sledgehammer to. Someone who looks unfathomably pretty when she cries. 

Someone like-

“Uh-huh,” says Karina. She must’ve just gotten out of the shower before you found her, because her hair’s damp enough to have left wet patches on your t-shirt. She licks her bottom lip, once. “Sure.” 

Someone to be what you’ve always wanted: a flawless girl to fall from the sky into your lap. To fulfill your promise to yourself: when I meet her, I’ll know. I’ll be able to make this movie. When I meet her, everything will slip exactly into place. 

Karina cracks another ice cube between her teeth.

“So,” she says, low with insinuation. “When you told me last night that you found me inspiring…”

She doesn’t need to finish the question. She knows exactly what you want.

“You’re…” You shake your head. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I saw you and I just - I felt like I knew. I knew. I wanted you.” You shrug helplessly, smiling. “Do you think I’m nuts?” 

She should, probably. You’re a total stranger, a practical lunatic, an artist talking of your visions like you’re possessed. You don’t know her - that’s the reality of the situation. You don’t know her. 

But then there’s everything else.

The unbelievable sex, the staying the night; the way she lets you touch her, blinking slow and subservient, like you already have a claim to her body. You think muse and you think in abstract concepts, glittering stars, guiding lights; you think of skin cut up and sewn together, of creators and their finest monsters, of the implicit poetry in the undoing. You think muse and you think of the way Karina smiles at you now, full lips and frail bones, a painter’s portrait reference. Unmoving, unafraid. Too otherworldly for your day-to-day but just right when she’s in your arms, like a trial-run demonstration: this is what we’re capable of. You could make it happen. You could make me fit.

You swear you’ve been dreaming of someone like her your whole fucking life. 

You think muse, and now you can only think of her. 

It’s a sign. It must be. And this, the next one:

“No,” Karina says, easily. “I think you’re just like everyone else.” But she raises an eyebrow, so you know it’s a joke. “I think you’re all the same.” 

You laugh, delighted; Karina’s smile widens, shows her teeth. “Shut up.” 

Karina acquiesces immediately - claps a hand over her mouth like it’ll keep any other words from escaping. It’s so adorable that you can’t keep yourself from pouncing, suddenly all over her like an animal: wrenching her thin wrist down, fingers threading through her hair, tugging her lips to yours as if you’ve been starved and she’s something to devour. She’s so cold, ice still melting on her tongue; even her body feels glacial, more porcelain than real. It drives you wild - the stunning impossibility of her. The desire to see it all reworked, unwound, shattered. 

“So,” you breathe over her mouth. “I can write about you?” 

“Babe.” Karina’s dark eyes sparkle, frozen-over streets in the mid-winter sun. “You can do anything you want with me.” 

That’s the whole point of having a muse, after all. Everything they are becomes yours. 

-

“But,” you can’t help saying right after: “you don’t have to be, like - concerned. About what I said. About art and pain. I mean…” You falter. You’re standing in between her spread legs now, thumbing the sharp curve of her jaw. “It’s fiction. I’m not that kind of guy in real life - I’m not going to hurt you.” 

Karina just stares at you, sentiment clear and unspoken. 

“Not like - not seriously.” You roll your eyes, laughing it off. “Not like that.” 

“Not like that,” Karina echoes. The hickey on her neck seems to flush redder every time you look at it - a photograph in a darkroom, developing. “But in other ways.”

Your mouth opens, but whatever defense you might’ve had gets traitorously stuck in your throat.

Karina laughs hoarsely, lets you trace her bottom lip with a finger. She seems to get the picture - that you’d love to see it bitten and bloody, but only ever in the name of art. There’s a kind of sick, sadistic beauty in destruction, battles waged and lost. She leans into your touch like she’s seen all the war films and knows precisely why they’re so well-loved. 

“For the record,” she tells you, arms looped loosely around your neck: “I look very pretty when I cry.” 

“Jesus Christ.” You’re smiling. She couldn’t be more perfect if you’d dreamt her up yourself. “Then I guess I’ll have to make it happen.” 

-

It’s like fate, probably. 

-

(Up next in your script:

The girl is standing in the stranger’s bathroom. She’s turning a little glass perfume bottle over in her hands when he stops in the doorway. He’s perfectly content to watch her; she’s the kind of beautiful that deserves to be observed, like some exotic wild animal caged between four walls in an elaborate exhibit, mildly unaware of all the attention. Her hair is messy; her head is tilted down. Unseeing. 

Oh, he says. That was my-

Except he doesn’t even get the rest of the sentence out before the girl whirls around, and the bottle slips from her hand and shatters on the floor. 

Jesus. The stranger jolts back. Jumpy. He’s not too concerned about the broken bottle; it’s not his, anyway. Why the fuck did you do that? 

Sorry, the girl says. She’s leaning rather casually against the counter, observing the glass covering the ground, the sickly-sweet smell of the perfume sticking to the tile. Honeysuckle and the sharp note of alcohol, rendered unrecognizable. You scared me. 

He looks down. A crystalline stretch of tiny little shards - if she tried to move she’d slice her foot open. 

No worries, he says. Hold on. 

He ducks into the kitchen to get a broom and when he comes back he stops in his tracks. There’s something slightly off about the picture in front of him. She’s small against the background counter, frozen, barely blinking. Everything about her looks suddenly frail, fair skin ghostly underneath shitty bathroom lighting, cheekbones gaunt and sunken-in, hair pouring ink-black in endless waves. A vengeful spirit. An incorporeal haunting. 

Did you…? he starts to say, thrown. 

She blinks, finally. Did I what? 

He pauses, reassesses. She’s gorgeous. She’s art. She’s vibrantly alive. 

Never mind, he says. 

It seems kind of like she’d moved, but he can’t tell. He forgets about it. She’s still beautiful and she seems okay and so he steps forward and clears the worst of the glass out of the way. 

It’s silly, she says, watching him. I used to know someone who wore that perfume. 

It was my ex-girlfriend’s, he says. She left it here a while back. I think it’s a common brand or whatever. Hey, let me help you. 

He’s very chivalrous about it, sweeping her off her feet, cradling her bridal-style across the possible remnants of glass. She laughs all the while, playing into it - a princess out of a fairy tale, being carried to safety by some gallant knight. But then he sets her down and cups her ass and says, You gonna pay me back for the property damage or what? and she laughs harder, because there’s nothing funnier than that: sweet moments turned filthy, a startling hairpin turn in intention. 

Or - conversely - a revelation of the absolute truth. Because what else could he ever want from her?

So she says, Yeah, sure, take everything, and leans in to kiss him.

It’s a normal kiss, mostly. It’s just that it begins pointedly erotic but seems to turn strange after a second, like he might be gripping her hair too hard, like she might be corpse-limp in his arms, like at any moment he could unhinge his jaw and sprout fangs and swallow her whole, cannibalistic, viperous. There’s too much spit and sound. There’s too much teeth and selfishness. It stretches on too long and lingers where it shouldn’t and overstays its welcome terribly - the score seems to fall off-beat, the lighting seems to shift dark and discolored-

But then the kiss breaks, and it’s over. 

When he pulls off of her she looks like the perfect picture of flushed contentment. Eyes half-lidded and lashes fluttering, her pouty lips swollen and rosy. Smiling like she wants more, like she wants it so, so bad. 

It didn’t get you? he asks finally, looking at her neck, thinking of thorns and pinprick pain and the rivulet of crimson that’d decorated her throat. The glass? 

No, she says. Don’t you wanna fuck me now? 

Oh, God, he says, grinning, and every other thought melts away into nothing. He likes how she doesn’t play coy. He likes how she’s smaller and has to tilt her chin up to look at him. He wants to fuck her, so he does. 

It’s excellent sex. The blood on the tile doesn’t really matter.)

-

Before you really start writing, there’s just one singular problem: you don’t know anything about her. 

“That’s not true,” Karina replies, right away. 

You open your mouth, then close it, because - okay, she’s not completely wrong. 

For about an hour now you just haven’t been able to stop talking to her. About anything, everything: your start into screenwriting, your favorite novels, your greatest inspirations, your neverending passion for eerie, erotic art. You can’t seem to shut up. And it would be bad - would be making you feel self-conscious right now, if it were anyone else - but it’s just not. Because it’s, well-

It’s you, you told her, thoughtfully, watching as the sun climbed higher into the sky, golden light grazing each scalpel-sharp edge of Karina’s body. You’re easy to talk to. Has anyone ever told you that?

Karina blinked at you. Tucked a strand of silky hair behind her ear and looked away, considering it. 

She has this way about her: this serene openness to her big eyes, her body language. Leaning back on her hands, humming and nodding and saying I get it, I feel that way too, I understand with such sweet sincerity that you can’t help but believe her. Like a Catholic confessional, a pristinely blank page - something you could pour hours and hours of words into that would never, ever complain. 

Yeah, Karina said, finally. She pulled one leg up to her chest; you could see the lacy black of her panties. I get that all the time. 

Just one of those people, huh? Her character was taking shape already. A vault for everyone else’s thoughts and ideas, cradling them between her fingers like something infinitely precious. A listener. Such a lovely trait; a perfect protagonist characteristic. An observer. 

Yeah. Her cheek rested gently against a knobby knee. Exactly. 

It’s something of an art study. You’ve been filing away these details about Karina since the moment you met her, unraveling her bit by bit.

She always seems to think deeply before she speaks, a sort of charming self-scripting, like she wants to make sure she gets every sentence just right. She makes silence seem like the most natural thing in the world. She doesn’t laugh nervously or blush or get embarrassed, ever. She’d mentioned offhand during one of your tangents about your most beloved movies that she tends to like films about gorgeous, dangerous, scarily self-possessed girls: Thirteen and Black Swan and Girl, Interrupted. She seems both intensely present and consistently lost in thought, there one moment and gone the next, her long-lashed gaze falling in and out of focus like a camera lens. A contradiction, you think to yourself. An enigma, even. Profoundly complicated. Not just a girl but something more. 

Art in and of itself, displayed deliberately on your kitchen counter, waiting to be understood. 

“No, you’re right.” Your fingers have strayed to your open laptop; you’re seconds from typing Karina’s name like a title, something you’ve created all on your own. “I know…”

You’re trying to think of something nonchalant to say and failing. I know you - the first instinct, somehow. I know you’re something brilliant and remarkable and new. I know I’ve never felt this way before about anyone. I know there’s something here, I know what I feel, I know what I want - you, you, you. 

Karina stares at the ice melting in her glass. 

Then she says, mouth tripping up at a corner: “You know I’m a world-class fuck.” 

“Jesus.” You laugh out loud, surprised. “Okay, yeah. That.” A pause. “And, obviously-” 

“Obviously,” Karina echoes, like she knows where this is going. 

“I know that you’re, like - outrageously fucking beautiful.” 

Karina hums once, letting the compliment wash over her, and turns to look out the window. 

You bite down on your lip - bite back all the other too-soon things you could say about her, threatening to claw their way out of your mouth - and go in on your script instead. 

It’s shockingly easy to write with her in the room. The details seem to stitch themselves together on-page, the restorative aftermath of an autopsy: sealing the slit chest cavity back up, prepping a corpse for an open casket, making something disconnected whole and beautiful again. You’d pulled these specifics from her like pulsing, throbbing organs - her tits, her tone, her tiny waist - and now all you’re doing is repurposing them. You know her body now. You turn stretches of pale, bruised-pink skin into prose, the curl of her little fingers around her thigh into dialogue. You imagine taking that perfect frame and picking it apart again, bit by bit; not just undressing her but peeling back layers of flesh, familiarizing yourself with the stark scarlet of her bloodstream. Until there’s nothing to hide and you can finally say it - I know you - and it’ll feel earned, and real, and honest. 

All very melodramatic, of course. It’s just the process: the natural consequence of being a writer. 

Your eyes trace the jutting protrusion of muscle in Karina’s throat, and you think about fucking her again. 

“Also,” you say, as though your earlier conversation isn’t long over. “I want to know-”

Karina makes a huffy, half-impatient noise.

You grin, gaze flicking back to her face. “What?” 

“You want to know more?” Her brows furrow in exaggerated confusion; her smile is absurdly self-deprecating. As if there’s anything she could possibly be insecure about. “You already got the two most interesting things about me, babe.” 

“Stop.” Your mouth twitches. “No way.” 

Karina’s smile stills in place, expectant. “No?”

“Come on.” Your hand slips from the keyboard to trace her knee. “I’m sure there’s all kinds of interesting things about you I haven’t learned yet.” 

The laugh she lets out is quiet and nearly secretive, legs parting to let you touch her. You’re already half in some faraway daydream, wondering if you can bottle the color of her eyes and turn it loose on the page.

“Okay,” Karina says, easily. She nudges your laptop away, scoots closer to you, her sharp chin pointed down at you. “Come and learn them, then.” 

“God.” As if that’s what you’re doing. Memorizing her body as some private education; taking her apart in a classroom dissection. “Can I - I’m trying to write, Karina. I’m being productive. I…” You’re shaking your head as though you’re not already giving in, fingers slipping up her thighs - she’s smirking at you like she knows it. “You’re fucking insatiable, you know that?”

“Then satiate me.” Karina’s head tilts, lids heavy. “Fuck me. Use me.” She leans down like she’s telling you a filthy, sordid secret. “Cum in me like I know you want to.” 

There’s something surreal about how certain she is: never tripping over her words or waffling over intentions, the most practiced actress you’ve ever seen. Every move - her tongue wetting her bottom lip, her hand sliding gracefully through her hair, her mouth forming a sweet little pout - all clean, choreographed precision. 

I know you, she says - like it’s earned, real, honest. Inexplicable, but there anyway. I know you want to. 

“Karina.” Her name comes out embarrassingly strangled. You’re pulling her thighs further apart, toying with the edge of her underwear. “You’re such a fucking - you’re so needy.” 

Her smirk sharpens even as you tug her panties roughly to the side. “I’m what?” 

“Needy.” 

“No.” She’s so wet - she’s probably seconds from dissolving into a whimpering breathless thing, begging to be underneath you, begging for more. That damn smirk is probably seconds from shattering completely. “What were you going to call me?” 

“Nothing.” You drag a finger down the slick drenched heat of her cunt.

“A slut.” Her voice is a purr, gravelly and sensual. “You think I’m just this fucking slut who needs your cock all the time, huh?” 

But it’s the kind of question that you already both know the answer to. Karina takes your finger-fucking so well, hips raised and rutting, hair cutting across her cheekbones - seems to give herself over to desire so fucking easily, with her whole body, back arching and neck craned and hot little cunt a sloppy mess. Never puts up a fight, never demures or acts shy; never says wait or don’t or stop. Only spreads her legs, and drips down your hand, and waits to be fucked good and hard.

And - hey, there’s one dirty word for a girl like that. 

“Well.” You raise your eyebrows at her: a challenge. “Are you?”

It’s dangerous. This is all dangerous. Stumbling down a treacherous path, asking a stranger something like this. Are you what I think you are? Do I know you? Do I really? 

Karina makes a low, luxurious noise at the stretch of your fingers in her cunt, buried to the knuckle. 

“Sure,” she says - and the gleam in her eye tells you she knows exactly what she’s getting herself into. “I’m whatever you want me to be.” 

-

So, it’s possible this is really the most interesting thing about her: she’s the kind of girl who never says no. 

-

That scene goes down how all scenes should:

“Fuck, fuck, fuck-” 

Karina’s choking out curses like she can’t recall any other words, head lolling back to expose the pretty bob of her throat. You thrust deep right then and she lets out a sound like an aching gasp, like you’ve doubled down with a fist to her gut, like you’re knocking the the air right out of her; you might as well be - oh, she moans, like she could be in shock or awe or pain - with the way you’ve got one of her thighs pulled up so you can fuck deep into her tight dripping cunt. It’s not nice, not really. Her back keeps hitting your counter. You keep staring at her neck and her hair and her face: the faint flush of her cheeks, the flawless construction of her bones underneath - there’s so much unmarked skin - God, she’s so clean, it’s like she’s never been fucking touched-

“You gonna cum for me?” you murmur, voice coming out thick and half-animalistic. 

She has one hand curled around the back of your neck. She’s got those ridiculous clawed nails on her but she never presses down. Her pussy can’t stop clenching around your cock but she takes it so well, lets you make room inside her little cunt, shuts her eyes and trips over her own breath as you force her spine hard against your counter over and over again. 

“Karina.” 

“Yeah,” she exhales, raspy and strained, as your cock stretches her out. “Fuck, yeah-” 

“Cum for me, honey. Cum all over my cock - oh, there you go, good girl-” 

It’s hypnotic. The tiny bitten-off sounds spilling from her ice-cold mouth - that small pristine face and all that hair tangled to her waist, just available to be knotted and tugged and fucked all the way up - Karina clings to you when she cums, and you feel so much bigger than her when she does, like you’ve got her sloppy and open around your cock and you could do anything to her, that’s what she told you, and even if she hadn’t, it’s not like she could stop you - she’s gorgeous but she doesn’t have it in her - she’s just too fucking delicate-

It happens too fast to process. 

One minute you’re buried inside her pussy and the next Karina’s on her knees, on the ground, and you’re jerking your cock until you’re cumming all over her. 

It’s obscene. It’s fucking inevitable. Thick ropes of creamy cum coating her forehead, her cheekbone, her nose and mouth and getting all in that hair-

Her hair. You don’t realize how hard you’re gripping her hair with one hand - balled in a brutal fist at the back of her head - until you disentangle your fingers from it and Karina sinks to the floor like she’s just been cut loose from marionette strings, breathing fast and hard. She doesn’t even say anything: doesn’t comment on the fact that you’d just shoved her straight to the ground or complain when the head of your cock smears cum across her jaw. Doesn’t even flinch when your cock slaps heavy across her cheek, at the indecent sound of the impact. 

You’re staring at her, open-mouthed. At her gorgeous, breathtaking, defiled face. 

Karina’s not looking at you. Instead, she’s preening in the most lewd, pornographic way possible: swiping her thumb through the cum streaking across her forehead, popping it into her mouth to suck. Halfway through she seems to remember you’re still in the room - seems to recall the value of a performance - and she redirects her gaze up at you, lids heavy, and smirks. 

“Did I…” you start, without knowing how the sentence will end. “Did I - was I-”

Karina lifts a cum-covered eyebrow. Her mouth’s an arresting pink, puckering around her thumb like it puckered around the cubes of ice, how her lips formed a ring around your cock back in the bookstore yesterday. She lets it slip free, shiny with spit. 

“No,” she says. “You’re good.” 

You can’t stop looking at the cum caught in her hairline. She’d been so fucking clean. 

You glance down and realize there are strands of black hair broken off in your clenched fist. 

Karina’s looking at her hair in your hand too, now, but with a sort of amused detachment. She stands shakily, using the counter for support. There’s cum all over her. Her knees are red from how hard she’d been pushed down.

“You’re so cute,” she tells you, grazing the side of your neck with her fingertips. “There’s no shame in being rough with me, babe.” 

“Right.” There’s an unnamed pressure coiling in your chest. “But - but you-” 

“Hey.” The word comes out in a rasp, and then Karina laughs, pushing the low hoarse lilt of her voice to its limits. She steps closer, angles her little cum-stained chin up at you. “Are you really gonna tell me you don’t like seeing me covered in your cum?” She’s tonguing the corner of her mouth. “Turning me into a-” her smirk pulls wicked; your next breath hitches so badly- “messy fucking whore for your cock?” 

“God,” you get out, because she’s winding an arm around your neck, and her pretty face is still sticky with your cum. “I-” 

“It’s what you wanted.” Karina blinks, in a show of such doe-eyed naïveté that saliva begins pooling hot in your mouth - like you’re feral, like you’re rabid. “Isn’t it?” 

You’re looking down again. Her knees are going to bruise. Black and blue, as if someone’s bullied her in the schoolyard, pulled her pigtails and knocked her to the asphalt. An echo of something teachers could’ve told her years ago: oh, look, he’s mean to you because he’s got a crush. It’s okay, really - he only hurts you because he likes you.  

“You like me like this,” Karina murmurs, dangerously low. “All sloppy and slutty for you.” Her gaze is trained on your mouth. “Marking me up.” Her hair slips from your hand. “Owning me.” 

Her name clogs your throat, cloying and candy-sweet. “Karina-”

Karina’s head tilts. “Yes or no?” 

She’s too close to you. She’s so filthily beautiful she seems somewhat alien, some kind of foreign invention. Her jaw is smeared with your cum and her flawless teeth shine like jewels and she’s like every creative vision you’ve ever had cut in clips and playing back in a movie theater, made to be scrutinized. 

“Yes,” you tell her, winded. “You’re fucking - you’re unreal, you know that?”

You’re smiling like it’s flattery, like it’s an exaggeration. Like she’s not living, breathing, visionary art. 

She smiles back, like she knows just how much you really mean it.

“So I’ve been told,” Karina says, and taps your neck, lightly. “Go make breakfast.” She shakes her hair out; some of it gets stuck to the cum on her cheekbone. “I’m taking another shower.” 

“Right.” You bite into your bottom lip, hand skimming down her side. “Go get clean.” 

“Clean?” She steps back and flashes a disbelieving grin, gestures pointedly at herself - her creamy thighs, her porn star tits in your t-shirt, her body like sex itself. Dirty by design. “Never happening.”

Some cynical part of you keeps waiting for a slip-up, some mistake in a masterfully crafted script - no one can be that gorgeous and still be here with you. But Karina moves and your eyes are hopelessly drawn to the disheveled curtain of her hair spiraling down her back, the sharp distinct lines of her calves, the flex of muscle in her thighs. Her hands, balled into little fists. She’s alluring as if manufactured that way: engineered to be perfectly bruisable, ruinable. It defies logic. It’s movie magic.

“Well.” You snort with laughter, swat at Karina’s ass as she turns to go. “At least you can try.”

You don’t even think she can help it - that’s the thing. It’s just what she was made for. 

-

“What would you have done if I said no, though?” you ask after a moment, as she wavers in the doorway. “Like - what if I told you I didn’t like you like this?” 

Karina shrugs.

“I would’ve been something else,” she says, and closes the bathroom door behind her. 

-

(Next:

The stranger and the girl fuck and afterwards he promises her breakfast and then he realizes his cabinets are bare, his fridge painfully unstocked. Sorry, he says, as she pokes around his kitchen. I don’t know how that happened. I usually have something to eat here, I swear. 

I don’t mind, she says. Her fingertips sweep his shelves. She seems fascinated by the emptiness, admiring the vacancy. Oh, wait, look. 

She finds a half-eaten jar of honey that she ends up scooping up crudely with her fingers, dripping sticky amber down her hand. He’d tell her that’s disgusting but she makes it - as she seems to make everything - into a pointed seduction, her tongue pink and wetly visible, her skin gleaming as she licks it off. It’s funny. He’d never thought it possible to turn eating into some sort of sexual performance but she manages it anyway: meets his eyes, sucks loud and lewd, smacks her lips and wipes her mouth with her thumb, ill-mannered and stunning. 

I can’t imagine that’s very filling, he says, delighted by her commitment. 

Yeah, well, she says. It’s a good thing I hate feeling full. 

But it seems like a moment of hilarious irony when ten minutes later he’s got her bent over his kitchen counter, tits pressed punishingly to the flat surface, honey stuck to her neck and collarbone as she’s fucked hard again and again, stuffed with his cock, his fingers everywhere, like her own body barely even belongs to her - all mine, he keeps saying, and means it; you’re all mine. All filled up. Overfed. Bursting. 

Sex is a manner of consuming, it seems. He might as well be eating her alive.)

-

“Do you do this a lot?”

Eventually, it turns into one of those lazy Saturdays. An afternoon of sitcom plot points. 

It’s just so easy to fill the time, the space, the page - you tell Karina some inane story from your college years and she reacts in all the right places like your own built-in studio audience; she says something off-handed and enticingly vague and suddenly you have a new thread of dialogue to explore. You’re both sprawled out over your couch, Karina’s got her thighs tucked over your legs, wearing another one of your t-shirts, a fresh hickey bruising over her throat. There’s something delightfully domestic about it - like you’ve been doing it for a lot longer than you have, or like you could do it eternally if given the chance, holding all the silken comfort of an old routine. When you’d mentioned it - I kind of feel like I could do this forever - she’d laughed her scratchy laugh and said forever’s nowhere near as long as you think it is, babe. A perfectly cinematic line. You stared at her, leaned over, and added it immediately to your draft. 

“This whole…” You’re trying to elaborate now, staring at the blinking cursor on your laptop screen. Your knuckles skim her bare, bony knees. “You know.” 

“Eloquent.” 

“Shut up.” 

“I thought you were a writer.” 

“Karina.” You’re charmed by the drawl of her voice, the raspy roll of sarcasm. “I’m just wondering.”

Karina shifts in your lap. You’ve got one hand sneaking up the hem of her shirt - your shirt - skating up her tummy, her ribs. You’re probably about five minutes from snapping your laptop shut and pulling her on top of you and saying something crass about her tits and passing it off as a character study. 

“What do you mean?” She’s as close to clean as she can be. You made sure of it - licked the hollow of her collarbone earlier after she got out of the shower, tasted nothing but soap and skin. “Do I have a lot of sex with strangers? Or do I stay the night a lot after I have sex with strangers?”

“Both.” You think of taking her hair down, sifting your hand through it, wrapping the strands around your fingers. “All of the above.” 

Karina shoots you a look, fluttered lashes, suggestive understanding. You hear it without her having to say it. You want me to tell you that you’re special. 

“I’ve kind of been going through a phase,” she says instead, nonchalantly. 

Your eyebrows fly up. “A phase?” 

“I’ve been, you know.” She gives an airy sigh. “Trying to find myself in the big city. Running wild. Terrified of monogamy but being very brave and quirky about it. Sordid past with love and romance and general human connection. Doing the whole manic pixie dream girl thing.” Her eyes flick to your open laptop, abruptly too wide and innocent. “That sound about right?” 

“Fuck off.” It’s a complete non-answer. You run a hand past her stomach, laughing. “You’re fucking with me.”

“What?” Karina inches closer. “Isn’t that what you wanted? Your textbook rom-com love interest?”

You make a rather disparaging sound in the back of your throat. “Ugh.” 

“Oh, my bad.” Her mouth curls, contradictory. There’s nothing apologetic about her. “I forgot. You don’t believe in art about love. You wanna see broken people and broken people only.” 

“See?” You’re obsessed with her tone; all flirtation, some distorted version of come-hither charm. Talking of suffering like it’s a seduction tactic. “You get it.” 

Karina rakes a hand through her hair; her fingers fall to the back of her neck and linger there. She pulls herself out of your lap and turns, hooks one bare long leg over you until she’s straddling you. Your hands find her hips. You’re disarmed by her strange weightlessness, like she’s seconds from either shattering or taking flight.  

Then she asks, “Is that what you’re doing with me?”

It’s gotta be a very roundabout request to fuck her stupid, because she follows it up torturously: ducks her chin, parts her lips, rocks her hips down until you groan. You watch her throat, the way muscle works over bone, picturing unspeakable things: taking her by that pretty neck and pinning her to the wall, ripping your shirt right off of her with your fingertips leaving bruises - bending her over to fuck her fast and cruel until her cunt’s raw and aching and leaking your cum - until she’s begging pathetically, saying please, God, please - and you’re triumphant, victorious. Telling her you asked for this, didn’t you? You said anything. You said anything I want. 

“Depends,” you reply, when you can breathe again. “Are you a broken person?” 

Karina stops, moments from your mouth. 

“Depends,” she echoes. “Is that what you want from me?”

It actually takes a beat for the question to sink in. Then two, then-

“No,” you say, loudly. “Obviously not, Karina, Jesus. Why would I…”

You falter. 

Karina only looks back at you, patient, tolerant. Like if right now you said that’s exactly it: I want you broken, I want you ruined, I want you decaying and dead and buried, she’d smile and say do your worst. Flashing those white, white teeth, perfect like pearls, ready to be knocked right out and strung together. 

You blink the bloody vision away. “Why would I ever want that?”

Karina studies you for a second longer, expression indecipherable. 

“Okay,” she agrees, breezily. “Then I’m not broken. I’m just going through a phase, like I said. I don’t like being tied down.” Her shirt rides tantalizingly high up her thighs; her hand slips down to palm your cock. There’s a twist to her lips, a dirty sort of smirk. “You understand that, right?”

You stare at her.

“Right?” Karina prods, again, low and sultry. 

“Right,” you say, unable to fight your sudden smile. 

The pout of her mouth’s an inevitability; her little body in your lap’s a seductive form of foreshadowing. You dig your fingers into her protruding ribs, playful, and you don’t quite get the squeal of laughter you were expecting - all Karina does is curl closer, expecting more, expecting harder. She knows what you’re capable of. You’re both just biding your time until you cross the same line you’ve been crossing and you fall back into bed again.

“A phase,” you add, considering. It intrigues you, anyway - the casualness, the connotation. “So - I’m not special, then. That’s the moral of this story.” 

Karina’s fingers sift gently through your hair. “You wanna be special?”

“I mean, yeah.” Your palm falls to her neck, presses down. She doesn’t seem to mind. “Doesn’t everyone?” 

Her eyebrows rise in vague, unconvinced amusement. It makes sense: she’s the most special of all, a cosmic glitch, an angelic fluke. Someone like Karina wouldn’t understand the aching, clawing, consuming desire to be extraordinary. She’s already there. 

Your hand on her throat looks even bigger now, tendons straining from underneath skin.

“I think we all want to feel important,” you mumble, thumb grazing gently across her jaw. “Don’t you?” 

You’re pretty sure the wry, glittering smile that sits at Karina’s mouth is an answer in itself. 

-

Alright, forget your television metaphors - you’re not sure there’s any sitcom out there that goes quite like this.

“By the way,” you say, grinning against her hair as you pull her to the bedroom. “Did you say you don’t like being tied down?” 

Karina turns in your arms and doesn’t even flinch when you force her too hard against the doorframe and its edge smacks into her shoulder blade, digging in hard. You should apologize but you don’t; the possibility of her in pain seems laughable, a distant fantasy. This is how it goes, fucking a girl who looks like a god - your brain is convinced she’s wholly immune to hurt. The universe wouldn’t actually let someone so pretty bleed. 

“Oh, sorry,” she says, voice raspy with insinuation. “Let me rephrase.” 

“Karina,” you say, not really like a warning - more like you’ve got something to prove. This is real. You’re really here. You’re really this perfect, gorgeous, greedy thing. You’re really made for me. 

Karina only lets her lips tilt in a smirk, devilish and knowing.

“I meant that I don’t like commitment,” she says. “I love being tied down.”

She’s still smiling when you shove her through the doorway, across the threshold - across that same old fucking line.

-

Not that it makes a difference now, but one of the reasons you and your most recent ex-girlfriend broke up was because of what you’d both referred to as sexual incompatibility. Actually, there were about fourteen other things, too - she was a trainwreck and a textbook attention whore; you spent all your time writing and she took offense to the fact that you found your scripts more interesting than her - but the crux of the sex problem between the two of you was that she thought you wanted too much power over her. She seemed to assume that was the point of potentially tying her up and shit like that: to exert power. To put you and only you in control. To make her into this helpless little toy - and I hate that, she’d said, working herself into a fit, I hate feeling helpless. 

You hadn’t pushed her. You’d also tried to justify it in a number of ways. It isn’t about that. It’s not about control. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But it hadn’t made a difference and she hadn’t believed you and you’d come to the reluctant, inevitable conclusion that that particular dream would never actually get fulfilled. 

Until-

“Look at you, baby.” 

Until now, when you’ve got Karina stripped bare and tied to your bed, thighs parted as you kneel over her, pretty little cunt glistening wet and tits heaving with every breath as she waits, and waits, and waits. 

Eyes half-lidded. Utterly fuckable. A curated collection of every salacious desire you’ve ever had. 

“You’ve been looking at me forever,” murmurs Karina, her tone still humorous, like the reason her voice is run so ragged is because she’s holding back a fit of giggles. “You gonna fuck me anytime soon?” 

To Karina’s credit, the idea of tying her up didn’t seem to bother her one bit. She’d let you knot her wrists to your bedframe and only grinned sharply when you asked her if it was too much. She didn’t seem to care about feeling helpless or feeling bad. Actually - judging from the wetness that collects on your fingers as you rub two of them over her cunt - it all seemed to turn her on either way. 

“You’re so fucking mouthy.” You lift your hand only to ghost it over her stomach, leaving a lewd shiny streak across her skin. “It’s like you want to be punished.” 

“Well, you put in all this work.” Karina yanks at the ropes tethering her wrists to the bedframe until they bite so severely into her skin that it turns white. “I’d hate to see it go to waste.” 

“Not a waste.” 

“No?” She’s got that seductive little smirk on, legs spread shamelessly, head back and throat bared. 

“Nope.” Your eyes rove down her body. “It’s a great view, actually.”

You’re shocked by the sound Karina makes, then: harsh and derisive, scratchy and painful, like she’s choking badly around some injury in her throat. You’re half-expecting her to turn her face and spit blood onto your sheets - all murder-scene evidence, horrifically vibrant gore. Coughing up her own vocal chords. 

It’s so awful it actually takes you a minute to realize that she’s laughing. 

“Karina?” you say, perturbed.

“Oh, please.” Karina hacks out one more horrid laugh. “Cut the shit.” 

You draw your hand back uncertainly. “What are you-”

“Come on, man.” There’s a glint to Karina’s gaze as she looks up at you: bored, mocking, infuriating. Irises flashing like the darkest corners of haunted houses, set-ups for a summoning; lashes like cobwebs, self-spun and delicate. “Fuck me or leave me alone.”

For a second you just stare at her, unmoving, something caustic and furious threading up your spine. 

And then-

Look, none of this next part is on you. You can’t blame yourself. It’s her - her tiny hands in tight clenched fists, tummy so flat it seems caved-in, hollowed-out; her own glimmer of slick smeared on her belly, physical proof of how desperately slutty she really is. The bruise on her chest; the one on her throat. Her goddamn eyes. Her lazy, lilting drawl, the exact matter-of-fact casualness she’d had last night when she’d told you to hurt her - fuck me or leave me alone. 

It’s so obvious what she’s trying to do - provoke a reaction out of you. It’s gotta be the only reason she’s talking to you like that. Like, what else are we here for? Like, what else could I possibly want from you? 

So - no, God, it’s not your fault. 

But-

It’s over before you can even think about it. Before you’ve even rationalized doing it, before you recognize the sound ricocheting through the room as the perfect violent land of a blow, the hot whiplash of skin on skin, your palm connecting with its target. Before you blink, and recalibrate, and you take in the rapid reddening of her cheek, and her angled jaw, and her hair falling starkly past her chin - it’s too late. It’s already done. 

Because you’ve just slapped Karina clean across the face - hard. 

“Oh.” You’re babbling as if on autopilot, all your nerves on shutdown. “Oh. Oh, God. Karina-” 

Karina licks the corner of her lip, like she can taste the impact. 

“Jesus Christ,” you’re saying, panicking; you can’t shut up. You don’t know what to do with your hands; you find yourself kneeling carefully in front of her, cupping her face, stroking her temples with your thumbs like it’ll soothe the sting. You can’t believe you hit her. All the things you could do to a girl like that, and you - “I’m sorry. I didn’t - fuck, baby. I’m sorry.”

Karina blinks up at you, expression placid and blank, porcelain-doll cool. 

“For what?” she asks. 

You freeze, her face still between your palms. “For-”

But the serene tilt of her mouth makes the words die in your throat. 

“Seriously.” Karina’s voice is softer now, a kind twist of mirth. “Isn’t that what you wanted to do with me this whole time?” 

Her features seem to fall out of alignment, occurring to you in cut, edited fragments - the baby-animal eyes, the bone-white glint of teeth, the pretty blooming flush of her cheek, blood rising underneath skin but never breaking through. No evidence of a limit breached; she doesn’t wince or wail or cry. She wears the hit so well. She’s smiling. A you-don’t-need-to-be-sorry smile, a you’re-forgiven smile: I’m strong, I’m good, I can take it. Whatever you need. Whatever you have to give. 

You blink and Karina reassembles, stitched up at the seams, beautiful and uninjured and intact.

“You want this,” you exhale, a wondrous revelation.

“Of course.” Karina’s shoulders rise as much as they can with her arms so tightly tied back. “You do, don’t you?” 

The panic recedes, and something else - something electric and brutal, visceral, intoxicating - takes its place instead. 

It’s the way she says it: rhetorical, all-knowing. As if she’s seen exactly what’s in your mind - what repulsive daydreams have settled right behind your ribcage, clawing to be set free - and she’s offering her own body in sacrifice. Saying here, put them here. 

So you do. 

She doesn’t even look surprised when you slap her again. 

“See?” Karina’s chin tips upwards in delicious, submissive invitation: eyes darkly pleased, pale skin a burning wildfire, curled mouth a beckoning. Like it’s been what she’s waiting for, all along. “There you are.” 

And when you’re finally able to catch your breath:

Oh, you think, in some exhilarating epiphany. Here I am. 

Every single reservation falls out the window. Karina’s smirk slants viciously and then you’ve got your hands all over her, on her shoulders and her tits and her hips and her throat and her face, thumb digging hard into her cheekbone. Any sort of gentle caution is gone when you’re getting on top of her and burying your cock deep inside the suffocating vice of her aching little cunt, half-drunk on the high mewling moans you’re forcing out of her, head swimming at the drenched audible sound of her pussy every time you fuck into her - at how tight she clenches down around your cock. Fuck it all, then, it’s not like it means anything - hurt me, she’d said, running through your head on loop; I want it so bad, I need it, hurt me - and so you do, wrapping a hand around her delicate neck and pressing down, slapping hard against her heaving tits, salivating over the marks that you leave. She doesn’t even struggle. Takes it like a good girl, an obedient girl: something meant to be hit and torn up and pulled apart. A hands-on art piece. A disassembling, made purely for audience consumption; a sign hung around her neck that says leave your mark, that’s the point. You’d been so naïve, thinking of being careful with her - like she’d ever even fucking want that-

“You like it like this.” Your voice sounds raw, almost unrecognizable; your fingers press into the base of her throat. “This is all you needed, huh? You just needed to be roughed up real hard.” Your hand trails up to grip a fistful of her hair, merciless. Karina shuts her eyes. “Like you’re just a slutty fucktoy-” 

Karina chokes out a small, wet gasp.

“Oh, baby.” You yank harder at her hair. “It’s okay to admit it.”

But in a way, she already is. Doesn’t fight against the restraints tying her wrists, doesn’t flinch at how rough you’re fucking her, doesn’t whine or blink back tears at the harsh graze of your thumbnail against her nipple. Like she’s a plaything, here in your bed for your pleasure alone. Like-

“Like you were just fucking made for this, yeah?” She comes undone so easily: cunt a wet sticky mess when you reach down to rub her clit, teeth pearly-white where they’re caught on her bottom lip - though nothing can hold back the anguished noise Karina lets out at your pace, the thick stretch of your cock, your palm smacking at her tits over and over. “Look at you. That face, these tits, this little fucking cunt-”

Like it’s her one and only purpose - to have all her fair skin turned searing red and bruised under someone else’s hands. Her cunt just begging to be split open and stuffed full, railed so hard she could break. It’s gotta be what she was created for. She’s more than mortal, so above the concept of imperfection; a nasty little fuckdoll of a girl, meant to be used hard and licked clean. She looks too irresistible all fucked-out and ruined. It has to be in her nature. Made for this, you keep telling her: to be fucked until she can’t walk. To be treated forever how you’re treating her now. 

Your ex-girlfriend couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s not about power or control at all.

“You’d really just let me do anything to you, huh?” you murmur, awed, but you’re holding her throat too hard for her to reply. 

You fuck her, and fuck her, and fuck her. Rub at her clit until she clamps down and cums around you, until you can really get on top of her, force her to hold those huge tits together so you can fuck them. You can’t handle how tiny she is underneath you, her face and her mouth slack with lust, eyes glazed over entirely. She squeezes her tits around your cock. She’s hardly even human. It’s the best thing about her. 

“That’s how I know you’re a fucking whore.” Your grin feels wide and manic on your face. You’re gonna cum all over her - again. “None of this even matters.” 

And it’s only after - after you’ve painted her collarbone and chest creamy white and let up on her throat so she can fight for air; after you’ve groped her tits and grabbed her face after just to see your cum glistening all over her perfect slap-marred cheeks; after you’ve rolled off of her and you finally leave her alone - that Karina gives you a response. 

“No,” she says, hoarsely, staring up at the ceiling. “It really, really doesn’t.” 

-

Power just isn’t the right word for it. It’s something much more beautiful than that. 

Desire. You’re dozing off, halfway in a sleepy fantasy. You imagine rolling the word around in your mouth, using it in speeches, citing it as an obvious central theme. It’s about desire, you’d say, in interviews, at film festivals, patiently explaining your motivations to the masses. That irrational animal instinct. That innate human greediness. You’ll maybe even throw in some fun anecdote about how people in past relationships never agreed with you. It’s never been about power, though, you’d explain: how foolish, how crude. It’s about the ache of truly wanting something. Isn’t that so much more romantic?

So you’ll make a movie about this one day. So you tied Karina to the bed and slapped her hard and fucked her senseless. Actually, you picture yourself explaining, foggy and on verge of falling asleep: actually, it’s about hunger. Irrepressible, all-consuming hunger. That’s why I did this. That’s why I’ll keep doing it. You’re all like me; you get it. That makes sense, doesn’t it? 

And it will, to raucous, riotous applause.

Good. You’ll laugh so hard. You’re dreaming, now; you can’t tell if you’re talking about the sex or the hypothetical future movie. I’m glad you understand. Anyone would’ve done what I did. 

Because - honestly - what’s the point of starving yourself of something that’s right in front of you?

-

(Let’s pull back from your script for a second. Here’s a real story:

A few months back you were visiting a museum with one of your friends when you got into this conversation about performance art. He’d told you about a woman back in the seventies who walked into a gallery and laid out various objects and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her for six whole hours. Her as the artist, in title only; herself as the art. A free, untethered canvas. 

And what happened? you asked, morbidly curious. 

Your friend grimaced. What do you think happened? 

It was a rhetorical question. The performance had been a test of what the general public was capable of - a reflection of their moral compass, of what they’d do if left unchecked. The setup spoke for itself. You didn’t have to get all the gory details in order to understand. 

Seriously, though, your friend said, about the artist: I don’t know what’d compel someone to do something like that to themselves. He’d shaken his head, baffled. Like - I think it takes a deeply fucked up person to just give up their body like that. Like it doesn’t even matter to them. 

It’s strange. It’s an almost universally accepted fact that, at least on some level, artists are inclined to put pieces of themselves into the things they create. A memory; a feeling. Condensing twenty different emotions into a single acrylic painting, or a lyrical reenactment of heartbreak into a song - something personal and unique and lovely. Often inspired, sure, but yours. 

I think that’s what’s funny about it, you told your friend, before you realized that funny was a fucked up word to use here. There’s nothing personal about that. It’s so detached. It’s about the rest of the world, whatever they might make of her - it’s not about her at all. 

You were both quiet, thinking. Visualizing what it might’ve been like. To be there, one of many in the audience, watching this woman who had thrown herself to the wolves and asked to be ripped apart. 

She’s just - material for them to use, I guess, you said, after a moment. A blank page. 

Removing her own identity; becoming nothing, no one. A ghost. An empty vessel. A slab of clay, taking on the impression of everyone who’s ever touched her: the ridges of fingerprints, the half-moon cuts of nails, molding her into something new. Even if it took some force. Even if it hurt. 

Still, it’s what she’d asked for. 

You can’t imagine she’d ever expected anything else.)

-

There’s this fascinating complaint people have about films these days, you’ve found. It’s actually quite the phenomenon. You talk to your colleagues and scroll through social media and read comments on movie trailers trying to get a grasp on it all: market research. This isn’t realistic, people gripe. It’d never sound like that. She’d never look like that. This would never, ever happen - God, are you kidding? Who are they trying to fool? As if they’ve somehow missed the point of fiction - of a sweet, escapist fantasy. As if they’ve convinced themselves that the real world is better. 

Which is moronic, obviously. 

“So what’s the solution?” Karina asks.

Well, you’re no expert; it’s been a while since you’d finished your last movie.

“But you have an idea,” Karina interpets. She’s perched on the edge of your coffee table, nursing a new glass of ice. She’s watching you with her head at an angle, eyes shrewd. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be telling me this.” 

As with most of her guesses about you, she’s right. 

“It’s all about the details,” you say, after a moment. “It humanizes a person. Having little bits and pieces about who they are - it makes them alive. Their likes, their dislikes. Embarrassing stories. Things that make them laugh. Diary entries, favorite foods - first loves, first heartbreaks. So on and so forth.” You’ve got one of Karina’s ankles between your hands; your thumb brushes against the bulbous protrusion of bone. “It’s what makes people real.” 

Karina’s mouth twists, sharp and strange; it takes a second for you to realize that she’s grinning. 

“Oh, right,” she says. “You want me to spill my guts to you.” She pushes her ankle further into your grip. Her legs are just like the rest of her: thin and pale, waifish. Like a nineties catwalk model. “That’s how you’re gonna make me real. In your movie.” 

You pull a face, letting her ankle slip from your hands. Spill her guts; what an ugly figure of speech. As if you’re doing something much more invasive and violent than just writing about her. 

“Basically,” you agree, anyway. “I mean, it helps that you’re already, you know - a real, whole, living person.” 

“Ugh,” says Karina, dry and amused. “Barely.” 

You wonder if she’s also thinking about this morning; you, stunned and staring at her cum-streaked hair, calling her unreal.

She’s got a point, in a way. There’s something slightly uncanny about her sitting in front of you, as if she’s been taken straight out of some wildly different scene - some spotlit stage, some movie set, some glossy high-budget existence - and haphazardly edited into your life. You reach out and press two fingers to the side of her neck, like they do on television if they think someone’s bleeding out. 

Karina tips her head to allow you access. Her pulse throbs hotly under your touch. 

“I don’t know,” you say, smiling at the swanlike line of her throat. “You seem pretty alive to me.” 

“Sure.” Her hair tickles your wrist. “But you want more.”

She says it like it’s this given - as if she’s always faced with people wanting more from her. You wouldn’t doubt it, little tease she is. You can picture her in motion so easily. Always running. Letting people pine and plead for more. 

“Yeah,” you say. It seems pointless to lie to her. “I want more.” 

Karina leans in closer. She reaches up and touches one of your knuckles with the pad of her thumb. Without makeup, you can see the shadows of dark circles underneath her eyes, but even those look painted-on, pre-planned; a study on the aesthetic allure of bruises. She lets her gaze drop to your mouth, then bites down on her bottom lip. Impish.

“Karina,” you say, grinning wider now. 

It’s one of those unspoken things: the translation of body language, the transcription of the tilt of her mouth. Then have me, she’s saying, almost certainly - like a swooning melodramatic heroine, throwing herself into your lap, wanting to be saved. You want more? You want me? I’m right here. I’m yours.

“Fine,” Karina purrs, and kisses you again, like sealing a contract. “Take it all.” 

-

You don’t fuck her again - not at first. There’s more than one way to take someone apart. 

Karina says she’s got a story for you and then she pulls out her phone. 

“This was back in high school,” she explains, scrolling back through her photo gallery. There don’t seem to be a lot of recent additions to it; you’d expected selfies, pictures of her with friends. There are more photos of food than anything: plates of pasta and donuts and burgers and pastries piled with whipped cream. It’s cute. It makes you laugh. “When I won prom queen.” 

You splutter. “When you what?” 

“What?” Karina gives you a bemused, sideways look. “Does that surprise you?” 

It floors you, actually. At first you can’t quite put your finger on why, but then you look at Karina again - at her intense dark eyes and pouty fuckdoll lips and the exaggerated pinup proportions of her body - and you realize you’re making that mistake writers often do: buying into archetypes. It just makes sense that she’d be some kind of brooding bad girl. Mysterious, promiscuous; in your creative vision she’s probably cutting classes and chainsmoking in the girls’ bathroom. A favorite of the rumor mill. A pretty little delinquent.

“Wow.” Karina makes a funny noise in the back of her throat when you tell her this. “No. I was - I did fine in school. Perfect attendance, almost. And I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes.” But she doesn’t look offended, either; you imagine people make these assumptions about her all the time. “The prom queen thing - it wasn’t my idea, though. My best friend did all the campaigning for me.” 

“That’s sweet.” You watch as she reaches the year she’s looking for. Flashes of her in a sparkly dress with her arms thrown around another girl - a tiny doe-eyed brunette - slide by. In one of them, Karina’s got her head tipped back, clearly mid-laugh; in another, she and the girl have their heads bent close together as if they’re trading secrets, unaware that they’re being photographed. “Well - I think it’s sweet.” 

Karina’s fingers stall. “Why wouldn’t it be?” 

“I’m just saying-” You shrug. “It’s a nice gesture if it’s something you wanted, I guess. Seems like a lot of attention, otherwise.” 

“Oh.” There’s a pause. “Yeah. It was - I didn’t get to go to junior prom, so it was kind of - this was - senior year. Senior prom.” Another pause. “Yeah. She did it to make me happy.”

“And did it?” She passes by pictures that fill up with more people: friends with big grins who stick close to her side, wrapping her up in an embrace. “Make you happy?” 

“Of course.” Karina’s thumb pauses on a video, the preview dark and unfocused. She says it like she doesn’t even have to think about it. “She was my best friend. She always knew what I wanted. Hey, look at this.” 

The video’s of her in the back of someone’s car, prom queen tiara askew on her head, satiny sash falling off one shoulder. She’s yelling, laughing; the sound isn’t on, but her mouth’s wide open and her dark eyes are crinkled to half-moons, creased underneath heavy false lashes and glittery makeup that’s begun to smudge and fade. It makes her whole face look very soft. Young, too - cheeks full and flushed pink with excitement, hair blown-out and everywhere, glossed black. As if she’s having the time of her life. 

“How old were you here?” you ask, in awe. 

“Eighteen. Just turned, I think.” 

“You look-” Like a baby, you almost want to say. It’s true, though. Big brown eyes, scrunched little nose - grinning like the rest of the world hasn’t quite dug its claws into her yet. Skin unmarred and infant-smooth. “You look pretty.” 

Karina doesn’t look at you, but you can see the slight, entertained upturn of her lips. All the nasty things you’ve called her - all the irredeemable ways you’ve touched her - and now, inexplicably, you’re going for pretty. 

“Thanks,” she says, and clicks the volume up.

“Shut the fuck up,” baby Karina is saying, delightedly. Her voice sounds high, childish and carefree. “You’re so dumb. It wasn’t - it wasn’t even like that, I swear!” She flaps one hand in the air, her nails all short and painted the same rich deep maroon as her dress. “No - you’re just saying that because you’re jealous, you idiot, I know you - you just-”

The person behind the camera says something that you can’t quite make out. 

Baby Karina presses one hand to her sternum, pearl-clutching, and gasps. 

“I would never,” she admonishes - over-the-top like an actress from a movie - before she throws her head back and laughs. 

It’s a startling, wonderful laugh. A little-kid laugh. A mess of wild, unabashed giggles, hiccupy and sweet, so loud and infectious you can hear the other people in the car start cracking up with her; out of frame, someone reaches out to interlace their fingers with Karina’s, waving their joined hands until they smack against the car window and Karina only laughs harder. With her whole body, shoulders shaking and all. Streetlights flashing across her face, making her look sort of blurry and surreal, like something out of a painting. 

“Your laugh,” you find yourself saying, stunned. 

Karina’s touching the back of her neck, completely engrossed in the video. “My what?” 

You don’t laugh like that anymore. That’s what you mean to say. That scratchy, almost painful laugh that she’s been gracing you with since the moment you met her - there’s no trace of that in how baby Karina wriggles with laughter in the backseat of the car until her happy, breathless blush spreads to her neck and her chest. Head tipping back against the seat, like she’s all tuckered out. 

“Um,” you say, voice caught in your throat. 

On the screen, her eyes fall shut, lashes fluttering so delicately. 

You can’t do anything but stare. Brilliant, past-life, prom-queen Karina - grinning at nothing, and sleepy from a perfect night, and laughing as if she’ll exist as this version of herself forever. As if she just doesn’t know any better, yet. 

“You,” you start to say, again-

Karina shuts her phone off, and turns.

And you’re about to say something - something about the gnawing, uncertain feeling you get when you watch this former self of hers. It’s on the tip of your tongue. You don’t laugh like that. Something happened to you. For a moment the whole image just seems off - like the way people make posthumous holograms of pop stars, superimpose faces of long-dead actors on stunt doubles. A kind of intense wrongness. A murmured, uncomfortable: that’s not really you, is it? It can’t be. I barely recognize her. 

“What?” Karina asks. Her smile reveals her teeth. “Why are you looking at me like that?” 

Then reality hits you, all at once. 

“Sorry.” Your hand finds her thigh. You laugh because you’re being ridiculous - how would you know who she really is, anyway? “I was just thinking - I don’t know. Never mind.”

She seems to take that at face value. You like that about her. How she seems to trust so easily - going home with you, winding up in your bed, staying when you ask her to stay. Giving you whatever you want: her body, her story.

“So,” you say, eventually. “I can put in my movie that you totally peaked in high school, huh?” 

Karina snorts. “Yeah,” she says, playing along, and taps her dark phone screen with a clawed nail. “Say it was the last time I was happy.” She pulls a face, like the thought of it is just unspeakably pathetic. “That’s a tragedy if I’ve ever heard one.” 

“Shakespearean,” you agree, and let her clamber into your lap. “It’s perfect.” 

But you know she’s kidding. You’d like to think that you understand girls like her. They live in a different world than the rest of you - the kind of world where every person on earth looks at them and falls to their feet, falls madly in love. You’ll write about it one day; you’ll feel out the narrative for her, a curious exploration. That rose-tinted life she must flourish in, closed-off and flawless like a snow globe, her spinning and protected in the glass.

“Perfect,” echoes Karina, and kisses you - like she’s proving she really means it. 

That’s the reality, here. That’s it. This is all there is. 

-

Well, almost.

-

Karina lets you scroll through the rest of her photo gallery, front to back. You take the opportunity, because you’re greedy for as much as you can get. 

There’s a lot of photos that are just her, funnily enough - selfies posed in front of the same full-length mirror, over and over again, clad in unholy outfits. Swimsuits, sports bras and little running shorts, lingerie: shit that makes your mouth water, eyes lingering, groaning out loud as she laughs at you. But it’s also her in faded old t-shirts, holding the hem up to expose her stomach. Body angled to the side in girlish sundresses. Hair pulled up, showing off her neck, her gorgeously sharp collarbone - in makeup or out of it, stare intensely focused and sultry. 

“That’s hot,” you comment. “Self-obsessed as fuck, but hot.” 

Karina smiles - her tiny private-joke smile - and doesn’t say anything at all. 

There’s one video in particular that catches your eye. It’s recent, relatively - the date reads late December, last year. Less than a month ago. Christmastime. You click on it, curious. 

Karina’s immediately recognizable in it, black hair winding past her shoulders, drowning in a large black sweatshirt. She’s smiling, but it looks sort of tense and tired - bags under her eyes, like she hasn’t slept in a while. She’s got both hands balled up into fists, held close and protective to her chest; her sharp chin rests on her pale knuckles. There’s a tiny smear of red across her mouth, lower lip bitten bloody. 

“You just got here,” she says. She’s looking at something behind the camera. “The first thing you wanna do is hear me sing?” She laughs once, scratchy and hoarse. “Why are you even filming this?” 

The answering strum of guitar strings, a pretty, perfect chord. An invitation, or a demand.

“You’re kidding.” Karina’s voice is flat.

Another chord - evidently not. 

“Wow,” says Karina. Her smile, out of nowhere, goes very soft at the edges. “You just do this because you know I can’t say no to you.”

“What?” you ask Karina now, laughing. “Is this - what is this? Do you - are you really going to sing?” 

And then - crazily enough - she does. 

“Oh,” you say out loud, adoring, and Karina turns her face into your shoulder. 

Her voice in the video is breathy, sweet. Shyly unpracticed, raspy from disuse, completely and utterly gorgeous; lids slipping shut and open again, laugh leaking into her melody line in lyrics about black eyes and kisses and wanting someone who’s just so, so bad for you. But what surprises you more than anything is the look that dawns on her blurry on-screen face - irises sparkling and smile bashful, hiding her mouth behind the sleeve of her sweatshirt, curled up with her knees to her chest. You see now that she’s wearing pajama pants, fuzzy and patterned with snowflakes. 

She looks radiantly pretty. She looks vulnerable. And not even in a sweaty, satiated, filthy post-fuck kind of way - actually, genuinely vulnerable. Soft and wide-eyed and tender.

Suddenly, you just can’t tear your gaze away. 

“Stop.” 

The song’s over. On-screen Karina’s fully grinning now. Porcelain-fragile, but undeniably happy, too. 

“I hate you,” she says. “Baby, I really do.” 

“You love me,” says the person behind the camera. “You’ll love me for the rest of your life and you know it.” 

And in the video - in vivid, fluid motion - Karina laughs. 

Whole-hearted, lovely. Familiar. For a moment, you swear she’s still that girl sitting in the backseat of a car with her prom queen tiara on, giggling free and uninhibited, unhurt, untouched. A month ago - less than that, even - looking like she’s coming back to life. 

That’s where the clip ends. 

It doesn’t change anything, if you actually think about it. It’s just another version of reality. A Karina from a whole other universe, laughing like a child, and so, so far away from whoever she is now. 

-

(Back between the lines of your script-

The stranger and the girl drink to get drunk and that’s about it. She reads the label of his wine; he makes fun of her for being a snob. She doesn’t really drink, she says at first, but he laughs like this is a challenge, and pours her a glass anyway. She flushes pink and fidgets around. She seems to shed hair like a cat and he thinks this is the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen, picking up thin black strands off of the arm of his couch, teasing her about girls and how they really like to leave their mark, huh?

Leave their mark, she repeats. There’s some trick of the lens here, some sort of strategic camera work - he’s in the forefront and she’s in the background, and she looks so much smaller than him. Why do you say that? 

He still had his ex-girlfriend’s perfume in his cabinet. He probably still has some of her clothes in his closet. Not out of any particular emotional attachment, but sometimes this is just the way things are: when you spend years intertwining your whole existence with someone else’s, it’s hard to rid yourself of that connection. You’ve grown into each other’s spaces, tangling limbs and heart lines, putting down roots. It’s gonna take a little force to get them out. 

They’re just so much, he says, gesticulating with his hands. And they affect everything in your life, like a fucking infection. And then it doesn’t work out, and you - he makes a wide, sweeping motion here, attempting to encompass the wreckage. You have to fix everything they broke. Purge them from your system and all that. It’s so fucked up. 

It’s like this, he means to say - you love someone and then they leave you behind and you’re left staring at the blown-up decimated crater that used to be your life together. You love someone and they don’t love you back and all you have now is the debris.

They’re both drunk. There should be music here and there isn’t. It’s only eerie, too-still silence, suffocating the both of them with every passing second. 

Well, she says, laughing, and takes another sip. You and I can agree on that, at least.)

-

It happens like this:

There’s a monologue you want to write. 

You tell Karina this after you’re finally fucking her again, when she’s balanced on the edge of your glass coffee table with her legs spread and your mouth slick with her cum. Well - not after, technically. She’s between orgasms and you have your thumb on her clit, tracking the expression on her face, the split-second moment where she comes apart. It’s then when you realize so badly that you want to write some great speech for your heroine - something about the sweat beading on Karina’s midriff and her tits that you can’t stop touching and the jerky movements of her hips, trying to get your tongue back on her clit, panting and delightfully desperate. Something about desire. 

“Desire,” repeats Karina, voice halfway into a raspy, worked-up moan. 

“Yeah.” You’ve replaced your mouth with your fingers, fucking up into the obscene tight heat of her cunt. She’s trembling, dripping everywhere; she’s the very picture of what it means to want, probably. “But I just can’t figure it out.” 

Karina laughs roughly, and then she cums. 

“Is that funny?” you ask her, after, when you’re wiping your wet mouth with your wrist and she’s sucking on your glistening fingers, licking the taste of her own cunt off your skin. Her eyes big, lips all full and pink - slutty angel on her pedestal, perched above you. “Me writing about desire?” 

Karina lets your fingers free with a loud pop. She’s still clutching your hand close to her mouth, thumb dragging through the sticky gleam of her spit. “No,” she says, eyes distant. “It just reminded me of something. There’s this Anne Carson quote, about men and desire…” She shakes her head. Presses her lips once to your fingertips in a small, startlingly sweet kiss. “It doesn’t matter. Tell me more.” 

There isn’t much to tell, truthfully. Except that you’ve got this love for movie lines that are just so utterly quotable - things that make their way into the pop culture consciousness. That’s the kind of work you want to be doing: creating something that has an impact, something that’ll exist long after you’re gone. Everlasting. If you had to pull for an example, you’d say-

“You ever seen Closer?” 

“Yeah.” Karina drops your elbow into her lap. “Oh, I get it. He tastes like you but sweeter. Lying’s the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off - et cetera.” She hums the melody line. “So you want an early 2000s pop-punk band to make a song about your movie? Ambitious.” 

“More or less,” you say as she shimmies her shirt back down, hem falling back over her midriff. “But like I said, I’m kind of stuck.”

Karina rolls her neck. Her hair is everywhere, sweet-smelling; snapped-off strands decorate your table, looking like cracks in the glass. 

“Any suggestions?” you ask, thumb skimming along the pale bruised inside of her thigh. 

She smiles, mischievous. “Maybe.” 

That’s how you both end up curled on your couch together with your laptop in front of you, Karina’s eyes glued to the movie playing on the screen, watching as the four main characters fuck and flirt and cheat on each other and scream at the top of their lungs. Melodramatic dialogue. How do you feel about him using your life? You’re lying; I’ve been you. This will hurt, which Karina laughs at - as if announcing the pain will make it better, playacting at exoneration. 

It’s also - predictably - how you end up fucking again. You barely make it an hour in, and then-

“Hey.” Karina’s breath tickles your ear. She’s already seconds from climbing in your lap already; her thigh is hooked over yours, bare and inviting. “Are you inspired?” 

You’re swallowing back a grin. “Sure.” 

“Oh. Great.” She’s no actress herself, clearly. She couldn’t be subtle if she tried. “Do you wanna be more inspired?” 

And - whatever. It’s a movie about sex. If anything, at least you’re sticking to the theme. 

The dialogue plays in the background as Karina rocks her hips down on your lap - you can feel how wet she is again, like she never stops wanting to be fucked. You’re telling her something about how she’s the most insatiable girl you’ve ever met; the sound of the film saturates the room, setting the tone like it knows its purpose. How? How does it work? How do you do this to someone? This big, infidelity-ridden confrontation. Did you phone her? Beg her to come back? Asking him why he falls for another girl, getting this ridiculous answer - it’s because she doesn’t need me.

“Huh.” You smile into the curve of Karina’s neck, already palming her ass. “That one’s funny.”

“Is it funny?” Karina’s sharp jaw brushes against your cheekbone. Her eyes are so dark, shadowed by her long lashes. “I think it’s pretty realistic. People don’t like needy girls. It’s a burden to be loved so hard.” Her tongue darts across her teeth; her smile’s somewhat caustic. “Too much to handle, I guess.” 

“What are you talking about?” This strikes you as fairly fucking ridiculous, too. “What men have you met who don’t like needy girls?” 

Karina just laughs and leans in for another kiss. 

It’s easy to let the rest of the film float away in the background, the lines coming disjointed, unconnected. A spoken-word soundtrack, tone perfuming the air: the angst and pain and eroticism seeping into your clothing. Once in a while you’ll pull back from kissing Karina’s neck or tits or mouth and see a thoughtful little quirk to her mouth. Like she’s genuinely listening, even as you’re taking off her shirt, slipping a hand back between her legs. Where will you go? Disappear. I can’t still see you - if I see you, I’ll never leave you. I amuse you, but I bore you. 

“I bet you’ve never felt that,” you say, half into the silk of her hair. 

Karina pauses. Her shirt’s on the floor; she’s gloriously naked on top of you. “Felt what?” 

“I amuse you, but I bore you,” you recite. You already sound sort of fuck-drunk, far gone. “You’re the farthest thing from boring.”

Back in the movie, the female lead sobs into her fists. Karina studies you, fingertips grazing the nape of your neck. You try to imagine it - her as one of those heartsick heroines, crying herself to pieces, begging a man not to leave her - but you draw an utter blank. Some people just aren’t breakable in that way. 

“You’d be surprised,” Karina says, after a moment. “People get bored of me all the time.”

“Oh, please.” Even when she’s the one top of you, you can’t help feeling so completely in control. It’s gotta be the look in her eyes, dying to be obedient. “I bet you have lots of ways of keeping guys interested in you.” You smack her ass hard just to make a mark. “I bet you let them fuck you however they want.” 

“Exactly,” Karina agrees, without missing a beat. She moves in close until your noses bump together. Lets her voice go all smoky and suggestive. “Wherever they want, too.” 

You open your mouth - probably about to say something very rude about what a dirty whore she is and how you should’ve realized it the second you saw her; I knew it, I know you - but then your hands slip lower and Karina presses her lips to yours and licks into your mouth, over your teeth, making you swallow your words. Filling you up until there’s nothing but her and the movie, playing on.

I think I’ll be happier with her. 

You won’t. You’ll miss me. No one will ever love you as much as I do. Why isn’t love enough? 

“Romantic, right?” murmurs Karina, sweet against your tongue. 

“Shut up,” you say, and grab her by the hair, tugging her off your lap as you stand. “Bedroom. Now.” 

Later, you’ll take the time to consider the different ways filmmakers illustrate a power dynamic - it’s playing on your laptop screen right now. The heroine’s sitting on the arm of the couch, clutching desperately at the hero’s jacket. Gorgeously emotional and pleading for another chance, her tiny chin tilted up, eyes so large and watery. Made fragile and fearful by everyone: the protagonist, the narrative, the director, the audience beyond. By herself, even. It’s a stylistic choice - she wants to look that pathetic.

And you-

Well, you’ve got Karina’s long hair wrapped up in your fist, tits bouncing as she stumbles to her feet, ankle knocking hard and horribly loud against the leg of your table. Cute little ass all red from your hand. Thighs shimmering from how drenched she is, cunt dripping from how you’ve treated her. She hasn’t managed to work her mouth into a trademark smirk fast enough: when she looks at you over her shoulder, her eyes are abyss-dark and bottomless, crease between her brows, lips parted in pained surprise. 

The definition of pathetic, too - but that’s exactly the point. She’s just so much more fuckable like that. 

“Ouch,” you say, touching her hurt ankle with the side of your foot. 

“It’s fine.” Karina’s skin feels clammy and cold. Her smirk’s intact now, camera-ready. “I’ve been through worse.” 

Her ankle throbs under the pressure of your touch; you still haven’t let up on her hair. You’ll go through worse, too, you think of telling her: a sly comment about how rough you’re about to fuck her, what vicious marks you’re about to leave. How you’re gonna hurt her exactly like she asked you to. 

You don’t say a thing.

She must already know all of that, anyway.

-

So, Karina’s not breakable like the helpless, weepy, soft-hearted girls in the movies - but that’s alright. She’s breakable in much more enticing ways.

Case in point:

“Oh, get real, baby. Don’t pretend you don’t love it.”

Well, breaking someone down doesn’t really get better than this.

It’s all a scene of your own making, a perfect pre-arrangement. You on your bed, Karina limp and bent belly-down over your lap - you in control and Karina as the most impressive toy you’ve ever gotten your hands on, creamy ass and needy cunt and skin that turns bruises to artwork. You’re goading her and failing - trying to get her to just admit to what she is, what a filthy slut, what a nasty eager fuckdoll - but it’s hard to get a response when even breathing seems to be a chore for her right now. Every noise out of her mouth is nothing but a gasping, choked-out whimper. Her face is buried in her forearm, hidden. And through the shine of lube dribbling down your hand and her ass and into the sticky wetness of her cunt, you’ve got two fingers stretching out her little asshole - and you’re just getting started.

“I know you fucking need this.” Your other hand slides up her back, slips to tangle in her hair. “You’re just too good at it.” You pull hard, wrenching her head from the crook of her elbow. “Too good at being an obedient fucking whore for me, huh?”

Karina’s whole body stiffens when you fuck your fingers deeper, as if tugged taut on a string: the flex of her feet in the air, shoulder blades straining, neck craned back almost painfully. You pull harder. It’s a buzz at the base of your skull, live-wire thrilling: the knowledge that you can yank her into whatever position you want - fuck her anywhere, work her ass open with your cock, fill her up with cum - and she’s just going to have to take it. Like she’s this pliant, powerless thing. Like she’s yours. 

Your self-satisfaction seeps right into your voice. “Answer me.” 

You hear Karina gulp down a breath. “I,” Karina mumbles, but she can’t do anything but babble. “I - fuck-” All teeth-clenching nonsense; she shoots a baleful glance over her shoulder, desperation clawing its way into every word. “Please-”

Your fingers pause. “You want more?” 

Her cheeks are splotchy and pink; you swear there are tears wobbling in those big dark eyes. The heavy arousal in your stomach turns to violent hunger, as though your mouth could start watering at any second. You can’t help it. The thought of seeing her cry is fucking exhilirating. “You - oh-” 

“Answer me. You want my cock?” You’re waiting for the breaking point. “You want me to really fuck your ass?” 

“Fuck-” 

But that’s not a proper reply and Karina knows it, so she doesn’t protest when you pull your glistening fingers out of her and smack your palm hard across her ass. Once, then twice, and then you just don’t stop. She yelps like a hurt animal - trembles uncontrollably, her thighs and her shoulders and her quivering bottom lip - and makes a sound in the back of her throat that might be a sob, but she still lets you hit her: gives into the harsh crack of skin on skin, over and over again. Listens as you tell her that she deserves this, that she wanted this, that you’re making her into a good girl and this is what good girls get when they’re too cock-hungry to follow orders or answer a fucking question, you know that - you know I’m this rough for a reason. It should hurt. It’s so much more fun that way.  

“I’ve been too fucking nice to you,” you mutter, teeth gritted in an effort to hide your grin - as if you even need to. It’s obvious how much you enjoy this. It’s the point. “That’s the problem with girls like you - you never learned your fucking place, huh? Never really been punished for anything?”

Karina mumbles out something unintelligible, slurring from her drooling mouth to the sheets.

“Yeah.” Your hand comes down again - she flinches just before her body goes slack. “That’s what I thought.” 

And after you’ve spanked her so hard that her fair skin is ravaged and raised with goosebumps along the slope of her back - her whole body in revolt - you finally, finally stop. 

Karina doesn’t budge except to breathe, and even that releases shallow, unsteady. You read it all in the shaky lift and fall of her thin shoulders, her hands in white-knuckled fists, her face pressed to your sheets and hidden - her hair coats everything, all ink, all words written but left unsaid. She shivers beneath your fingers. Her cunt’s dripping all over your lap. She’s a masterpiece. She’s a wreck. 

You’re filled up with thick, swollen pride. “Karina.” 

Karina. Your own personal creation, transformed under your touch. Might as well have your name carved into her, too. A brand right across her back, slicing through tissue, scarring to seal her fate - this is who you fucking belong to. 

“Poor baby.” You follow the sharp ridges of her spine, tracking notches, keeping a tally: counting how many times you’ll hit her, how many days she’ll stay in your bed. How many movies she’ll let you make out of her, being your brilliant muse for decades. “It’s painful when you don’t listen to me, huh?”

But then - inexplicably - you think of her bruising ankle. Her twist of a smirk, detached and humorless. I’ve been through worse. 

You’re abruptly glad you can’t see the look on her face. 

“Come on, sweet girl.” You dig the heel of your palm into her lower back, half a warning. “Pull it together.” 

Between the strands of glossy hair tumbling over Karina’s skin and your sheets, you spot a reddish mark on the back of her neck. Like the impression of a thumbprint, small and round. Blurry enough in the dim light that your brain starts conjuring up strange theories; an old wound, maybe. A birthmark or a burn, a childhood injury.

You graze her shoulder blades with your fingertips, exploratory. She feels so small draped over you like this, a tiny wet wisp of a girl. A doll. 

She still hasn’t moved.

“Karina.”

Nothing.

“Karina,” you say again, suddenly uneasy. Your hand stops. “Are you-”

For a few terrible seconds, you can’t even hear her breathing. 

But then Karina shifts. Slow, sensual, deliberate. Pushing herself up off your lap, arching her back, the slick pucker of her asshole obscene from where you fucked it open with your fingers. Her bruised knees dig into your mattress as she straightens up, and her gorgeous pale face seems to glow in the midday light - heavy dark eyes, bitten-pink mouth, black hair curtaining her cheeks like a frame to a portrait.

“You,” you start to say, feeling suddenly like you’re looking at her for the first time. 

“I’m really sorry,” Karina murmurs.

She doesn’t look close to tears at all. She’s so unfazed, as if having her ass spanked punishingly raw is something that happens to a girl like her on the daily. A run-of-the-mill occurrence - a consequence of having a body like that, made to be brutalized. She’s already reaching towards the nightstand for the lube. 

“I just wanted it so bad I couldn’t think straight,” Karina tells you, with erotic-film certainty - reciting all the lines that’ll make her seem the most insatiably slutty. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her lips form a pout; she leans down to press them to the tip of your cock, all sweet and demure, like she thinks she needs to convince you. Eyes flicking up at you through her thick lashes, molten-hot. “I should’ve listened.” It’s only a breath, warm and torturous. “I deserved that, I know.” 

Your hand winds tight in her hair. You want to force your cock down her pretty throat, make her gag and choke over her simpering apologies, spitting up your cum until it trickles down her chin, her tits, her tummy. Both a game and a power play: prove how sorry you are. 

Karina pulls back before you can, and holds up the lube. 

“Babe,” she says, the term of endearment almost a singsong - a lilting reminder. “I thought you wanted to really fuck me now.” 

“Uh-huh.” Her tits heave as she moves, crawling closer, offering herself up. “And I always get what I want, right?” 

You feel drunk with power. You forget that this isn’t supposed to be about power. You watch as Karina coats her palm with lube and pumps your cock, her fingers slick and hot, her veins starkly blue at her delicate wrists. Expression delighted at how hard you are, pink little tongue poking out between her teeth - seduction down to an art form, meticulously calculated. 

“With me?” Her smile burns. “Obviously.” 

You pull her in by the neck to kiss the smirk off her mouth. 

It’s interesting. There’s this other thing regular critics and moviegoers have been saying about films these days: sex scenes need to have a purpose. Some sort of coherent motivation. Strip your lead actress down to nothing and get her keening and moaning and you’ve got to explain it away somehow. It forwards the plot, you could insist, pitching it to producers and directors. It does something for the character dynamics. It’ll draw in just the right audience, the ones dying to see their favorite celebrity debauched and getting dirty on-screen - they’ll see it over and over just to get a taste. Isn’t that enough? To satisfy the masses? Isn’t that why we’re all here?

Because otherwise all people are staring at is a play at pornography: useless half-convincing make-believe. The heroine can writhe and whine and arch her back all she wants. Everyone knows she doesn’t feel anything. 

“Tell me the truth.” 

Oh, if you two were a movie - you don’t know how anyone could justify a sex scene quite like this. 

It doesn’t matter what artsy angle you take. It all comes down to the same unforgivable details: Karina face-down ass-up on your bed, the perfect bowed curve of her spine, the depraved wide stretch of her asshole around your cock - the sweat shining along her shoulder blades, the hard smack of your palm against the red raw skin of her ass, your other hand at the crown of her skull with your fingers wrapped entirely in her tangled hair - her cunt fucking ruining your sheets, wet all the way down her thighs, each brutal shift of your hips sending her little body into full-blown shudders-

“Tell me that you fucking love it.” Your hand slips lower until you’ve got her pinned down by the back of the neck, fingers pushing down: a grip she couldn’t escape even if she wanted to. “Whoring out your slutty little ass like this for a stranger. Getting on your hands and knees for me just because you’re so fucking needy for cock, baby - don’t even try to deny it, you’re so wet, nasty fucking girl-”

You just can’t stop yourself. It’s so easy. She really is so fucking pathetic. Too fragile to get free - too easily manipulated and manhandled. Trembling and drenched and giving way as you make room inside her, forcing space. She’s just so tight - it’s godless, how you make your cock fit in her lube-slicked asshole, how she moans like a bona fide bitch in heat over it: needing faster, needing harder, needing more. Cheek pink and pressed hard to your mattress, sharp nails digging into the sheets rough enough to tear through the fabric. Giving herself up to be fucked cruelly and stupid and senseless. 

Like she’s a real-

“Natural fucking cockslut, huh?” 

Look, seriously - you can’t be held accountable for the things you say to her here. 

Because when you say shit like you’d just let me do anything - like you’d let me fucking tie you up and keep you here forever, be an eager fucking cumdump for me whenever I want you, I know it, I know you - that’s just the moment talking. The circumstances. The pretty arch of her back and the drooling wetness of her cunt and the indecent tightness of her ass, conspiring to make you lose your mind mid-fuck - that’s the whole reason you even tell her any of it. You think you’re good for anything else? Right at her ear, your body covering hers, your cock buried deep. You’re not. Just made to get this slutty ass fucked open, and your mouth, and your cunt - this is all anyone’s ever gonna want from you and you know it - better get used to it now, baby. This is all you got. This is all you are. 

It’s Karina’s fault, really. She just takes it - all of it. She doesn’t even try to fight it. 

“But that’s okay,” you murmur, as she gasps and squirms and cries out like you’re killing her. “I’m still gonna make you cum.” 

And with your cock filling her ass and your hand between her legs, slapping hard at her sopping cunt until she can’t do anything but collapse - shaking, shattered - her whimpers fucked-out and drool-soaked and bleeding into one big nonsensical mess, everything about her used and ruined-

“You’re mine,” you tell her, laughing as she falls apart. “You get that? You’re mine.” 

-then, you do.

When it’s all over, Karina rolls over to face the wall, breathing hard. She’s slick everywhere, sweat and saliva and lube, your creamy cum dripping out of her well-fucked asshole and trickling down her thigh. You trace her lower back and grin at the way her skin seems to give into you, turning pink with a press of your fingertips. You’ve come to realize you adore her like this, the fugue state after you fuck her: utterly dead to the world. 

Like she could become a permanent fixture in your bed. Too tired to move. Too tired to ever leave. 

“Mine,” you say again, softer.

Karina doesn’t argue. 

It’s basically all the confirmation you need. 

-

So, really, if you two were a movie-

It goes like this: life can imitate art, too. It happens all the time. The line between fiction and reality blurs together until it’s indistinguishable - until you can’t tell where the fantasy ends, or if it ever did at all. 

-

(It goes like this: the heroine smiles sleepily and tells the hero he’s the best she’s ever had. You’ve seen this film before. The movie stars with their fake on-screen fucks might not feel a damn thing, but at least it’s still fun to pretend.)

-

Also, the mark you saw on the back of her neck isn’t actually what you thought it was. 

“It’s a tattoo,” you realize out loud, drowsily awed, brushing her hair away so you can get a better look. You’re both tuckered out, an inevitability when you fuck like you do; you’re seconds from dozing off. Karina’s looking away from you, on her side to escape the soreness of her ass, sheets loose across her chest. She lets you touch her wherever. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before.” 

“You don’t know me,” mumbles Karina, half into your pillow. “It’s not your job to notice anything about me.” 

The tattoo’s crimson-red, all delicate linework. It really does look like it hurts: like someone painstakingly cut the shape into her skin. It’s of a heart, rendered in anatomical detail - valves and ventricles and arteries. It’s beautiful, you realize belatedly. Bright instead of faded, and obviously cared for. Lovely. 

The only permanent stain on her perfect body. You press your thumb against the ink, fascinated. 

“What does it mean?” you ask, but Karina’s already fallen asleep. 

-

(In your script, the girl and the stranger watch some gory crime show, except they don’t pay very close attention and he tugs her into his lap and makes her ride his thigh. The episode they’ve got on is about a serial killer who murders so-called sinners - liars, adulterers, the like. Slaughters them like sacrifices, cutting their throats with vicious efficiency. Fake blood drenches the screen with every crime scene: a form of fucked-up baptism, a psuedo-religious cleansing. 

The girl’s putting on an equally decent show on top of the stranger: head thrown back, eyelids fluttering, high-pitched little moans. He sinks his teeth into her shoulder and keeps watching the TV.

Hey, he says, a murmur against her skin, a close-up on his mouth. You’re a sinner, right?

She’s got her hands on his shoulders, hips rolling. Sure am. 

How do you think this guy would kill you? 

He thinks this’ll shock her, but she doesn’t even pause. Like he kills all the rest, she says. Like an animal.

I think he’d be more careful with you, the stranger muses. You’re too gorgeous. He’d have to use, like - a scalpel, or something. Something cleaner. Something that’d keep you intact. 

It’s no use. Nothing he says seems to scare her. Her eyes are far-off, almost glazed in recollection. Like she’s thought about it too - her own untimely end. Her own vivisection, skin flayed and organs visible, viscera and bone. There, hold the shot: now the audience can consider it with her, ponder all the ways she could be torn apart, all the repulsive things they could do with her desiccated body. All the ways flesh can warp under a human touch: the blue-black yellow-green purpling of bruises, a whole palette on one tiny girl. There’s value in that, isn’t there? There’s something intimately, incomparably beautiful in suffering. There’s art. 

Isn’t that why everyone’s watching? 

I get it, the girl says, still soaking his thigh, smiling as if it’s an inside joke between them. You want me dead. That’s been obvious since the moment you met me. 

I don’t want you dead, he says, and grabs her by the jaw. I just want to fuck you. 

Okay, she says, uncaring, like there’s barely a difference. Fine. Whatever you want. 

They don’t turn the TV off. They let the characters scream and bleed out in the background; he fucks her like she’s got a death wish. It’s funny - he expects her to get louder the harder he fucks her, ruthlessly working over the tight clench of her cunt - but she keeps getting less and less responsive, as if he’s pushing her little body into some sort of trance: expression vacant and blank, body limp and lifeless, mouth open and speechless. It makes him angry. Give me something, he’s saying, frustrated, clawing at her hair: baby, it’s not fair, it’s no fun like this. The on-screen shrieks aren’t enough - he wants it from her. Actually, he keeps saying he needs it - as if fulfilling desire is on the same level as food or air, as if he’ll drop dead in seconds if he doesn’t get her sobbing. He gets his overlarge hands on her face and starts contorting it, pushing her mouth open, her eyes wider, his fingers down her throat until she spits and gags and chokes. Oh, the audience will love this one: it’s reminiscent of those filthy exploitation films with their cult followings, so cleverly referential. Look at her pathetic and pinned down. Look at her helpless and struggling. Think of your favorite on-screen murder scenes, and then think of this.

Anything I want, the stranger reminds her, yanking back her hair as she drools down his wrist. You asked for this, didn’t you? You said anything I want. 

Except now the girl can’t say anything at all. 

This moment will start rumors, invite horrified scandal the same way some purposefully marketed horror movies are passed off as snuff films - that really went down, they really died like that. This scene’ll get a similar response. Did he actually fuck her? Did he actually hurt her? Did everyone - the writer, the director, the crew, the captive audience - actually just stand by and let that happen? 

Sure. Or she might just be a really, really good actress.

There. The stranger’s murmuring to her now, watching her manufactured expression, watching the tears fill her eyes. There you go. There’s my girl. And she is his, she really is - transformed into something all beautiful and new under his clumsy fingertips, molded right into art. The camera will zoom in close on her gorgeous, cadaverous face, a perverse little gift for the audience: here, have this, take a look. She’s all yours now. 

There’s something to be said here about the manmade link between sex and violence - inescapable, brutal, primeval; bodies in all shades of red - but he forgets it the second he touches her, and she’s being fucked too hard to remember.

Maybe they’ll get to it next time.) 

-

AND WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!!!!! <33333

all my luv ever to @capslocked @worldsover @passingnotions @braaan for beta reading my dumbass shenanigans and also for being the best ever I LOVE U!!!!!! AND ANYONE WHO IS READING THIS I LOVE YALL TOO.................. PART 2 COMING SOON!!!!!!!!!!!

[imaginesmai]

The orange peel theory - Azriel

I saw this post by @marvelsmylife and I thought I would give it a try! I've seen also lots of couples doing this on TikTok, so here's my take on how Azriel would do it. Hope you like it!

Plot: the spring court is beautiful, oranges are beautiful, but there's nothing more beautiful than your mate.

You loved the Spring court, you really did. Unlike Cassian, who couldn’t even get out of his room without sneezing the life out of his body, you spent your time there walking through the beautiful gardens. No matter how terrible Tamlin was, how much you despised the meetings between courts – you loved the Spring court.

All your friends and family were busy that morning, most of them in said meeting. Rhys and Feyre had been the first ones to arrive, Cassian and Azriel following close. You had woken up to an empty bed and cold sheets, your mate’s training not keeping up with your late nights reading. Still, Azriel had left you a short note and a beautiful flower.

You would have spent the morning with Nesta, but she was busy with Elain preparing the last details of her wedding with Lucien. Mor and Amren had chosen to stay in Velaris, and that left you alone in those beautiful gardens.

Time flew by each time you stopped to look at a flower or insect, as you let your body soak the warm sun through the trees. You wouldn’t have noticed the morning rolling away if it wasn’t for your stomach rumbling angrily at you. Deciding leaving the gardens was too much of an effort, you looked around for something to eat.

The meeting would end soon, but you would remain for two days more. There were enough matters to discuss that the high lords needed more than one meeting. As soon as Azriel was free, he would come looking for you – and you didn’t want to waste any time eating when you could explore the beautiful court.

So, when you spotted the orange tree, you made your decision.

It was big enough that you had to step on a bench to grab the closest orange. Once you did, you couldn’t resist grabbing some more. Big and colorful, your mouth watered just at the sight. You ended up on your tiptoes, barely keeping balance, gathering the oranges between your chest and arm.

One of them rolled out of your grasp, but before it fell, shadows gathered around it and brought it back to the group. You smiled instantly, stretching slightly to take the last orange. You felt your body gravitating forward as the tips of your fingers barely grazed it, and just before you could fall over, warm hands rounded your waist.

You were lifted the missing inch and stabilized at the same time, shadows keeping your legs upright. After taking the orange, you barely had time to look at it before you were lowered to the ground, back meeting his hard chest.

“Aren’t you a little shabby for a thief?” Azriel whispered against your ear, holding you close. “Risking your life for a bunch of oranges?”

“Oh, like you would have left me fall” you rolled your eyes, resisting the urge of squirming away when his lips brushed your cheek.

“I could have been away”

“Still”

You turned around, your arms full of oranges, and met his hazel eyes. Azriel could have been miles away, in a different country, that you were sure his shadows would have found a way of keeping you from hurt, just as they always did. You knew it, he knew it, and there was no real concern under his words, just playful banter.

Politics, territorial business and high lords were hard for him, and you could guess the outcome of the meeting in the darkness under his eyes. Still, when you looked at him, they shone a little brighter, his lips curling upwards.

His wings blocked the sun from behind, but some rays peeked through and made him look even more divine than he already was. Only a few hours away, and you already missed him.

His arms circled your waist and he lowered himself until he could kiss you softly, erasing the memories of the previous meeting. He tasted like home, like safety, and you were ready to drop your treats and wrap yourself around your mate.

Barely two seconds into the kiss, it was broken by the loud sound of your stomach reclaiming you back to your previous task. Azriel tore away with raised eyebrows, and burst into a loud laugh at your rosy cheeks.

“It’s past lunch time, don’t judge me” you looked down to your arms. “Want an orange?”

“I would love nothing more than a stolen orange”

You didn’t need words when you were with him, not as you sat on the bench you had climbed on and Azriel took the oranges from your grasp. His dark leathers were a rough contrast with your soft dress, the scars on his hands contrary to your careful touch. He didn’t flinch like he used to when you wrapped your fingers around his, only smiled softly and pressed a kiss to the back of your hand.

There was no other place you would rather be but on that bench with him, the sun and shadows creating a beautiful landscape full of flowers and colors.

Azriel took the last orange from you and easily peeled its roughness away. His nails were chipped and broken, but he managed to get the whole thing off and hand it to you in small pieces. You gladly let him put the first one in your mouth, happy with not moving a muscle away from him.

“I can do that” you raised a brow as you bit on the juicy fruit.

“And I can do it for you” he bit on the next piece, eyes dropping to your mouth.

You tried grabbing the rest of the orange from him, but he easily brushed you away. It was common for him to do that type of stuff – peeling an orange for you so your hands wouldn’t get dirty, doing your hair in the morning when you were too tired, putting food on your plate before his own.

Those little things had built a comfortable relationship during your years together. You cleaned the blood off his leather when he came back from a mission and he brought you flowers each Sunday. He folded your clothes in a neat pile to you after your bath and you helped him tie his boots when he was sore from training.

The birds chirped around you as he kept peeling oranges, handing you some pieces and eating the rest of them. You watched as he carefully removed the white striped that you always complained about, checking each piece before giving it to you.

“How was the meeting?” you tried eventually, breaking the peaceful silence.

“It was” he shrugged, plucking the last part of the peel before dividing the orange. “Tamlin growled at everything and everyone. Kallias stepped out in the middle of it. Beron and Eris”

“What of Beron and Eris?”

“They were… them”

You knew without words that Beron and Eris had been the worst part of it. Maybe, if it wasn’t for them, Azriel would enjoy the politics of those meetings. He would stand in that room with his wings wide and head high. But they always managed to find something to bring him down, to make him feel less than them. And you would have gladly punched them into the knowing they wouldn’t even get close to the man Azriel was.

Azriel didn’t elaborate the answer for a while, both of you eating quietly. Once he had peeled the fourth orange and you had refused the last part, he started plucking the crumbs from under his nails.

You hoisted your legs up to his own, and made yourself comfortable on his lap. The reaction of having your body close was instant, his muscles going lax and his shoulders dropping.

“Rhys thinks Eris will stick to his part of, you know” Azriel talked softly, as if his shadows wouldn’t inform him of any presence within twenty feet. “But when he’s with his father, with that… smile and attitude, I wish he wouldn’t. I just wish it was different”

“I know” you agreed, pressing your stained lips to his cheeks. “It will be soon”

He turned to look at you and you smiled as brightly and convincingly as you could. Working with Eris was worse than any type of meeting. Having him coming to Velaris, where your home was, and letting him know where the most precious part of him lived was hard enough. But watching him play his enemy in a room full of threats and knowing he knew those things was on a different level.

It broke your heart each time he came back from those meetings, each time his vulnerability became apparent and you could do nothing about it.

Just smile, stay by his side, and stick to the promise of not letting anything happen to any of you.

You tried changing the subject for his sake and yours, anything to make him smile again like a few minutes before. Brushing the sticky stain on his cheek, you mentioned something Nesta had talked about before.

“There is a theory, you know” you started, trying to bite the smile off your lips so he would take you seriously. “About males, and oranges, and peeling them”

“Likely a theory of one of your books” he teased, and when you didn’t confirm neither deny it, he chuckled. “Or Nesta’s. I don’t know which one is worse”

“The theory says, that if your partner peels oranges for you without asking or saying, they love and care about you” you repeated what Nesta had told you a few days ago. “Getting their hands dirty and not minding about it because they love their partners more”

“More than an orange’s peel?” Azriel smiled widely now. “After almost fifty years of relationship, I hope you too love me more than that”

“You’re missing the point”

“It’s a stupid theory”

It was because he did way more than peel oranges for you. And you did way more than change the subject to stupid theories so he would take his mind off the worries. If Azriel had to peel a thousand oranges for you, he would do it. If he was allergic to them, he would still do it.

There was little Azriel wouldn’t do for you. The basics of protecting you, of giving you his love and affection, were already set at the begging of your relationship. But as he thought of the stupid orange peel, he wondered if there was something he wouldn’t do for you.

And he knew that there wasn’t.

“Let me guess” he tugged your legs closer and looked into your eyes with a deep frown of concentration. “Nesta told you about it, just as he has told you about the rest of stupid theories you have put to test. And she has also told Elain and Feyre, and you all have put it to test”

“You’re missing Mor” you smiled, knowing he would make the whole story perfectly.

“Rhys passed, for sure. Lucien too, though he would probably be a little wary and ask about it before doing it, because Elain doesn’t eat too many oranges” he guessed correctly, making you scoff a laugh. “And Cassian asked Nesta to peel his orange”

You burst into a laugh because, just like he had said, had happened.

As you tilted your head back, a ray of sun hit the side of your face and Azriel’s heart started beating a little faster. He would never not find you beautiful, but sometimes, it would hit him just how beautiful you were. How lucky he was, how perfect his mate was. The cauldron had made him wait, had made him suffer, and all of it was worthy from the moment he laid his eyes on you.

“I love you” he smiled, Eris and Beron long gone from his mind. “Even if you’re a shaggy thief”

“I love you too”

Azriel closed his eyes and let the sun bake his skin. Having you in his arms always felt good, no matter where you were. Spring court, Velaris, your home. He could be lying in a battlefield with you in his arms, safe and sound, and it would feel like heaven.

The meeting had been shitty, and the two days left in that court would be too. But if enduring it and peeling oranges for you would get him that kind of peace, he was ready for it to last forever.

Want to read more? Check out my side blog @imaginesmaimasterlists, where I keep all the masterlists! Feedback is always appreciated

Let me know if you want me to do an Azriel taglist!

[hellisharchive]

The Most Divine

Summary

▬ Drabbles of how Lucifer and Adam would fight over gender neutral reader!

・━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━・

・C/TW! ▬ 18+, NSFW

・NOTES! ▬ Literally did not mean to this post now but whatever hope you enjoy it. It's also 3 am yay

・━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━・

♡...... LUCIFER would take notice of you immediately in the Hotel, from your voice to your body to your eyes, you were beautiful in every sense of the word. He treated you like royalty, like you were the best thing he could have found ever in all his billions of years of existence. He never made any moves on you though, the mental scars from Lillith leaving him still fresh in his mind and heart. You two were both really good friends though and he wouldn't trade that for the world.

♡...... ADAM would take notice of you during your first year in Hell as you were out during extermination day. He hates sinners with his very being due to a certain fallen angel, but something about you enamored him. He managed to find you alone and decides to take his chance. He hit on you and he ended up throughly fucking you in exchange for being spared this year.

♡...... LUCIFER makes sure you're ok after extermination day, you tell him that you ran into Adam and that he spared you, but not the true reason why. It made Lucifer incredibly angry as he knew you were lying, but played it off as he didn't want to be too overbearing and controlling. He was just concerned for you as Adam wasn't the best guy, regardless if he spared you or not

♡...... ADAM decides to watch you from heaven, keeping it a secret from Lute as she would surely scold him and never let him live another day without her disproving self. But seeing you talk and laugh with Lucifer made his blood boil. How dare you move onto that bastard after you just got fucked by the original dick? He didn't expect his attraction to you grow this bad, but it every passing moment when he didn't have important shit do, he watched you and Lucifer be all buddy-buddy.

♡...... LUCIFER would finally confront you about Adam, feeling jealous that he would be so much better in bed than that man. He knew he would treat you right. He watched as you stared up at the sky, knowing you were missing that angel for some odd reason. You admitted it right away, the guilt eating away so badly it was hard to contain. You did miss him despite him really being a terrible person, you did miss him. He shushed you and told you it was ok and that he wasn't mad, he was just concerned if he hurt you in anyway.

♡...... ADAM would reach his breaking point when he sees Lucifer tllt your chin up and say that he would always be there for you. Always make you feel better and always make you feel loved. He couldn't take it. Watching the scene play out with a hug, you two parted ways. Watching and waiting until Heaven's mistake was alone, the first man opened up a portal to Lucifer lounging on his couch on his phone when he looked up, not surprised at the sight before him.

♡...... "Well if it isn't the first man. Been a while since Eden? How've been? Fucking my people you swore to kill every year?"

♡...... "Shut the hell up! You stole Lillith from me. You stole Eve from me. You will NOT steal them from me!"

♡...... LUCIFER stood up then, despite his shorter stature, he walked right up to Adam with a smirk. He wasn't going to back down. He wasn't scared of this asshole. Even if he was scared to let you in, he still loved you very much and didn't want you wasting your time here in Hell with this man.

♡...... ADAM simply looked down at him, letting his anger be very known to the fallen angel. The key word is fallen. He was a traitor to everything good, and Adam would show you everything good and more if you let him instead of Lucifer.

♡...... "You think they were screaming your name? Last night, we were going so hard they cummed multiple times on my face just from my tounge" It was a lie, you both never had any sex at all, but he wanted Adam to feel intimated.

♡...... "That's a fucking lie. I've been watching them and you laugh and joke but never fuck. At least I actually fucked them unlike your coward ass. How's Lillith by the way? She really seems to love being with you, prick"

♡...... LUCIFER was going to quip back as the snide about his ex-wife especially upset him, but the door opened and you walked in sleepily and asked what was going on while rubbing your eye. Every one of you froze as the situation was becoming apparent to you as you woke up. He watched as you started to panic, knowing that this situation got too out of hand. You rushed up and demanded what was going on in a half sleep state. He was too angry to fully appreciate how adorable you were like that.

♡...... ADAM didn't feel threatened by your prescence at all, in fact, this was going to work in his favor. Smirking, he sauntered up behind your smaller form and wrapped his hands around your shoulders, leaning down and asking in a soft voice if Lucifer ever fucked you. You said no and shook your head. He could tell by the fact that you were shaking that you were very anxious yet thrilled at what was happening. He knew you liked Lucifer, he was just too much of a pussy to take what he wants. It's ok though, more for him.

♡...... LUCIFER hated how Adam defaulted to sex instead of what a real relationship is and its far more than lust. It was always being there for them, helping them, ensuring they were safe and loved. Not someone who fucked them and stalked them. But the ruler of Hell would play his game. Walking closer to your caged in self, he got right up in front of your face with a certain type of smirk you've never seen him wear before. However, his attention was turned above your head to Adam as the taller angel rested his head on top of yours.

♡...... "What's big shot doing now huh?"

♡...... "How about this? We both fuck them at the same time and see which one of us they like better"

♡...... "Deal"

[blue-ink-pearls]

Fig Isn't Meant to Be Cassandra's Paladin, Bucky Applebees Is

As most of us have realized since Ankarna's original domain was revealed, Fig is clearly supposed to be her paladin. The archdevil of rebellion united with the goddess of conviction and justice would be an incredible force for fighting wrongs, for inspiring revolutions, and creating true positive change.

But Fig wasn't wrong that Cassandra would be immensely helped by having a paladin swear themselves to her. Even though Kristen is an extraordinary cleric, she's only one person.

When we first meet Bucky Applebees in Junior Year, he is filled with doubt and uncertainty. He's a paladin of Helio, the same religion (cult) that Kristen fled from and he has been forced to take on the role of protector to his younger brothers that Kristen once held as the eldest daughter. He hasn't told his parents about the gold Kristen gave them, he thinks he's going to hell for lying, he misses his sister but thinks she's living in sin (maybe?), and he's curious about what beer tastes like (but never mind, he doesn't want to know. He bets it would be great. For sinners, would love it.).

When Cassandra dies/is kidnapped, Kristen first feels a connection to her goddess again when she thinks of how her doubt and uncertainty led to her escaping that life and finding freedom from Helio and her parents.

Ally: "I think she spent so much time trapped and feeling, like, super wrong, that doubt and mystery actually feel like a really beautiful escape, and more true." Brennan: "The concept of escape hits you. And for a moment you hear (clicking). And all of the locks on the windows and all of the locks on the doors of this room just open slightly. A little bit of divine magic flows through you....[W]hen you thought of escape, you thought of, yeah, embracing the unknown gives you the strength to leave a bad situation. Escape."

Bucky, Bricker, and Cork are still trapped and now that Brennan's brought Bucky back into the story, I don't think the season is going to end with Kristen leaving her little brothers in an abusive home life when there's every possibility for them to find safety and acceptance at Morded Manor.

I believe that if Kristen is able to help her brothers get away from their parents and the Church of Helio*, then Bucky is going to need a new god to follow. Why wouldn't Bucky, a scared, uncertain 14 year-old kid, not follow a goddess in the image of his older sister, whose very essence is that "whenever you're in the dark, I'm here holding your hand."

Kristen has always had a hard time doing the work of growing her church, of telling people about Cassandra. I think she'd find it easy to tell her siblings all about Cassandra when she's trying to help them find enough doubt and uncertainty in what they've known all their lives, that they'll have the courage to escape too.

*Also, there's definitely going to be further exploration of the Church of Sol, and by extension the Church of Helio, as they were 100% involved in what happened to Ankarna and Kristen is probably going to try to keep Bobby Dawn away from Bucky, just as she absolutely rejected Buddy Dawn becoming her brother's mentor.

[viennakarma]

Three is a party

Lewis Hamilton x Reader x Max Verstappen

Summary: Max hated you. He hated your pretty face, your beautiful body and your amazing personality. He hated that you were Hamilton’s girl.

Word count: 3.8k

Tags: Smut, female reader, +18, anal sex, unprotected sex, voyeurism, exhibtionism, edging, filthy, porn with very little plot, dom!lewis, sub!reader, sub!max, possibly queer! everyone, kinda polyamory situation, bit of dirty talking, pet names, not beta read

Notes: this is honestly just pure filth, you are warned. This is entering lgbtqia+ territory (for both drivers).

I’ll post this and drink a bottle of holy water or something.

God, Max hated you.

He hated your pretty face, your beautiful body and your amazing personality.

He hated that you were Hamilton’s girl.

Really, it was never his intention to look at you that way. Your paths should’ve never even crossed if you weren’t the most friendly person in the entire world. The first few times he saw you was just in passing, and he thought you were beautiful, but granted, all Lewis’ girlfriends were beautiful anyway. But then, you and Lewis became official after a couple of months, and your presence in race weekends became more and more prominent.

You soon became friends with other drivers, and Max always saw you around having a blast with George and his girlfriend, or even joking with Lando and Oscar, or helping the Ferrari guys with photography, or chatting with Valtteri or Esteban. When you even started a brief friendship with the Alpha Tauri boys, Max knew his time was coming, you seemed intent on getting acquainted with everyone.

The first time he was introduced to you, it came from Daniel Ricciardo, who was strolling with you, and Max suddenly crossed your path, trying to avoid both.

“Max!” He heard Daniel calling after him, and Max immediately froze on the spot. He managed to move and turn around just in time as you and Daniel stopped right in front of him, “This is Y/N, she’s brought everyone some cookies!”

“Hi, nice to meet you, Max!” You shook his hand, and he looked down to the box of cookies you were balancing with the other hand, “those are 100% healthy, ok? Gluten-free, vegan, low carb, all the athlete friendly stuff!”

“You made them?” Max asked, dumbly. But you laughed out loud as if he had said the best joke ever.

“Oh no, I can’t bake- or cook, to save my life!” You offered, raising the box, “go on, take one, you won’t regret it!” You said sweetly, your eyes shining in such a way that if you had offered him poison, he would probably take it willingly.

You chirped away as soon as you spotted Lando and Oscar, offering them cookies too after wishing Max a quick “good luck”.

You were always at the races, and through gossip, Max had heard you had a job only during four weekdays, so even if you had to work up until Thursday, you would always find a way to go to the races to support Lewis. You made sure to always greet every driver, wishing them luck regardless if you were rooting for your boyfriend only.

One day, Max was passing by and you noticed him, even if you were chatting with your boyfriend.

“Hey, Max!” You saluted him, and he just nodded back to you with his lips pressed in an almost smile.

He hated your ass in those jeans. He hated the way your perfume lingered behind every time you left after chatting with him. He hated the way you were always touching Lewis, not in a very PDA way, but more with soft touches, holding his hand, putting a supportive hand on his shoulder, whispering softly and giving him that divine smile of yours.

God, Max was so fucked.

-

Lewis invited everyone to a pre-season party at his place in Monaco. He even invited Max, who was particularly surprised, since they’re not really close. When Max texted other drivers to check if they were going, all of them confirmed, because no one would willingly miss an infamous Lewis Hamilton party. And Max decided to go because he didn’t want to be the only stuck up guy who wouldn’t show up.

And definitely not because he was hoping to see you there.

As he arrived purposefully late, the party was in full swing as soon as he entered through the door. His eyes scanned the room, dimly lit lights, loud music and way more people than he expected. He spotted you first, wearing a skimpy shimmering dress, standing between Lewis’ legs as he was sitting in a bar stool right behind you. The two of you were chatting with Lewis’ friends and Carlos, so Max did the most rational thing and walked to the opposite side, finding Checo and Charles talking over drinks.

Eventually he had to go and greet you and Lewis, since you’re both hosting the party, would be rude not to. He saw the opportunity as soon as you and Lewis were alone by the bar, whispering conspiratorially. He approached with a small smile.

“Glad to see you, Max” Lewis shook his hand as you smiled softly. It took Max a lot of restraint to not allow his eyes to rake down your body as you touched his shoulder in a friendly manner.

“Hope you’re enjoying yourself tonight, Max,” you said sweetly.

“I am, thanks for the invite,” he raised his drink politely. Luckily for him, he was immediately called over by Charles, who wanted a partner for a darts game.

He managed to let loose after a few drinks, and he didn’t stare at you as much as he did on the paddock. He drank and even met new people that Charles introduced him to.

As the party was winding down after a few hours, Max made sure Checo got to his car safely and instructed his driver to walk him inside because his teammate was way too drunk to walk on his own.

When Max got back, the amount of people still partying had lowered to half, and as he entered the room, he saw you exactly on the center of the dance floor. Reggaeton was blasting by the DJ, and you were dancing and grinding on your girl friends. And he felt like he was going insane as he went half hard just watching you dance. The way your hips moved, and the dress hiked up dangerously close to show half of your ass, and the envy he felt as he saw your girlfriends’ hands roaming your sides. He swallowed thickly forcing himself to look away, but the image of your hips moving slowly didn’t fade from his mind.

He tried to not pay you any attention, but you spent the next 30 minutes dancing, and grinding dangerously close to show your ass and you cleavage as the dress moved with your body.

He decided to go into the bathroom to calm down his mind and the hard on inside his pants. He threw cold water in his face that was red from the alcohol and the show you were giving outside. He refused to do anything about his boner other than mentally calm down. He is a high performance athlete, he could and would have the self control to command his body. He didn’t even want to touch himself because he didn’t want to cross that line.

He spent almost an hour inside the bathroom, pacing around and calming down.

As he came back to the party, he frowned, noticing that almost everyone had left, and those who were still there were getting ready to leave. Max decided that was the right course of action.

He spotted you and Lewis sitting down, Lewis sitting on an armchair and you sitting on the arm by his side.

“Hey, guys, thanks for the invite, I had a great time” Max waved.

“Do you want to accompany us for a nightcap?” Lewis suggested. Max looked between you two, confused.

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Max said slowly, not sure if you were only being polite, or if you really wanted him to join.

“Come on, Lewis stock the good stuff in the second office,” You winked at him, which made him laugh a little, in disbelief.

He watched as you got up, strolling happily upstairs. Max wasn’t sure if you were tipsy or sober enough, because you were always this chirpy and extroverted. Lewis followed behind you, and Max trailed right after, following to the second floor.

The second office, as you had called, looked like it had came right out of a 1920’s movie with leather couch and armchairs, and a wall full of different types of alcoholic beverages.

Max sat in an armchair close to the warm lights, and Lewis sat right in front of him, strangely close, with only a small centre table between them. Max’s eyes followed you as you went to the bar area.

“Max, how do you take your bourbon?” You asked softly, aligning three glasses.

“On the rocks, please” Max muttered, still unsure about everything. Something seemed off.

“You’re one of us, right baby?” You commented with a little giggle. As Max watched you prepare the drinks, he understood what you meant, all the three glasses were bourbon with ice.

Lewis started a small talk with Max, talking about how you two were considering buying a place in Netherlands because you adored Amsterdam.

As you came back, balancing the drinks with both hands, Max helped you grabbing one and giving other to Lewis. Max swallowed as you bent over to hand him his glass, and his eyes snapped to the way your dress lowered and he caught a glimpse of your breasts. His cheeks were red and warm as you sat down on Lewis’ lap.

“Cheers!” You said sweetly as you raised your glass for him in a toast, Lewis following your lead raising his too, from behind you.

The three of you kept talking about the plans to buy a new place, and the neighborhoods you’re contemplating moving to. Suddenly, you stopped talking.

“Max, can you be a dear and help me take off my heels?” You raised one of your legs in his direction, dangerously close to raising the hem of your dress. He stared at the red bottom of your heels, the strings around your ankle in a simple knot.

Max licked his lips, unsure as he looked over to Lewis, who just nodded, as if giving permission. The Dutch just leaned forward and held your ankle firmly with one hand and pulled the knot with the other. He tried not to think about being so physically close to you, how soft your skin felt against his hand, or the way you curled your toes as soon as the shoe was off. He lowered your foot trying not to linger his touch on your skin, and waited with bated breath as you raised the other one. He quickly undid the other, and he sighed as you finally let go.

He felt like it was some sort of test, as he checked Lewis to see a small smirk tugging his lips.

“Thank you, Max.” You said, politely.

“Do you think she’s pretty?” Lewis asked all of a sudden.

“No, I- I mean- Yes, but-” Max failed miserably, choking on his own words, but both you and Lewis waited calmly for his response. Finally, Max exhaled, looking deep into your eyes, “You’re beautiful, Y/N.”

He watched as you smiled, your cheeks blushing a bit and some kind of sick pride swelled in his chest.

“What do you say, baby?” Lewis tapped softly the side of your hip.

“Thank you, Max,” you whispered.

“We have noticed you,” Lewis started, looking Max in the eyes from above your shoulders, “how you ogle my baby every time you set your eyes on her,” Max felt his chest thudding on his ears, eyes wide, he barely breathe as Lewis’ hand settled on your neck, rising until it cradled your jaw firmly, “but luckily for you, we’re putting on a show tonight. Right, baby? You can stay and watch, Max, or you can leave right now and we’ll never talk about it again,” Lewis offered and waited for Max to get up and leave, but instead, Max just flexed his fingers, eyes on you.

Max’s breath caught on his throat, and he couldn’t believe his eyes as Lewis let go of yours, settling back on the armchair.

“Go on, baby. Make yourself comfortable.” Lewis commanded you, seemingly unbothered as he went back to nursing his drink. But you didn’t move from your place, just staring at Max, as Lewis finished his drink, he set down the glass, pulling your hair on the back of your head, “you’re not getting shy right now, are you pretty baby?” Lewis said and nipped at your neck, eliciting a moan from you as Max watched, mesmerized, his own hands firmly against his thighs.

Max’s eyes were wide as he watched Lewis hands finding your shoulders and pulling down the strings of your dress, making the loose fabric pool down around your waist, and your breasts proudly poking up beautifully. Max had to stifle a moan, his blood going straight to his cock at the sight of you half naked on Lewis’ lap. His eyes went from your nipples to your eyes that looked so turned on, pupils dilated and pretty mouth hanging slightly open, he then looked to Lewis, who looked up from ravaging your neck with a smirk.

“Go on, honey,” Lewis said to you but kept his eyes on Max’s.

Max only stared as you put both feet on the center table, flexing your knees and opening your legs to give him a full view of between your legs. He groaned as you showed him you were wearing no panties under that tiny dress. Lewis helped you take the dress fully off, throwing the shimmery fabric on the floor.

“I can bet she’s glistening right now, isn’t she, Max?” Lewis said, grabbing a hold on both your thighs and opening your legs even more for Max to see your pussy, “isn’t she?” Lewis asked again, his tone showing some dominance.

“She’s dripping wet,” Max answered slowly nodded, eyes focusing between your legs, which made you even hornier as they talked so casually about it. Your pussy was clenching and dripping so much you were sure you’re going to ruin the couch between Lewis’ legs soon, “you look so pretty, Y/N” Max added, reverently.

“Keep going, pretty baby, touch yourself so Max can see how pretty you look when you come.”

You obeyed, reaching your middle finger between your legs, finding a small relief running it up and down your slit, moaning softly which made Max palm himself on his jeans. You also could feel Lewis raging hard by your ass, and you wiggled your hips a little to give him some relief too.

“Put a finger in your pretty pussy,” Lewis said, and you went along, putting your middle finger into your pussy, moaning loud at the delicious contact, even though your fingers were nothing compared to Lewis’, “make yourself feel good.”

Max only watched, hypnotized by the way you were pulling your finger in and out, moaning and head lolling back, your tits bouncing with every roll of your hips. Lewis hands caressed your sides and went up until he pinched your nipples and you cried out, your moans louder by the second. The only thing Max could do was press his own erection through the fabric, the up and down of his hand, matching your own movements. He was getting closer to shamelessly finishing on his pants, and he could assume by the way your moans were getting louder that you too were close to finishing. He followed your rhythm, attentively.

“Stop” Lewis commanded and you immediately stopped, whining from being so close to release.

Lewis hummed softly as he noticed how Max also responded to his command, stopping his hand too, fingers flexing against his thigh. Lewis wasn’t sure about anything when the two of you talked about inviting Max to watch. But now seeing how quickly he was to follow an order, how his cheeks flushed and how his mouth was open, Lewis realized he got a great deal in all of this. He never knew Max could quickly fall into a sub preference.

“Max, open your trousers, pull your cock out” Lewis kept his voice firm, no space for questioning.

Max did what he said, unzipping his jeans, lowering just enough to spring his cock free.

“Now you two can start again, slowly” Lewis said, and he watched as Max licked a wet stripe in his own hand, finally closing his fist around his cock and starting slow, immediately moaning. You also started touching yourself again, enthralled by watching Max do the same. He was still following your lead, setting the pace the same as you. Lewis watched, feeling a little bit of relief in your ass grinding against his clothed cock. You were so close again, this time both you and Max moaning out loud, quickening the movements, you pressing the heel of your hand against your clit and Max pressing his cock head firmly. You could feel the tightening in your core, close to-

“Stop.”

You two stopped, you whining at being denied again, and Max put his shaky hand on the arm of the armchair. Max had never had no one bossing him, much less in edging, but relinquishing control was very freeing, in a way.

“You will warm my cock in your ass as you touch yourself, ok?” Lewis said, calmly instructing you. You only nodded. “Use your words.”

“Yes, Lewis.”

“Now get up, give me a kiss and show Max your pretty plug,” Lewis helped you up, because your legs were a bit shaken.

You turned around, bent over to kiss Lewis on the lips, and the position allowed Max to see your beautiful plug decorated with a pink gemstone. Lewis sucked your tongue, and you moaned against him. You wanted more, but his hands made you turn back around. Max watched fascinated as Lewis lowered his pants and freed his cock, pumping twice before spitting on himself, then pulling the anal plug out slowly, and you only moaned as he aligned his cock in your ass and started pushing softly.

You settled back on his lap, groaning at the feeling of his girth inside you, your eyes rolling in pleasure.

“Oh, Lewis! This is so good, love” You moaned, voice failing.

“You two can start again.”

You let Lewis hold your legs open, and placed your hand on your pussy again, inserting two fingers at once, needing release. Max also grabbed his cock, hand pressed against his leaking head, the view of Lewis’ cock disappearing between your legs was doing something to him.

The build up was quick for both you and Max, all the moaning mixing together, and Lewis joining you now that your ass was gripping his cock.

“Lewis, I’m going to-” you tried, moaning as you pumped your fingers in and out.

“Nuh-uh, hold it,” Lewis said, holding the sides of your hips with both hands, managing your movements as you were impaled on his cock. You kept moving, rubbing your wet fingers circularly your clit. Your eyes found Max’s, face fully red, sweat dampening his hairline. “I said, stop.”

Max was the one to whine as he let go of his cock, hips bucking searching for release. You also stopped, feeling the overwhelming need for release as your eyes teared up. Even if it was hard to endure, you loved the reward after edging sessions. Sometimes Lewis even edged you for hours, and in those occasions you came so hard you almost passed out.

“Please, please let us come,” you begged, not caring about how pathetic you sounded.

Max was only following you and Lewis, going with whatever was the flow, needy for release as much as you, but not as prone to begging as you, so he just stayed there panting as desperate.

“Sure thing, baby. Keep going now.” Lewis snapped his hips up, making you choke to the feel of him filling you up.

You nodded to Max, and the both of you started masturbating again, now more synced than ever. Lewis kept fucking into you, and the sensation only added to your own orgasm quickly building up again.

“Lewis,” Max moaned, “can we just-”

“Yes,” Lewis said with a breathy groan, with how your ass gripped his cock he knew he wasn’t lasting long either. “Max, Y/N, you can come now.”

Lewis had barely finished the sentence when you pressed your clit harder and started shaking, and he held you in place as the blinding pleasure overtook you, his cock twitching inside you as he also came with your body pulsating on him. Max groaned loud as he saw you shake, eyes rolling back and toes curling as you practically sobbed through the orgasm. Thick ropes of cum spilled down his hand and his lower abdomen, hips stuttering. He watched as you squirted, hand still on your pussy making a mess as you gushed, dripping on the floor and on the couch.

It was the filthiest view Max had ever witnessed, your tits bouncing as you came shaking, Lewis’ cock still inside you, spilling his cum down his length. Max fell back on the armchair, trying desperately to catch his breath. For a few minutes, the three desperate breaths calming down were the only sounds heard.

Then, Max watched as Lewis carefully removed you from him, putting you on the sofa, you were still all soft from coming so hard. Lewis opened a small fridge and picked two bottles of water, opening them before giving one to you, and the other to Max.

“Drink it up, Max” Lewis said and Max stared dumbly at him, but he just drank it, the cold water refreshing the heat. He watched as Lewis held the bottle against your lips, and you gulped down more than half of the water at once.

You were still fully naked but you didn’t seem really bothered by it. Lewis got up again, and this time, he went through a small door that Max hadn’t noticed before. Max tucked himself in his pants again, and he stayed silent as Lewis came back, he had a damp towel and he cleaned you between your legs.

“I’m sorry, baby” Lewis said as you hissed when he pressed the towel against your still sensitive pussy.

Over the table, Lewis handed Max the towel.

“To clean up the mess,” Lewis explained, looking pointedly at Max's hand and shirt still a little smeared with his cum.

“Thank you,” Max said, using the towel. As he cleaned, he watched as Lewis helped you put on a fluffy robe.

“Max, it’s really late so we suggest you take one of the guest rooms,” Lewis said gently as he helped you get up.

Max was still confused and also spent, but he just nodded. The party had ended long before and he really believed that the three of you should talk about it. But he could see you and Lewis were too tired for a conversation.

Lewis and you led him to the guest room that was the closest to yours, just in case.

“Just sleep, and we can talk about it in the morning, ok?” You said, smiling kindly.

“Yes, of course.”

Note: should I do part 2?

[finelinefae]

soft

synopsis: girls with cute tummies and soft thighs and extra chub in different places can also date hot popstar boys okay? okay.

word count: 2.1 k

contains: plus size reader, non au harry, fluff, mentions of body image and insecurities, harry being obsessed with his girlfriend

A/N: the start of a new thing called 'soft girl sundays' which I'm starting !! i wrote this for wp a few months ago but it's one of my fave things I've written so I'm re-posting it here. it's cheesy and fun and harry's obsessed with his girl !! i know for a lot of us girlies sometimes it feels like we take up too much space and we're always made to feel smaller mentally, physically, in every way really but you have much of a right to be here as everyone else so take up alllll the space u need !! women are beautiful and majestic no matter their size 💘

. . .

My girls' in the audience tonight.

I look past the curtain across the stage and see her in the VIP section.

Even without the stage lights shining on her, she's glowing.

She's wearing a shirt with my initials stitched over her heart and every time she lifts her arms, I see her soft tummy and the dimples on her back when she spins. Her thick thighs are on show as she wears the smallest pink skirt known to man. Her hair falls past her shoulder and down her back and her cute cheeks turn pink as she smiles when she speaks to some of the team who stand with her. 

She's the living embodiment of the divine feminine and I can't ever seem to get over the fact that she's all mine. 

The music begins to play and I watch as her face lights up with excitement. She's seen this show over a few dozen times but she never fails to be just as excited as the first time she saw me walk on stage with a hickey on my neck that she'd put there moments before.

When it's my queue, I skip onto the stage and my ears nearly burst as the sound of people screaming over the music starts to fill the stadium. She's smiling, she's cheering, she's singing the words to every single song. She's so pretty and she's all I see.

When the show ends, I walk backstage to my dressing room. Normally I'd run into a car and get the Hell out of there before crowds of people start to fill up the streets to get home, but this time, Y/N was here and I knew how much anxiety she felt whenever we had to rush to be somewhere.

I walked in and accepted the compliments from my team after another successful show. Paris was a city I held close to me so it was always a fun time when we played.

I gulped down a glass of water and felt arms snake around my waist. I immediately grinned when I saw the lilac-painted nails that matched my very own. I feel her nuzzle her face into my back before I twist in her embrace and look into the eyes of the girl I love with everything in me.

"Hi baby," I whisper, stroking her cheek that still had glitter on it.

"Hi Harry," Y/N murmurs, her eyes tired but full of happiness.

"Y' okay?" I hold her, feeling her soft skin beneath my hand. She was so soft and cuddly.

"I'm okay." She smiles, lazily. "You did so good up there. I nearly cried,"

I laugh, "You always nearly cry."

"That's because I'm proud of you." She shrugs.

We sit on the couch and she straddles my lap, her skirt riding up and I nearly choke when I catch a glimpse of her lacy underwear. I put my hands on her thighs and squeeze them softly. "You excited for our trip tomorrow?" I asked, staring at her lips and suddenly feeling the temptation to kiss them. I did and she happily accepted.

We had a few days before the next show so we decided to head down to the South of France and spend a few days in Nice. We haven't been on a trip together in a while other than the tour locations so we made the most of the little time we had in between shows to spend as much time as we could together.

She nods, "I bought a new swimsuit just for the occasion."

I groan, my head falling back against the couch, "You kill me."

She giggles, "love you."

I immediately smile. "I love you too," I kiss her.

The morning after the show, we woke up early to make our flight down to Nice. Y/N whines the entire time because she's not a morning person and refuses to step one foot out of bed until I force her.

She sleeps on my chest the entire journey there, wearing an oversized hoodie with the hood up. "My whole heart is inside y'." I murmur as her cheek presses against my chest and makes her lips all pouty, light snores falling from them. I lightly push some of her baby hairs back from her face and trace my thumb over the soft skin of her cheek.

We arrive and head straight to our room at the hotel to drop our bags off before heading to the beach. Y/N immediately opens the doors to the balcony and gasps when she looks out at the view. "Harry, it's beautiful," Y/N says in awe.

I come up behind her and wrap my arms around her tummy, squeezing the softest part of her. I loved all the parts of her but her tummy was my absolute favourite. She always complained about it. How it stuck out when she wore tight clothing and even more so after eating. 'Harry I already have a tummy? Why punish me further by making it bigger after I eat? Seems unfair don't you think?'  I'd spend the whole journey home telling her how beautiful she looked and how I loved watching her enjoy the food she loves and then I'd hold her in bed and run circles on her little, bloated belly because I had made it my life's mission to show as much love to the little chub of a tummy she had.

I pull on my swim shorts and a white linen shirt, leaving the buttons undone. I pack my beach bag for our beach towels and my book as well as my film camera and sun lotion.

Y/N walks out of the bathroom. Her hair in loose curls from the heat and her face already sunkissed and pretty. My mouth falls open when I take in the small, blue bikini on her body, revealing her soft curves and every perfect inch of her.

"Do you like it?" She blushes, acting like she's not the hottest girl I've ever seen in my entire life.

It tied at her waist and around her neck, my immediate thought being how easy it would be to take it off her and spend the entire day in bed, making out or whatever. I honestly couldn't care less as long as she's there.

"Baby," I dropped the bag on the floor and made my way towards her, pinching her chin between my thumb and forefinger and tilting her head back so I could kiss her at the perfect angle.

She whines and the sound nearly has me dropping to my knees. "You're fucking unbelievable."

"You really think so?" She bites back a smile, "You don't think I need to hide my stretch marks?" My heart aches at how unsure she sounded, the fact she even had to ask made me want to pick her up and kiss each stretch mark on her body.

"No, my love," I shake my head, kissing the stretch marks at the top of her left breast and feeling her heart racing at the delicate touch. "You have absolutely nothing to hide from anybody. Y' beautiful and you're mine,"

She smiles and kisses me again.

We head down to the beach to the reserved sunbeds. Y/N lays out her towel and sits down to apply sun cream to her arms and legs. I help her do her back, massaging her shoulders and trying not to combust as she rolls her head to the side and moans at the feeling.

I literally have a crush on this woman.

And she's my fucking girlfriend.

What did I do to get this lucky in life?

"Let's go in the water baby," I held her hand and we walked to the water, stepping in together.

She wraps her arms and legs around me when we're deep enough in the water. I squeeze her ass and she gasps, swatting me gently. "What?" I look at her innocently.

"There's people watching." She hides her face in my neck and I turn us both around to catch sight of the paparazzi hiding behind the trees and snapping pictures of us.

I release a sigh and pull her face back to get a better look at her. If there was one thing that could make my girlfriend second guess herself, it was the paparazzi constantly posting her pictures online and allowing people to berate her for how she looked.

"Please don't let them ruin your day my love," I kiss her shoulder, still holding her in my arms. "I promise, you're the prettiest girl I've ever seen."

"You promise?" She pouts.

"Feel this," I reach for her hand and guide her to the small bit of chub on my hip.

She gasps, "You have chub too!"

I rolled my eyes but smiled at the same time, her excitement was adorable. "Everyone's got something they're insecure about. No matter how hard I've tried I can't seem to get rid of it, maybe it's from all the cakes you've been making but how am I meant to say no to such a pretty face?"

She squeals in delight when I pinch her sides and giggles as I press kisses to her face. "Wanna go and sunbathe for a little, baby?" She nods and we both walk out of the water so she can sit in the sun for a bit.

I spend more time in the water and come out to find Y/N verging on the brink of sleep. I smirk as I crawl between her legs and lay between her thighs, sighing softly as I turn my head away from the sun and press a kiss to her inner thigh. She reaches down and runs her fingers through my wet hair, her nails scratching my scalp.

After midday, I order food to be sent up to our room. Y/N's passed out on the sunbed so I gently shake her awake, "Hi baby," Her pretty eyes flutter open, "Need you to drink something darling, you've been in the sun for a while." She slowly sits up and rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. I unscrew the cap of the water bottle and pass it to her, watching as she almost drinks the whole thing.

"I got us room service to be delivered. Want to head back upstairs for a bit?" Her cheeks were red and her hair was all frizzy due to the humidity. She nodded and we packed our things up and made our way back to our hotel room.

Our food was already laid out on the balcony by the time we walked into the room. I had left the air conditioning on so the room was nice and cool since Y/N struggled to sleep when it was too hot and stuffy.

She was wearing my linen shirt over her bikini and I couldn't help but stare at her ass as I followed her to the table outside.

There was fruit, bread and pastries laid out on a spread at the table as well as a glass of red wine and some orange juice. Y/N sat on one of the chairs with one leg hitched up as she ate some of her baguette and cheese, her favourite snack to eat when we were in France.

"Are you having fun, my love?" I asked, taking a bite of fresh watermelon.

She nods quickly, "It's the best. Anytime with you is always the best,"

"Come sit here," I motion and move my chair out, patting my thigh. She doesn't hesitate and stands up to sit down on my lap.

I kissed the back of her neck and put one hand on her hip, my thumb traced the edge of the waistband of her bikini bottoms, slipping under the material to trail soft circles over her hip bones.

"I'm keeping you forever, I hope you know that," I murmur, appreciating this intimate moment between us which didn't happen as often as I liked them to but we made do.

"I hope so," She whispers.

I loved this girl for all she was. There is nothing in this world that could change just how much I adored her.

"Harry," She says my name, "This bikini is pretty easy to take off you know."

I choke, eyes widening and seeing the smirk on her face. I pick her up, her legs wrapping around me and her ankles locking behind my back. "Is that a challenge or a request?" I kiss her lips, tasting the saltiness of the sea on them.

"Both," She says in between kisses.

This girl. 

[thehighladywrites]

ACOTAR men x reader, meeting your parents

𐙚 summary: the acotar men meet ur parents for the first time, how will it go?

𐙚 warnings: crack, fluff

𐙚 amara’s note: thank u sm for the req anon!!💗 i need cassian so bad i’m not joking 🙁 | based on this req

Rhysand

okay so in my mind there are two ways this could go

either ur parents are scared shitless bc of him or they absolutely adore him

They’re real scared if your parents live in the Hewn City and have only seen Rhysand’s bad side, you know, when he was with Amarantha and just seemed like a real jerk overall

The part where they adore him would come into play if your parents lived in Velaris and witnessed Rhysand's true self, not the facade he presents to his court, but the genuine person behind the mask

I think he would act very nonchalant and act like its a casual thing meeting your parents but he is shitting himself behind the facades

He's just really eager for your parents to like him, so he ends up accidentally over-complimenting your mom, which might make your dad a bit irked.

“Mrs. L/N, your beauty is as radiant as the stars. And your cooking is absolutely divine,” he has a hand on his heart, his famous smirk playing on his lips

“Aw, thank you so very much Rhysand, how very kind of you. I’m glad you like it!” your mom beams at him sweetly

“Alright, Rhysand, let's not get carried away,” your dad mutters, staring daggers at rhys as he gets drags your moms chair closer to him

After a while they grow to love him and your father’s distaste for him lessens

Azriel

it’s kind like rhysand’s situation, your parents score is based on how much they know about him

okay, so if ur parents know he’s the scary night court torturer and spymaster who does dangerous things for his work, he might not be very well liked. not only that but they would be genuinely worried and very scared

but if they only know he works for the high lord, i believe the chance of liking him is big

I think azriel’s calm aura when he’s with you makes him very likeable and trustworthy

Your parents see how much he cares for you, the little things he does for you and they approve

they see the small things he does, like this vid right here

Azriel is actually so fucking nervous, he stalks your parents before meeting them. He knows what your dad likes and he knows what your mom likes. Azriel brings their interests up casually in conversations and see how their faces light up

of course you know about all of this but you let him think he’s slick

Eris

Just like rhys and az, it depends on how much they know ab him.

If this is pre berons death eris, they will probably not like him bc of the way he presents himself

I still think Eris is charming and will win over your parents

He’s an expert on charming people and he uses it when he meets ur parents

he is very respectful, tho not very talkative. He speaks when spoken to basically

He gets very nervous when he is asked questions about your relationship bc if there’s one thing he loves it’s privacy

Eris is super vague, i’m talking one word answer for everything

“So how did you meet?”

“at a meeting.”

“Okay! so whats the story?”

“we fell in love.”

Absolutely melts when ur parents decide to like him bc he has never had any parental figure like him that much except for his mom and he is very happy on the inside when ur parents love him

literally thinks of ur parents as his after a while

Lucien

He is extremely well liked, like right off the bat, they love him

We all now he is prythian’s most charming male

is the type to say “wow i see where my girl gets her beauty from” to your mom and “you raised her well, she is very smart” to your dad

I swear he will flirt with anyone. your brother, your sister, your mom, your dad

he brings gift baskets whenever u visit them and it’s always personalized gifts too

your younger siblings always greet him before you bc they think he’s wayyyyy cooler than u

he just basks in the attention bc slowly ur family basically adopts him and he becomes part of the family very quickly they all love him

Goes on walks with your parents, bakes with them, talks to them, literally becomes their fav in a heartbeat making u a lil jelly

This is SO him and ur mom LINK

Cassian

awww😭 bless his heart he is so awkward

he is so adamant about being liked, he goes all out

i’m talking gets a suit, shaves and gels his hair back even though you say it’s really not that deep

sweating bullets, wings drooping a tiiiiiny amount. not noticeable to anyone but himself

anyway

cassian knocks on the door w flowers for ur mom and his hands are literally sweating

absolutely doesn’t let you touch him in a romantic way. he literally swats of your hand on his bicep, “bae, we can’t do that right here, are you crazy??” he says in ur mind, looking around to see of anyone saw that super scandalous touch

at the dinner table he almost knocks over a glass and drops a fork on the floor

his tie is too tight and he carefully tugs on it for air until you decide it’s too much and take him to your childhood bedroom

“Cas, are you okay? They love you so much, there is really no need to be this nervous.”

“Are you sure they like me? Be honest.”

“Baby, I promise you, if they didn’t, you would know. Now get rid of this tie, pop a button and relax, let me get you a drink.”

After you kiss him and get him a drink, he calms down and goes back to his normal non nervous, lovely self

🏷️: @amara-moonlight @rowaelinsdaughter @redbleedingrose @artists-ally @thelov3lybookworm @clairebear08 @riddlesb1tch @cupidojenphrodite @readychilledwine @berryzxx @fell-in-luvs

[neuvistar]

TOO TEMPTING FOR ME TO RESIST. (tbh there is no topic or theme for this is just separate thirsts i’ve been thinkin abt for these men lawl)

— featuring ┊ dan heng, jing yuan, blade, luocha x fem!reader (all separate)

— warnings / content warnings ┊ not proofread whoops uh uhuh makeout sessions wink wink, use of she/her pronouns, hair pulling or tugging??? (luocha + blade), praising mayhaps?? (jing yuan), slight degradation (blade), vaginal fingering (danheng), oral sex (blade, fem!receiving) luocha being such a sweetheart (maybe ooc luocha? i don’t rlly know what he’s like so stay w me on this), mentions of breeding, ALSO blade is also called “ren” here cuz i think that’s his real name?? idk! luocha is a tittie lover foreal (tittie men.. ugh), use of nicknames (angel, sweetheart, etc), overall slight suggestive content || 18+ MINORS DO NOT INTERACT

— a/n ┊HONKAI STAR RAIL SMUT DEBUT FOREALSSS! except it’s kinda messy cuz this is just a brainrot n also i’m sososorry i’ll get requests done right after this, i’ve been busy so again think of this as a filler, although i did enjoy writing this tbh （＞ε＜ ）

✦ 𝐃𝐀𝐍 𝐇𝐄𝐍𝐆

“cmon pretty, tell me how much you trust me,“ dan heng pulled you closer, his right hand touching her cheek. “you’re giving me complete control over you. you’re letting me do whatever I want with you, whenever I want. how do you know I won't go too far?“ he plunged two fingers inside of her soaking wet cunt, earning a whine from her as she felt him buck his hips against her, fingering her at a slow and steady pace. fuck.. you were beautiful. dan heng wanted to do this with you for so long but yet never had the chance to ask you properly. you were just.. too tempting for him to resist. he wanted you, now. he wanted you to take him and his fingers right then and there on his lap

“hah.. i don’t mind.. just— mm.. faster please, ‘need you so bad, dan heng.”

he smiled nonchalantly, “well... I'm sorry if it gets too intimate. you asked for this, mm?.” dan heng pulled her into a deep kiss, pulling her body closer as his arm embraced her so gently while the other was working on her aching pussy, the lewd sounds of squelching could be heard as his fingers worked wonders on her sweet cunt, struggling to hold back the dirty sounds that threatened to leave her throat. that kiss soon became more passionate as his tongue explored your mouth. the taste of his lips was so addicting to you.. the sweet taste of strawberries filled your mouth. dan heng curled his slender fingers inside her as he began to bounce his leg gently, adding another digit inside. he kept the pace of his fingers up, planting a series of kisses and nibbles along her neck

she couldn’t take it. she really couldn’t. the feeling of his fingers inside of your cunt drove you crazy, you wanted more. you yearned for more. throwing her head back as she felt herself chasing her orgasm. “‘gonna cum, dan heng.. g-gonna cum!”

suddenly, he stopped the movements of his fingers, completely catching her off guard, her pussy clenching around his fingers. he slowly pulled out, cum connecting his digits to her cunt as he looked at her dead in the eye, chuckling to himself. “i love it when you cum on my fingers like that, sweetheart. it just makes me more tempted to ruin you more than i already do.”

✦ 𝐉𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐘𝐔𝐀𝐍

“goodness your body is divine... it’s like you were carved by angels,” his eyes lingered on her chest, giving her a wide grin before planting a small kiss on her neck. “maybe that’s why you’re so tempting, hm? that body of yours.. ‘can’t get enough of it. temptin’ me too much.”

he pinned her down onto the mattress, knee brushing up against her crotch which forced out a whimper out of her as he chuckled lowly. “your body.. It's so damn beautiful,” jing yuan traces circles on your bare shoulder, kissing it every now and then. “your body is like art, angel. i wang to keep looking, touching, and feeling you.. i’m sure you wouldn't mind, would you?”

“you want me sooo bad don’t you, yu?”

he chuckled before his fingers moved up from her neck then to her chin, his thumb brushing against her bottom lip. “mm.. more than anything.“ he smirked pulling her into one of those kisses that she can't help but melt into, as his hand trails down into the curve of her waist, pulling away slightly. “you’re the only one I want, my sweet angel.“ jing yuan pulls her in even closer, the intensity of his kiss rising even more. “I crave you like nothing else. I need to have you, hold you, treasure you.” she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him even closer than he already was, her hot breath landing on his neck as she licked it slowly, hearing a low moan leave his lips “fuck baby.. you’re like a drug to me, you make me weak. that’s why you’re so tempting. ‘s so hard to hold myself back when i see you.. ‘s hard to hold myself back from bending you over my desk to fill you up whole.”

his fingers ran along her thigh, lifting it up slightly as he interlocked his lips with hers, loving the feeling of her lips on his. jing yuan’s breathing becomes even more ragged, his eyes looking into hers with utter passion. “i’ll make sure you never forget tonight, ‘gonna breed you all full.. you want that, don’t you? you want a lil’ me and a lil’ you running around, sweet thing? ‘cause i’m gonna give you exactly what you want.”

✦ 𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐃𝐄

“stay still f’me.” he lifted her knees to her chest as he kept them in place, pushing her panties aside. he gazed up at her one last time, moving closer towards her with a low hum. his lips curved into a smirk, she sucked in a short sharp hiss of breath as he bit down on a spot on her thigh, kissing the other. “‘s mean.. always ‘s mean to me ren..”

“but you like it when i’m mean to you like this, right? don’t you put up at act with me. you know you enjoy it as much as i do.”

“mm.. ah! r—ren!” blade pressed his thumb against her puffy clit, giving your cunt one nice slap as her body shuddered, moaning his name before tightening her grip on his hair, pulling his face closer to her cunt. “‘always so desperate, huh? you want it so bad? fine. if that’s what you really want, i’ll give it to you, sweet thing. don’t start cryin’ that it’s t’much. because you’ll lay there and take it like the slut you are.” she whined and threw her head back as she felt his warm tongue lick her dripping slit. his tongue swirled around her clit, keeping her knees completely still.

god, he was good at this. it’s like he was a natural. licking at all the right places, circling his tongue on her folds, gazing up at her only to see she was already gazing down at him, eating her out like a mad man like there was no tomorrow. he stared at her in awe, the facial expressions she was making, the way she arched her back at how he lapped at her juices, and the way her hand on the back of his head pushed him down further on her cunt, he was absolutely losing it. all of the sudden, the pleasure she was receiving suddenly stopped as blade pulled away from her, licking his lips clean. he stared down in between her legs then right back at her, wrapping an arm around her waist as he crashed his lips against hers, letting her taste herself before pulling away from her lips slowly. “‘want more, ren..”

“then beg for it. ‘m not givin’ you anythin you want unless you beg. beg like a needy slut. maybe then i’ll give you whatever you please, cmon. lemme hear you beg for me, sweet girl.”

✦ 𝐋𝐔𝐎𝐂𝐇𝐀

“want you to do whatever you want t’me, luocha. show me what you can do to me, show me that you’re the only one who can love me like this, who can cherish me like this, show me that nobody is willing to love me like you are, nobody is willing to be as genuine with me as you are.” she ran her fingers through his long hair, massaging his scalp before tugging at it slightly, hearing the blonde’s breath hitch at that before smiling at her lovingly, “you’re really asking me to do absolutely anything i want with you?”

“please.”

“you’re doing things to me y’know that, princess?” luocha’s entire body throbbed with the immense heat present between them. she heard him sigh lowly, his lips now on hers kissing her roughly, his kisses filled with lust and heat ahe hadn’t felt in so long. she inhaled sharply, running her fingers through his soft locks, pulling on it gently once more. she kissed and sucked on his lip, yanking his hair more roughly now. he slipped his hand underneath your shirt, caressing your belly ever so gently with his palm, running his all the way up to cup your breast. a string of saliva followed his lips, pulling away from your lips. “say.. [name]?”

“mhm?”

“you said i can do whatever i want with you, right? that being said, i’m sure you wouldn’t mind if i put a little one in you right here right now, mhm? i’m sure you can handle that can’t you, princess?” her back arched at his words, body jolting at the feeling of his cold hands on her sensitive breasts, rubbing them with the tip of his fingers. “then.. go ahead. i’m not stopping you, luocha.”

“then.. have all of me.”

damn this is messed up n all over the place it’s ok it’s just thirsts guys trust stop i had no theme in mind — Maryse

[redtaylorsversiongirlie]

𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔.

❥ pairings: fred weasley x fem!gryffindor!reader

❥ summary: "i don't want you like a best friend, only bought this dress so you could take it off"

❥ warnings: underage drinking.... nothing much really

❥ word count: 1,4k

❥ a/n: based off the horniest song blondie could ever write, dress.

requested by @stevies-sweetie , hope u enjoy it. tysm for the request!!!

you looked into the mirror at yourself as angelina was finishing your hair and did a couple of changes in your make up. when she was done, you stood up to check the dress that you had bought in hogsmeade, and definitely not because george told you fred was going to wear a suit of the very similar colour.

"you look hot," your friend katie commented. "fred's going to drool when he sees you."

you rolled your eyes but the thought made blood rush into your cheeks.

"well," you sighed, "in case you have forgotten, me and fred aren't going together. i'm going with peter kerridge."

angelina scoffed. "can't believe you said yes to him. he's a complete jerk."

"well, nobody else has asked me. especially not fred," you said deffensively.

"i don't understand why, though," katie frowned. "even a blind person would be able to tell he likes you."

"apparently not," you retorted, enough with the topic of fred. it suddenly hit you how crazy it was to buy wine coloured dress just to match fred. he will probably be busy with his date to even spare you a glance and notice it.

with a sigh and a last look in the mirror, you made your way out of the dorm into the common room.

fred was already there, talking to his brother. just as george told you, the boy you fancied was truly wearing wine-coloured suit and you had to stop yourself from staring because, god, he looked so beautiful.

fred turned around just in time to see you walking down the stairs. his mouth slightly opened as his eyes scanned you up and down.

"you look so divine," he breathed out, reaching for your hand.

you blinked. "me?"

he chuckled. "yes. who else?"

just then, fred looked behind you, drawing his hand back. you turned around to see fred's date. she was very pretty though you hated to admit that. however, her dark blue dress didn't match fred's suit.

jealousy pulsed through your veins at the sight of them intertwining her arms and you looked away, deciding that it was time to meet peter in front of the entrance to the common room.

he looked handsome, peter, i mean. he wasn't bad looking at all, no. a lot of girls wished to be in your shoes at that very moment but your heart didn't pick up its pace when you locked your arms together or when he said you looked beautiful or when he held your waist as you two danced. you could only pretend that he was fred.

speaking of him, fred seemed to have far more fun than you. laughing with his date, george and angelina as you were sulking in chair while peter was getting you drinks.

angelina was right, peter was a complete jerk, talking about himself the whole night while you were only pretending to listen to whatever he was talking about and glancing over at fred across the whole great hall.

when peter approached you with the drinks, you chugged the whole glass in one go. your date stared at you wide-eyed before chuckling and asking if you want to dance again.

you shook your head but he kept bugging you, saying how boring you are and how he thought it was going to be more fun and how he then, standing there in front of you while the alcohol started doing its' job on you, wished he asked the girl that went with fred instead.

you scoffed and rolled your eyes so much that it hurt.

"of course! everybody wants to go with (name)!"

you crossed your arms on your chest and let out a sigh of relief when peter finally left you alone.

harry and ron joined you shortly after. they, just like you, weren't enjoying the night like everyone else. harry was in very similar situation like you, after all. he wanted to go with cho chang who went with cedric diggory and so, the boy spent the entire night glaring in his direction.

few minutes and about thousands of alcohol-filled glasses later, you started to feel your head spin. you were almost certain that if you tried to stood up and walk somewhere, you would most likely fall.

you were so lost in thoughts, staring at your lap and feet that you didn't notice fred approaching you. it was only when he tapped your shoulder that you glanced up at him.

fred didn't take that personally though as he sat down next to you, grinning from ear to ear. "hi."

you raised an eyebrow and blinked drunkely. "yes?" you asked, sounding more rudely than you intended to.

"hi?"

"how are you?"

you scoffed as if it wasn't obvious from your mood. "perfectly fine."

"mhm, yeah, i can see that." he then stood up and handed you his hand. "would you like to dance with me?"

you shrugged, hoping to hide the blush on your cheeks as you stood up and he took your hand into his.

as he dragged you to the dance floor though, you tripped over your feet and you would fall to the ground if fred didn't catch you in time.

he chuckled and said, "alright, dancing might not be the best for you right now," he paused as you placed your head on his shoulder, eyes dropping. "oh, no, love, don't you fall asleep on me. let's get you to your dorm, yeah?"

you hummed and fred lead you out of the great hall up the staircase which was quite difficult for you to walk up. fred would lie if he said if he didn't find you hilarious and absolutely adorable at that moment. but he always did.

"don't you think we'd be in your dorm faster if i gave you a piggyback ride?" he asked.

you nodded and fred bent in his knees so you could get on his back. you wrapped your arms around his neck and leaned your head against his, breathing in his hair shampoo that you loved so much.

you almost fell asleep by the time you arrived in your dorm but once you did, fred sat you down on his bed and carefully took off your heels.

"did you have fun tonight?" fred questioned, tried to keep you awake.

you pouted. "no," you hiccupped. "peter's a dick."

he smiled. "but you knew that when he asked you. why did you go with him?"

"cause you didn't ask me," you said, making fred freeze, glancing up at you.

"we-well," he stuttered, "i didn't know if you'd say yes. you're my best friend. . ."

"you're mine, too," you shrugged and bit your lip. "but maybe i don't want you like a best friend."

fred shook his head. "you have no idea what you're saying, y/n." your heels were off and so he stood up and you did too. you reached to your back for the zipper of your dress and even though you could reach it perfectly, you had an idea.

he was so close to you with his hands now on your almost bare shoulders and you could feel his hot breath on your neck and back. you shuddered but he didn't pull away. you turned around to face him and bumped your nose with his before connecting your lips together.

"could you help me?" you whispered and the good friend freddie was, he nodded and pulled the zipper down.

you really wanted to go further, but fred pushed you away, causing your eyes to widen as you thought, oh no what did i do?

"oh, love, no," he tucked a string of your hair behind your ear before taking your face into his hands, thumbs wiping the tears that fell from your eyes. "i'd love to continue this, but you're so drunk and i'm quite sober. i don't want to take advantage of you."

"you wouldn't," you mumbled and let the straps of your dress fall from your shoulders. fred's cheeks turned redder than his hair at the sight of your bare chest. he turned around to give you privacy and you grinned. "don't worry. i only bought this dress so you could take it off, anyway."

that night was the beginning of something magical.

[liesmyth]

@moscca you're right and you should say it! Here's a really great compilation of Taz quotes I've been keeping in mind

From an interview where she says that Lovecraft was one of her main inspirations, talks about her relationship with horror vs. sff as a genre author, and wanting to find relatable heroines in horror lit.

I didn’t write Gideon the Ninth for the characters—I wrote it entirely for the structure. I wanted to tell a very specific story, and I needed everything to serve that story.

I want people to realise there are no boundaries. I also want to release people from having to take their universe entirely seriously, if they don’t want to. Science fiction and fantasy reflects ourselves, our anxieties, our joys. I’m just writing to amuse myself, as per usual.

I am writing for my younger self and it would be disgusting of me to try to teach her anything.

(& other quotes from that same interview)

Although love and forgiveness aren’t necessarily the same thing either, Gideon’s frankly divine ability to forgive is a huge core of the novel. [...] Forgiveness is almost the electrical current being able to transmit through love.

The way I personally stay true to the story I started down on is to give myself permission to not teach anyone anything. [...] I know that a lot of people do take enormous pleasure and relief in lines or phrases or ideas from stories that ring true to their own lives, but it’s important for me that I tell a story and that I’m not writing Chicken Soup for the Necromantic Soul.

...the God of the Locked Tomb IS a man; he IS the Father and the Teacher; it’s an inherently masc role played by someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch. John falls back on hierarchies and roles because they’re familiar even when he’s struggling not to. But the divine in the Locked Tomb is essentially feminine on multiple axes.

It seems to me that most books by anyone female-adjacent have an expectation that they will comfort the uncomfortable and discomfit the comfortable etc., whereas a guy can just tell an adventure story and be done with it. This ties in with an idea that I think nowadays that good art is moral and bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is good it must somehow be beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut.