#small savings interest rates

[neuzboyx24net0]

PPF, NSC, KVP: Govt Likely to Keep Interest Rates on Small Savings Schemes Unchanged on September 30

Interest rates on small savings schemes like PPF, SCSS, and NSC are reviewed at the end of every quarter and are decided for the next quarter accordingly. Paras Jasrai, senior economic analyst at India Ratings & Research, says although the global rate cut cycle has begun, the domestic factors remain strong with inflation expected to go up from September onwards, thus a status quo looks…

[seonghwaddict]

save a horse, ride your best friend — song mingi

in which your best friend can’t believe you’ve never ridden a dick before, so he takes it upon himself to teach you.

best friend!song mingi x fem!reader. requested by anon. genre. slight fluff. smut. best friends to friends with benefits. warnings. explicit sexual content mdni, inexperienced!reader, thigh riding, fingering, use of a dildo, big dick!mingi, multiple orgasms, unprotected, creampie, swearing, nicknames (baby, angel, pretty). wc. 4k. rating. mature.

lilo’s notes. this was requested a while ago but i’ve been putting it off because… i’ve never written anything about toys being used so uh, i was worried about the pacing and stuff. i wasn’t sure if you meant for them to be in an established relationship, so i went for the fwb route. IMPORTANT!!!! i lost access to my google account bc of a stupid mistake, if you sent in a request through my google form and would still like me to see it, please send it as an ask <33 i remember a few of them, but do send yours in just in case!!

listening to. need to know, doja cat // if u think i’m pretty, artemas // moonlight, kali uchis

masterlist.

it was a regular saturday evening. you were on a video call with your best friend, mingi, talking about anything that came to mind as you each ate a bowl of ramen as if you were really in the same room. he really only lived a couple buildings away, a two minute walk at most, but actually joining you in your apartment didn’t cross his mind until something interesting was brought up.

you weren’t sure what led to the conversation, but somehow it steered into the direction of something less innocent as you found yourself talking about an embarrassing date you’d gone on a while ago. recounting the story, laughing together, soon turned into a conversation about what each of you like in bed.

“oh, it’s just amazing,” mingi laughed as he gulped down a mouthful of water, momentarily pausing his rambling about how much he loves it when someone rides his dick. he ran a his hand through his short, washed-out pink hair, “honestly, my favourite thing ever since it probably feels just as good for whoever is, y’know, riding.”

based on everything he’s said so far, you came to the conclusion that he was more into giving than receiving, that he got off on seeing all the pleasure he can give his partner. so, it made sense he’d choose to mention the fact that riding him would feel good. not that you would know.

“can i admit something?”

he looked up from his bowl, sharp eyes looking almost hopeful as he nodded.

you looked around your kitchen jokingly, pretending to make sure no one sense was listened as you leaned closer a whispered, your hand cupping the side of your mouth.

“i’ve never done that before.”

his jaw dropped at that, letting out a small laugh. “you’re kidding.”

“no, really,” you insisted, going back to eating casually as if you were having the most normal conversation in the world with your best friend, “i really haven’t done… much, so i can’t confirm or deny your theory.”

“huh.” he leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms as he thought for a moment. his head tilted and it was then that you felt how warm your cheeks felt, how your thighs were pressed together under the counter. of course, he was well aware of the fact that you had much less experience than him, only knowing about two people you had slept with. but damn. he clicked his tongue and shook his head ever so slightly. “that won’t do.”

furrowing your eyebrows, you opened your mouth to ask him what he had meant by that. he beat you to it before you could get a word out.

“i can… teach you, if you want?”

you blinked at your screen, resting your wrist on your countertop and gripping your chopsticks a little too hard. a silence followed his offer, though it wasn’t awkward. in fact, he could see you genuinely considering it as you thought it over. eventually, you gave him a tiny nod.

“i mean,” you shrugged, shifting your eyes away shyly, “sure, i guess. why not?”

he grinned, trying to hide it as he shoved a mouthful of noodles into his mouth and shoved his bowl aside. he chewed, swallowed then got up and made sure to bring his phone with him. you recognised his hallways then bedroom as he walked through his apartment. “i’ll be there in like 15, i need to buy something on the way. just wait there, and where something comfortable and… um, accessible.”

you nodded, despite your confusion, and he hung up. accessible? you looked down at your clothing—or rather, lack thereof. since you were home and not expecting anyone, you’d settled on wearing just a shirt you stole from mingi that was too large for him and much larger for you, and panties. you lifted the hem of the worn shirt, assessing how much of your dignity you’d lose if he saw your pink hello kitty undergarments that you only wore if you were doing laundry.

you could already hear him giggling at the sight.

groaning and cursing under your breath, you dropped the shirt and sped to your bedroom to dig through your closet in hopes of finding something a little more appealing. after making a mess of one of your closet’s drawers, you finally pulled out a pair of less offensive panties. they were made of soft cotton; a muted light blue with thin white lace trim, the cut shaped more like a bikini than what you call your grandma underwear.

deciding they were flattering enough, you slipped off your hello kitty pair—ignoring the embarrassing amount of wetness creating a wet patch right where it was pressed against your core—and replaced it with the new pair. as you untwisted the waistband and adjusted it to fit properly, your doorbell rang and you froze on the spot before pulling yourself together and heading to open the door.

the walk to the door felt abnormally long as you stumbled over on wobbly knees. admittedly, you were a little nervous. sure, there have been times where you wanted to do some more than friendly activities with mingi, but you never actually thought it was happen. yet here you were, opening the door for him so he could come in and show you what being a cowgirl feels like.

“hey,” he greeted you softly, stepping into your home and closing the door behind him. you noticed a small plastic bag in his hand, eying it curiously as you watched him kick off his shoes and hang up his coat. once that was of the way, he took one of your hands in your free one and pulled you to where he knew your bedroom was.

once there, he set the bag down on your bedside table and dragged you to stand between his knees as he took a seat on the edge of your bed. he looked you over, lingering on the familiar t-shirt.

“so you’re the one that took this shirt, huh?” he quirked an eyebrow, glancing up at you as he released your hand and brought both of his to your hips. his thumbs caressed the curve of your waist over the shirt. “it was my favourite.”

you laughed softly, “clearly you didn’t care enough if i was able to keep it for three years without you noticing.”

“you little thief.” his nose scrunched as he glared at you jokingly, giving you a gentle squeeze.

“if you really want it back, you can always take it.”

“nah, it’s fine, keep it. it looks cuter on you anyway.” he took a breath and gave you another once over, humming appreciatively when he moved his hands up higher, dragging the shirt with it until he caught a glimpse of your panties. you tensed, caught off guard by how close he felt. “i need you to relax a little, how about i help you loosen up, yeah?”

you nodded, averting your gaze but returning it to him when you felt him pull you onto his lap. he slotted one of his legs between yours, easing you down to straddle his thigh. his hands ran up and down your sides and few times before resting on your bare thighs, your breath stuttered and he held back a smile.

“are you still okay with this?” he asked quietly, absentmindedly playing with the hem of his your shirt. “if i do anything that makes you uncomfortable, just tell me and i’ll stop immediately and we can just watch a movie or something, okay?” when you only nodded, he continued, “i need you to say it, please.”

“i’m okay with this,” you muttered in return, resting you hands on his biceps, “and i’ll let you know if i need you to stop.”

“good, now…” without waiting any longer, he leaned forward to attach his lips to your neck, his hands slowly beginning to rock you back and forth on his lap.

you sucked in a sharp breath and clung into his arms a little tighter, your stomach fluttering at the feeling of your clothed cunt on his firm thigh, your panties dragging against your clit with ease thanks to how wet you already were. he lifted you slightly as he pulled you towards him, pushing you down as he pushed, the varying pressure making your lips part in a soft whimper. he nearly groaned at the sound, moving his lips right below your ear.

“you know,” he rasped between the licks and kisses, “i can’t deny that i’ve wanted to fuck you for a long, long time now.”

“r-really?”

mingi chuckled as he pulled back to look at your face, half surprised and half needy. he noticed that if he relaxed his hands, you’d continue grinding against his thigh.

“yeah, really. i mean, look at you,” he glanced down, one of his hands lifting the hem of your shirt to watch you ride his thigh slowly, a dark wet patch forming right where your leaking pussy sat. he bit his lip, “you look so perfect… and i bet you’d feel perfect, too.”

you nearly whined at that, fucking yourself on his thigh just a little faster as he sucked a dark mark right above your collarbone before returning to mutter dirty words into your ear.

“i know practically everything about you and your cute little body, you know. better than anyone else,” one of his hands inched it’s way up your thighs, brushing against the edge of your panties, “i’ll make you feel so good, angel, i promise.”

“mingi?” you whimpered, prompting him to lean back a little to look at you with a curious tilt of his head and a raised brow. “if you don’t shut up and kiss me right now, i might lose my mind so… please.”

his beautifully plump lips stretched into a smile as he wasted no time in practically pouncing forward and smashing his lips against yours. it started a little slow as you got acquainted with each other, despite the fact you could feel a nearing orgasm as a knot in your stomach drew tighter with each roll of your hips, but soon the kiss turned hungry.

he groaned into your mouth as you let his tongue explore, making you let out a quiet moan. mingi knew he wouldn’t be able to kiss anyone ever again. you, his best friend of all people, had the most inviting lips he’s ever felt. so inviting, so perfect and so soft. he thought everything about was soft. his hand slipped just under the edge of your panties as his other one made your grinds slow down.

you didn’t mind the slow pace, knowing just a few more rocks of your hips would have you tipping over the edge. but he evidently had other plans as he finally made your hips still completely. you pulled away from his lips with a pout. if you were trying to make him feel bad, it backfired terribly.

all he could think of as he looks at your swollen, red, wet, pouty lips is how much prettier they’d look wrapped around his cock. but he could save that for another time.

“there’s no need to rush, baby,” he chuckled, wiping some saliva away from your bottom lip.

eventually, when he was sure you had calmed down enough, he lifted you off his lap a little and turned to lay you down on your back, pressed against the comfortable mattress as he kneeled on the edge. he gripped your knees and bent them, pushing them closer to your chest with his eyes zeroed in on where your slick was leaking through your panties.

with one hand keeping your knees together and elevated, he ran his other over the fabric, pressing down on where he knew your clot would be and elicit a sweet little moan as you squirmed beneath him. he thought you were so cute like this, you looked so flustered as he gave you nothing but featherlight touches where you needed him most. for now.

“don’t get all shy on me now,” he cooed as he glanced up and noticed you covering your face with your hands, “let me see you, pretty.”

he didn’t continue his touches until you finally removed your hands, giving him a nice view of your abused lips and round eyes, pupils blown wide with lust in a way that had something stirring in his abdomen. and his pants.

he let down your knees for a moment so both of his hands could slip under the waistband of your panties, slowly pulling them down your legs. he actually moaned when he saw the strings of arousal clutching onto the fabric as he dragged it away, snapping when he got too far.

“you’re so pretty, baby,” he murmured, watching your entrance squeeze around nothing, making more slick drip out.

after tossing it aside, he wasted no time in getting your knees back to the previous position and running his fingers through your folds.

“oh, fuck,” he groaned, eyes squeezing shut for a moment as you let out a moan when he tapped against your clit, “you’re soaked.”

he glanced up at you, wanting to see your face as he slowly pushed in too fingers and catching a glimpse of your hard nipples poking through your shirt. your face contorted for s fraction of s second before relaxing, your head tipping back against the mattress as you let out a whine.

he choked back a moan at the tight walls around his middle and ring fingers, the fingers of his other hand digging into your thighs. “sh-shit… you’re so tight. i’m gonna have to stretch you out first, okay?”

you nodded mindlessly, too distracted by his fingers prodding at your sweet spot to care about any words he may have said. but you furrowed your eyebrows and lifted your head when you felt both his hands leave you, finding him reaching for the bag. your curiosity outweighed your disappointment as he pulled something out.

it was a dildo. about as thick and long as the biggest person you had before, and made of what looked to be transparent silicon. your insides tightened at the sight, somehow the thought of him seemingly buying this just for you turning you on even more.

he returned to kneeling at the edge of your bed, leaning down to loop his arm around your waist and lift you up to place a pillow under your hips before letting lay back down.

“couldn’t find one my size, but this should be fine,” he held the dildo and ran the tip through your pussy, collecting wetness as you shuddered, “my cock will just have to stretch you the rest of the way.”

you breath hitched at the implication of his words. so he was bigger than that? your thighs pressed together at the thought of being completely stuffed by him. he chuckled, separating your knees enough for him to have a clear view of your pussy, pulsing and dripping and begging for his attention.

he began slipping the toy into you, filling you up inch by inch and watching your needy hole stretch around it and swallow it up. the sight had him choking back a moan, biting down on his bottom lip.

the stretch had your back arching and pushing yourself against it desperately, feeling like that alone could get you to finish. it only took a few deep strokes for your pussy to get used to the size, squeezing and writhing around it until you couldn’t handle it anymore. your arousal coated it quickly and seeped out with each stroke, squelching sounds filling the room that shot straight to his dick.

when you finally came, your toes curled and your body twitched as you let out a string of and whines and moans, little curses slipping between. he watched with fascination as you came undone right beneath him, not wanting to wait any longer to be inside you. he shoved the toy deep inside you, leaving it there as he leaned back for a moment to discard his clothes, slipping his hoodie and sweatpants off.

when you were brought back to your senses, you found yourself on his lap again, straddling his hips this time as he sat with his back against your headboard. you felt his erectile straining against his boxers and pressing against your core. you couldn’t help but rock your hips against his slowly.

“do you ever ride your pillow?” he asked suddenly, voice dropped what felt like two octaves lower than his regular tone. your eyes widened at the question but you nodded. he nodded too, his hands finding your ass and helping you grind against his clothes length. “this is a lot like that, except you have something in you… and it’s more of an up and down movement… and i’m obviously not a pillow… still, there’s really no right way to do it, just go slow and you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t. plus, i’m here to guide you.”

he gave your ass a squeeze as if to punctuate his sentence, massaging the soft flesh in his palms. when you felt ready, you dropped your hands from his shoulders to his boxers, palming his length a few times before hooking your fingers into the fabric and dragging it down until his cock sprung out.

he definitely wasn’t lying when he said it would stretch you more than the already-big dildo. he was definitely a lot bigger than anyone else you’ve been with, well over average. you nearly dropped at the sight, wrapping your hand around him and jerking him off, eyes fixated on the angry red tip leaking precum as you passed your thumb over it.

the muscles of his abs rippled and squeezed as your worked your hands on his cock, his head thrown back against the headboard and letting out stuttering moans. all the sounds he made encourage you to sit up on your knees, guiding him through your folds and whimpering as you finally sank down on him carefully.

the two of you moaned at the same time, him at how well you squeezed around him and you at how well he stretched you. you stopped when you reached just halfway, unsure whether or not you’d be able to fit more. his hips jerked slightly as his hands squeezed your hips.

“come on, baby,” he moaned softly, looking up at you with encouraging eyes, “just a little more… we can make it fit, right? just breathe.”

you nodded and as you took a deep breath, he used his hold on your to sink you further down until he finally bottomed out. he cursed silently, the back of his head finding the headboard again as you whined and dropped yours onto his shoulder.

you felt his tip pushing against your cervix, the new feeling making a lump form in your throat as you blinked back tears. this time it took a while to get used to the stretch before you tried grinding back and forth. it was slow, almost painfully so. he was amazed that despite stretching you with two different things, you were still so unbelievably tight, hugging him in a death grip as your raised your hips an inch before dropping down again.

your soft noises were muffled by his shoulder as your hands rested on his biceps, panting and squeezing gently as every inch of him dragged against the sensitive spongy patch in your walls every time you grinded on him. soon enough you were able to lift yourself to his tip and drop all the way down, your wetness letting him slip in and out with ease.

still, you kept the pace torturously slow, savouring each bounce and grind. his hands had left your hips at some point, exploring your body under your shirt, massaging your breasts and tweaking your nipples. he lifted the fabric but kept it on your as he watched your tits bounce temptingly, your puffy pink nipples making his mouth water as he pushed himself forward to take one into his mouth.

your hips stuttered as he sucked and nibbled at your nipples, throwing your head back and arching into his touch as your grinds grew sloppy. he felt your decreasing pace, using the hand that wasn’t teasing your other breast to guide your hips once more. he angled you slightly differently in a way that made your clit press against his pelvis each time he bottomed out, the speed of your grinds picking up quickly as his hips bucked up to meet yours.

his lips detached from your bruised breasts with a popping sound as he leaned up to capture your lips in his once again. it wasn’t much of a kiss, more teeth and tongue and moans and groans than anything else as you swallowed each other’s sounds.

you finished first, pushing yourself down hard and stilling, filling yourself with his throbbing cock and pressing your clit against him. he held you tightly, burying his face in your neck to suck at all the spot he knew would get your to writhe. many tickling fights contributed to his knowledge on all your sensitive spots.

your body twitched as you returned to bouncing on his length, your juices looking at his base. the overstimulation burned a little, making your thighs and knees quiver, but you were determined to get him to finish too. and by the looks of it, it shouldn’t take much longer.

“shit, baby,” he said, halfway between a whimper and a moan, fingertips digging into your hips as he threw his head back in bliss, “‘m so close— fuck, you feel s-so good.”

his chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, bottom lip caught between his teeth. his cheeks and the tip of his ears flushed a deep red, his plush lips a few shades darker and coated in your mixed saliva from your kisses. as you adjusted the angle of your hips, something in him snapped, grabbing your hips tighter and taking over. he took over your movements, thrusting his hips up desperately as you fell forward onto his chest with the sudden change in intensity. his tip pushed itself against your g-spot continually, another knot tightening in your stomach.

the wet sounds of your cunt and your skin slapping against his egged him on until finally he felt like he couldn’t hold back any longer.

“baby, p-please— fuck— please, can i cum i-inside you?” he begged through a groan, “i— please, angel, i-i can’t wait any longer.”

you nodded against his chest with a whine, you were on the pill anyway. not a second later, he released into you, filling you up with stuttering hips. he pulled you down, flush against him and keeping you there as he emptied himself with softly muttered curses, his head dropping to press open-mouthed kisses to your shoulder.

it felt new to you, the warmth making you squirm until you came again without warning. it was much weaker this time but still enough to make you shake in his arms, panting softly after letting out a strangled moan against his skin.

after a few long moments of trying to recover from the shared orgasm, he lifted his head, one of his hands cupping your chin to tilt your head to look at him.

“so,” he started, lips stretched into a smile, “how’d that feel?”

“fucking amazing.” you rolled your eyes at how smug he looked after your confession, not protesting as he leaned forward to kiss you.

this one was much softer than the previous kisses you shared, much more tender. it was a lot shorter too, he pulled away first to rest his forehead against yours.

“yeah?” he whispered, kissing the corner of your lips, “just wait until i hit it from the back.”

networks. @cromernet @wonderlandnet @cultofdionysusnet @pirateeznet

permanent taglist. @ad0rechuu @sankatchu @mlink64 @yeosangsbb @seonghwasbbgirl @likexaxdaydream @dreamingofyeo @yalyallic @yunhoswrldddd @coffee-addict-kitten @thunderous-wolf @chngbnwf

[amarugujarat]

Small Savings Schemes : હવે નાની બચત યોજનાઓમાં પહેલા કરતા વધુ વળતર મળશે, સરકારે વ્યાજ દરમાં કર્યો વધારો

Small Savings Schemes : નાની બચત યોજનાઓના વ્યાજ દરોમાં આજે સુધારો કરવામાં આવ્યો છે. કેન્દ્રએ શુક્રવારે જુલાઇ-સપ્ટેમ્બર 2023 ક્વાર્ટર માટે નાની બચત યોજનાઓ પરના વ્યાજ દરોમાં 30 bps સુધીનો વધારો કર્યો છે. શુક્રવારે જારી કરાયેલ એક નોટિફિકેશનમાં જણાવાયું છે કે કેન્દ્રીય નાણા મંત્રાલયે મોટાભાગની યોજનાઓના વ્યાજ દરો એક જ સ્તર પર રાખ્યા છે, જેમાં 1-વર્ષ, 2-વર્ષની FD અને RD યોજનામાં નાના ફેરફારો કરવામાં…

[concededlesbian]

can you write hcs of lover girl ellie williams, fluff and smut if you’d like <3

Lover girl!Ellie Modern AU Headcannons

Creds to @angelgbc for the third pic (correct me if I'm wrong though)

Ellie Williams x Female Reader

Content: Fluff and Smut

Rating: Explicit

Proofread?: Could've been if my friend responded to my message (jk I love her)

A/n: The grammar and punctuation is probs really fucking shitty because this is literally me just ranting. This is also my second time ever writing a headcannons list. Also I didn't know if you wanted this to be set in a modern environment or the canon one. I can make another version set canon one tho.

｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★

SFW

Lover Girl!Ellie has craved a relationship since her first crush when she was fourteen.

Lover Girl!Ellie honestly thought she would never find love because she usually drove girls away due to her coming off as dry and uninterested.

That was until she met you.

Lover Girl!Ellie met you by sitting at a table with you in a crowded restaurant. She was waiting to pick up a to-go order and there were no empty tables to wait at. Ellie saw that your table was the most empty because you were the only one sitting there plus you also seemed to be waiting.

Ellie had approached you and asked if she could sit at your table and you smiled and nodded.

You guys sat in awkward silence for like 5 minutes before you broke it by complimenting her Savage Starlight shirt. She looked down at the faded shirt with the phrase "Endure and Survive" above an assortment of characters and groaned in embarrassment. "Oh yeah- I uh- got this shirt in high school it's so cringey."

You smiled at her response and responded with "Well, I think it looks cute on you."

Ellie immediately got flustered because, God, your smile was so pretty and you were complimenting her. Ellie replied with a "thank you?" She then immediately regretted how bitchy her questioning tone sounded.

Ellie mentally scrambled to save face when she saw how your smiley expression fell at her response.

"Sorry, I don't know why that came out that way. Thank you- like for real."

Ellie desperately wanted to make a good impression on you and was about to compliment your smile, but her words got stuck in her throat when her order was called out.

Ellie immediately got up to get her food, but before she walked away, she turned to you and asked if she could get your number. You looked a bit surprised at her question but nodded and took her phone to type your number in.

Lover Girl!Ellie excitedly texted Jesse and Dina that she successfully got a pretty girl's number.

Lover Girl!Ellie wrote about you in her journal for a week straight before you two started dating.

Lover Girl!Ellie found pictures of you from your social media (curtesy of Dina) and proceeded to draw you NONSTOP.

Lover Girl!Ellie finally texted you first and made small talk that somehow morphed into her explaining all her interests to you in depth.

Ellie literally thought she scared you away when she looked back at the paragraphs that she sent but was surprised when you asked her out on a date to the carnival.

Lover Girl!Ellie spent days planning for the date before it happened.

Lover Girl!Ellie who got you flowers on the day of the date.

Lover Girl!Ellie literally wanted to win you so many stuffed animals at the carnival.

She ended up getting you three

And you ended up getting her five

Lover Girl!Ellie playfully rolled her eyes and got defensive when you teased her about winning her more gifts.

Lover Girl!Ellie shut down your teasing by kissing you.

Lover Girl!Ellie asked you to be her girlfriend on the second date.

Lover Girl!Ellie as your girlfriend loves spending time with you.

Like she is all up in your personal space. Sometimes when you're laying on your stomach in bed she'll fully just lay on top of you.

"You're so warmmmm." She would sigh out every time.

Lover Girl!Ellie literally always wants you around.

She's taking a shower? She wants in the shower or in the bathroom with her.

Anytime Ellie's about to run an errand she ALWAYS asks if you can come with her.

"I'm going to the store. Can you come with me?" And all she has to do is pick up a jug a milk.

This girl would literally ask you to come with her to walk to the mailbox.

Don't even get me started on how she acts when YOU'RE going somewhere.

"Where are you going? Can I come with you?"

Cue her rushing to put on her converses and trailing behind you like you have her on a leash.

Lover Girl!Ellie is also a fien for physical touch

Her favorite thing to do is hug you from behind and rest her head on your shoulder while casually talking to you.

She also boops your nose repeatedly when she wants your attention.

Lover Girl!Ellie also "kiss taxes" you anytime she does you a small favor.

She always surprises you with it too.

Like, you'll ask her to peel an orange for you, and as she's handing it to you, she'll say "Kiss tax" and give you a quick peck on the cheek or lips before you can even think.

Lover Girl!Ellie loves kissing you

Lover Girl!Ellie that will buy things that that remind her of you.

"Ellie, why did you buy an ashtray? You don't even smoke."

"The design reminded me of you." She responds with the cutest smile ever.

You have to convince her to just send you pictures of things that are a reminder of you because you're honestly scared for her bank account.

Lover Girl!Ellie LOVES to bring you up in conversations.

Her favorite line is "That reminds of when my girlfriend..."

Lover Girl!Ellie insists on wearing little things that are yours just because she wants a reminder of you everywhere she goes.

Lover Girl!Ellie compliments you so much but gets so shy and awkward when you compliment her back.

Like she'll find anything to compliment you about but the minute you compliment her, she gets flustered and tells you to shut up (lovingly ofc).

"You look so pretty when you're cooking, Ellie." "Dude, shut up I'm literally just cutting vegetables."

Oh yeah, as much of a lover girl she is Ellie will still call you "dude" or "bro" even though you're her literally girlfriend, you are NOT an exception. Those words are ingrained in her vocabulary.

Also on the topic of nicknames...

Lover Girl!Ellie calls you over the top petnames to annoy the shit out of you.

"My pretty sugar plum princ-" "Ellie I swear to fucking God."

But when you give her a taste of her own medicine she gets SO flustered.

You once called her "pretty princess" and she was wide-eyed and speechless

Lover Girl!Ellie loves to share anything she enjoys with you.

If she likes a type of food, she'll want you to try at least one bite.

If she likes a show, she'll want to finish it with you.

Lover Girl!Ellie also writes sweet ass poems about you.

The type of poems that describe you as the joy in her life and compare you to the most pleasant things and experiences.

Lover Girl!Ellie keeps a list of your favorite things/interests in her journal.

Lover Girl!Ellie loves cuddling.

She doesn't care if she's the little or big spoon; she wants to cuddle.

Once again she loves being close to you.

Lover Girl!Ellie also values going on dates ever since she got with you.

Her favorite part about going on dates is planning them with you.

You once canceled a date last minute and Ellie was deadass mad at you for two days.

You made it up to her by taking her to a record store and paying for her vinyls.

Lover Girl!Ellie loves to show you off in public

Lover Girl!Ellie always looks at you with so much love and adoration in her eyes.

Because you're her girl

And, she is yours.

NSFW

Lover Girl!Ellie is obsessed with skin-to-skin contact.

She's so nasty about it too like she loves the feeling of your sweaty skin sticking to hers.

She prefers tribbing or scissoring over using strap-ons.

When she DOES use a strap, she prefers a missionary position because wants to wrap her arms around your body and whisper sweet words in your ear.

Like imagine her thrusting deep inside of you while calling you her favorite girl.

Lover Girl!Ellie is a dom switch in my eyes.

She's so soft though.

She rubs your thigh soothingly while grinding her clit against yours when you two are scissoring.

She runs her fingers through/strokes your hair when she has you on all fours and is thrusting from behind.

Lover Girl!Ellie loves dry-humping you.

It's like top-tier foreplay to her.

Like if things get heated while you two are kissing, she'll start rubbing her clothed pussy against yours.

There are numerous times when Ellie has either cum or made you cum in your pants while making out.

Remember when I said that Ellie will lay on you when you're laying on you're stomach...

Sometimes when she's horny, she lays on you, leans into your ear, and asks if she can use your ass to get off.

If you say yes, she practically fights her pants off and starts rolling her hips on your ass.

Even though you're not getting any stimulation, the sounds of her soft moans and the feeling of her thighs tightening around your hips as she gets closer to her orgasm leave you soaked.

It also doesn't help that Ellie will praise you like her life depends on it.

"Fuck you feel so good, Babe..." "You're such a good girl, wanting to help me cum."

When Ellie to cums, she fully falls forward, her tits pressed against your back, wraps her arms around your body, and moans and pants in your ear as she rides out her orgasm.

Afterwards, Ellie will finger until you're creaming on her fingers because she knows this experience leaves you so fucking horny.

Lover Girl!Ellie loves when you eat her out.

The sight of your face buried in her pussy is one she'll cherish until she's on her death bed.

She loves to stroke your hair and tell you how good you're making her feel

Most of the time eating Ellie out ends with 69-ing because she always wants to make you feel as good as you're making her feel.

Lover Girl!Ellie also loves to plan dates with you when she knows she's fucking you stupid.

Like she's asking you if you want a restaurant date or an outdoor date while her strap is nestled deep inside of you.

When you don't answer her, she says "C'mon Babe, focus." with a cocky smirk plastered on her face.

Then she'll make the strap rub against your G-spot every time you try to answer.

"Mmm, I didn't get that baby."

Lover Girl!Ellie also has thing for overstimulation.

She loves the vulnerability and trust she feels when fucking you and wants to make the experience last as long as possible.

She wants to make love until you're both sore.

When you calm down from a previous orgasm, she rests her head on your stomach, looks up at you, and asks "Can you give me one more babe?"

Obviously, there's a safe word you can both use at any time.

But the look of adoration on Ellie's face as she pushes you to another orgasm is enough to motivate you for another round.

Lover Girl!Ellie always provides aftercare.

She holds you tight in her arms while whispering words of encouragement.

Then she gets cleaned up with you, puts on a comfort movie/show, and cuddles you until you fall asleep.

｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★

A/n: SORRY if this is shit! I literally finished this at 1 am and had a pounding headache. Also sorry for taking a decade to finish a fucking HCs list it's rough out here.

[sagarsk786]

Govt hikes interest rate on small savings schemes for Q3 of FY23

The government has effected minor hikes of 0.1% to 0.3% in interest rates payable on five small savings instruments,including kisan vikas patra,Senior Citizen's Savings Scheme and time depositss for two and three years,for the quarter beggining 1 october,according to a statement...

With the correction, a three-year time store with mailing stations would procure 5.8 percent from the current 5.5 percent, an increment of 30 premise focuses for the second from last quarter of the ongoing monetary year.

Senior Resident Reserve funds plan will procure 20 premise directs more toward 7.6 percent from the current pace of 7.4 percent during the October-December period, a money service warning said.

As to Kisan Charge card, the public authority has amended both residency and loan fees.

In the mean time, there is no adjustment of loan fees of seven other assigned little reserve funds plans, including the Public Fortunate Asset (PPF) at 7.1%, Sukanya Samriddhi Record Plan at 7.6%, Public Investment funds Authentication (6.8%) as well as five-year repeating and time stores (5.8% and 6.7%, separately). Returns on investment funds stores and one-year time stores are likewise kept static at 4% and 5.5%The Reserve Bank since May has raised the benchmark lending rate by 140 basis points, prompting banks to raise interest rates on deposits as well.

[flamingpudding]

Fictober23 Prompt: 3 - "Okay, show me."

Fandom: DPxDC

Rating: G

Warnings: -

"So… first time getting kidnapped?"

Tim blinked at the teen that was tied to a wall right across from him. He marveled for a a moment at how similar the two looked and even thought that he could see how the other teen could have gotten mistakenly kidnapped in his place. Though if they had already kidnapped him then why did they end up kidnapping him again?

"No, getting kidnapped kinda comes with the name and status." Tim finally answered and the other kid nodded sagely as if he understood. "Usually they are a little more incompetent."

He moved his wrists a little causing the strange silver bracelets they had slapped on his wired before chaining him to the wall so that they would cause a rattling noise, making the other teen look at them with a raised eyebrow.

"So first time getting kidnapped by the GIW then."

"GIW?"

"Guys in White, or well Ghost Investigation Ward, a government organization." The other teen explained with a shrug. "Usually they are incompetent. Aside from a couple of burns from getting shot, this is the first time they actually managed to chain me in a while. Normally they would have messed up by now but it's interesting that they even manage to nap you too."

Now Tim raised an eyebrow. That was news to him. To think there was a governmental organization that was actively abducting civilians for who knows what. Damn, he could see how B would not be happy once he told them about that.

"Sorry btw." Tim blinked up at the other teen in confusion, who chuckled in return. "They probably kidnapped you thinking you were my double or something. We look similar enough for them to think that."

"Wait…" Tim's eyes widened in realization. "They kidnapped me because I look like you? Not the other way around?"

"Uh yeah, why would I be kidnapped because of you?"

"Tim Drake-Wayne. Does that ring a bell?" Tim huffed only to watch how the other teen furrowed his eyebrows as if deep in thoughts before shrugging.

"In fact no it doesn't. But I don't keep up with high society, it helps pissing of the fruitloop whenever he drags me to 'meet important people' and I actively call them false names no matter how often he introduces them."

Tim's eye twitched. While that is fun, this was also the first time he met someone who hadn't heard of his name before in some way or form. In the end just let out a sigh.

"So what now? We wait to get rescued or will they release us after some time?" Well he had already tipped off his family, so it was probably only a matter of time until one of his siblings burst in to play knight in shining armor. He just hoped it wasn't Jason again, or he wouldn't shut up about having saved him for another month.

"Oh we can wait, but they won't release us. It's probably better if we get out on our own."

"Really? And how do you plan for us to get out of the handcuffs?" Well Tim did have a lock pin hidden in his jacket and some small sized tools stuffed into the sole of his shoes but with his hands chained above his head it was a little difficult to get them. But his feet were not chained so with just a bit of body twisting he could-

"Oh the handcuffs are no problem. They can be easily removed by overloading them."

"Overloading?" Tim arched an eyebrow, now the cuffs did not look like your normal brand he can admit that but how was the other going to do that unless he had some secret electric tool stored on him.

"Yea, overloading. It's pretty simple. These look like the same Brant they tried to cuff me with a year ago. It's funny how they look like they haven't learned a single thing in all these years."

"Really now?" Tim stared at the other teen unimpressed. "Okay, show me. How are you going to overload them with no tools around?"

"Easy." The other teen smirked at him and Tim's eyes widen as he saw the others hands emitting a green light before the cuffs on his wrist sparked and then fell off. Okay, noted the other teen was a Meta.

"My name is Danny by the way." Danny grinned as he rubbed his wrists before getting up and walking over to Tim to do the same to his cuffs. Tim rubbed his his own wirsts, carefully examining them for any time of injury only to look up just in time to watch Danny reach into his own chest. With wide eyes he watched Danny sticking out his tongue while one of his hands was going through his body as if he was looking for something.

"Aha! I knew I stuck them in my body somewhere for a situation like this!" Okay there was so much to unpack from this sentence alone but before Tim could even ask a single question Danny pulled out a lockpick set from his chest and proceeded to pick at their cell door.

"I have so many questions." Tim muttered, still watching the other teen.

"Well I can probably answer some of them once we are out of here. It's the least I can do after you get kidnapped because of me." Danny grinned as the lock he was working on clicked and he swung the door open. "Wanna talk over some coffee? You look like you need some."

"This is definitely not what I expected when I said 'show me'." Tim muttered once more walking passed Danny out of their cell, eager to leave this place.

"Yea well that the more civilian friendly things I can do." Danny followed with a grin. "Though I do have some other tricks I could have used too."

"You talk like a hero." Tim thought aloud, eyeing the teen and how they were holding themselves. Nothing about this teen screamed innocent civilian anymore, well aside from the obvious Meta abilities. He also marbled about the fact that they basically just walked out of the warehouse they had been holding. Huh looked like these GIW guys were really as incompetent as Danny had mentioned earlier.

"Yea, well I am a retired Hero." Great now Tim got more to look into in regards to Danny. Oh that reminded him, he probably should tell his family that he was no longer kidnapped… but that could probably wait until after he got his coffee with Danny. What was the worst that could happen? Red Hood storming an empty building. Oh well, it would be a good exercise for his brother then.

[tenebrous-if]

LINKS:

🜲 Play the Game

Estimated Release: N/A

🜲 FAQ

🜲 Pinterest

🜲 Character Descriptions

🜲 Family Descriptions

🜲 Map of Arvandor

🜲 Genre(s): Fantasy, Romance, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, and Action/Adventure.

🜲 Rating: Tenebrous is an 18+ Fantasy IF set within the mythical world of Arvandor.

The Kingdom of Aetheria, within the world of Arvandor, is a nation ripe with history. King Lysander du Aetheria rose up and led the fledgling Aetherian Army against The Forsaken One— Herald of the Abyssal Uprising— and came out victorious when everyone else had failed. With his victory, Lysander placed Aetheria as one of the key pillars of keeping Arvandor safe; allowing for peace to reign over the continent for centuries.

Peace, however, was never meant to last.

The Order of Netheron, Followers of The Forsaken One, had captured you at the tender age of fifteen, holding you captive for a decade within a tower only labeled as “The Spire”. All due to their wish of resurrecting their fallen deity— something that they believe could only be accomplished by using the blood of King Lysander’s descendants; it was a ritual that didn’t go as planned— one that did bring back their deity, but only for your eyes and ears only; the both of you attached to the other in a way that probably wasn’t intended.

And that’s how you spent the last decade of your life… Growing used to the presence that now appears whenever the time calls for it. It isn’t until your twenty-fifth year that you’re finally found and taken back to Aetheria, to everything you had long thought you’d lost.

Your time in the sun, however, was short-lived as the tidings of an even darker uprising was beginning to grow— one that threatens to demolish everything and everyone.

Can you figure out how to save your home?

🜲 Create your Aetherian Royal:

Name/Nickname

Gender [Male, Female, or Non-Binary]

Appearance

Hobbies

Personality [Mainly involving unique reactions to certain situations— the MC is semi-set in some ways]

🜲 Romance 1 of 4 potential love interests— each offering their own unique experience within the story and how the world at large will react to the burgeoning relationship.

🜲 Bond with your family after being apart for so long. They have missed you a great deal. [The MC is a middle child.]

🜲 Harness the magic that flows through your veins due to the gift of your blood.

🜲 Choose from a variety of skill sets that your MC may be able to acquire. [Note: This means you can choose something to specialize in, instead of having to constantly choose between being a diplomat or warrior. You can instead choose to be a swordsman while also focusing on the art of diplomacy.]

🜲 Build a codex from the various interactions that you can have throughout your story— from places, to people, to old legends that have tested the passage of time within Arvandor.

Astorian/Astoria du Aerilon: The Heir to Aerilon, and the person that was your betrothed from the time you were seven until your disappearance. Astorian/Astoria spent every winter with you, and you every summer with them, in hopes that a union between the both of you would bring your countries together. You remember many things from that time of your life: their warm laugh, brazen attitude, arrogant smirk, and their inability to stay still for long. Meeting them again? It simply proves how much can change in a decade. [Can choose to have been in an almost relationship with them or still rivals.]

William/Wilhelmina du Arvandor: A recent addition to the Holy Order, who has an iron-clad need to help and be of assistance to anyone that may require it. Being a Paladin has been something they’ve strived towards for the last eight years of their life; training being second to nothing. It’s simply a mere coincidence, or the Divine’s Will, that their first major mission was to rid Arvandor of the last dregs of Netheron… A mission that brought them to The Spire, with a small band of warriors, to carry out that very task— wherein they find the Lost Heir of Aetheria. You.

Gabriel/Gabrielle Adair: Being renowned within the arcane arts, having achieved the rank of High Mage within the Aetherian Institute of Magic, it’s of little surprise that the royal family of Aetheria would call on someone with their skill set— if it weren’t for the scandal that still plagues them. You’re not sure what could have been so bad that would force them to retreat within themself like they have, especially if your parents had seen them fit enough to tutor you, but it’s obviously something that weighs heavily upon them. Will it be possible to wrangle out the secrets of their past when you’re still trying to figure out your own gift?

Ilyran/Ilyria Caelestis: The Forsaken One, an individual that’s visible only to your eyes from a ritual gone wrong. There isn’t much you can glean from them, after all you can only take what they say with a grain of salt, but the shadows that lurk within their eyes has nothing to do with the darkness that now lives within them. It’s hard sometimes to look at what they’ve become when you’ve seen what they were in Old Texts, when they weren’t the Forsaken One, weren’t the Divine’s Disgrace… When they were simply Ilyran/Ilyria Caelestis, High Priest/Priestess of the Holy Order.

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

30 Sickos, 3.5 Stars, and Pervert Writers

As I gear up to publish Detente for the Ravenous, I've been thinking a lot about these tweets. I know that my writing is solid, but it's not groundbreaking. My designs are fun, but they're not revolutionary. My prose is simple, my plots well-trodden. The fights and monsters kick ass, but god help me my romance is milquetoast at best. It's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the 30 years war and Catholic kaiju.

We like to quantify things, online. When I'm shopping for games, I sort by "most popular" and "highest rated." I don't want my time to be wasted, I don't want to spend my money sub-optimally. It's easier to connect to folks over a movie that 3 million people watched as opposed to a podcast listened to by a few hundred. I am not criticizing the impulse. Life is too short, and none of us have enough money.

But as a creator, whatever that means, I think I have to get comfortable with my shortcomings, and be honest about what I actually care about. I am not interested in writing a novel that appeals to all people. I am interested in writing a novel where they assassinate Pope Kissinger. That doesn't mean I won't ever try to improve my romance, or make my character arcs less predictable. But if I am gonna write another book, I have to write it for me, not for my imagined literary agent or Big 5 editor.

There's this great manifesto on itchio by “Average Urotsukidōji Enjoyer," called "Good Writers are Perverts." It touches on this sentiment that I've been stewing on, and I think this passage crystalizes what I'm trying to do with my own work.

I know my best work is the work of the pervert, the ex catholic who grew up on Naruto, the military history dork who trained for years to save lives instead of taking them. That is the stuff that makes me want to create, the hope that I can take all my stupid interests and life experiences and twist them into something at least partially interesting, to hit that 3.5 star rating that isn't all things to all people, but is at least one really good thing to a few people. If a handful of young folks get ahold of my work and it changes their lives in a small way forever, then I'll be happy.

I hope that as art becomes less profitable, as financial incentives only encourage the bland and inoffensive, the tried and true instead of niche and experimental, more artists double down, go deep instead of wide. I'm not afraid to fail, I'm afraid of trying so hard to be loved that I stop giving a shit about the craft

[hedgehog-moss]

Writers who use imitative harmony + the movement of their language to evoke meaning are so great to re-read once you’ve learnt this language, if you’ve read them in translation before, it feels like the best reward. I’m reading Annie Proulx in the original for the first time, and so much of her writing style was just not salvageable by French translators (< my condolences), because she intertwines sound with meaning so often, at least in Close Range, and French just doesn’t sound the same! so by translating the meaning you’ll sacrifice a lot of the style... It reminds me of a haunted house book in French that also made me think “haha RIP translators” because it made great use of sound—a lot of “u / eu / ou” to create a sort of sinister howling effect in some sentences, and one sentence about a closed door used “i” and “rr” sounds to give an ominous “creaking open” sensation without actually opening the door in the text...

This kind of thing always makes me reflect despairingly on how many authors I’ll never get to appreciate fully as I can’t read them in the original, but I’m glad to re-discover Annie Proulx at any rate! I mean compare the sound of a phrase like “a hundred dirt road shortcuts” to the French “des centaines de raccourcis, des routes de terre”... First of all the English phrase sounds clippety-cloppy, it sounds like hooves on a dirt road in a way that’s very hard to preserve in a language without syllable stress, but also the French language demands that you turn it into ‘a hundred of shortcurts of roads of dirt’, so it’s best to dilute it into two phrases, and you just lose the clippedness. It sounds less tight, more leisurely.

Same for the phrase “the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts” vs. “la plaine fauve encore marquée des ornières laissées par les chariots des pèlerins.” That’s a 54% expansion ratio and once again you turn the tight clippedness of ‘grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts’ into ‘grooved with the ruts left by the wagons of the pilgrims.’ You just can’t avoid it, French words have to hold hands in a long procession rather than being stacked like pancakes on top of one another. And sometimes it makes for lovely stylistic effects too (*), but it doesn’t fit the style of a text like this one, which uses rhythm and sound in a very un-French way—rhythmicality in French tends to rely on long flowy phrasings rather than the potholed ruggedness this story demands. (I saw a NY Times article describe it as Annie Proulx “mining the ore of language out of a gritty Wyoming rockscape”)

The rhythm of this whole bit is so neat, you can snap your fingers along with it: “hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog...”

The French version is not finger-snapping material but you can tell the translator did her very best to preserve the author’s intention by creating interesting rhythms in French as well. For “hard orange dawn” she could have kept close to the original with, say, “la dureté orange de l’aube” but instead she chose to turn ‘hard’ into a four-syllable adjective (éblouissante / blinding) to end up with a noticeable rhythm—“les aubes orange, éblouissantes,” one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four (and she made ‘dawn’ plural for the same reason.) She wasn’t able to preserve the g/r alliteration of “GRooved with pilGRim waGon Ruts” (although her translated phrase also has a lot of R’s) but she did preserve the ‘sss’ alliteration of “Smoking Snaking duSt” (“pouSSière Serpentant Sur le Sol”). Even with languages as close as French and English, for every stylistic effect you can save you have to sacrifice a few, or replace them with opposite effects which align better with your language’s notions of literary style (like with the orange dawn bit, doubling the length of a tight phrase so it can sound rhythmical).

You can tell all throughout the book that a lot of thought and care went into respecting Annie Proulx’s writing choices and you still end up with sentences that sound and move so differently. You get to see the limit of translation when authors fully lean on their language’s syntax and melody to help convey meaning, like poets do!

(*) Re: English stacking words and French linking them—this reminds me of an essay I read by an English translator of Proust who despaired of this difference in the opposite direction—saying some long, descriptive phrases in Proust with articles & prepositions linking words, and commas linking phrases with regularity, read like telling the beads of a rosary. And the sensation (or a lot of it) had to be sacrificed because English just does not use as many linking words as French, information is conveyed in a more economical way, so a lot of these sentences with a hypnotic rhythm like “the A, of the B, of the C, whereby the D, of the E, on an F” were often not achievable with English syntax or created redundancy (e.g. having to use ‘that’ or ‘which’ 5 times when French used different tool words). But he said he did try to form sentences that had this continuity, and meditative quality.

I don’t have a conclusion to this post other than to say something precious will be lost if human translation is replaced by AI translation, because literary translation involves creativity and ambiguity and aesthetic considerations and a dimension of instinctual feeling for your own language and the original style, and I don’t think any amount of data and processing power and artificial neural networks will yield the flavour of literary quality that emerges from human sensibility and care, from someone reading a sentence and thinking “this feels like hooves clippety-clopping down a dirt road” or “this feels like rolling the beads of a rosary” and starting from there...

[chronically-ghosted]

go west, to the southern plains, go west to breathe (lover, share your road - part i) series masterlist | AO3 Link | prologue | part ii

chapter rating: T

word count: ~21K

chapter summary: at the end of the line, you make a business proposition to Joel Miller. He brings you and Ellie home to the last sanctuary left in this world in exchange for your skills. What you find there and what you find out about Joel Miller is not what you expect.

chapter warnings/tags: depictions of going hungry and poverty, sexual harassment, period accurate sexism, depictions of a sick child, reader depicted as skinny but due to lack of food not her natural body type (and this will change), allusions to domestic abuse, hurt/comfort, pining, the beginnings of a praise kink, let the idiots in love begin

a/n: shout out to the ever incredible @jennaispun for beta-ing the prologue and this first part!

“After a long walk in hell, I found you. You made hell feel like home, you made the flames feel warm. It’s true, you haven’t saved me but you were the closest thing to heaven.” — Maram Rimawi

part i:

Beneath the soot-gray fingertips of your gloves, the dust of the high plains sits coarse and heavy on the tattered, yellowing strip of paper. You hold it down flat as a brutish wind snakes up the empty dirt road through the center of Dalhart, grabbing hold of the brown dust that clings to everything — and tugs. Underneath your pale blue dress, with the hemline torn and the collar in need of stitching, your heart pounds as you read the small, almost guilty, advert:

Help wanted. Can pay.

Contact Joel Miller.

The promise of actual money should have had every able-bodied American scrambling to answer the advert, but by its place near the bottom of the announcement board outside of the country store, buried beneath slashed prices for milk and eggs and headlines out of Washington – it seems certain to be relegated into obscurity. 

For all you know, this could be months, even years, old. Miller, whoever he was, could be long dead, or gone with the rest of the exodus to California. Or he could have gone the way of your “Uncle” Robert – a huckster, discovered too late; one of many who prey upon the desperation that sticks to the country like the acrid smell of smoke. Your hand shakes as you pluck the yellow card from the wooden plank. There is no contact number, no address. Another trick? Dust stings the corners of your eyes when you pinch them close, your breathing quickening, your pulse sharp in the sleeve of your ratty glove. 

Oh, God, what are you going to do? What if this is nothing, just like Robert’s promise? What if there’s nothing here for you? What if –

A small hand on your forearm centers your spiraling thoughts. From beneath a faded blue baseball cap, two brown eyes peer up at you, firm and reassuring. 

“You okay?” She keeps her voice low, just like you asked.

“Yeah, El–Ellie, I’m fine.” You squeeze her too-thin hand, your stomach toiling with guilt and its own emptiness. “Just figuring out what to do next.” 

“Is finding and murdering this asshole Robert still off the table?”

You frown, your niece’s quick temper more from your dead sister than you. “It is. Now, I’m going inside to ask about this advert. Maybe this Miller still has a job or two open.”

Ellie’s eyes fall to the slip of paper in your hand, her aggressive scowl tightening into something that too closely resembles fear. She knows what’s at stake just as much as you do and you hate that that knowledge ages her youthful face. 

“You stay close and don’t let anyone get a good look at you, okay?” 

Ellie nods, already familiar with the routine, and scoops up your luggage case, her tattered satchel hanging off her other shoulder. She had been wearing pants long before reaching Dalhart, but it soothed you to think the eyes of cruel men passed right over her, their interest rarely in young boys. 

A bell above the door tinkles when you open it, but by the dull, muted sound, it most likely has a few dents. Behind you, the afternoon heat follows you in, the sunlight illuminating the floating dust mites in the air. The door whines as it closes, brightening the inside of the store, where the mites settle back into the silver layer that sits over cans of tomatoes and peaches, linens, boxes of gum and cigarettes. Nearly everything sits untouched and unmoved, old dust settling between cracks and grooves, patrons not having enough money to buy something and the owner not having enough to change out stock. Struck still, frozen in a single, long exhale. The slow, creaking death of the economic system has reached Dalhart too. You shudder, suddenly cold as if in a mausoleum. 

The further away from Boston the train took you, the further back in time you felt. Here, you are reminded of the old general stores of cowboys and pioneers. But maybe, that is exactly where you are: out of time.

A man in long white sleeves, coiffed hair, and perfectly round glasses, looks up from the wilted newspaper spread out over the counter. 

“Can I help you?” His accent hails from the east, North Carolina most likely. However, his manners are not reflective of that famous southern hospitality. He looks at you like you’re a bad dream and it unsteadies you.

“Y-yes. I, uh, I’m hoping that you know a-a Miller. Joel Miller? I have his advert and I’m, um, I’m looking for work.” 

The man’s thin eyebrow jumps mockingly. Aren’t we all, sister? But eventually, he shakes his head.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing all the way out here, but this ain’t no place for a young lady out on her own, job or no job. Where’s your husband?”

“Dead.” Your voice doesn’t waver, but then again, why would it? 

The clerk’s eyes soften, if only slightly. “I see. But I’m sorry to say, there is no job here for you.”

Your mouth instantly dries out. “What do you mean? Where’s Mr. Miller?”

“He’s a mean ol’ sunuvbitch, livin' God knows where. Comes in twice a month for supplies and he’s back out into the prairie.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t see why that’s a problem –,”

“He ain’t fit for civilized life, ma’am.” The clerk drops his nose, eying you seriously over the rim of his black glasses. “Whatever he’s offering, you don’t want no part of it.” 

“I think we’ll be the judges of that.” Beside you, Ellie drops your suitcase and it loudly clatters to the ground. “Thanks for the tip though.” 

The clerk’s eyes widen – this is terrible behavior even for a boy – his mouth unfurling to give a nasty tongue-lashing, when you interject, your voice thick with pleading.

“I would just like to meet the man. Please, sir.” The clerk, like most men without scruples, can barely resist the sound of a woman begging. Those uncanny blue eyes find you again. “Has he come in recently?”

You can feel Ellie’s wicked sneer behind you, the clerk’s gaze switching between the unlikely pair in his shop. Finally, he shrugs. Who gives a fuck if one more woman goes missing?

“He’s due for a resupply.”

“How soon?” Your palm sweats under your gloves.

He narrows his eyes, evidently annoyed that a woman would reject his warnings. “Soon. We have a parlor in the back if you’d like to wait for him. But you have to buy something,” he adds vehemently. 

You nod, unsteady on shaking knees as you walk towards the door in the back of the store. 

“Thank you, sir. You have been so kind. We very much appreciate it.” 

Any chance that the clerk finds you sincere is lost when Ellie wraps her knuckles on the counter as she passes.

“Buh-bye, dude.” 

The parlor is small, dark, damp, and smells faintly of kerosene and leather. A woman, most likely the wife of the clerk you just annoyed, glares from behind a counter as you and Ellie walk in. 

“Lunch.” Not a question.

Ellie looks up at you, eyes wide, fearful. You hadn’t let her see what is left in your purse, but she knows it’s low.

With your stomach in knots, you wouldn’t be able to eat anyway. You pluck out a dollar, bringing your total down to three dollars, and giving it to your niece.

“Order whatever you want.”

The beating heart of the blazing Texas sun edges downward across the open sky, falling, until it drops completely behind the harrowingly flat horizon. Purple erupts in its wake, the last pump of blood of a dying muscle, and nearly instantly, the temperature drops. You watch the explosive coronary of the sky from a table at the back of the parlor, your own pulse doubling the later it gets. You squeeze your hand between your thighs to keep your fingers from drumming uneasily on the table. But for once, Ellie doesn’t pick up on your nerves. 

A dollar went farther out here and, as a result, Ellie is allowed her first big meal in months. Twice now, she’s nearly forgone the silverware to shove food directly into her mouth with her fingers, had it not been for your glares to remind her to slow down.

“This is slow,” she grumbles as she licks her bowl of mashed potatoes clean. Of course, half of what she ordered sits waiting for you, but you know she needs this meal more than you do – even if your rumbling stomach disagrees. You’d already had lunch at the train station; one more missed meal won’t kill you and less for you means more for Ellie.

Suddenly becoming a parent to a very opinionated fourteen-year-old girl was not something you had anticipated, and most times you figured you were doing it all wrong. The least you could do is give her everything you could.

“You think he’ll show?” 

You tear your eyes away from the parlor door, blinking back into your body out of your cloud of thoughts. Ellie’s little hands grip the bowl, a white smear sitting on her bottom lip, her eyes dark as they watch you. 

You grin as her pink tongue swipes up to lick her mouth clean. How easy you forget she’s only fourteen, with her loud mouth and provoking eyes. “Eat your food, Ellie.” 

The words have barely left your mouth when the door to the parlor bursts open. Two men, clearly drunk and smelling of it, stumble in. This is the part where you wish you too could believably dress up like a man. Your pulse thrums in your neck like a heightened prey animal. 

One pushes the other’s shoulder, smirking, and grunting something. His friend, also in a cowboy hat but half his size, nods and makes an unsteady line for one of the tables, while the other does his best to get to the bar. 

The man at the table has light green eyes, overly thick eyebrows, and a flat mouth, loose with drink. He flops into a wooden chair and you watch as the Texas Rangers badge on his chest flashes in the firelight behind him. Your stomach tightens. 

He stretches out, feet crossed over his ankles, limp hands crossed over his denim jacket, hollering at his friend and the woman working, who looks equally displeased to see them as she did you and Ellie. 

Smirking, his eyes slide from the wooden bar top, over the back wall, and right onto you.

You watch as his gaze blurs for a moment, a film of beastial hunger smothering the color of his eyes. You can feel your pulse in your ankles now.

“Well, now, what do we have here?” The lilt in his voice calls out two unspoken words: fresh meat. Distressingly steady, he climbs to his feet, his hat tilted obnoxiously on his forehead. “Where did you come from, you pretty little thing?” 

He saunters over, his thumbs stuck in his belt, the gun at his side snug in its holster. The grin on his face is hideous. You’d smack it off if you weren’t suddenly overcome by a debilitating fear. A look like that on a man is never, ever a good thing.

“Whatcha got there, Lee?” his buddy calls out from the bar, beard drenched in beer foam. 

“I dunno quite yet, Knapp,” he says over his shoulder, his livid green eyes never leaving your face. He nearly folds in half to press his spider-like hands on the surface of your table, coming inches from your face. His breath smells like corn whiskey and cheap tobacco. “Guess I’ll have to find out. What’s your name, pretty thing?” 

“Or she could not tell you her name and instead, you could fuck off.” Ellie’s scowl wrenches her mouth open, her knuckles white around her spoon. There’s a part of you that fully acknowledges and accepts that if given the signal, she’d scoop the fucker’s eyes out with the silverware right here. “We’re eating here, or are you too busy smelling like a fucking whiskey barrel to notice?”

As with most adults when Ellie decides to show her teeth, Lee stares stunned before the self-righteous anger sets in. Your heart stops for a moment when you think he’s going for his holster, but instead, he uses the flat of his hand to swat her hat off her head.

“Shut up, you little fucker, where’d you learn your fucking ma–,”

Ellie’s long hair tumbles down her shoulders, the baseball cap on the floor behind her. 

Lee is stunned into silence once again. The parlor goes deathly silent.

It’s Knapp who sets off the explosive spark again. “Holy fuck, you’re a little girl.”

Ellie snatches up her hat, cheeks flaming red, but Lee’s hand grabs her wrist. 

“A kinda cute one at that,” Lee sneers. He twists her arm and she yelps. Knapp at the bar laughs, his paunch shaking as beer sloshes over the side of his glass. The woman is cleaning something with a rag, turned away from the scene, her shoulders hunched to her ears. You’re on your feet, your hand on her purse. “What are you thinking, hm? Dressing this sweet little girl up like a boy?”

The trigger clicks and Lee and everyone else in the parlor freezes. The edge of your lash line is wet, fear rolling through you like fog on the bay. Your hand is steady, miraculously, but your voice isn’t.

“L-l-let–,” your voice cracks and you try again. You only have one gun drawn on Lee and you pray to whatever god is listening that Knapp doesn’t remember his. “Let her go.” 

This small pistol is your last line of defense against those who would take everything from you. You couldn’t keep your sister safe, your husband didn’t want to be saved, but you’d die before you’d let anyone come within an inch of Ellie. You pawned off your wedding ring long before you ever considered selling this weight in your hand. You couldn’t physically win a fight but you’d be damned if you weren’t going to take someone out with you.

There’s more than one reason you never let Ellie look into your purse. You won’t make eye contact with her now.

Lee’s eyes harden into black flints in his head. “Yeah? You’re shaking like a leaf. You ain’t gonna do shit about it.”

He twists harder, forcing Ellie to her knees, his mouth smearing into a sickening sneer, Ellie’s cries loud – “get off me, you fucker!”

All you have to do is miss. Once. 

Your arm shifts right and you fire. You meant to hit the floor, but instead the leg of a chair at a nearby table shatters, wood and smoke sparking into the air. Lee and Ellie jump, their struggle broken, but Ellie’s quicker, smarter. Hunched to avoid debris, they are nearly eye to eye and Ellie doesn’t hesitate; she jerks her head back and then launches her forehead forward – square into his flat nose.

The crunch is sickening and it turns your already empty stomach. Lee shrieks, releasing Ellie, his hands flying to his misshapen nose to staunch the river of blood pouring from his nostrils. 

“You bitch!” he whines, voice wet and gummy as blood trickles down his throat, eyes watering. You hear a roar of anger as Knapp stands, no longer finding any of this funny.

“Get behind me, Ellie.” You snap, eyes on Knapp as he lumbers forward. She hesitates, looking like she’d like nothing more than to kick Lee up the balls, but obeys the closer Knapp comes. She slots behind you, eyes sharp on the squealing man on the floor. 

“She broke my fucking nose, man,” he cries, face already purpling. 

“Yeah, and don’t you forget it, you fucker!” She snarls over your shoulder. One hand holds your elbow, and the other brandishes her mother’s knife that had been at the bottom of her satchel seconds ago. Fuck. 

Ellie Williams is not, and never has been, nor will be, one to deescalate a situation. Knapp responds in kind. His drunk fingers fumble with his holster, his face contorted with rage.

“Shootin’ at an officer of the law – you’re gonna hang for this, you thieving little c–,”

“Knapp.”

A fifth voice – low, deep, a mammalian bark that grinds the chaos of the room to a halt. The large man stalls, his engine snagged by the rough grain of that voice. On the floor, Lee lets out one quiet whimper as he cracks open a pulsating black eye.

In the glow of the firelight, you watch as beads of sweat swell on Knapp’s big forehead beneath his wide-brimmed hat. His wide eyes flash between you and the man who just walked in.

“M-Miller, the fuck you want?” 

Your heart seizes in your chest. Miller. 

Joel Miller. 

You never thought your saving grace would come in the shape of a hulking, dark-eyed man. 

A well-worn handkerchief around his neck, crusted over with dust, his broad shoulders stretch a denim work shirt, the unbuttoned collar loose and just as dirty. Worked-over hands, dry and brown as the earth, curl into fists at his side. Tight jaw, flared nose, eyes black, his presence expands in the cramped room, a leviathan cresting dark waves to command the roaring void. 

“Back off, both of you.” 

Knapp sneers, desperately tugging at some misguided sense of bravery, with sweat running hot and fast and smelly down the sides of his rubbery face. “Y-yeah, or what?” 

“You fuckin’ know what.”

Knapp visibly swallows and lowers his pistol, hands trembling. Lee whines from the floor, his eyes open as wide as the swelling will allow, abject terror on his face as he stares up at Miller. Neither of them move.

A guard dog satisfied by the corralled sheep, Joel’s heavy gaze roves from the two men, across the room, to you.

His expression doesn’t change. 

The weight shifts across the stiff planes of his shoulders, and he turns, leaving as quickly as he appeared. Beneath his thick boots, the wooden floor creaks and it rouses you. Your mouth is so dry you can feel the skin of your lips split apart. 

“Mr. Miller, w-wait.”

He doesn’t. 

With a single glance to the men still frozen in terror, you follow him through the now-dark and empty store. The cold desert air cracks hard against your overheated cheeks when you burst through the door, into the black night. The moonlight illuminates the threads of silver hair in his beard that the dark parlor hid. His fingers work slowly, unhurriedly, as he tightens the leather buckle beneath the wide girth of his off-white horse. It lifts its head as you stumble out onto the dusty road, its round eyes watching you with more interest than its rider. White ears twitch forward, a snort from the long snout, and Joel rubs the soft place between two giant nostrils without looking up. 

“J-Joel – Mr. Miller, please, I need your help.” 

“Already got it.” His shoulders flex and roll as he loads up another loose sack onto the rump of the horse, then tightens the securing belt. It snorts again and shifts on its hooves, its long tail flicking back and forth. 

You shake your head, swallowing the hot rush of embarrassment. The wind licks at your ankles and you fight back a shiver, bringing a hand to your shoulder to warm the goosebumps. “No, sorry, I mean – I’m here to help you. I saw your advertisement and I was wondering if the position was still open.”

The buckle quiets. The dirt at his feet crunches as he faces you. 

There are no trees in Dalhart, Texas. There are barely any clouds, no coverage. Overhead, the few buildings not yet folded up in the wake of the financial collapse throw shadows over his angular face, but you can still feel the trace of his gaze over you. A curious search, the investigation of scent. 

Then he shakes his head.

“No.” 

Your entire chest tightens. “Has the position been filled?”

“No.”

“Then why–,”

“I don’t need you.” He lifts up the third and final sack and you feel your hope being carried away with it. “Need a farm hand. You’re not the type.”

“N-n-no, I’ve worked on a farm. I-I’ve only planted seeds but I’m a quick learner and I–,”

“No.” 

“Sir – please, I’ll do anything–,”

“Then go home.” He unties the reins from the wooden post and clicks to the horse. Its big eyes watch you as he turns them for the road. “There’s nothing here for you.” 

You absolutely will not cry in front of this gruff stranger. Panic icing down your spine, you follow him on weak knees. In the wake leftover from the wheat boom, Dalhart is quiet as soon as the sun goes down. Empty of people, of light, of any sort of guiding hand, you try to appeal to the last human you’ve found at the end of the world.

“Mr. Miller, there must be something you need. I’m a hard worker, smart, you won’t have to train me at all. Please. I’ve been a housekeeper, a seamstress – a nurse. I —,”

The horse huffs when Joel pulls tight on the reins. 

In the moonlight, all of his hair looks gray. Your heart plunges in your throat. You can feel your stomach trying to digest your spine.

“Done any work with kids?” He asks, after a moment. 

His brisk question is not what you expected. You can barely hear him over the pounding in your heart. 

“Y-yes. I’ve treated children before. A-and I was a teacher, briefly. I’m very good with children, actually.”

The scarred hand at his side tightens, flexes open and closed, the tips of his thumb and forefinger twitching over the other. Over his shoulder, you think his head tilts a centimeter towards you.

“You know what? Fuck this.” 

Out of the shadows of the county store, Ellie tears down the steps, her face pink and her hair stuffed back up her ball cap. She loops her small hands around your forearm and tugs, her eyes like chips of bark, glaring hatefully at the man in the middle of the street. Faint dust churns beneath her faded sneakers. 

“She’s fucking begging you and you don’t give a fuck, you old shithead!” She tugs again. In the flash of the moonlight, a glassy film has settled over her eyes. “C’mon, we don’t need him. We – don’t need – him.” 

“Ellie, please!” You grab her by the shoulders, a soft hand in a swirling tempest, and she settles, her mouth twisted up in anger and embarrassment. She hates that you have to beg anyone. “Please.” Shielding her from him, you squeeze her shoulders. “I know, Ellie. I know. But I have to keep you safe.”

Ellie finally turns that hot glare at you, eyes damp. Petulant when terrified, your sister was the exact same way. 

Fuck, Anna, it should have been me.

“She yours?”

Joel rests his weight on his left knee, fingers loose around the reins. He’s lowered the mask around his mouth. You snap your head up, your voice thankfully steady. “She’s my niece. She . . . I’m responsible for her.” 

Below your palms, Ellie stiffens. 

Fifteen feet from you, Joel nods, the muscle in his jaw tight. The horse huffs and he glares at it like it just yelled at him too.  

“I’m not in the habit of pickin’ up strays,” he says as if that means a lot. 

Hope springs in your chest and it snags the air in your lungs. “We’re not. I-I mean, we’ll work hard. Please, give us just one chance.”

“And you expect me to take on the both of you.” It isn’t a question, but his eyebrow arcs all the same. “That’s two mouths I gotta feed, ‘steada one.” 

“She can have mine.” In the silence, you think you can hear the faint choir of crickets. You remember the tarantulas and centipedes that lived inside the walls of your husband’s prairie dugout, and your stomach twists. “Ellie can have whatever you give us.” 

She makes a brief cry of protest, but you squeeze her shoulders. The sharp flair of his nostrils smooths and the corners of his eyes pinches, tilting his eyebrows up. He’s still glowering, but somehow, his expression has suddenly opened, just a crack. 

And then he nods. 

“Stay here a night. I’ll be back in the morning with the wagon.” 

And that’s it. You have a job. 

You’re so elated it takes a minute for his words to sink in. He turns back down the road, the horse's hooves clipping on the dry ground. You follow after him, hand outstretched.

“Oh, no, w-we can walk, it’s no trouble. Let me just get our things and–,”

“Too far to walk. And there’s things out in the dark more dangerous than those fuckin’ rangers.” He nods to the country store, eerily quiet. It sits, ugly, like a brown old frog. “There’s a hotel just up the road. It’s not much, but it’ll do for one night.”

“But, sir, we really can’t stay. I don’t – there’s no –,”

You stumble to a stop when those merciless dark eyes root you to the ground. The leather reins squeak when he tightens his fist around them. Again, you are under the impression of a dog sniffing out your scent for any deception, any treason. He takes you in, all of you in – your ratty gloves, your torn hemline, your tattered collar – and by some miracle, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, the groove above his nose softens. 

Wordlessly, he reaches into his back pocket and takes out five dollars from a brown leather wallet. He offers it to you between two fingers. 

Take it, his eyes command. 

You do, with a shaking hand. You hate charity, you hate that you’re at his mercy –

But Ellie has a bed for the night. Inside, warm. Where, hours ago, she didn’t. You smother your pride and nod, gaze at the scar on his cheek that you only now notice at an arm’s length away. 

“One night,” he says. “For you and the kid.”

You nod again because that’s all you really can do, his pity clutched in your fist and held against your heart. 

Ellie scowls as he swings up onto the horse and readjusts his mask. 

“What a guy,” she murmurs to you, her eyes still narrowed. Joel clicks his teeth, and the horse trots off into the dark, a lone man riding out into the featureless night.

Evidently still feeling slighted, Ellie sticks her tongue out at the denim back.

“Better keep that tongue in your mouth, kid,” he hollers before digging his heels into the horse’s flanks. “Liable to be chopped off like a copperhead.”

Ellie’s mouth snaps shut.

The money Joel gave you is more than enough to cover a room and another plate of food. You even spurge your own money on some small candy for Ellie, determined to give Joel back every cent left over and then some, once you’ve proven you can earn your keep.

For you and the kid.

You shake your head, lost in your own thoughts, the gnawing hunger in your belly satiated, as you pull back the covers to the twin bed. The metal frame squeaks as you climb in, your night dress thin and ragged as the rest of your clothes. 

“C’mon, Ellie, time for bed.” When she doesn’t move, you stop rearranging the pillows and look at her. In her own white nightie (because she’d outgrown all her other pajamas), she sits in front of the roaring fire, her chin on her knees, and her arms wrapped around her shins. 

She’s quiet - either a good sign, or a terrible one. 

“Ellie, sweetie, we’ve gotta get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.” 

You watch as her narrow back expands and falls in one slow breath, her skin bright in the firelight.

She nods mutely and climbs into the space beside you. She rolls onto her side, away from you, her hands tucked up under her head, her knees curled up beneath her. 

This is where Anna would know what to say. How to soothe this girl with so much awareness in a world that is raw to even those willfully ignorant. You can’t bullshit Ellie the way you can some kids. She knows too much. Seen too much. 

You settle down next to her in the shadow of her shoulder. Your fingers hover, locked between the yawning gap of touching her and not touching her, when she finally speaks.

“Is this really going to work?” Her voice is quiet, soft, dust-covered and buried. “Is Joel really gonna . . . are we safe?”

You cannot bullshit Ellie Williams.

“I don’t know. I’d like to think so. I know you don’t like him, but I think we can trust him.”

She’s quiet again, only this time because there’s something she doesn’t want to say. 

“Not like Uncle Robert – or Robert, if that’s even his real name. I’d never met the man in person, but I wanted – so badly – to believe . . .” You swallow, your own shame boiling your skin. “I think we’re safe with Joel Miller.”

The god’s honest truth. 

She hears it in your voice.

Ellie tips back to look you in the eyes. She’s lost so much weight recently. “Yeah?”

You tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, the ghost of your thumb across her cheek. She allows the show of affection. “Yeah, El. I do.” 

You want to say: you can trust me. I’ll always take care of you.

But you know it would only come out hollow.

Neither of you would think it was honest. 

She pulls away from your grasp, her eyes almost golden in the firelight. She nods and stares at the burning wood. 

“Okay.”

“So . . . is your car, like, broken or something?”

You elbow Ellie and she sits up from hanging over the edge of the wagon. She frowns at you – what? – and you both glance at Joel at the front of the wagon. If the question annoys him any more than he perpetually already is, he doesn’t show it. 

“Don’t have one.” He says to the back of the horse. The wagon rocks and sways over the clods of dust and stone in the road. “Never did.”

“Uh, why?”

“Cars break down in the dust storms. Short out. They end up being more trouble than they’re worth.” 

Again, that half-centimeter turn, his tone implying what his eyes can’t, faced away from you. Ellie narrows her eyes at the back of his head. She wrenches her mouth open, fire in her eyes, but she catches you glaring, and her mouth snaps shut. Pouting, she chucks a lone pebble off the back of the wagon. 

The sky is strikingly blue, bright as a livewire, the air warm and crackling with the early summer heat. Away from Dalhart, away from the collection of dust on every surface, dripping through every crack, you find the clarity and distance of the southern plains to be . . . unexpected. So careless and abrasive one minute, but then, in moments like these, it became hard to believe that nature could ever be so cruel as to make the earth rise up and swallow it all whole. 

You swing your legs off the wooden edge, the sunshine warm on your knees. It’s no use trying to hide how badly your socks need darning, so you lean back and stretch your legs as far as you can, your face tilted towards the sky, the still air peaceful. This morning, you’d put on your yellow plaid dress, torn cotton lace around the sleeves that stop at your elbows. You tucked your hair up and pinned your straw hat to your head. It was a reflex, to present your most beautiful self to a man, even one you barely knew. By the way Ellie had rolled her eyes, she felt no such compulsion. 

Demure, your mother always told you, you’re not very pretty, you’re not very bright, the least you can be is demure. 

The wagon shudders, clicks, over the empty road and you open your eyes. Ellie is turned away from you, eyes out to the fields on either side of you. You don’t understand what she’s looking at, until you realize that’s exactly it: there is nothing to look at. On the other side of those loopy barbed-wire fences through cock-eyed posts, there are miles and miles of nothing but churned-over dirt. A lazy wind spins over a patch of emptiness, tossing clods and sand into the air, an aimless sadness as tangible as the dust itself. Phone lines stand, corroded and chipped, along the side of the road like tangible manifestations of a deadly infection. 

“There’s no crops here either.” Ellie says, voicing loudly what you only thought. You can’t see her face but she sounds as stunned as you are. “What happened?”

You watch over her shoulder, eyes level with the earth bleached of all material, all life. With the drought, your husband’s field shriveled up in months, the cracked ground peeling away from the sodhouse in some places. You still have nightmares about waking up with grit between your teeth, choking and coughing up bloody chunks of mud.

This is desolation on an epidemic scale. 

“Ask different people ‘n they’ll tell you different things.” Joel says in his slow drawl, the crackle of the earth soft beneath the wooden wheels. “No one really knows. But nothing like this happened when the buffalo grass was here, ‘steada wheat.”

“Wait, you were here before Dalhart?” Ellie twists on the wagon, leaning over the lip where Joel sits and drives the horse. 

“My family was. Here before anything. My grandpa befriended the Comanche Indians and –,”

“You got to hang out with Indians?” Ellie nearly hurls herself over the edge of the wagon to try and look him in the eye. “What are they like – did they teach you how to shoot a bow and arrow – can they really ride horses like that –,”

“Ellie!” You want to grab her by her collar and yank her back into the wagon. “Not so many questions.”

The noise Joel makes is somewhere between a grunt and the word no.

“It’s fine –, “ he looks down at Ellie, still curled around the back of the seat, her eyes wide with a giant smile on her face. His ever present scowl doesn’t seem any deeper, nor does it deter her. Joel turns away again and in the sunlight, his hair is gooey, caramel brown. You stare at the dirt road while listening, the back of your neck hot. “They’re good people. Didn’t deserve what happened to them – to any of ‘em. But they taught my grandpa and grandma how to take just what they need, nothing more. But then everybody needed grain, offered money for cheap, easy labor. They poured in here, into the prairie, and in years, it became this. Folks blame the drought, but it’s more’n that.”

Ellie’s inordinately quiet. She knows exactly what your husband did to you, to your family, and now, maybe to the entire land. 

“‘Next year’ people, they claim,” Joel continues, his voice deepening with anger, “‘next year’, things’ll be better. ‘Next year’ the rains’ll come. ‘Next year’ the wheat’ll return.” He shakes his head, boots creaking against the toeboard. “Anyone who thinks that is lyin’ to themselves. Anyone’s who’s been here, seen what’s here, for us it’s been –,”

“The end of the world.” 

The silence that follows your words stretches long, an anchor dropped off the end of the wagon and rattling around the wheels. You swing your legs, fingers curling around a tear in your hemline. It wasn’t the first time you’d heard those words to describe the state of things. That’s what your husband called it and you believed him. 

Evidently, Joel agrees. His wide shoulders taught, the denim blue faded beneath the boundless sky, he nods.

“Griiim,” Ellie mutters as she curls up and drops her chin on her knees. 

You’ve been watching a single cloud chase the sun from the floor of the wagon when Ellie, silent for all of about fifteen minutes, lifts her head from her hands draped over the edge. Her eyes go wide, her ears pink from the sun, and says:

“Whoa.”

The horse huffs as you sit up, a soft wind snagging the loose hairs on the back of your neck, and your mouth drops. 

Grass. 

Fields of it. 

The air is fresh, warm, and filled with the scent of living, breathing earth. Tipped with lush purple seeds shaped like paintbrushes, a sea of stalks bend and ripple in the cooling breeze, undulating like waves on solid ground. The wind is soft here, teasing, rolling through the tall grass, carrying the scent of growth and green in the air. You’re suddenly aware of how dry your mouth is, cracked and padded with dust. 

“We left it be.” Joel offers simply, voice too gruff to surely be filled with pride. “It’s endured and survived, and so have we.”

Further back, you can see where the line of his property ends – a harsh division of paradise and purgatory – and marked to the north by a dip in the ground and even over the crunch of the wheels over the ground, you hear it: water. 

A river. An oasis in a wasteland. 

Ahead of the white tufts of hair on the horse, the road curves, disappearing into the sea of grass, but letting your graze drift up, you see an a-frame home, white like a lighthouse at the edge of a storm. The instant the home comes into view, Joel clicks his tongue, urging the horse faster – eager. 

He leads the horse up through the road, through the grass, and on the other side, by the river, two cows chew up the green, oblivious. Beyond them, tucked behind the house is a barn. Low to the ground but wide, hunched like a fighter with a heavy center of gravity, it looks ready to endure and survive. As this entire secret world had. 

Joel tugs the horse to a stop, the wagon rattles as it slows, by the wide porch of the a-frame. It sits also low to the ground, wider with a dark roof, held together with something black and smeared. You’re so distracted by the unique qualities of this house in the middle of paradise that you miss it when the door creaks open until you’re staring down the barrel of a shotgun.

“Who are you?” The voice behind the gun is deep, even if the barrels shake slightly. In the dark of the doorframe, you can’t quite see their face, only their short stature. 

You see Ellie’s hand twitch towards her knife, which she now carries in her sock since the night of the county store. 

However, Joel is less concerned. In fact, the boulders of his shoulders loosen, ease to simple muscle and blood. He makes a noise that on anyone else, it might be considered a laugh, a chuckle, but he isn’t even capable of smiling –

He slings down from the seat and pats the horse.

“Easy there, Annie Oakley, it’s just me.” 

The shadow in the doorway stiffens.

“Dad?”

The shotgun lowered, the shadow staggers into the light. Brown eyes, just like his, scrunched against the blinding sunlight, a girl with the most beautiful head of curls blinks at Joel, her thin hand held up to shield her face. 

“Hey there, baby girl.”

In a single leap, she jumps down from the porch but all too quickly, the smile slips from Joel’s face.

“Hang on, not too fast–,”

She stumbles towards him as best as the metal braces around her knees, down to her ankles, will allow, defiant and smiling, despite the beads of sweat that have swelled over her forehead. Joel surges forward, faster than you thought possible, and reaches for her, nearly on one knee. 

“Slow down, please, Sarah.”

“Dad, I’m fine,” she huffs before tossing her arms around his neck. “I’m fine. Just – missed you, is all.” 

You can’t see his face, but he straightens up still holding her. With one hand he flattens those curls to her cheek, and kisses the other. 

“Enough to forget all the things I taught you about gun safety? You just tossed that thing aside,” he scolds fondly. She rolls her eyes as he sets her down. 

“Okay, but if you didn’t know it was me, you would’a been totally scared, right?” 

She watches as he chuckles, a deep, warm sound, but her own smile flatlines when she spies Ellie climbing down from the wagon. You ease off the edge, your lower half sore from the ride. 

The girl, Sarah, narrows her eyes. 

“Who are you?” She positions her body slightly in front of Joel’s. “And why are you dressed like a boy?” 

Joel’s soft scolding – “Sarah” – is lost beneath Ellie’s scoff. She adjusts her satchel. 

“Why are you dressed like Raggedy Ann?” 

Her father’s massive hands clench down on her shoulders, Sarah’s scowl evident that she’s about half a second away from launching herself at Ellie, leg braces be damned. 

“Now, let’s slow down here.” Joel’s deep baritone is light, but just as firm as his grip. If you knew him better, you’d think he is about to laugh, the lines around his eyes thick, while his mouth stays flat. “We got off on the wrong foot. Sarah, this is Ellie and her aunt. They’re going to be staying with us for a while to help out with your schooling.”

Those curls go flying, her frown now pinched in worry. Another girl caught between a child and adult – for the sake of their single parent, you notice, your chest tight. 

“I thought you needed a farm hand. You were going to teach me.” 

“You know you already read better than I do.” 

“Dad–,”

“Miss here is also a nurse.” 

“Oh. Oh.” She glances down at the metal braces as if she’d forgotten they were there. The skin on her knees is chaffed, rubbed pink. “She can . . . help me?”

Twin pairs of brown eyes settle on you, one hesitantly curious, the other aggressively determined. 

You can, right?

Ellie’s staring at the braces, her gaze distant, heavy. She’d seen this before, but everything back then moved too fast. Back then, there was no time for braces.

Braces only help a small percentage of polio patients. The lucky ones.  

You nod, your heart hammering under your chest bone. “Yes – yes, sir. I think with Ms. Kenny’s therapy, we might be able to alleviate some pain.” 

Those eyes, exactly like and so unlike her father’s, widen.

“Really?”

You introduce yourself with your first name, pressing the crease in your glove between your nail and your thumb with your other hand.

“I’d like to try, Sarah.”

You suddenly understand that Sarah is Joel Miller’s most guarded secret, out here in paradise, paradise as the most beautiful prison in the world. He continues to stare at you from under thick eyebrows after Sarah moves away from him. Ellie, caught off-guard by her forward movement, takes a significant step back.

“I, um, got some marbles out back,” Sarah starts, thumbing over her shoulder, and every other word sounding like an apology. “If you wanna play.”

Ellie jerks forward, her eyes round with excitement, but stops. She looks at you.

“Can I?” 

Soft when eager, just like her mother. So unlike you. You nod.

“Stay close, okay?” 

You and Joel watch as Ellie and Sarah toddle around to the back of the house, Ellie quietly narrating every thought she has as she keeps pace with Sarah.

Those look actually really cool, you know?

Yeah?

Totally. Have you read Amazing Stories? You look like you could be part of the Space Family Robinson.

Who are they?

Oh, you’ve never read those!? Okay, so they’re a family who live in space and they go on these awesome adventures together to different planets and . . .

The farther they go, the faster Joel turns back to stone. His gaze lingers just a hint longer before those dark eyes pin you to the ground. 

“You said you can clean? Cook?” 

You nod quickly. “Yes, sir.” Guard dog Joel. Stocky pitbull, teeth long and wet Joel.

He tilts his chin towards the house.

“Kitchen’s in the back. I gotta clean up the wagon and the horse, then gonna tend the field. I’ll be back in a few hours, but Sarah knows where to find me if y’need somethin'.”

You nod again, but he misses it, turning away to unbuckle the horse. You slide your trunk and Ellie’s satchel off the end of the wagon and head into the shadow of the house.

The white clapdoor snaps shut behind you, followed by the softer snik of the screen clicking into its frame. Slipping the bobby pins out of your hair to release your hat, you take in the Miller home.

The air is cool. Dust motes float in the sunlight streaming in from the second floor over a staircase with wooden wainscoting leading away from the open front room. With a brief glance up, you can see the faded white walls of the upper hallway, some not-yet-seen window drawing in bolts of morning light that pierce the air in bullet holes. It’s quiet and it smells warm, like lace kept in the back of a drawer near a wall that faces the heat outside. 

A blue two-seater couch faces a squat fireplace, with a Queen Anne table sandwiched between the two. Behind you, a large grandfather clock ticks and waits, a server waiting in the shadows with a watchful eye to report back to its master on the going-ons of the house. With only a cedar hutch, a few daguerreotypes, a smattering of books, the room is sparsely decorated, but kept clean and organized. You could see Sarah, a focused look in her eyes, sitting on the steps of the stairs and making Joel move and rearrange furniture over and over again until the room felt right. 

Through a white arched doorway, you find yourself in the kitchen. The light sparks more brightly here, the sky a stark blue through the four square window over the kitchen table and above the sink, reflective of the sun. You realize then the house runs north to south at an angle, where there are limited windows in the walls on the east and west sides, thereby limiting direct sun exposure and, more importantly, heat. Both the kitchen and the front rooms had been built out of the line of the sun, making cooking and cleaning and living bearable without a painful glare. 

A thoughtful and patient consideration.

Someone had attempted to add some levity with brown and blue plaid wallpaper around the cove of the dinner table, all the way to the other side of the room around the kitchen counters and stove. But unfortunately for everyone else, the wallpaper is hideous, only tampered by the off-white counters and cupboards. 

The cupboards have glass doors, blurring ceramic cups and plates on the tops of the shelves. 

It reminds you of the small apartment Anna and you lived in back in Boston, when it was just the two of you. It wasn’t much, but it felt sturdy, secure. Safe.

A door to the right of the stove has a latch, and you lift it and poke your head inside. A chilly darkness greets you, along with the scent of wet, deep earth. A basement? No. Not this close to the kitchen. Curiosity pulling you forward, you descend the sturdy wooden stairs, into the sunken darkness. You count ten until a draft licks your ankles. You keep going, one squeak of wood after another until - you touch soil. The heady scents of pine bark and peat moss soothe the air from where your feet press into the ground, fertility thick like mushrooms in the gut of a lichen-drenched tree. But it’s dark, too dark to make out much, barely your own hand in front of your face. With your fingers outstretched, as if you’ll bump into a gas lamp conveniently on the ground, you shuffle forward and almost immediately a cold chain tickles your face. You grab out of instinct and pull. 

Nearly blinded by the light that erupts from an exposed bulb directly in front of your left eye, you stagger back, wincing, your footsteps muffled by the earthen floor. You blink through the tears as the secret at the end of the stairs finally reveals itself. 

A pantry. A cellar. 

At least twenty feet deep and ten feet high, with rows and rows, stacks and stacks, wood shelves cover nearly the entire length of the underground room. In between the rows, large barrels sit, quiet and sturdy, with bottles of vinegar and olive oil sitting on their rims. 

You realize two things within seconds of each other. 

This house has electricity. It stands above the ground, proud, independent, full of heat and light. So unlike your husband’s dark hole in the ground. 

and

there is so much food. 

Pickling jars. Seed pouches. Culled wheat. Cans of fruit and vegetables and eggs. Olives with squash and pumpkins. Crates of potatoes and half bottles of wine and syrup. Onions and carrots and spices and garlic.

A feast. Meals for days and days and days. The bounties of earth stored, safe beneath the ground, like a secret. 

It’s more food than you’ve seen in years.

A hunger like you can’t remember having roars in your stomach out of nowhere and everything pitches to the right. The edges of your vision blurs, your shoulder knocking into stone wall, and breathing becomes a nearly impossible task. You turn, nearly stumbling up the dozen steps that have turned into a thousand.

The tacky memories that stick to the crevices of your dreams yawn awake, bringing with them dry mud in your mouth and thick salt to your eyes. Mud, dirt, dust – everywhere. In that stinking hut in the ground, the dust replaced your molecules, your atoms, until you too might blow away, until you are cracked and empty and dry. The static from the dust storm memories shoots down both of your arms and you sway on your feet. Your heart suddenly pounding so achingly fast, you have to drop your forehead against the flat surface of the closed door to keep the room from spinning. 

You had forgotten what safety looked like.

You had forgotten what living could be.

You know the ringing sound of that gunshot is just in your head, it’s not real, but you shudder all the same, your hands curling into claws under your chin, your nails tearing up the white paint. 

You’re here, not there. You are safe. Ellie is safe. That house and him have been entombed together under piles of dirt, with the bugs and the rot and the stench from the weak stove. Rivers of sweat rolling down the back of your neck, you beg yourself to stop shaking. You feel like cheap terracotta pottery – made from dirt, left too long to bake in the sun and made brittle; one good tap and you’ll shatter. 

You breathe in and taste wet salt. Breathe out and cry – cry from the fear and the dread and the relief and the hope. God, that hope tastes worse than all the dirt in the Panhandle of Texas.

You cry and cry and cry until you don’t feel so brittle anymore.

Sunlight has struck copper, heavy, tangy in the mouth, when the back door opens and the house is instantly filled with the sound of girls’ rabid conversation. You step back from the stove, cheeks warm and arm sore from continuously stirring the rice and vegetable soup. It’s not as thick as your mother once made, but without milk, it would be nearly impossible to improve. You smile at the girls as they tumble in, more dust mite than human, whispering about some secret. 

“Having fun?” You ask with a grin on your face as Ellie helps Sarah take off her shoes, already attentive to what a girl with her health concerns might need. 

There’s an overlap of chatter as Ellie and Sarah both answer you and then, answer each other.

“Well, good,” you say, turning back to the stove, making sure the bottom of the soup doesn’t burn, “but whatever you got up to, it’s all over your faces so please wash up before dinner.” 

“It smells real good, miss,” Sarah says as she hobbles over to the sink and starts rinsing off her arms and cheeks, while Ellie takes off her own shoes. “What is it?”

“Something my mom used to make when the cupboards were bare.”

Sarah stills, the water rushing over her soft skin. Those inquisitive eyes are just as captivating, just as forceful as her father’s, but for entirely different reasons. She tugs the words out of you by the sheer, needling strength of her gaze.

“I mean – I found the cellar, the house is incredibly well stocked, but I didn’t see any preserved meat or dairy and I didn’t – I didn’t think your dad would want me poking around out back.”

Immediately Sarah softens and rolls her eyes. “Dad’s all bark and no bite,” she huffs. “We’ve got stored beef and cheese in an ice chest downstairs. I’ll show you around tomorrow.”

You smile and those brown eyes go warm in the coppery light. “Thanks, Sarah.” 

“Bunch up, I gotta wash my hands too.” Ellie none-to-gently bumps Sarah with her shoulder to get to the sink but before you can scold her, Sarah swings back, using her precarious momentum, and pushes Ellie back. They both giggle. Something that’s been cramped far too long in your chest loosens. 

“So, Sarah, tell me where you are with your schooling. Do you have books, diagrams?”

She thinks for a minute as she opens a drawer that leaves her back to you and takes out two, then four thin cloth placemats. She hobbles back to the table to carefully spread them out.

“I was up to seventh grade before the school shut down. That was about two years ago, so Dad’s been trying to make sure I don’t forget anything. He got me a Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare a while ago and made me read it out loud to him. He has me work on my letters every day – including cursive.” She adds, with a bright spot of joy cranking her mouth open. You imagine someone like Sarah would have beautiful penmanship. “He shows me around the yard, asking me to identify plants and animals, especially anything that might be poisonous. I don’t think he really understands it but he explains what happens when you add water to a seed and keep it in damp earth. Oh, and he has me help balance the books for the farm – what we made, what we sold, how much we have left, stuff like that.”

You smile at her over your shoulder as Ellie hands her bowls. “Accounting.”

“Huh?”

Ellie rolls her eyes. “It’s so boring, don’t worry about it,” she whispers conspiratorially.

“What your dad is teaching you is called accounting,” you say a bit firmly, eyes tracking your niece as she shows no shame. “It’s a very special skill to have, especially if you work on a farm or in a business. Do you like it?”

She nods rapidly, those cork-screw curls bouncing around her thin face. “Yeah! I do! I’m much faster than Dad when it comes to figuring out the sums and dollar value.”

In the front hall, the clap door creaks open then slams shut, heavy footfalls proceeding the man that makes them.

“Does that happen a lot?” you ask softly as Sarah sidles up next to you to peer into the pot.

“Where I know more than my dad?” Sarah smirks up at you, all devious youth. “More often than you think.”

A mini sun bursts from the ceiling as Joel flicks on the light switch and is almost immediately tackled by Sarah. The copper sun on the horizon finally, in the distracted moment, slips down and drags the night behind it. It’s purple twilight outside when Joel lifts his head from the embrace around Sarah’s shoulders to stare at the two strangers in his kitchen.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” you say brightly and you can almost picture your mother in the same exact position in front of the stove, stirring soup until her cheeks were pink, her hand resting low on her back, her tummy round and full in her second attempt to keep her husband’s rage diverted from her. It’s a boy, she promised.

The memory makes you so violently ill out of nowhere, you lose your appetite. But you persevere; you carry on and load up the bowls Sarah stacked for you. Ellie saves you from having to dislodge the prickly knot in your throat when she snags a bowl and eagerly yells, “get it while it’s hot!”

The arrangements from the stove to the table are a bit of a blur, the slick anxious weight from earlier today curling around your lungs again as you remember shadows in chairs like these, but so different from the flesh-and-blood bodies that occupy them now. 

You’re dazed, a little light-headed, but not so much to miss the glance between Joel and Ellie. A junkyard puppy skirting the territory of an older watchdog, a bone in each of their mouths and dragged to opposite corners of the battlefield. Satisfied with the lines of demarcated territory that had been drawn, they call a temporary truce by eating in complete silence, until Sarah groans.

“Oh my god, this is better than it smells!” she hums, her mouth full of potatoes. 

“Just wait till she adds chicken,” Ellie grumbles, mouth cupped open to keep from spilling. You watch her, a faint smile on your face, and the slippery feeling fades. When cleaning up, she missed a spot on her left nostril and you fight the urge to clean it with your thumb.

“There’s more.” 

Your gaze snaps to Joel hunched over his bowl. The spoon that Ellie and Sarah have to both clutch in their fists to eat barely swings between his massive fingers. 

Joel’s dark eyes trace down your nose, your chin, your neck, to where your hands lay flat on the table in front of you. Your own bowl and spoon sit on the counter behind you. You worry you might have upset him, with the way he’s frowning.

“There’s more,” he repeats, same tone. 

“I'm sorry?” 

He puts his spoon down and clears his throat, then nods to the pot on the stove. Ellie watches him out of the corner of her eye.

“I saw how much you made. If you’re hungry, you should eat.” 

As though speaking a language only you could hear, he looks at Ellie the same time you do. 

She frowns. “What? Is there something on my face?”

Sarah begins to giggle, nodding, when Joel starts again.

“You should eat. There’s enough.” 

It’s like his eyes can see through your blue veins and clammy skin, to your yellow bones and clawing stomach. You choke on the mudball that’s been hovering in your throat for months and nod.

“Alright.”

You don’t know if you’re actually hungry – you can’t really remember the taste of warm food – or if you’re doing it just to appease him, but something about the heat of the bowl and solid spoon in your hand, it rouses you from this sinking you find yourself in. Your bones feel like jelly.

“How’re the fields, Dad?” Sarah asks with her big eyes, seemingly unaware of the layered exchange between you and her father, or kind enough not to address it. 

He responds to her, his voice deep in the cavern of his chest. It’s an easy way he speaks to her, heavy with the seriousness she’s earned to be talked to like an adult, but gentle enough that for all his low grumbling, it comes out as a thick murmur. You find yourself listening to their conversation, their interactions, as soothing as music turned low from a well-tuned radio. Ellie is even roped in when Sarah tells Joel all about the Space Family Robinson and Ellie’s knife. “It’s really cool, Dad,” she says preemptively. “She knows how to use it and she’s really safe.” 

“Well, if it’s really cool . . .” he fills his mouth with potatoes, tamping down the ghost of a grin on his lips around the spoon. 

Ellie shuffles in her seat, her own hesitant smile glittering in her eyes, and with only minor prompting, she holds no prisoners when gleefully telling Sarah that she’s got the story of finding a mess of wriggling worms out by the back of the barn all wrong. 

“Just keep ‘em outta my side of the bed, alright?” You grin at her, spooning another dribble of soup into your mouth. You’ve realized too much, too fast can just as easily twist your stomach so you focus on cradling a digestible amount of food – broth, potato, carrots – in the well of your spoon. 

But the landscape beyond the silver lip has stilled. Both girls are happily slurping up the last bits of their meals, throwing quips back and forth, but Joel’s shoulders have locked up again, the bones of his wrists flat, a static alertness that you’re sure would travel all the way down to his ankles if he was standing up right. You aren’t sure if Sarah has picked up on the subtle change in his breathing – from the deep well of his lungs to shortened and shallow – but somehow you have. 

You’re staring at him far too long.

Those thick eyebrows pitch down again. Beneath the loose button that pins your dress closed over your chest, you feel a swell of heat and you wish you were like Ellie, capable of making an easy joke – what, is there something on my face? The heat bubbles almost uncomfortably under his weighted gaze. 

“I hate bugs,” you blurt out, desperate to give him what he wants, if only you knew. The girls glance at your sudden outburst. “I don’t like worms especially. I don’t mind straw beds, as long as they’re clean – I mean, I–I hope they are, the straw beds, not the worms.” 

Another eternal second of being pinned down by Joel’s frown, this one decidedly less hostile, before understanding breaks open the harsh lines of his mouth and around his eyes. His eyes go wide for less than breath, then he drops his gaze to the bowl. His shoulders shift, muscle redistributing weight as he settles his thick forearm closer to the edge of the table.

Oh, that relief of muscle says. 

“You’re not sleeping in the barn.” Joel says, head tucked down. At that, Ellie slows her ravenous eating and frowns at him. 

“Then where are we sleeping?”

Joel lifts his head, a new, special emotion just for her tugging on his mouth: exasperation. “My room. You two in there and I’m takin’ the couch.” 

Shame and embarrassment drip down over your skull, between your ears, like a cold, runny egg. 

“No, we couldn’t possibly–,” 

He shakes his head, eyes still on the split potato chunk at the bottom of the bowl. His hand flexes briefly and you think of it around the bridle of the horse. 

“It’s not up for discussion.” 

Beside him, Sarah frowns at him and you’d wonder how many times in her life he’s ever said that to her – if you could think properly over the roaring of blood in your ears. 

“Joel,” you say, something syrupy under your tongue molding the words Mr. Miller into a tone you’d use for an old friend. “I can’t ask you to–,”

Hand flexes. The seat of the chair squeaks.

“You’re not askin’, I’m tellin’.” You’re still vastly underprepared for when those eyes - those deep, dark eyes - suddenly snap on you, as if your very presence commands his entire attention. You notice the dirt underneath his nails and around the knot of his wrist on the table. He’s filthy. 

Quietly, with the surety of a dog slipping its snout between its paws, he cuts the last chunk of potato in half with the curve of his spoon. “The new mattresses’ll be here next week. We’ll make do ‘till then.”

The slurp of soup between his lips seems to signal the end of the conversation, but you can’t quite mash together your kaleidoscope-spinning impressions of the man across the table from you. 

“Thank you . . . Joel.” 

He nods, back teeth breaking apart the soft mush of the potato. He swallows and glances back up at you. 

“It’s good,” he says, briefly holding his spoon aloft. “You did good.”

His words burst the choking bubble in your chest and warmth drips down your spine, splashing in the cradle of your hips. Hunger rises, but it’s a different kind of hunger. A growl of neglect. One you sometimes wondered if it was even possible for you to ever even feel. 

Even while you were married to your husband.

You put your spoon down to keep your hand from shaking. The soup won’t feed this new churning hunger and, frankly, you don’t know what will. 

You did good, he praised, parsed out like torn bread tossed across a black lake. 

It makes you warm in places food never could.

The immediate next morning, you meet the sun early, eagerly. Eager to wake and rise and become so useful, you are intricately tied to this house; if you are removed, a vital piece of the land, the prairie is torn up along with you. Ellie sleeps softly next to you, curled up in the same position she was in the hotel bed, tucked in so tightly as if to take up the least amount of space possible. She sleeps, unbothered, blissful, and again you fight the urge to brush the hair that covers her sleeping eyes. You settle for tugging the beautiful quilt, with its stunning blue and red and green patches, up to her shoulders. 

As you tie your dress up, your suitcase partially open and on the ground, movement from outside in the dawning pink catches your eye. A brisk shadow, those thick shoulders proceeding a taught waist are unmistakable as they move towards the barn. You stand, transfixed for a moment as broad hands slide open the barn doors, you hear a faint creak, and he disappears inside. The capability of those hands; the surety, where every action is deliberate and intentional – it makes something arc up your throat. A warm piercing that bursts through bone and muscle alike. Trembling fingers tug at the wilting lace around the cuffs of your dress, imagination stretching out into the dark morning, inspired by curious and impossible ideas of those hands. 

Something – most likely Sarah next door – squeaks the floorboard and those tendrils of thought snap back as if someone had slammed a lid shut. You glance at the clock and make a mental note to wake up earlier tomorrow, to beat him to the kitchen. 

You are also desperately eager to get out of the room where you can practically smell Joel on the walls. It’s simple, just like the rest of the house, but amongst the hand-drawn sketches of himself and birds (likely gifts from Sarah), the half-spent candles and well-read books, you find him in everything. You wonder, briefly, if the indentations made on the cotton mattress are from him or you – the scent of his hair in the pillow from sweat or soap. 

The encroaching feeling that you don’t belong here in this house nearly swallows you whole as you dress in a room you definitely don’t belong in. 

Joel remains a distant figure, a familiar shadow across the lightning horizon, long after you finish the eggs and toast. You consider perusing the pantry for blueberries or something similar, when Sarah comes down. Fresh-faced, dressed with the care most people reserve for church, she stumbles in, her braces clacking as she finds a seat at the table. 

You notice a brief flash of pain across her face when you bring over a plate of food. She unconsciously rubs a circle with her thumb on her left knee as she picks up her fork.

“Pain today?” You ask, eyes on her knee, even though it’s obvious. 

She nods, strained. “Just a little bit. But it’s nothing. I’m sure it’ll go away when it warms up outside.” 

You doubt that is remotely true, but you let her hold the comforting lie. She doesn’t seem like the type to swallow pity with ease, and neither was Anna. You put on that detached but focused "nurse's" mask, your lips a straight line and brow furrowed, your voice slipping on something more commanding too.

“Let me see.” 

Sarah blinks at you briefly, evidently surprised by your shift in demeanor but eventually, she obeys. She drops her fork and slides the chair back, the chair legs squeaking against the rough wooden floor.

You crouch in front of her, gathering up her ankle first and testing its mobility.

“When were you diagnosed?” you ask, as soft as you are firm.

“Never, technically.” She watches you and occasionally winces. You wonder how long she’s grown stiff like this. “The doc had left over braces that Dad bought before the guy skipped town.”

“So then how did you know it was polio?” 

By her sudden stillness, you know this is the first time that word has been uttered under this roof in a long time. You lower her ankle, rising gaze meeting hers. Her mouth is pulled tight. You can practically read the familiar headlines as they scroll across her mind.

New Polio Cases by the Thousands

Polio Claims Life of Infant

Polio Outbreak: Thirteen Dead

“Not every case is serious,” you say, gently, using the word serious in place of fatal. You don’t want to scare her unnecessarily. But by her wide eyes, you know the word sits in her chest all the same. 

“I know. And I know it can be made worse by moving too much. That’s why Dad’s always on me about resting and going slow.” 

You return to your examination. Her skin is rubbed raw in some places by the braces. You remind yourself to ask Joel for some old sheets to make better padding. 

“That’s not always true,” you say, shifting to her other leg. “Even though she was sore after, Anna often said she felt the stiffness go away after walking around the neighborhood block.”

Curious, Sarah tilts her head, those lovely curls swaying like leaves in a breeze. “Who’s Anna?”

Your skin around your eyes tightens – how could you be so careless with such a secret – when you hear feet thundering down the stairs and a second later, Ellie swings around the lip of the doorway.

“Is that toast?” She asks, eyes wide and hopeful. “If you got bacon, I’m gonna start kissing faces.”

You and Sarah exchange a small grin before you stand up right and Sarah returns to her own meal.

“No bacon today, but who knows what else is stored in the pantry?” 

“Oh, fuck yeah,” Ellie exclaims as she slides into a chair, her own plate pilled far too for a girl her size. “Treasure hunt.” 

You see the tips of Sarah’s ears go briefly pink at Ellie’s language but the muffled smile on her face hints at awe, impressed – so you let that one slide. A stream of light through the half-shut curtain tugs your thoughts outside, to the man literally toiling in the fields. 

“Does your dad want me to bring him some food?” You ask, standing from the chair and glancing out the window. You can’t see him any more and for some reason that makes your chest go tight.

Sarah shook her bouncy curls. “No. He’ll come in and get it when he’s hungry.” 

You didn’t like the idea that you weren’t going to be directly feeding the man who employed you literally to cook for him and his daughter.

“Does he like coffee?”

Sarah arches an eyebrow at you. “Yeah, he loves it. But I’ve tried for years to make it the way he likes and he always drinks it, but I think a little piece of him dies inside every time he does.” 

“Then you must be a great cook too,” Ellie smirks up at her. In response, Sarah smiles impishly around a mouthful of eggs. 

You hold that little bit of information about Joel - something you knew that he didn’t know you knew - close, like a dollar bill in your pocket. You drum your fingers, searching for memories of how Anna used to shoe-string coffee when you couldn’t afford a maker in Boston.

“Did you eat?”

Ellie’s voice tears your gaze from the window. Her plate is only halfway empty. Her fingers uneasily move the fork around.

“Yeah,” you answer truthfully. In fact, you are rather ashamed by how much you took, sitting at the table in the purple dark, before you remembered that you had to feed three other people. “I’m good, Ellie. Thanks.”

She nods, returning to her plate and shoveling two bites into her mouth without slowing down.

“What’s first today?” Sarah asks, her eyes bright. “I can show you my sums. We have a chalkboard in the barn.”

You smile at her eagerness to show off while Ellie dejectedly pokes at her remaining floppy eggs. She had never been one for school, another thing you found hard to relate to about her. Fortunately for her, Anna nor you ever had the time to be as diligent about her education as Joel had been for Sarah. And unfortunately for her, you intend to fix that as quickly as possible. 

“I’d love to see them, Sarah, but would you mind showing me around the cellar first? Maybe there is bacon hiding down there somewhere.”

You don’t miss the small smile that creeps across Ellie’s face.

“Junk or keep?” 

Sarah looks up from the tip of her stick dragging nonsense through the barn’s dirt floor, her chin flat in her palm, elbow on her knee. She frowns at Ellie holding up . . . something that might have been a tractor part at one time. 

“I don’t even know what that is, so – junk?” 

Ellie shrugs, tosses the piece back and forth in her hands, and then chucks it like a ball to the opposite end of the barn. It collides loudly with the wall and Flora, the white and black cow, lifts her head at the noise from her stable and lets out a low groan. 

The entire barn smells of hay and animal but in a way that is warm, almost comforting. The two cows lazily munch from their troughs in their stalls, occasionally eyeing you as you carry items back and forth. It’s fortifying in a way only working outside and with your hands can offer. 

You turn to her disapprovingly but she’s already back, elbow-deep, in the pile you had designated hers to sort. Sarah, to whom you suggested rest this morning, goes back to boredly drawing circles in the dirt. Even though she clearly hates the idea of being idle, you are surprised she takes your medical advice without any fight. 

If you had successfully completed your duties as cook, now it was time to take on your other task as teacher. Sarah had a few textbooks, but mostly outdated and only one copy. You know trying to find a full library in times like these is laughably impossible, but there is nothing wrong with hoping for a blackboard. You’d made one before when the school district you tempted at didn’t approve new funding, and you feel confident you could do it again. Trouble is, you have nowhere to put it, much less set up a laughably impossible classroom for two students. 

Until Sarah casually mentioned the unfortunate pile of junk in the back of her father’s barn, “taking up at least half the space in there.” 

She wasn’t wrong.

“Yuck – is your dad a hoarder?” Ellie asks with slight disgust as she pulls up a stack of newspapers held together by twine. “Why does he even have this stuff?”

Sarah grins, delighted by Ellie’s prickly teasing. “This place actually used to be pretty organized. This was his space for a long time – where he went to think, or figured out what crops we needed for the next year.”

Her smile crumbles. “But, uh, then I got sick and now he doesn’t come out here unless it's for work.”

Ellie pinches the soft of her cheek with her teeth, nodding, her eyes downcast.

“So . . . junk?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” 

The stack of newspapers comes up to her knees and Ellie struggles, off-balanced, to carry it across the hay-covered floor. 

You reach for it and she gives it to you gratefully. You take it with a smile; you never know what she’s going to appreciate or just see it regretfully as charity or pity. 

“I think your dad is losing it,” Ellie says as she wipes sweat from her brow, shaking her head far too seriously. “Losin’ it, big time.” 

Sarah giggles.

You drop the stack of papers in the corner, but when you let go, the string snaps and the papers spill everywhere. With a sigh, you kneel down and gather them back together, but not before a few headlines catch your eye. 

Your heart twists.

Paralysis Takes Three Children

Join the Mothers’ March on Polio

QUARANTINE: POLIOMYELITIS

Why would Joel keep these? Everyone knew how devastating polio could be to children, even infants. Why would he –

Roughly dispersed throughout the article, sentences and phrases were underlined in blue pen. Sentences containing, “iron lung”, “bedrest”, “antibiotic” –

No cure.

Warmth spread out across your chest. Joel was looking for a way to treat his daughter, the only way he could in a town without a doctor: outside information. Something about this makes the space beneath your chest bone hurt so badly, you get a little nauseous. 

Now you consider conserving these papers as if they are important historical documents. Behind you, where Ellie and Sarah are lobbying jokes back and forth, you see more stacks of neatly contained newspapers. He looked everywhere and found nothing. 

You reshuffle the stack that fell, when you spot something else that hardens the warm feeling in your chest and makes it brittle.

Mob Over Breadline Kills FIVE

Experts Say There is No Way Out of This Depression

Mother of Drowned Children Claims She Did “What Was Best”

The rough floor hurts your knees. Eyes closed, you try to ignore the flood of images of what you witnessed in Boston, how desperate and cruel people became in Oklahoma. With each memory, your heartbeat pounds harder.

Red. Blood. Pink. Skin. White. Bone.

The riots got to be so terrible, but people were just hungry.

Ellie calling your name jerks you out of the sinking muck of memories. 

“What? What is it?”

She eyes you with distant concern then glances at Sarah. “She wanted to know where you learned all this stuff.”

“About cooking, and teaching, and nursing,” Sarah clarifies. “I think I’ve read every book in our house probably four times and I still feel like I don’t know anything.” 

“You probably know more than you think,” you offer as you scoop up the uncomfortable newspapers, easily switching tracks of thought to mute the swell of horrors from the rotting box in your mind. You leave them in the corner for Joel to do what he wishes with them and stand, dusting your dress off. “What do you call the process by which plants get energy from the sun?”

Sarah’s eyes brighten immediately. Where her body fails her, her mind is as sharp as a tack.

“Photosynthesis!”

“Good,” you nod, smiling. “And what’s the primary source of energy in animal cells?”

“The mitochondria!”

“Very good.” 

Ellie sighs angrily from her pile and puts her hands on her hips. “I think I’m gonna make like mitosis and split, if we keep talking about all this boring stuff.”

Scorned for her love of learning a second time and already in a bad mood from the pain this morning, Sarah frowns. 

“What’s your problem? Why do you act like school sucks? You had your mom teaching you –,”

“She’s not my mom!” Ellie snaps back, her knuckles white around a rusted bucket. “She’s just my aunt!”

“Yeah, well, I have an uncle I never even get to see!” Sarah stands up as smoothly as she can, but her knees and ankles are pink again. Her calves shake. “You’re lucky!”

Ellie’s teeth clench in the back of her jaw, lip curling. 

You remember distinctly more than once having to pick Ellie up from school early because she’d been caught fighting and you take a step in her direction, even if Sarah could no doubt land a few solid ones in. 

“And you’re–,”

“Ellie.” You know how rough Ellie can be. You remember the tone to take with unruly students, even if you don’t mean an ounce of it. “Don’t. Just let it g–,”

“Why do you always take her side?” That ire whips around to you. Loyalty, that was another trait her mother favored. Ellie’s shoulders roll forward, her fists clenched. “Why do you let her talk like she knows anything about us? About Mom?” 

“I’m not taking a side, Ellie,” you say firmly, your chin tilted down to her. One day she’s going to be taller than you, you know it. “Both of you, this is enough.”

That was the wrong thing to say. Ellie tosses the broken bucket in her hand to the ground and storms towards the barn doors. 

“You just like her because she’s a fucking dork like you,” she growls under her breath before shoving open the large square door. 

It swings shut, the metal clattering against the wood. The brief stream of light filtering in is shortly swallowed up into the shadows again. 

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says almost immediately, her brown eyes swiveling on you. Her skin is tinged a little lighter and there’s sweat along her hairline. With a fleeting flash of worry, you wonder if she’s in more pain than she lets on. “I didn’t mean it . . . I mean, I think she is lucky to have – but . . . I shouldn’t have said that.”

She drops your gaze and you think those dark eyes might be softer, wetter than usual. She plucks at the hem of her dress, her mouth twisted to the side. 

Where Ellie explodes outwards, Sarah implodes inwards. You never could understand Ellie’s inclination to destroy everything around her.

You hand her a broom, with a smile on your face. 

“Do you want to tell me about your uncle?” 

She takes it slowly from you, eyebrows furrowed down. This is a look you are familiar with, even when it comes to Ellie. She is stuck between answering like a kid, getting it all off her chest to be free of the emotional burden, and swallowing it all to please the adults in her life. 

You’ve also found Ellie tends to open up when she doesn’t have to look you in the eye. Sarah’s own gaze is stuck to the floor as she vaguely sweeps at the hay. 

“We don’t talk about Uncle Tommy a lot,” she mumbles. 

You focus on untangling an old bridle. “Oh? Why?”

“Dad’s still pissed at him for moving out to California. Said he left what’s really important for a bullshit dream.” Her eyes pop up, wide and shocked. “Sorry, that’s what he said.” 

Despite your limited time with him, you can easily see how Joel Miller might take something like that personally, but you just store that away too, another breadcrumb leading the way.

“Why California?”

“It’s–,”

The barn door opens again and Joel’s shadow breaks through the almost painful white light. Behind him, Everett (the horse) snorts and huffs, pulling along the giant creaking plow, the air suddenly pungent with the smell of warm dirt, leather, and animal sweat. Joel murmurs something to the frothing snout and wipes his own forehead with the back of his arm, smearing sweat and dirt across his browline. He stops when he sees you two staring. 

By Sarah’s wide eyes, it’s clear Uncle Tommy is a subject that is not often brought up in this house either. Joel frowns, but just as he opens his mouth, you interject – you know how to deflate a potentially angry man.

“We were just cleaning up the back of the barn,” you say, careful not to use words like junk or scrap heap. “I’m hoping to use the space as a school, for Sarah and Ellie.” 

His gaze settles on you, like the dust at his feet. 

“Mhmm.” His tone scrapes something low in your stomach. 

“I’m sorry – I should have asked – I didn’t think –,”

“No, it’s –,” he shakes his head. His eyes catch Everett’s foamy nose and he pats it, noting the long sweaty forelock. “Smart. Next spring, we’ll come up with something better, but there’s no time now, with the harvest comin’.” 

You nod, peeling off what you were going to say from the back of your teeth with your tongue. Joel casually drags his fingers through Everett’s forelock before stepping back to unhook the plow’s leather buckles. It’s when he shifts towards Sarah, looking to her, that he grimaces. 

He put his weight on his right knee and it immediately caused him pain.

“We could help,” you offer, eyes on his knee, his thick fingers rubbing into the muscle just above his knee cap. "Ellie loves being out in the sun and I can teach her how to plant–,”

“‘M fine,” he mutters gruffly, straightening up and wiping his hands on the cloth around his neck. “Sarah, go inside for a bit. There’s something she n’ I gotta discuss.”

His tone indicates this is not the time for eye rolling but she does it anyway.

“I’ve said for years that you need help, Dad. She’s just offering to–,”

“Sarah, inside. Please.” 

Sarah scowls and drops the broom against one of the stalls. She hobbles out of the barn, first scrunching her nose up at Joel’s obvious smell, then muttering something about having to go look for the hell spawn. You finger the scrap metal in your hands, a fluttery nervousness growing in your stomach the closer Sarah gets to the door. With one more disapproving shake of her thick curls, she shuts the door behind her. 

Everett nickers and paws the ground, eager to be returned to bed after a long morning of work. Light streams in gold from the slanted windows above the loft, separating the front stalls from the back of the barn where you stand, fidgeting. There’s no escaping the hot animal smell now, and it’s your turn to be intercepted by Joel. 

Another apology is nearly out of your mouth when he speaks first.

“Do you know how to shoot a gun?” He asks, his mouth set into a firm line. In the half-darkness of the barn, you can’t quite make out his eyes. 

You swallow against the encroaching dryness in your throat. “I-I have a gun. Keep it in my purse, o-only for emergencies and I–,” 

“That’s not what I asked.” He shakes his head, tone soft, almost gentle. He glances past you to the stacks of newspapers you had moved into the corner, the ones about violence and pestilence. He rubs his fingers between the bridle and Everett’s thick hair. “Found a hole in the barbed wire fence today.” 

You frown, the tension of his voice indicating a severity you are utterly unprepared for. “What does that mean?”

“Someone tried to cut through.” 

A white hot panic lurches up your spine out of nowhere. Fueled by fear, you see the outline of your husband shambling across the propertyline and you go cold. 

“W-why would someone do that? What are they after?”

His hand stills as every muscle in his body briefly tenses. Eyes dark beneath a tight brow, the tightness in his jaw is an answer and a threat all at once. He looks almost offended by your question.

You know exactly what they would take. 

All you can do is nod. 

Everett nudges Joel’s shoulder, impatient to get out of the harness, for that bath he so very much deserves. As though you had disappeared, Joel unbuckles the restraints, taking a brush to the gray coat as he goes. Maybe you’d misread that last signal and he thought he told you to fuck off.

You move towards the back door when his voice, timbre deep and low, stops you again.

“I’m gonna to teach you to shoot.” He announces to the lathered withers of the horse. “But you keep that gun on you, at all times, especially when you’re out with the girls. You got that?”

He pauses just as he slides the hitch off the horse's back, his arms covered in dirt as dark as the leather. It’s minute, the shift in his weight, but you suddenly realize he wants verbal confirmation.

“Y-yes. Yes. I’ll take it with me.”

The minutia shifts again, a lessening of tension across his broad shoulder, his thick back. He nods. 

“Good.”

The aching need for him to say more, for that good to turn into you did good or good job – or good girl – it sparks so fast and hot inside of you, you think you’ll choke. Instead, you leave through the door on unsteady legs, jaw locked tightly shut. 

You find comfort in the monotony of sewing. 

Anna always scolded you for it, that you were “giving into women’s work.”

How are they ever going to take us seriously when you actually like doing this dainty shit? 

But where Anna seemingly delighted in her mile-a-minute thoughts, you need an outlet – some way to settle, to ground yourself in the here and now. Furthermore, you could sew anywhere – on the train, on the bus, in a foreign house in the middle of nowhere where you were, again, dependent on the kindness of a complete stranger – 

It isn’t sewing specifically that you enjoy. If there was another activity where your mind could detach itself from your body, you would have liked it too. Here, in this space of blank concentration, you separate further from yourself with every stitch you pull together. Here, you are not a sister, a housewife, or an aunt. Not a nurse or a teacher or a failed fieldhand. 

Not scared of living or scared of your husband or scared that you’ll fail your sister over and over and over again – 

For a handful of minutes, you are not scared and you are the closest thing to yourself you can possibly be. You think, as a child that might have been the closest you’d actually been to understanding your own wants and dreams and desires, but now it is through this act of repetition, of delicate guiding, do you find yourself remembering what it was like to exist unafraid, as thoughtless as a child.

You sit on the edge of Joel’s bed, eased into something vaguely like relaxation by the needle and thread in your hand. You’d found some old pillows in the barn earlier today and surprisingly the stuffing was still intact. After watching Sarah struggle today, you knew you couldn’t spend another second watching the poor girl hobble around on painful braces. 

It’s twilight, the sun gone beneath a blanket of scarlet and indigo, everyone fed and full – the girls almost instantly forgetting their first fight in favor of a discussion about their most effective marble-flicking techniques – and you already have at least one leather-bound pad that is twice as thick as her old one. You grin, excited to share your creation to her. You wonder what Joel will say.

Through the wall over your shoulder, in Sarah’s room, you can hear the low murmur of their voices, as quick and fast as two co-conspirators. You can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but the words don’t matter. It is the high joy in Sarah’s voice, or the creaky laughter from Joel. They could be speaking in a completely incomprehensible language but the sentiment is unmistakable: you make me happy and I love you.

I love you.

The needle and thread stills in your lap. 

You glance out the window, to a much smaller shadow in front of the barn as it cuts and darts in the blurry half-light. The silver tip of Anna’s knife winks in the glint of the light from the windows as Ellie slashes and digs in the open air. Alone. 

In the late hours, in the hours when the veil between life and death felt so especially fragile, Anna made you promise that you'd look out for Ellie, to raise her as your own. To finally give her a childhood like the two of you never had. 

You had done that. You raised her. She’s alive and healthy and fierce. 

But would she find your sentiment about her unmistakable? Do you know hers as intimately as you knew your sister’s? 

Do you make her happy when both of you are constantly reminded of the ghost between you?

Sarah’s chatter echoes throughout the dark house, disembodied and entirely untethered.

It’s one week into this new, adjusted life in a house you haven’t yet found a home in when the unthinkable happens.

A loud, wet cry startles you awake and immediately your hand flies towards Ellie, panic like ice in your jaw. Your palm touches her shoulder, but she’s already sitting up, eyes towards the door. She glances at you and from your stumble out of a dreamless sleep, you realize it wasn’t Ellie who made that noise. 

It comes again, as sharp as a bone crack, and you both scramble out of bed.

Sarah. 

Up against the far wall, in the corner where her bed tucks up into the corner, Joel holds her like a lion clutches to prey. 

Giant, fat teardrops pour down the sides of her ashen cheeks, those bright eyes clamped shut, her mouth twisted in agony and she claws at her father’s forearm across her shoulders. His other hand is going white from her fingers crushing his in a bone-cracking grip. His voice is soft, firm, and fast in her ear, comforting and scared as hell, as she whimpers. 

Every muscle from her thighs down is stretched taut. Every muscle unwillingly tightened, flexed, the chemicals in her brain battling the commands of the bacteria. The pain, as described in medical journals, is crippling. 

Ellie glances at you out of the corner of your eye. Muscle spasms. 

“Sarah, darling, how long has this been going on?” She’s trembling from the pain and exhaustion. You wrap your robe around you before kneeling down to inspect her — and you feel Joel’s glare nearly singe the skin from your face.

“Don’t touch her,” he snarls and pulls her closer. Sarah whines and buries her face in his shoulder, trying to stifle her sobbing to keep from shaking and causing more spasms. “She’s–,” 

“I can help her, Joel.” Your training became a bulwark – strong, immobile – in moments like these. Maybe it was all an act but that first rush of hope that you could ease pain, soothe what hurts, made you feel like you were made of gold. You let that unbreakable shine pierce Joel’s gaze. “But you need to listen to me.” 

Sarah squeaks and you watch his resolve instantly break. Shakely, he nods. 

“Ellie,” you instruct over your shoulder. “Go start boiling water. There’s a pail out on the porch.”

She is out the door before you finish your sentence. She knows exactly what you need. 

Help on the way, you turn back to Sarah, her feet twisted in grotesque contortions. 

“How long has this been going on?” 

“About ten minutes,” Joel grumbles. She squeezes his hand so hard you hear his knuckle pop. She sobs, open mouth, and he presses his cheek to her. He murmurs softly, “I’m sorry, I know, I’m sorry.” 

“Is this the longest fit she’s had?”

Joel reluctantly nods. 

“Sarah,” you say and gently touch her knee. She peels her eyes open, cheeks stained with tears, eyes wet with fear. “We need to loosen your muscles, okay? That’s what’s causing you pain right now. So, we’re going to use heat and pressure to do that.” 

She nods, gaze solidifying with your every word, every word a new step out of the path of pain. Joel smooths her curls off her sweaty forehead, his own wide-eyed stare never leaving your face. You roll up your sleeves and curl up your hair off the back of your neck just as Ellie stumbles back into the room. She’s got at least five towels around her neck, and she’s red-faced and straining from keeping the pail of boiling water from spilling or burning her. She eases it down next to you and hands you a towel. Both of you each take a side and immediately tear the one in half.

Before you wore gloves, some sort of protection, but now there is no time. You hear Ellie inhale sharply, recognizing what you’re about to do a second before you do it.

You dip the towel into the steaming water, let it soak, and pull it out. You grit your teeth against the immediate burn on your palms, the trail of fire over your knuckles and wrists, as you squeeze out the dripping water, Sarah’s soft cries in your ears enough to push past your own pain.

Half-way between an inhale and an exhale, you think you hear your name. 

Ellie already has another dry towel loose around one of Sarah’s legs. She glances at you, her brows knitted together. 

Ready? She asks without words.

You drape the hot towel around her leg and Sarah yelps. She thrashes in her father’s arms as you wrap the towel tighter and tighter. Expecting Joel’s inevitable bark, a hard shove against your shoulder, get away from my daughter – but it never comes. 

As soon as you tighten the towel as firmly as it can safely go, Ellie slides in next to you and begins to massage the muscles in her calves, her feet, her toes. 

Sarah whimpers again, but the sound isn’t as sharp, pain-choked. Joel holds her tighter, as if her torso is also knotted and could be relieved with warmth.

On an inhale, you pick up the other half of the towel, drench it in boiling water, and wring it out with your bare hands. A silent prayer for lotion is fleeting as it drifts through the dense focus of your mind. You squeeze out the dripping water and wrap Sarah’s other leg, prepped again by Ellie. She watches you as you tug and tuck the steaming towel, her own focus as sharp as a tack, mirroring your motions as you knead and massage the muscles. 

After a few minutes of faint whining, a couple of sobs, the room slips into an exhausted silence. Her breathing slow on his chest, Joel draws back her damp curls and finds her face relaxed, asleep. His mouth parts and the skin around his eyes goes slack.

Relief. 

With a shudder, Joel knocks his forehead against hers, his thumb on her chin as if to feel her breathing. You look away, the moment so tender it shouldn’t be witnessed. 

You realize then how badly your palms ache. 

The towels have lost their immediate heat, so you unwind them. Ellie’s small hands overlap yours as she helps. For some reason, you can’t bring yourself to look her in the eyes. The both of you fall back into roles most comfortable to you. 

The wet towels gone, you wrap her legs more tightly this time, slightly past the edge of comfort. You ease her back, flat into the bed, and some small part of you is aware Joel is letting you guide her. He slips out from behind her when you tuck her in, tight with another blanket around her legs. She could be exhausted for days after this.

“We’ll need to keep heat on her legs every thirty minutes, fifteen if we can manage,” you say as you fold up the damp towels. Joel hasn’t moved. Stares down at Sarah’s small body. “I’d like to keep a warming pan here, to have hot water on hand if she wakes up in pain again. When she comes out of it, she needs water and food. Have her eat it slowly, small bites at first.”

You remember a doctor at the hospital where you trained as a nurse give advice to a newer doctor: medical mysteries and illnesses are one thing. Nervous parents are something else. 

You call his name and he doesn’t move. 

You step forward, touch his forearm, and he blinks at you. He feels so remarkably solid.

“Joel. She’s safe.” 

“Do you want me to go get more towels?” Ellie’s gathered the damp towels off the floor, her chest wet. She stares at Sarah’s bed frame. 

“Get breakfast first. Then I might need your help later.” She nods, turns to go, but hesitates. Her mouth is pinched tight, eyes wide, looking for something to ground her, to calm the vortex that the adrenaline in her veins widens with each beat of her heart. She looks so . . . childlike. 

She looks so much like Anna.

The momentary fortified strength shatters and you're afraid again. What do you say to comfort her? What would Anna say? Good job, I'm proud of you, thank you -

But then she turns away, carrying the dripping towels, and you lose your chance to parent.

Joel has curled himself into the rocking chair by her bed, so close his knee touches her mattress. He holds her thin hand in the cup of his two massive palms. His heel taps loosely, quietly against her rug, every possible outcome of this morning striking him in the chest with each drop of his foot. His face is a blurred, dark shadow, hanging between his shoulders.

To describe Joel in this moment, nervous seems quaint. 

In silence, you gather up the tepid pale of water and exit the room, closing the door after you.

The rest of the day passes in haze, tendrils of sleep still between the cracks in your brain left there by the harsh break into consciousness. 

You have Ellie feed the animals, and you start a load of laundry. The ratio of dry towels to wet is rapidly becoming unbalanced and you know after the initial attack is over, pressure is more important than heat. Sarah has barely moved all day but she is responsive and drinks water when she comes out of her deep sleep. You’ve made soup again – a heavy meal that doesn’t require much managing and can be easily re-served – and it gives you time to think. Sarah mentioned the doctor skipping town, that he had all but dropped everything and ran. You wondered what else might be in the doctor’s old shop. Morphine seemed too valuable to have been ignored in any ransacking, but often doctors kept a secret supply, unbeknownst to even most nurses for special cases or when supply was low. You think about that and stir the pot as the sun crawls across the sky. 

With your head bent over the pot, something moves in the field outside and you watch with surprise as Ellie leads one of the cows, Fauna, out of the barn. Through the rippled glass, you watch her talking to the cow, her face scrunched up in concentration, and shockingly, Fauna appears interested, her big ears flicking back and forth. But Ellie leads her only a little bit from the barn, in the grass but visible from the house. She drops to her knees and takes out a wooden stake and a hammer — nevermind where she found those – and then ties Fauna’s lead rope to top of the stake sticking out of the ground.

Ellie wags her finger, her back to the window, her stance very serious. You smile to yourself and to Anna as she marches back inside and shortly returns with Flora, the other cow, to do the same. She gives them both a stern talking to, as evident by her hands on her hips, before turning back to the house. You glance down, knowing she wouldn’t appreciate it if you saw her babysitting the cows. It was what Joel did every morning – let the cows out to graze – but she did it in her own Ellie way: on a smaller scale and perhaps with a little more gentleness. 

See, Anna, she’s all grown up.

By nightfall, both of you are exhausted. You don’t know how Joel manages to run this place by himself, especially with a sick child, but after one day, you’re ready to curl up into bed and never leave. Ellie looks like she’s about to face-plant into her soup, her eyes half-shut. You smile, stretching, before gently shaking her shoulder.

“Go to bed, Ellie. You’re exhausted.”

She blinks harshly, indignant and scowly, as you take both your bowls to the sink. “‘M fine. Just a lil’ –,” she yawns deeply, “sleepy.” 

“You’re right. My mistake.”

“Besides, we got coffee coming, don’t we?” 

On the counter, your make-shift coffee press gurgles, the cap steaming from the bubbling water over the grounds you found in the cellar. You eye her over your shoulder.

“You don’t even like coffee.” 

“Yeah but you’re staying up, right? You and Joel?”

Neither of you had seen Joel leave Sarah’s room all day. Ellie eyes the ceiling as if she can see right through it. 

“I’m taking him some food and a cup of coffee,” you say as you finish drying the plates. There’s a rigidness to your hands as you delicately lay the plates flat, unconsciously careful to keep them from making a sound as they touch. “But at St. Joseph’s, some of the nurses would offer to keep vigil, to give the parents a chance to rest.” 

You know in your heart he won’t take it. You just hope he finds your coffee inoffensive.

But Ellie doesn’t respond. She sits still, staring at the ceiling. 

“Ellie, she’s going to be okay.”

Those bright eyes fall on you. “You can’t know that.”

In your hands, you wind the damp towel between your fingers. They’re pink and still ache but the rough linen is a welcome distraction from the churning acid in your stomach.

“This isn’t going to be like last time,” you say, your hips against the counter. “Sarah’s infection is nowhere near her lungs. And she’s been responding to treatment.”

Ellie drops her gaze, her bottom lip curled between her teeth. 

“Don’t say that unless you mean it. Unless you can swear to me.” 

One of life’s simple truths: parents lie. 

You recognize there is a part of her that wants you to look her in the eyes and lie. She’d be angry, eventually, if your lies were exposed, but in that moment, as she sits in an unfamiliar house, at an unfamiliar table, with you and this wretched ailment the only things she knows to be constant – she wants a comfort you can’t give her. You are not capable of parental truth.

“I can’t promise anything.”

She inhales, breathes shaky, and exhales, the spoon in her hand trembling. “I know.” 

Hands full of a white, chipped food tray, you knock twice carefully with one hand like you had been trained to before opening the door. The lamplight has been turned on, but the room, blanketed in darkness and shadows, looks the same. Sarah sleeps deeply, if not well, her hand curled by her face against the pillow, her heavy storm of curls cradling her head gently. Joel watches her, as still and silent as the moon. His foot has settled, but now he breathes so slow he might not be breathing at all. 

Of all the terrible things you had seen during your time as a nurse, witnessing someone like this is always the hardest. Feeling helpless is a sentiment you are all too familiar with and the thought of someone just sitting there and watching you with your grief makes your skin itch. 

“Joel.” A formality, because those trapped in a cyclone of worry require a slow approach, easing a startled animal. “I brought you something to eat.”

Speaking, it lets him acclimate to your voice. 

You set the white tray on Sarah’s dresser, a piece of furniture meticulously crafted. Like Joel’s room, there are books everywhere, but more animal drawings, some directly on the walls. Sarah’s brilliant personality expanded here, in the blues and pinks, not capable of being contained in a single body. 

A body that seems so small and fragile in that little brass bed, while her father looms impossibly large.

“Joel.” Again, soft, but this time you put a hand on his bicep. Never near the neck, an older nurse warned you, that area is sensitive. His denim shirt is soft beneath your fingers, nearly bleached white from the sun and worn smooth from dust and dirt and wind. You think you smell churned earth and hot leather in the instant it takes you to kneel down beside him, your grip sliding from his shoulder to his forearm. With the other hand, you tip a steaming cup into his open palm. 

“Sarah told me you liked coffee.”

Slowly, as though he had blinked and reality disintegrated and reformed around him, Joel’s gaze slides from Sarah’s waxy face, to yours, and then the hand on his forearm. The back of your scalp prickles, the bulwark of courtesy shaking, before you remember you’d done this hundreds of times, to people of all ages, men and women. He seems to understand this – a professional gesture – and he takes the mug from you. With an almost perplexed expression, he stares into the nearly black liquid, his jaw tight. 

And then he drinks, without saying a word. 

You think you might have heard a low rumble from him, a pleased groan as heavy as the plow in the barn outside, but the floorboards creak when you stand up, so you might have been imagining things.

“This tastes good,” he says bluntly, voice weather-beaten. You smile into the bowl of soup as you wave a hand over the steam to cool it down to something bearable. “How?”

Despite his monosyllabic responses, you take this as a good sign. Something tells you that you’ve made exceptional progress by getting him to talk at all. 

“I got pretty good at making cowboy coffee, as my sister used to call it, before we moved to Oklahoma. You already had the beans in the cellar,” you say, shrugging as you bring the soup over to him. He eyes it warily, as if this is not the appropriate time to eat, as if his own suffering would make Sarah’s lessen. 

You’d only ever seen that instinct in a handful of parents while in the hospital and it made something wide and warm press up against your chest bone. 

So you don’t give him a choice. You push the soup into his hands with enough speed that he has to take the bowl or drop it entirely. He, like most people with common sense, takes the bowl. He has a second to frown at you before you turn away to Sarah. 

“And I suspect they were hidden down there on purpose?” You ask as you take out another blanket from the basket beside her bed and flutter it over her legs. You remember stories about the women working with Elizabeth Kenny filling quilts with rocks or beans, anything with weight, and putting them over the affected limbs of polio patients. The compress soothed the ache. 

Sarah snores gently in her sleep as her father behind you laughs, a soft rush of air from his nose, his mouth preoccupied with a half-grin. 

“I try not to hurt her feelings,” he admits quietly. You hear the clatter of metal on porcelain as you fold and refold the blankets to carry more weight. “That girl is a lot of things, but good at making coffee isn’t one of ‘em.” He slurs around the soup in his mouth. 

It’s hard to believe she’s only a year older than Ellie. They have both lost things, indescribable things at too-young an age. But where Ellie carries it in the grip of her hand around her knife, Sarah takes it on the chin. 

Polio, a disease of freezing agony. 

You wonder how much of Sarah’s inner world she keeps to herself. 

Like with Ellie, you fight the urge to brush a lovely curl away from her cheek. 

“You have a special girl here, Joel.” 

You feel his gaze on the back of your neck and you drop your gaze from her pristine face, remembering it’s not your place to look at her like that. Not like how you want to look at her.

Not like how you might want to look at him. 

Joel shifts on his feet, leaning forward to put the now empty bowl on the ground.

“I know.” By the strength of his tone, he admits to knowing that you see the bright light about Sarah like he does and so he lets you look. Your heart stutters at this silent transference and you grab blindly for that mask of noble duty. 

“How has her breathing been?” You sit down next to her and pick up her wrist, feeling for that steady pulse. You relax slightly when it’s easy to find. The beat of it is a little faster than you would like, but it hasn’t woken her up. 

“Good.” A disgruntled groan from the chair as he adjusts behind you. His voice is rich like molasses, dripping warmth down the knots in your spine. “Woke up here n’ there, like you said. Gave her food. Got her water. But she just went right back to sleep.”

“But she ate and drank?” 

He nods out of the corner of your eye. You check the mobility of her joints and they seem to be back to their natural looseness. Whether she’ll feel strong enough to walk is another matter entirely, but it’s not good to worry him unnecessarily. 

“That’s good, Joel. That’s really good.” 

You smile at him and finally, finally, the corners of his eyes soften, his brows pluck up, and he breathes deep. The tension leaves his body the way steam leaves a lake in the hours before dawn, the cup of coffee resting on his thigh. His gaze falls from your face to hers, shrouded in shadow.

“She’s never slept this long after an attack,” he says quietly. “Always restless, pain flaring up. We once stayed up a whole day and night when it got bad.” 

He shakes his head, clears his throat a bit as if the words in his mouth leave behind a mucky, sour taste.

“Thank you. For treating her properly.”

For doing what I couldn’t. 

It’s true. But no amount of reassuring – I’ve just had training, you did the best you could – would dissipate that repugnant scent of guilt lingering in the air. You are forced to let it linger, unable to say a single damn thing that would mean anything to him. 

As he finishes the last dregs of coffee, Joel unwinds his long legs from beneath the seat and his knees crack. Stiff joints after a long day of stillness, but immediately his fingers fly to that same spot he touched in the barn in that afternoon, his mouth tight from the unexpected flash of pain. 

Immediately you kneel down, worried at the slight hiss he made, fingers inches from his thigh when he straightens.

“You don’t have to–,” he shifts as if he can pull away from your touch and stay seated. “It’s not that bad –,” 

You frown at him. “Can the person here who has had actual medical training determine that?” 

Something light flickers over his eyes, so fast it might not have been real, smoothing the lines around his mouth. Joel nods, glancing to the floor. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

That single word almost splits your skull in half like lightning. 

You are immediately grateful for the heavy shadows in the room. Your palms, smarting all day, are now blistering with heat. Mouth shut tight, you don’t trust whatever sits behind your lips, so you begin your inspection of his muscles. Thumbs down, you feel along the lines that lead down to his knee.

Hard, firm, you notice. Made solid by work and toil. A few of the bricklayers and farmers you’d attended to had muscles like these. Despite the rough denim and how unsettling it is to be this close to him, it’s easy to lose yourself in the methodology of the human body. You’ve learned to read sinew and bone and scar tissue like a map and you come to find that the topography of Joel Miller is mountainous. 

“So, mhm, where’d you learn to make coffee?”

You thought the stiffness in his thigh was due to lingering pain, but when you look at him and his guarded expression, chin tilted into his chest, fingers tight around the bottom of the seat, you realize he is uncomfortable. He is made uncomfortable . . . by you. Something sharp pokes through a slot between your ribs and you sit up straighter, trying to make your touch even more clinical if possible. But what he says next, you aren’t sure if it’s genuine or genuinely meant to hurt.

“Your husband?” 

You shake your head. “My sister, actually. Ellie’s mom. We’d trade night shifts when she was a baby. One of us would come home from our second job, and the other would leave for their first. Anna said she’d never have survived those first years without coffee.”

You can hear the question he wants to ask buzzing in his head, your thumb rubbing therapeutic circles around the inflamed area. But instead he asks:

“And you . . . you like coffee?” 

You shrug. “I don’t think I ever slowed down enough to ever taste it in the first place.” 

With Joel Miller, silence means a thousand things. It’s not the way he looks at you, but the way he looks into you.

“Anna always said we’d be fine, that two unmarried women with a baby could make it in the city. But I wasn’t so convinced. There wasn’t much time for something like enjoying the taste of coffee because I was always busy taking every job I could get.” 

“Like treating sick kids.” He says it like he just found a piece of you off the ground and added it to a sprawling puzzle. He politely stares over your shoulder.

You swallow, throat tight. “Actually, um, Anna had it - polio - too. I took the job as a nurse to learn how to treat her from home.” 

Those heavy eyes swing into you full force and you can feel your stomach roll and collapse against your spine. 

“Every case is different, Joel. What I did for Sarah, it wouldn’t have helped someone like Anna.” 

“But she died?” A third unwelcome presence. 

“Yes. She went fast. There was nothing anyone could do to save her.”

There was nothing you could do to save her. 

Your thumbs are starting to ache, but you don’t want to leave just yet. You want to sit and listen to his voice, even if it’s pitched in anger towards you. 

But it’s not. His next words come out soft, if not a little bit disbelieving. 

“Where did you come from?” Joel asks. “You said the city, Oklahoma. How’d you end up in fuckin’ Dalhart, Texas?” 

You use your elbow on the thicker muscle up his thigh and he tries very hard not to wince. 

“We grew up in Boston. City girls all our lives. We had big plans of catching the bus line and going all over the country, just the two of us, but then Anna got pregnant and overnight, everything changed.”

He nods, knowingly. You add that to your own Joel Miller mosaic.

“I met the man I’d marry while I worked as a maid in a motel. He was a banker, or so he told me, and he wanted to whisk me away. We were three months behind on our rent, so I told him yes, I'd marry him after knowing him for a week — as long as I got to bring Anna and Ellie with me. All he talked about was money, so I thought he had it. What he did have was enough to get us to Oklahoma, buy some farm equipment for the wheat boom, and then lose it all in a handful of years.”

“And then we lost Anna. We lost my husband. I went back to trying to find a job in town with no jobs.” You pull your hands back, the deep tissue of his thigh flushed with blood from your therapy, and having nothing more to do, little more to say, you drop them into your lap. “Just after we missed the payment for the equipment for the second month, I got a letter from a man claiming to be my long lost Uncle Robert. I hadn’t eaten in three days and Ellie just got tagged by the police for shoplifting. I sent him a letter back and he said if I sent him our last twenty dollars he’d get us set up in Dalhart where he had a successful car dealership. I did and he didn’t and if you hadn’t picked us up, I don’t know what we would have done.” 

You sit with the hot truth of it and he sits with the both of you. It’s silent in a way that only a house in the middle of nowhere can be. Sarah stirs in her sleep, her legs rustling the sheets, but doesn’t wake up.

“You don’t have to do that here, you know.” He straightens his legs, just as quietly as the rest of the house. He crosses his arms over his chest and you think about the muscle just under his forearm, thick and immobile as sea-drenched rope. “Not eat . . . for Ellie’s sake. There’s enough for you and her. Always.”

You think of the cellar with its soft dirt, cool air, the endless rows of stored fruits and vegetables and meat, buried like a still-beating heart beneath the dust-whipped house in a paradise on the prairie. 

“But I understand the inclination.” With you on the ground before him and Joel leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his broad back arching under the stripe of white moonlight, he looks at you. 

Really looks at you. 

Like recognizing like.

A passing in a distorted mirror that might be me but it’s not but I think I know you all the same there is a thing just like me out in the world and it sees me.

Slowly, hesitantly, as if he’s afraid you’ll bite, he reaches forward and takes your wrist from your lap. The calluses on his thumb brush roughly against the knot of bone as he twists your palm upward. Pink, too pink, a stinging color, even in the low lamplight. Joel works his jaw back and forth, staring at your palm with weary concern, as if it told him things he didn’t want to know. 

His gaze lifts and your fingers curl instinctively in. He’s trying to make you look and you don’t want to. He sees your sacrifice and you don’t want it called that, there’s certain nobility in sacrifice, in a sort of suffering for other people, but it’s not sacrifice if you go willingly and despite you not wanting to look, not wanting to put a name to it, not wanting to take up any space at all, he looks at you like he, a man as broad and wide and powerful as he, is grateful. 

For you. 

Every bulwark inside of you, every foundation that you had built yourself because you never had the chance to grow hearty roots somewhere permanent, rumbles. Shakes, beneath a single solitary, rolling earthquake. A landslide of earth behind the strength in his eyes. 

“For her, for Sarah, I’d do the same,” he says. 

For her. For the children in your lives. 

Do you even like coffee? All you know is how to make it. What would you do with it if you did? If you liked coffee? If you loved it.

If there was someone outside yourself and Ellie to make you coffee simply because you wanted it. Because you were in a circle of people for whom people would do things for. For her. For you. 

The heart of Joel is like coffee: dark but warm. 

Your wrist slips between his fingers, finding refuge again in your lap. 

“I know.” 

You wonder what it would be like to be within Joel’s circle of people for whom he does things. To be given coffee, just because you want it. 

You bet it’s warm.

You stand up, collect the empty, used things, and wish him a good night. 

A noise and sunlight startles you awake. Your eyes tear open, hand flat on an open pool of sunlight in the center of the mattress, head twisted and knees bent up by your chest. In your sleep, your body twisted itself into a Gordian knot, unable to escape the dreams about the cellar ground turning into coffee beans, and the cramped bloodflow leaves you disoriented until you can roll onto your back and remember where you are. The smells that surround you. 

You hear the noise again and you think of Ellie and in that instance where complete consciousness returns to you, the weight of her is gone. Literally.

Ellie is not in the bed beside you. 

The room’s brightness is suddenly too bright, the clear, electric blue sky too blue – it’s too beautiful and it lulled you into a sense of comfort. Stupid, so stupid. You ignore the warm floorboards against your bare feet, the faint birdsong from outside, as you rush towards the source of the sound, towards Sarah’s bedroom – oh god, I was wrong it’s too late it took her in the night and I –

The sound you do not recognize, the sound you could not comprehend while buried in dreams and memories, is the sound of laughter. Loud, full laughter.

The brass bed creaks as Ellie uses the mattress to fling herself into the air. On the other end, just as determined to reach the ceiling, is Sarah. Hands outstretched and reaching, her legs bend and flex and propel her up and up. Every time she gets within a handful’s reach of the ceiling, Ellie’s laughing, cheering her on, and then it’s her turn, Sarah giggling as Ellie’s face scrunches up as she reaches out towards the blue sky on the other side of the roof.

“Oh, hey!” Ellie says, pink-faced and causal, half-way out of breath. Sarah spins, mid-way through a jump, her eyes bright, sweat peaking on her brow line. “Sarah bet – I couldn’t touch – the ceiling — so we’re taking turns – loser has to shovel – the barn!” 

You watch, dumb-struck, as the bet continues, the girls laughing and criticizing each other and offering techniques as they work in tandem to fling the other one higher. Sarah is flush with vitality, with life, with a dewy glow reserved for spring mornings when the earth stretches awake after the death of winter.

And Ellie . . . she looks her age. 

The earth has shifted beneath your feet, while you were sleeping, and a seedling has been planted, the dawn of something new, something fresh and utterly unexpected. You can feel it in your bones. Hear it in their laughter. 

“Not a bad thing to wake up to.” 

Joel, arms crossed, eyes soft, leans up against the door frame, blue striped pajamas low on his hips, a thread-bare white undershirt cupping his biceps. He eyes you from toe to head and stops when he meets your eyes. You wonder how long he’d been standing there – if he too woke to noises he couldn’t explain, rushed in here, and found something miraculous.

The smile crinkles his eyes as it unfurls across his face. 

“I haven’t heard her laugh like that in a while,” he says quietly, head tilted towards the bed, as if there could be any other meaning. “I owe you one.” 

You could say the same thing about Ellie.

There’s the line, the boundary of the circle to the place of being warm. He’s not cleared the way for you, not invited you across, but he’s shown it to you. You can see it, feel it, and know what it takes to get there.

Your smile blooms. The girls’ laughter rings throughout the house and into the sunlight.

But, outside of paradise, away from the river and the white a-frame house, from the horse and the cattle and the long strands of prairie grass, where there is not enough to eat and the earth is in its death rattle, the wind blows. It swallows up dust, and dirt, and fine sand, gluttonous. It swirls and pulses, agitated and restless and seeking violence. Spinning with the power to blind with a single whip of dust, it spins up over the earth in its death rattle, where there is not enough to eat, towards the prairie grass. Towards the horse and the cattle. Towards the river and the a-frame.

Towards paradise with the promise of total ruin. 

END OF PART I 

series masterlist | AO3 Link | prologue | part ii

[pretzel-box]

wait. WAIT.. THE REVERSE AU DID SMTHN TO MY BRAIN. I HAVE A REQUEST..

please hear me out; reverse au seb x reader, and the reader saves him from dying to something (probably a wall dweller or perhaps (door 30.) pandemonium) because that'd be funny i feel.....

i really liked the jacket one. it has. altered my brain chemistry.

SEQUEL TO PAYMENT RECIEVED

words: 1,5k

tags: Reversed AU, human sebastian, experiment reader, gn reader, fluff at the end

Sebastian muttered under his breath as he continued his exploration, frustration evident in his every move. “I swear, if I ever see the Urbanshade staff members in person again, I’m stuffing them into one of those lockers too.” His voice was rough with anger as he yanked open a locker door, only to slam it shut with a force that made it bounce back slightly. The sight of the locker door refusing to stay closed sent a fresh wave of irritation through him, and without thinking, he kicked the locker. Pain shot through his foot, and he hissed, biting back a curse.

His day was going from bad to worse. As if on cue, his flashlight began to flicker, the weak beam of light stuttering before fading completely, leaving him shrouded in darkness. “Great, just great,” he muttered, the sound of his voice swallowed by the pitch-black room. This was the worst moment since he’d arrived here—he was sure of it. The Navipath had shown Door 28 right before the electricity cut out, leaving him stumbling through the dark, colliding with abandoned furniture and debris as he felt his way to the next door.

Room 29 was a welcome change. The lights were still on, casting a soft glow over neat office desks. Stacks of papers were scattered around, and a large, faded poster with the title “Pretzel Box was here” hung on the wall. The sight of the ordinary office supplies gave the room a strangely peaceful atmosphere, a stark contrast to the chaos outside. Sebastian allowed himself a moment to breathe, moving toward the nearest desk to check the drawers. The first drawer he opened contained a keycard, which he pocketed immediately. He didn’t know what it was for yet, but he had learned to grab anything that looked remotely useful.

The other drawers held mostly junk, but he managed to find a few valuable items that he knew would interest you, the shopkeeper he’d met down the halls. The thought of you brought a small smile to his lips; he could already imagine your bright smile when he showed up at your shop with a handful of treasures. But first, he had to make it there in one piece.

Suddenly, the room’s lights began to flicker once he opened the Door Nr.30. Sebastian’s smile vanished, replaced by a cold dread that settled in his stomach. His heart rate spiked as the familiar, chilling sensation of impending danger washed over him. The fluorescent bulbs flickered faster, casting erratic shadows that danced across the walls. He heard it then—a distant, inhuman scream that sent shivers down his spine.

“Pandemonium,” he whispered, fear gripping him. He’d heard the stories, seen the aftermath, but he had never faced it directly. Not until now.

Instinct kicked in. Sebastian darted to the nearest locker, yanking it open and squeezing inside. He tried to control his breathing, forcing himself to stay quiet, his heart pounding so loudly he was sure it would give him away. The room fell into an eerie silence, broken only by the distant sound of something approaching growing louder, closer.

The door to the room slammed open, and Sebastian held his breath, every muscle in his body tense. He heard the heavy, wet sound of something dragging itself across the floor, and then the unmistakable sound of a body slamming against the locker he was in. The locker door he was hiding in rattled as Pandemonium slammed into it, trying to pry it open. Sebastian squeezed his eyes shut, panic surging through him. He was out of time.

Just as Pandemonium smashed against the locker again, a sudden noise from outside the room made it pause. The creature let out a frustrated snarl, turning its attention toward the new sound. Sebastian dared to peek through the small slits in the locker door, his heart still hammering in his chest.

And then he saw you.

You stood in the doorway, your hybrid form barely visible in the dim light. Your eyes glowed faintly, reflecting the flickering lights, and your claws were extended, ready for a fight. “Hey, ugly!” you shouted, your voice echoing through the room. “Looking for someone?” The bright light of a flash beacon in your hand blinded the creature badly.

Pandemonium let out a furious roar and lunged toward you, abandoning the locker that hid Sebastian. You moved with inhuman speed, dodging its attack, your tail flicking behind you as you sidestepped its lumbering form. You slashed at it with your claws, your movements fluid and deadly.

“Get out of here, Sebastian!” you shouted over your shoulder, still keeping your eyes on the creature. “Go! Now!”

Sebastian didn’t need to be told twice. He pushed the locker door open and stumbled out, his body shaking with adrenaline. He risked a glance back at you, watching as you fought off the creature with a fierce determination. He wanted to help, to stay and fight, but he knew he would only be a liability.

He turned and bolted for the exit, sprinting down the hall as fast as his legs would carry him. He could hear the sounds of the battle behind him, the roars of Pandemonium and the sharp, angry snarls of your voice. He didn’t stop running until he was far away, collapsing against a wall to catch his breath.

He waited, chest heaving, listening for any sound of pursuit. But the only sound he heard was the pounding of his own heart. After what felt like an eternity, he forced himself to his feet and started moving again, heading toward the familiar path that would lead him back to your shop.

Sebastian stumbled back into your shop, chest still heaving from the adrenaline. He looked around, waiting for you to return. His mind was racing with thoughts of what had just happened, and how close he had come to being torn apart by Pandemonium. The shop felt like a sanctuary, a place where he could finally catch his breath.

After what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. His heart leaped as he saw you step into the shop, looking a bit battered but very much alive. You had a few scratches and bruises on your arms, but your eyes were bright and filled with that familiar spark of mischief.

“You look like you’ve been through a blender,” you teased, a smirk tugging at the corner of your lips. “Let me guess—you tried to pet Pandemonium?”

Sebastian chuckled, a relieved grin spreading across his face despite his exhaustion. “Yeah, well, I thought it could use a hug. Turns out, not a fan.”

You rolled your eyes, walking over to him and giving him a playful shove on the shoulder. “Idiot. I told you to keep your distance from the big, scary monsters, didn’t I?”

Sebastian shrugged, trying to look nonchalant but failing. “Yeah, yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

“Oh, so getting mauled by a creature from your worst nightmares is your idea of fun?” you shot back, your tone dripping with sarcasm. “Good to know. I’ll make sure to schedule more near-death experiences for you.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “Thanks for saving my ass back there. I thought I was done for.”

You folded your arms, giving him a once-over. “You’re lucky I was in the neighborhood. Otherwise, you’d be a very pretty smear on the floor right now.”

“Pretty, huh?” Sebastian grinned, leaning against the wall as he caught his breath. “So, you think I’m pretty?”

You snorted, rolling your eyes again but failing to hide your smile. “I said ‘pretty smear,’ not pretty face. Don’t let it go to your head, Solace.”

Sebastian laughed again, feeling a warmth spread through his chest at your teasing. Despite the danger, the fear, and the madness of this place, moments like this made it all a bit more bearable. “You know,” he said, a bit more seriously now, “I’ve never met anyone quite like you.”

“Damn right you haven’t,” you replied, still sassy but with a hint of softness in your voice. “I’m one of a kind. And don’t you forget it.”

“I don’t think I could if I tried,” Sebastian said quietly, his eyes meeting yours. For a moment, the two of you just stood there, the playful banter giving way to a deeper connection.

You broke the silence with a mock sigh, dramatically placing a hand over your heart. “Careful, Solace. Keep talking like that, and I might think you’re actually starting to like me.”

He chuckled, pushing off the wall and taking a step closer to you. “Maybe I am,” he admitted, his voice soft. “Maybe more than a little.”

You blinked, momentarily caught off guard by his honesty. But then, your lips curled into a grin. “Well, you better hold onto that thought, because if you pull another stunt like today, I’m letting Pandemonium have you for lunch.”

Sebastian laughed, the sound filling the small shop. “Deal,” he said, smiling. “No more stunts. Just… maybe stick around a bit longer?”

You nodded, your playful demeanor softening as you looked at him. “Yeah, I think I can do that,” you said softly. “Just try not to get yourself killed, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” Sebastian replied, his smile widening. For the first time in a long time, he felt a glimmer of hope, a sense of belonging in this strange, dangerous place. And it was all because of you.

[wildechildwrites]

Attitude Adjustment

Simon "Ghost" Riley/Reader

Word Count: 1.5k

Warnings: Light angst, violence

No use of Y/N

Summary: Ghost beats the shit out of you no I will not elaborate

A:N: Ghost's hands are rated E for everyone

AO3 Link: Attitude Adjustment

You're sitting in furious silence during the mission debrief, Gaz and Soap shooting you sympathetic glances that you pointedly ignore, Price's anger filling the room like natural gas, smothering you. Ghost leans against a wall, shadowed and silent. 

Price finally dismisses everyone else with a bark, and you’re left alone with your fuming captain and his silent lieutenant, haunting your peripheral. 

“You ignored a direct order.” Price’s voice is gruff, leaving no room for argument. You know you should apologize, but you can’t stomach it. Not when you saved his goddamn life.

“You think I was just going to let them kill you?” You ask, indignant. Price glares at you.

“I think, corporal, that you ignored a direct order from your commanding officer.” Price’s tone is sharp and dismissive. 

"You put yourself and the rest of your team in danger. You could've been killed. You almost were."

“But sir–” You object, still trying to justify yourself. If he would just listen– Price shoots up from his desk, stabbing a finger towards the door. 

“Don't fucking argue with me," He growls, chest heaving. "Get out."

You stand, stunned, feeling your traitorous tear ducts begin to sting. Ghost has offered nothing, and you catch his cold gaze before spinning around and storming out, slamming the door behind you. 

You knew you were out of line, had vaulted out of order the moment you ignored Price, the moment you ignored every instinct the military had beaten into you, but it wasn't fair. He would’ve pulled the same stupid bullshit if the situation was reversed. You scrub angrily at your eyes, potent rage bubbling in your chest. He was singling you out on purpose, angry at you for something he would’ve excused had it been anyone else. You turn a corner, stomping down the hallway. 

Soap is lingering near your room, acting far too interested in the leaky ceiling tiles. He spins around to face you when he hears your footsteps, opening his mouth to say something, but you cut him off before he can speak.

"Just don’t Johnny.” You snarl, aiming for a biting tone. It comes out as a plea, and the Scotsman gives you a pitying look that just stokes the rage curling in your chest. He steps in front of you, trying to slow your momentum, and you purposefully slam your shoulder into him, ignoring him as he calls after you.

You make a beeline for the gym, heading for a punching bag. Your fingers are numb, and you can’t stop shaking, so you throw yourself at the bag, hurling punch after punch. 

“Price ripped into you good.” Ghost calls out from behind you. You jump, throwing him a sour look over your shoulder in response. You hadn’t heard him come in, unsure of how long he’s been standing there.

“You ripped into him right back.” He observes. His gaze is cold, prickling along your spine. You bite your tongue, landing a hard kick on the bag. 

“Heard you also barked at Johnny.” He adds, as if an afterthought, his tone deceptively casual. You know then that you’re in real trouble. You’d been a bitch to Mactavish, and now Ghost was here to defend his honor. You roll your eyes, giving yourself that small amount of defiance before turning to face him. 

He’s wrapping his hands, standing on the sparring mat closest to you. He cocks his head, eyes flat and expressionless, but the challenge is clear. You're angry enough to take the bait, abandoning your punching bag. 

Ghost wordlessly gets into a fighting stance. You mirror him, waiting for the lecture, and the first blow almost knocks you on your ass.

You’ve sparred with Ghost before, but you don't think he's ever hit you that hard. It's staggering, and you double over slightly. Simon doesn’t give you a second to recuperate, throwing another punch. You barely dodge it, sliding under his arm, aiming for his ribs. You’re sloppy, and he blocks you, adding a shove to throw you off balance. It’s a dirty move, one that pisses you off even more, and you’re back on the defensive, protecting yourself as Simon throws another punch, harder than the first. You block it with more success, then move closer, aiming low. He blocks you again. 

You’re panting, already exhausted from the mission, heat in your cheeks, anger building. Ghost has the advantage, twice your size and fucking mean, and you’re just trying to defend yourself. That’s all you’ve been doing all fucking day, defending yourself from your own goddamn team. 

You kick him hard in the stomach. Ghost seems unaffected, those cold eyes unreadable. You throw another punch, putting all your weight into it, and he grabs your arm, using your momentum against you, flipping you over his shoulder. You slam onto your back on the mat. 

“What the fuck Si-” you snap, and he kicks you in the ribs. You scramble backwards, trying to regain your footing as he advances on you. 

“Price is too relieved that you’re still alive to give you a proper punishment for insubordination.” He says. "I have no such scruples." 

Ghost’s blank expression doesn’t change, not even when he slams his boot into your shoulder, sending you tumbling onto your back again. You glare up at him, your chest heaving.

“Fuck you.” You spit.

“You need to remember who your superiors are,” Ghost continues evenly, ignoring you. 

You go to stand, and he knocks you over once again. You practically snarl at him, shooting out and grabbing his leg. Using his body weight against him, you bring him crashing down onto the floor next to you, then slam your knee into his stomach, knocking the air out of him. Your victory is cut short when Ghost grabs you and flips the two of you over, pinning you to the floor with his body weight. 

“You scared all of us,” he says. His eyes are still flat and cold. “Pull something like that again, I’ll pop your shoulder out of socket.”

You grapple against him, cursing, but he just tightens his grip, pinning your arms. It hurts, your shoulders and ribs screaming, the air being crushed out of your lungs by the weight of the giant man on top of you, but you keep fighting him.

“Get off,” you rasp. Ghost leans down, his face inches from yours.

“Are you done being a brat?” He asks lowly. You manage to twist one of your hands enough to dig your fingernails into his stomach. In response, Ghost grabs your wrist, pulling your arm behind you with enough force to wrench your shoulder. You’re completely immobilized.

It’s all too much. The exhaustion and pain, the anxiety of the mission, the humiliation of being reprimanded, the indignant rage that’s been bubbling inside of you. Everything comes crashing down, tears you’ve been fighting all day suddenly pouring out. You let out an involuntary sob, and Simon lets up, just enough to allow you to breathe, keeping you pinned beneath him as your tears build up steam.

“There’s our girl,” he says, his gravelly voice uncharacteristically soft, almost frayed. It only makes you cry harder, keening wails muffled by the large man on top of you.You're confused at the sudden switch, overwhelmed and disoriented. He rubs comforting circles into your wrist, and you’re falling apart, coming unspooled.

You sob until you run out of tears, your cries trailing off into sniffling, and only then does Ghost let you up. The anxiety and anger is gone, leaving tender exhaustion, the soreness from the fight a tangible sensation, grounding you. 

“I think a hot shower is in order, corporal” Ghost says gently, helping you to your feet. You’re wobbly, trailing after him on unsteady legs as he leads you to the locker room.

He leaves you to it, disappearing back into the gym, and you strip, letting the warm water wash off the rest of the day, standing under the stream until your eyes are drooping. 

To your surprise, Ghost is waiting for you when you get out, eyes closed, head resting against the wall. He looks tired, his dark circles a bruised shade of purple, showing through the half smeared off black paint. He opens his eyes, expression unreadable, and you sit down next to him.

“Apologize to Soap, will ya? He’s gutted. Sensitive, that one,” Ghost grumbles, rolling his eyes, but there’s real warmth behind the gruff, dismissive tone of voice. “And the next time you want a lashing, come straight to me instead of stomping about.” 

Heat rises unexpectedly to your face, and you open your mouth to protest. 

Simon holds up a finger, silencing you before you can say anything. 

“Don’t fight me on it, we both know that’s what you needed. Price would've gladly taken you over his knee, but I figured you’d bite our heads clean off at the suggestion."

Your brain short circuits, your mouth opening and closing wordlessly as you stare at Ghost. He holds your gaze unflinchingly.

“I should, um,” you stutter, stumbling to your feet, “I should go find Soap.” 

You practically run to the doors, and you swear as you step into the hallway you hear quiet laughter, echoing behind you.

[officialaemondtargaryen]

Never Gonna Be Alone [part 1]

Summary: A collection of small moments that lead to falling in love with your roommate. This is a Modern Day!AU.

Pairing: Aegon Targaryen x Reader

Word Count: ~1.5k

Author's Note: I've been writing two horribly depressing stories simultaneously for a while now and I needed a break from the angst. I hope that you all enjoy this.

Warnings for the entire series: language, drug & alcohol use, pining, fluff, possible angst, and possible sexual content. Plus, me attempting to be a comedian.

Playlist here!

She said, "he's kind of messy in every aspect of his life, but he's fun to be around!" Then, she very positively followed that up with, "I think you two would really get along!"

You met Helaena in college, and to be honest, you really didn't know her that well. She was a friend of a friend who had been in a few of the same classes as you, went to the same bars, and had a similar taste in art and music. She'd like every selfie, or ask to borrow a book you posted about, but you had never really hung out alone together.

So when your phone started ringing on a Friday night, after you were already three margaritas deep and swimming in queso dip at your cousin's birthday party, and it was Helaena Targaryen's name flashing across the screen, you were admittedly concerned; though, you'd always known her to be a pretty sincere person, so you took her word for it when she said that you should let her older brother move into the empty, second bedroom of your apartment. It might have been the tequila, or the fact that you were just that desperate, but you immediately agreed to her proposition without question.

You had been trying to rent the room out for months when it became impossible to afford the luxury of living alone, but every person that was interested happened to fall through for one reason or another. You had even offered a discounted rate (as the bedroom was smaller than yours and there was only one bathroom and it was a Jack-and-Jill), but you still couldn't find a good fit.

Enter Aegon Targaryen.

Suddenly, a guy whom you could only describe as 'that has to be Helaena's brother', was knocking on your door a week later. There was beat up Wrangler sitting on the curb behind him filled to the roof with cardboard boxes, and a tiny U-Haul hitched to the bumper with what little bit of furniture he had. He looked at you, blinked a few times and said, "I'm Aegon." You introduced yourself and he nodded; there were no pleasantries, no hand shakes or smiles. He just walked into your apartment, looked around, and then started moving his things in.

It was mid-July, so obviously there were better things you could be doing with your time than helping a complete stranger move his things into your home during a drought and a heat wave. Yet, you slid on your sandals and got to work after you had started to feel bad that you were sitting pretty in the air conditioning while your new roommate struggled in the humidity.

It didn't take long until the only thing left was his mattress. You weren't even sure how he got that monstrosity stuffed into the tiny trailer in the first place. It was ridiculously bulky and much heavier than it needed to be, but he swore that it was the most comfortable mattress you'd ever lay on in your life- a fact that you would just have to take his word for. You struggled, a lot, but put on a brave face as Aegon did most of the heavy lifting in the back and you navigated up front.

As you were coming up the porch steps with your sunglasses sliding off of your face as you dripped with sweat, and your arms tired from hours of heavy lifting (saving the heaviest for last, which was a terrible idea), you ended up missing the stoop completely and landing on your ankle awkwardly. You played it off until you had gotten the mattress onto his bed frame, and then silently cried about it in your now shared bathroom; quietly cursing the economy for forcing this situation upon you. Later that night as you were sitting on the couch, with your swollen ankle elevated on a couple of throw pillows, your new roommate tosses a bag of frozen peas in your lap and continues into his room with a bowl of cereal for dinner.

"Thanks," you called after him but only heard the sound of his bedroom door closing in reply.

Over the next few weeks you observed quite a bit about Aegon Targaryen. You knew which spoon was his favorite, how he preferred his tea, that he washed his hair with tea tree shampoo, and enjoyed mint chocolate chip ice cream. He cut the crust off of his sandwiches when he ate them at home, but when he packed his lunch he left them on. He could drink an entire box of wine by himself, but he typically stopped after two glasses, and he always asked if you wanted him to pour you one. He talked to his siblings a lot, but never his parents, and he really enjoyed watching dog videos on his phone while sitting on the couch as you tried to watch your show.

And when he laughed, he belly laughed, and you couldn't help but smile softly to yourself when he did.

Despite how taciturn he may have been, he was still good company, even if you were just sitting on opposite ends of the sofa doing your own thing. He always thanked you when you would leave leftovers in the fridge with a sticky note that had his name on it, and you started making sure that you made enough for two. When he came home late on the weekends, he tried his absolute hardest to do so quietly, but with those hardwood floors, it was almost impossible. He'd wake you up every single time, but you would never say anything. It was hardly an inconvenience after the many nights you'd fall asleep to the sound of him softly strumming his guitar in the next room.

And yet, you just couldn't help but wait for the other shoe to drop. Because it had to, right? Surely this would be a nightmare; God finally sending a punishment for your sins and giving him the face of a literal angel for shits and giggles. You weren't entirely convinced he wasn't Karma-In-Disguise, as the only other option was just too good to be true.

One morning you woke to find Aegon in the kitchen, standing at the counter, making himself a cup of tea. He had already brewed a pot of coffee for you and there was a box of assorted pastries sitting on the table, one of which he was holding between his teeth as he poured a splash of milk into his cup. He turned to you, leaning against the counter and took a bite out of his scone.

"What's this?" You quirked an eyebrow as you studied the scene.

"A 'thank you', I s'pose," he shrugged, voice deep with residual exhaustion. He scratched at the short stubble on his chin, almost nervously, "It's been like a month since I moved in here, and, to be honest, I wasn't really expecting you to let me stay longer than a week."

You laughed softly and took a few steps deeper into the kitchen, taking note of how comfortable the space was with his presence in it. You couldn't ignore the way your pulse quickened at the sight of him in this light; the way the soft, morning sun bounced off of his blonde hair like a halo. He stayed right where he was as you moved around him; his tired, blue eyes following as you grabbed your favorite mug and a spoon from the drawer.

"To be honest, I wasn't expecting you to want to stay," you mentioned as you stood next to him and added two scoops of sugar to your cup. Your eyes flickered up to meet his stare, which was so blue you might as well have been looking up at the sky itself. "We're basically strangers."

"I wouldn't say that," he shrugged, lips curling into a small smirk, and you had to stop looking at him before you spilled coffee all over yourself.

"Oh? What are we then?" You asked, feeling your cheeks warming slightly as you averted your gaze.

"Not strangers," you could hear the smirk in his tone; his gaze lingering for a moment longer before he took another bite of his pastry and pushed himself off the counter. "Besides," he added, taking a few steps towards the living room before glancing back at you. "A stranger wouldn't know your favorite bakery."

You laughed softly through your nose, realizing that your new roommate had just admitted to eavesdropping on your late-night FaceTime conversations with your best friend. Though, you were sure it was only because he didn't have a choice in the matter; the walls were paper-thin, after all. But, you remembered telling her just the day before yesterday how badly you were craving a chocolate croissant, but getting one was difficult because they were always sold out.

There were four chocolate croissants in that box.

"Fuck," you sighed.

[vanacoar]

Sneaking Around - Sebastian x F! Farmer

Rating: M

Warnings: NSFW (MDNI), oral sex, vaginal sex, terrible humor, submissive Sebastian, Farmer sneaking around with the sheer purpose of fucking the emo

Word Count: 5.7K

A/N: Sebastian brain rot continues

You and Sebastian had been “hanging out” for about two months, hanging out being the term you use because despite the fact that you’ve kissed him (only once you might add) the two of you hadn’t really defined your relationship yet. However, despite the fact that labels were currently up in the air, both of you were still hesitant to let anyone else know about the amount of time the two of you were spending together. Most nights you would find yourself precariously sneaking past Robin to make your way to your not quite boyfriends bedroom, where you two would spend the night watching terrible B list horror movies and eating stupid amounts of popcorn. If Sam or Abigail asked about how you two got along, you’d always find yourselves either deflecting away from the question, or answering with a “they’re pretty cool” or “they’re fun to hang with”. It was starting to grate on your nerves.

Tonight was no different. You approached 24 Mountain Road at about 7:30 PM, knowing that by this time Robin and Demetrius were more than likely getting ready for bed, and Maru was probably locked up in her room working on her latest invention. You had about 30 minutes to get in and get to Sebastian’s room before Robin came out to lock the door, like she did every night at exactly 8PM.

You opened the door slowly, freezing when you heard it give a small squeak of resistance. Deciding not to push you luck and risk it making more noise if you opened it further, you quietly slipped through the small gap you’d made before silently shutting the door behind yourself. The house was silent save for the quiet hum of a TV coming from Robin’s bedroom. You peaked your head around the corner, making sure her door was shut before slipping around and down the stairs to Sebastian’s basement bedroom, not even bothering to knock as you opened the door and rushed inside. Looking at the time, it was 7:45, perfect timing.

Looking around, you saw Sebastian at his computer, fingers nimbly ghosting along the keyboard as he typed line after line of code, eyes trained on the screen in front of him and headphones over his ears, it didn’t appear that he had even noticed your entrance. Perfect.

You clocked Sebastian as handsome the second you saw him on your second day in Pelican Town. You were out at the dock, Willy had sent you a letter to come by that morning and you were down there to meet him. It was a rainy Tuesday, most of the town were in their right mind to stay in doors in such nasty weather, but when you got to the dock, you noticed another person there with you, across the way on the opposite bridge. His hair was dark and plastered to his slim face, he sat at the edge of the peer, one knee pulled up to his chest, the other dangling off the edge, his elbow perched on his knee, a lit cigarette in his hand that he periodically brought to his lips.

“Who’s that?” You’d asked Willy after he’d gifted you his old fishing rod. The angler looked out to the opposite peer.

“Him? Oh that’s the carpenters boy, Sebastian I think his name is. He comes out here when it rains, kid’s interesting I’ll give him that.”

You met Sebastian properly the next day, he and Sam were outside Sam’s house, the blonde working through another level on his gameboy while Sebastian looked over his shoulder, cigarette in hand. Having already met Sam on your first day, you walked over to greet him.

“Oh hey, (Y/N)!” Sam greeted you when he looked up from the screen. “What’s going on?”

“I was just picking up some stuff from Pierre, thought I’d stop by and say hello.” You replied, holding your bag of goodies from the general store. “What are you two up to?”

“Nothin’ much, playin’ some games, chatting, that sort of thing,” Sam looked over to his friend before a look or recognition crossed his face. “(Y/N) I don’t think you’ve met Sebastian.” He pitched a thumb to the dark haired boy beside him, who only offered a glance to you. “He lives like right down the road from you.”

You took the opportunity to really look at Sebastian, he was tall, at least a few inches taller than Sam, who himself was not particularly short. His hair was dark, parted to the side and a stark contrast to the fairness of his skin. He was slender, the hoodie he wore looking to be a few sizes too big on his thin frame, his face was handsome though, sharp and angular with some of the most piercing gray eyes you’d ever seen, eyes that appeared to stare into your soul. “I’m (Y/N),” you greeted sweetly. “It’s nice to meet you, Sebastian.”

“Welcome to Pelican Town,” Sebastian’s voice was low but not extremely so, it was nice. “Out of all the places you could have gone, for some reason you chose this place.” He almost seemed amused. Something in your gut told you he was interesting.

You would spend the next several months getting to know Abigail and Sam, and it took a few more months after that for Sebastian to finally begin opening up to you. Getting through his thick outer shell was hard, but you eventually managed to crack it open, exposing the vulnerable boy underneath. The boy who felt displaced in his own home, under appreciated and undervalued by his mother and step father.

Right now, you leaned against the closed door of Sebastian’s bedroom, arms crossed over your chest as you watched him work. Normally he was done with work by now, usually waiting for you on his sofa or bed, but you guessed tonight was either a late night, or he had lost track of time, the latter would be your guess. You pushed yourself off the door, quietly slinking around his desk to stand behind him, watching for a moment as strings of code appeared on the screen as he typed.

Tonight would be different. Tonight you were finally going to get a label out of him, you were tired of not knowing what you meant to him, when you knew he meant so much to you. Slowly and gently, you placed your hands on either of his shoulders, feather light touches as you smoothed them over the soft fabric of his jacket, curling your arms around his neck as you leaned down to rest your head on his shoulder.

His fingers paused on the keyboard, taking a moment before reaching up to pull the headphones from his ears, turning his head slightly to greet you, a slightly tired look in his gray eyes. You smiled, placing a kiss on his cheek. “It’s almost 8 computer man.” You said against his skin.

“It’s that late already?” He asked, glancing down at the time at the bottom of his computer screen. Quickly, he moved his mouse over to the button highlighted ‘save’, and closed his file, turning around in his chair so he could face you clearly. “Any ideas on what you want to do tonight?” He asked. His eyes were completely innocent, as was the question, your mind however, was less so.

“I’ve got a couple.” You answered as he stood from his chair, once again towering over you, walking over to a shelf to look through his movie collection to find one the two of you hadn’t already seen. Yes, you definitely had a few ideas in mind.

***

Sebastian was always so warm, you’d noticed as you laid next to him on his bed. He was practically a furnace with the amount of heat he kicked off. The two of you sat in silence as the movie played, some cheap knock off of Godzilla, the effects were terrible and the script was laughable but that’s what made it fun. It was always like this, sitting side by side, arms occasionally brushing but other than that, minimal contact between the two of you. Originally, when the two of you first started these “date nights” you though that maybe he didn’t like you the way you liked him, but then you remembered that night, looking out at the lights of Zuzu City in the distance. He’d kissed you that night, so clearly he was interested in more than just a friendship. You kept expecting him to make the first move, an arm around your shoulder one night, maybe a hand on your thigh, but no, he was ever the gentleman, every night keeping his hands to himself, it was starting to drive you up the wall. However, you had made your decision, tonight you were going to make some waves, whether those waves were good or bad, was yet to be seen, but it was time to enact the first past of your plan.

You maneuvered, feigning a desire to get more comfortable when in reality you were moving to get closer to Sebastian, encircling one arm around his front to rest at the hem of his hoodie, your head coming to rest on his shoulder. You felt him freeze for only a moment before he relaxed into it, one of his arms coming up to wrap around your shoulder, forcing your head off of his shoulder and onto his chest. Part one was a success! Now for part two, which was going to be a little more tricky.

Your fingers played with the hem of his hoodie, occasionally slipping underneath just enough for the slightest touch of skin, the first time you’d done it the poor boy jumped, your fingers were cold against his heated skin, but he didn’t stop you, instead, the hand he had wrapped around your shoulder began tracing lines up and down your side, it was hypnotizing to say the least, but you had to stay focused.

Slowly, you slipped your fingers further and further under his shirt, you felt his abdominal muscles tense as you traced patterns onto his skin, making sure to keep your face schooled, as to not let him in on your plan. He was handling it well, fingers on your side rarely faulting, even as you looked up, placing a chaste kiss on his throat. You lips lingered on his skin for a moment before you pulled away.

“Something tells me you’re not watching the movie.” Sebastian said, despite the obvious amusement in his tone, you heard the slight waver of his voice. So you were effecting him.

“I’m watching something more interesting.” You whispered agains the skin of his neck.

“Why do I feel like you’re throwing out some hints?”

“I’ve been throwing out hints for the past few months but thanks for noticing.” That got a light chuckle out of him, just a soft breathy noise.

“How could you ever be not 100% enraptured in discount Godzilla?” Sebastian joked, finally looking down to meet your gaze, his eyes were cool, but you saw the glint of interest in them, curiosity even.

“Is discount Godzilla more interesting then a willing and eager girl in your lap?”

“Well I don’t know, seeing as there is not currently a willing and eager girl in my lap.”

“So sorry, let me fix that.” You sat up, slinging a leg over his lap so you were properly straddling him, his hands immediately coming to rest on your hips as your tucked your head against his shoulder, placing another kiss on his throat.

“You’re right, this is much more interesting than discount Godzilla.” Sebastian laughed as you planted a kiss just below his ear, before sitting back to meet his eyes. “Now my only question is what to do with her.”

“I’ve got a few ideas.” You said as you leaned forward, slotting your lips with his, the first kiss you’ve had with him in months and it was intoxicating. The kiss itself was chaste, innocent, just like the first one had been. It only lasted for a few moments before you pulled back, Just far enough to look him in the eyes, those steel gray eyes that had caught so much of your attention the first time you saw them. Your hands slid up his chest to rest on his shoulders, one of your thumbs grazing over the skin of his throat, such fair skin, skin that you would love to mark all over.

You don’t know who moved first, but before you knew it your lips were back on his, a desperate kiss that had you gasping as you pulled him infinitely closer, his arms wrapping around your waist and pulling you in. You practically shoved your tongue into his mouth, earning a desperate whimper from him, a sound that went straight to your core. One of your hands came to rest at the base of his throat, pushing ever so slightly, not enough to restrict his breathing, but enough to push him back against the headboard, a gentle knock of his head against the wood.

Your other hand moved down, once again slipping beneath the hem of his hoodie to press against the hot skin of his abdomen. “Take it off?” You asked against this lips. He didn’t make a verbal response, instead only nodding as he reluctantly pulled away from the kiss. You helped him pull the hoodie up over his torso until he tossed it across the room, where to, you didn’t care right now. “Good boy.” You said before you could stop yourself. You froze for only a moment, waiting to see his reaction, but instead of rejection, you were met with a whine. A fucking whine! You knew the game to play now.

You smiled into his lips when you kissed him again, hands moving to travel over his now exposed chest. “Are you going to keep being good for me?” You all but whispered against his mouth. You felt him nod. “Use your words, Sebastian.”

“Yes.” Was all he said before you moved lower, planting open mouth kisses over his neck, starting just below his ear. You contemplated leaving a mark, nice and dark where he couldn’t hide it, so everyone would know he was taken, spoken for.

You could feel his growing erection under you, straining against the fabric of his jeans. You planted a kiss to his collar bone as one of your hands traveled south, cupping him through has pants. He hissed at the friction your hand gave him, his head once again falling back against the headboard.

“This is definitely not what I was expecting to happen tonight.” Sebastian panted out as you applied more pressure to his clothed cock. You looked up at him, meeting his eyes again.

“Do you want to stop?” It was a simple question, and if he said yes and you would, no questions or rebuttals. He was silent for all but a moment before,

“No.” You smiled as your lips found his again, your hand moving from his cock to the button of his jeans, popping it open to slip your hand inside and palm him through his boxers.

“Tell me, was it the ‘good boy’ that got you this hard?” You asked, and you swore you heard him moan.

“Among other things.” He hissed out as you wrapped your fingers around him through his boxers. You smiled, you were going to wreck this boy.

The movie was still playing in the background as you coaxed Sebastian to lay on his back, chest heaving as you pulled your hand from inside of his pants, only to hook your fingers into his waistband, pulling his jeans and boxers together far enough to let his cock spring free, precum already leaking from the tip, he was so worked up and you felt as if you’d hardly done anything yet.

Part of you wanted to pin him to the bed, climb on top and ride him until you couldn’t remember your own name, but that could wait until the next time, tonight you had a very specific plan. You wrapped your fingers around the base of his cock, squeezing slightly just to hear him hiss. Leaning down you placed a gentle kiss on his hip bone, looking up at him through your lashes.

“Red means stop.” You said as your hand began to move, sliding to the head of his cock. He nodded, panting as you collected the precum at the tip into your hand to use as lubricant as you stroked him, slowly at first, letting him get used to you, experimenting with different levels of grip before you started working him faster.

Sebastian brought a hand to his mouth, biting down on his knuckles to keep from making too much noise as your hand stroked up and down his length. You felt him attempt to thrust up into you hand, at which point your other one came to pin his hips to the bed, drawing out another whine from his throat. Sebastian was well endowed, a solid 7 inches, thick enough to take your entire hand, your fingertips barely meeting, staring down at his swollen cock, you couldn’t help but wonder what he tasted like.

You leaned down, flattening your tongue against the underside of the head, and he nearly wailed, would have, had he not brought his other hand to press against his mouth as well. You could tell he was getting close as your closed your lips around the head of his cock, laving your tongue over the slit, feeling him shudder beneath you. His moans got louder, higher pitched the closer he got, all the way until he was at the precipice, ready to fall, when suddenly you pulled away.

Sebastian gasped at the sudden change, nearly choking on the air, meeting your eyes, you could see the tears in his eyes. You grinned, placing a gentle kiss on his stomach. “I didn’t say you could cum yet.” You smiled as you dragged your tongue up his chest to lap at his throat, this time not hesitating to suck a mark there, marring his fair skin for all to see. He was still panting, trying to catch his breath.

“Please,” he whispered as you began your descent down his torso again, giving gentle nips to his skin along the way, until you once again reached the bones of his hips, flattening your tongue over his skin. “(Y/N), please.” You smiled against his flesh.

“Please what?” You looked up at him again, his face was flushed, pupils blown out wide with want, breath coming out in short pants.

“Please let me cum.” He said so nicely, you were tempted to give in, but what’s the fun in that?

“And how would I do that, baby?” You stroked the skin of his inner thigh, well what you could reach with his pants still in the way.

“Please touch me.”

“I am touching you, Seb.”

“No.” He flopped his head against the pillow. You smiled once more.

“You gotta be specific babe.” You started, tracing soothing circles into the skin of his hips. “Tell me.”

He was silent for a moment, seemingly choosing his words carefully. “Please touch my cock.” There it is.

“Good boy.” You said as you hooked your fingers into his waistband again, this time pulling his jeans and boxers all the way off, shoving them to the floor as you made yourself comfortable between Sebastian’s legs. You heard his whine again, his hips giving an involuntary thrust up at the praise. Your clothes felt too tight, still fully intact as Sebastian lay in front of you completely bare, spread out and waiting for you to take him. You leaned down to press a kiss to the base of his cock, ripping a choked out gasp from his throat as you dragged your tongue from his base to the tip, tasting the saltiness of his precum at the head. Wrapping your lips around him once more, you took him further into your mouth, letting the tip of his cock hit nearly the back of your throat before pulling back again, dragging your tongue along the underside as you hollowed your cheeks, hand wrapped around what you couldn’t fit.

His hands found your hair as you proceeded to take him in your mouth, lavishing his cock with your tongue. The noises he made switched from moans to whines and back again as you moved your head up and down. He clasped a hand over his mouth to keep the noises from being to loud, not wanting to let the whole house know good he was being taken apart. His grip in your hair tightened as he painted your name, a litany of ‘please’ and ‘yes’ sprinkled in. He was getting close again his hips thrusting up into your mouth. You let him.

“(Y/N),” he choked out your name as you took more of him in your mouth. “(Y/N), close, so close, please, please.” He sounded wrecked, eyes shut and tear tracks down his cheeks as you sucked hard, moving just a little bit faster. You wanted to feel him cum, taste him and swallow everything he had down your throat.

Sebastian’s back arched off the bed as he came, flooding your mouth with his cum, which you happily took. He gasped soundlessly as his body tensed around you, his grip in your hair nearly painful, but sending pulsing heat to your core nonetheless.

He collapsed back on to the bed, chest heaving with the intensity of his orgasm. You let his softening cock fall from your lips, climbing up his body to kiss him again, pushing your tongue into his mouth with little resistance, smiling at his responding moan. His hands came up to wrap around your waist again, pulling your closer and deepening the kiss.

You felt his heated hands slip under your shirt, his palms flat against your sides as he slid your shirt up your torso. You broke the kiss, sitting up so you could completely remove it, reaching back and unclasping your bra, tossing it across the room. Sebastian’s eyes were glued to you, sitting up to press his lips to your chest, kissing your clavicle before moving lower, planting kisses over the curve of your breasts, one hand coming up to graze his thumb over your nipple, pulling a startled gasp from your lips. His fingers trailed deftly down your torso, fingertips calloused from years of typing, as he reached the waistband of your jeans, popping open the button and pulling the garment past the curve of your hips, along with your panties. You moved to get your jeans off of your legs, dropping them to the floor as you moved to once again straddle Sebastian’s lap, wrapping your arms around his neck as you kissed him.

“And to think, we could have been doing this the whole time instead of watching B list horror movies.” You stated against his lips as you rolled your hips against this, his cock starting to once again so interest.

“What you don’t think discount Godzilla adds to the mood?” Sebastian joked, and you found yourself giggling into his mouth.

“Something you wanna share with the class about your affinity for Kaiju?”

“He must have a massive cock.” This time you really laughed, tucking your head against his shoulder, he smiled against your hair as his hands strokes up and down your sides. He placed a kiss just under your jaw before you found yourself on your back, Sebastian hovering over you, he leaned down and pressed a hard kiss to your lips. You gladly open your mouth for him, letting his tongue into your mouth as he settles himself between your legs.

He kissed under your jaw, trailing his lips down your throat, you felt him sucking marks into your skin, but you didn’t care. He trailed further, placing kisses down your chest, sucking a few marks onto the curve of your breasts before dragging his tongue over one of your nipples, you arched your back into his touch, which he was all too pleased about by the look of his smile when he began to continue his descent down your body. He kissed down your stomach, down to your hips, where he marked you again. He carefully pushed your thighs further apart, admiring how you were spread out before him. He latched his lips onto the sensitive skin of your inner thigh, pulling a gasp from your lips as he sucked another mark there, and another and another until you were sure your inner thighs were going to be black and blue by morning.

Your breathing was heavy as he inched closer to your core. “To think,” he started, propping himself on one elbow while the other hand came to brush his knuckles against your throbbing heat, a ghost of a touch, but enough to light your skin on fire. “All this time you’ve been giving me pleasure, when you were so worked up yourself.” He slipped on of his fingers through your folds, teasing just at your entrance, but never daring to push inside. You were desperate to feel him inside.

“Well you were being so good for me, how was I supposed to focus on anything else?” You felt Sebastian sigh against your thigh. You wanted to tell him to hurry up, to put his mouth on you, devour you like you knew he wanted to. Instead he proceeded to place kisses everywhere but here you really wanted him. You were about to say something when without warning he licked a strip from your entrance to your clit, making you choke on your gasp. Your hands find his hair as he does it again before focusing his attention on your swollen clit, his arms wound around your thighs, pulling your legs further apart and half yanking you down further to meet his mouth. One of your hands moved from his hair to your mouth, covering it with the back of your hand to stifle the loud noises that wanted so badly to breech from your throat.

Sebastian lapped at your core like he was a man dying of thirst and your soaked cunt was the only source of water. You thrust your hips up, or tried to, as he had your hips in an ironclad grip, arching your back as he gave a rough hard suck to your clit. “Sebastian,” you gasped out, you felt him hum against you, sending a spark of electricity up your spine. Your grip tightened in his hair. “Fuck, baby, so good, you’re doing so good.” You babbled out, barely registering the moan from the man between your legs as he pulled you impossibly closer. The room was filled with the lewd slick noises of Sebastian’s ministrations on your cunt, combined with the quiet moans and gasps that escaped your lips, muffled by your hand. You wished you could be loud, make sure he knew just how good he was working you, just how thoroughly he was wrecking you with his tongue, but you definitely didn’t want the way Sebastian’s family found out about the two of you be because they were woken up at 1 am by the sounds of their son giving the sweet farmer girl from down the road the most amazing sex of her life.

You barely contained as scream when two of his long fingers penetrated you, scissoring inside of you as he stretched you open. He thrusted the two digits in and out of you, curling them in a come hither motion that had you seeing stars. You were getting close, each lap of his tongue and curl of his fingers pushing you closer and closer to the edge.

“Don’t stop,” you panted, gripping the pillow behind you for leverage as your spine arched off the bed, attempting to get closer to him, if that was even possible. “So close, baby I’m so close, fuck, make me cum.” Sebastian hummed against you again and you felt yourself fall, the coil wound so tight finally snapping as you came, hand locking over your mouth to keep your scream inside as your body tensed, your lungs spasming as you tried desperately to take in air. He worked you through it, only pulling away when you pulled at his hair. He placed kisses over your hips and up your stomach as you panted, kissing up your chest and neck until he reached you lips. Your hands tangled into his hair as he kissed you, one hand gripping behind your thigh to hike your leg up over his hip, you could feel his cock, rock hard against your core.

The movie had long since ended, the bright white words spelling ‘play’ being the only thing to illuminate the room. He gave you a minute before reaching down to align himself with your entrance, pressing a kiss to your forehead as he pushed into you, making you impossibly full as your hands scrambled for purchase over the skin of his back, your nails surly leaving angry red marks over his flesh. You pressed your lips against his shoulder as he bottomed out inside of you, buried to the hilt inside your heat. You could feel him trembling above you, not daring to move just yet, you let him get his bearings while you lavished the skin of his neck and shoulder with kisses, nipping gently at his skin.

Before long you felt his pull almost all the way out, covering your mouth with his own before slamming hard back into you, swallowing your gasp. He set a steady pace, fucking into you roughly while your nails bit into his shoulders. The room was full of the sounds of gasps and broken moans as he slammed into you, one of his hands coming to grip at your hip, lifting your hips just barely off the bed, but allowing him to get so much deeper, and you couldn’t help the moan the was ripped out of your throat, although he didn’t seem to care much as he buried his head against your shoulder, nipping at your sensitive skin as he picked up his pace.

Your moans became high pitched, trying desperately to stifle the noise by sucking mark after mark onto his shoulder. “Sebastian, seba- fuck.” A litany of his name fell from your lips, panting against his flesh before he faced you again to engulf you in a breath stealing kiss. “Don’t stop, please don’t stop.” You pleaded into the kiss.

“(Y/N),” he all but moaned as his hips stuttered. He filled you so completely, his cock hitting every spot inside of you on every thrust, the grip he had on your hip tight enough you were sure you’d have bruises by morning, and you wanted them. You were approaching the edge again and fast, as you grasped for any kind of purchase, legs wrapping tight around his waist as his pace got faster and faster. “Close,” he gasped against your lips. “So close, fuck, (Y/N).” You tightened your legs around him, pulling him as close as you could.

“Come on baby,” you encouraged him, gasping at a particularly well aimed thrust. “Cum for me, fill me with it, I want it please!” You gasped out, Sebastian choked on air as his rhythm started to stutter some more. He grasped your body tight as he came, his cum spilling into you, filling you more, you toppled over the edge with him, letting out cry as he fucked the both of you through it.

Eventually the only sounds in the room were the sounds of panting, as the two of you caught your breath, Sebastian propping himself up on his elbows as he hovered above you, before slowly pulling out of you to collapse onto his back, chest heaving.

“Wow,” he choked out. You turned to your side to look at him, his dark hair scattered, unkempt from the way your fingers had raked through it, figuring your own hair wasn’t much better. You smiled up at him as you moved to lay your head on his chest, his arm coming to wrap around you, fingertips tracing lazy patterns into your skin. “Next time we have sex, we’re doing it at your house.” You felt your heart warm at his words.

“Agreed,” you said, planting a kiss on his chest. “That way I can hear all those pretty little moans.” His responding whine sending a dulled heat back to your core.

It was quiet for a while, part of you though he had fallen asleep, you were startled when he spoke. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.” He all but whispered into your hair. You felt the question rise in your throat, pressing your lips to his neck when you asked.

“Why’d you wait?”

Sebastian sighed. “I don’t know if it’s hard to tell, but I’m not exactly popular with people,” he confessed, you hummed in response. “We already had something good, and I wasn’t sure if you wanted more and I didn’t want to risk it.” You lifted yourself up onto your elbow, placing a hand on his jaw to turn his head to look at you, his gray eyes meeting your own. You pressed a chaste but passionate kiss to his lips, which he responded to in kind as his other arm came to wrap around your waist.

“I want everything you have to give.” You confessed against his lips.

***

“Woah someone got lucky last night.” Sam exclaimed walking into the saloon that next night, seeing Sebastian already waiting for him at the pool table. “Who was the lucky lady… or dude, I don’t judge my best friends taste.”

Sebastian stiffened, attempting to pull the collar of his hoodie up to cover the very obvious hickie that you had left on his throat. He seemed to stumble for an answer before he was interrupted by the sound of two more entering the back room, you and Abigail rounding the corner together, giggling about who knows what. Abigail went to her usual spot on the couch, ready to watch as Sam got his ass handed to him again in pool, while you walked over to Sebastian, reaching up to place a kiss on his cheek before moving to go sit next to your friend.

Sebastian felt the flush rising up his neck, glancing up at his best friend to see an awestruck disbelieving look on his face, it would have been funny if it wasn’t directed at him.

“How the fuck did you pull-“ Same started.

“I don’t know.”

[tinycozycomfort]

some quiet evenings

pairing: mike schmidt x f!reader

summary: If he wasn’t so far away all the time, working and worrying and wracked with undeserving guilt, you’d disassemble him completely—down to the fucking marrow.

warnings/tags: no use of y/n, sub!mike, the tone? they're in love, underwear play, c*ck grinding, finger sucking, pet names (baby, honey, etc), the socks stay on, criminally gratuitous descriptions of how good-looking this man is

word count: 2k

rating: explicit! 18+ only, mdni

a/n: huge thank you to @cupofjoel for these amazing fics that were a direct contributor to me watching the movie (and then subsequently falling into a lore hole) and to @pascalisbaby for listening to me fumble my way through this!!

main masterlist

Mike is always tired when he gets home. 

Tired like the weight of his body is too much to bear, eyes wet and just-open like a seam that’s freshly split. He hangs at the end of his own rope, slumped on the line of his spine, damp across his brow as he sits and undresses at the corner of the bed. 

You don’t question him when he says it’s nothing, when he mumbles something about work being a lot of pressure and just needing to make it through the end of the week. For something so mundane—watching unwanted property—it seems off; still you kneel at his back to help him shrug off the lip of his vest and hoodie and creased t-shirt with nothing more than a sigh.

“Didn’t mean to put this on you. I know you work as much as I do—more, even,” his head lolls down towards his lap, fingers sweeping his face as he shrinks with guilt, “I just need to figure out some money for another babysitter so I can actually sleep and you can actually see me and—” 

“It’s okay. Don’t know how many times I’ll have to tell you before you believe me.” 

He works at the clasp of his pants before you can—another thing he feels the need to take responsibility for, right now—bending at the waist enough to pool them at his ankles, socked feet tapping the ground inside their halos. Nervous, like always, high-strung and erratic for reasons you can’t begin to pull out of him. 

“And everything with Abby, she just… I worry about her.” 

“She’s asleep down the hall. Got her to eat and everything. You need to worry about yourself, too, y’know.” You widen your thighs, straddling the base of his hips, left hand curling to cradle the strip of skin between his shoulder and neck. He’s warm there, too, tacky and tense when you tuck your pointer up against his jaw. “Look at me, Mike.” 

He refuses at first, pushing back against your guidance, reserve strong in the face of shame.

In return, you press harder into him, doubling down, dimpling the underside of his chin in an effort to halt his retreat.

“No,” he whispers, insistent. 

Something hot swirls in the core of your spine at his defiance, as small as it is loud, the corner of your lip tugging up in response. He can’t see you, hiding like this, but it’s like he can feel it, knocking a shoulder up to shield himself even more. 

He likes this game, you’ve realized—where you let him have his fit just to reel him back in, to prove to him he’s wrong. That special kind of attention to detail—the laborious care of taking the time to peel back his doubts to get to the tender meat of his heart, just to string up your favorite pieces of him as you go. Declarations is maybe the most correct way to put it; he likes to earn the kind of love he can hang on the fridge.

You lean in behind him, cheek brushing the hair at his temple, and his guise falters, body unfurling on instinct. What a sweet man he is, naked save for the rings of fabric on and at his feet, the thin veil of his boxers—the latter failing to hide his own interest. Opening for you like he needs to.

You drag your nose across his lobe, the flesh there raising in little welts, “You do know how much I worry about you, right? How much I want you to relax? Don’t you want that, too?” 

He swallows hard, wrist twisting in his lap—restraint, you think, or warning; Mike, ever-courteous, letting you know he’s reached his threshold, fizzing over the top. 

“What do you think I could do to make you feel better, honey?” You run the bend of your free hand along his inner thigh, chest flush to his back so you can reach the fold of his knee. 

Mike shudders, short puffs of air jutting out of his open mouth. The grip you have on his neck tilts, wrapping your thumb over the knob of his jaw, longer fingers spreading out so you can curve one between his lips. He licks at it, tongue soft where he sucks you in, skipping the gentle work-up to get to his favorite part—more tired than you thought, then.

“I don’t want to have to choose for you, but I will.” You rub the inside of his cheek like you can coax the words out, “C’mon.” 

“You could—I want, fuck. I want to be inside you.” 

The papery t-shirt clinging to your back stretches, looped material around your hips tacked down by the trickle of slick that seeps out at his words. You were ready for bed when he arrived,  more thankful than ever to have nothing else between you and his body, now that he’s ready for something else.

You drag your wandering hand across where he’s straining, hot and heavy, his only reaction a gentle tug of teeth on your knuckle, a too-deep inhale that inflates his chest. Mike’s hands sit limp where they’re glued to his thighs, waiting patiently for your next instruction, seeing if you’ve decided to grant him his request. 

It’s not until you wedge your hand free to toy at the waistband of his boxers that he sets into motion, raising off the sheets and letting you strip him of his last shred of modesty, just the slouched cuffs of his socks left clinging to him.

His cock is hard—angry—coming down on his stomach with a dull thud, a sticky pull of precome following in its wake. The muscle under his torso jumps at the impact like he forgot it was even there, too focused on what’s coming next, sold on the prospect of something better. 

You guide a leg down the slope of the bed, planting yourself on the floor by his side. He takes the hint, pushing himself higher up on the sheets and resting his weight on the flat of his elbows behind him, quick to obey.

You take your time climbing along him, bracketing him from the front this time so you can take in the full image of his want. He’s flushed across his cheeks, his neck—even the little reliefs in the skin under his eyes are touched by pink. Lips shining, hair clumped with wet at the root—he’s the kind of beautiful he doesn’t even know he’s capable of, sleepy and misty and shaky when you run your fingers against his jaw—still damp from his own mouth—marveling at the rounded edges that find their way in his angular face. 

If he wasn’t so far away all the time, working and worrying and wracked with undeserving guilt, you’d disassemble him completely—down to the fucking marrow. Clip him off at every joint just to piece him back together. 

“Pretty,” you mumble, mostly to yourself, but you know he hears it when he preens, eyes fluttering and chest squeezing tight in a long exhale.

You loop a thumb through the center of your underwear, swinging it out to fit his cock in with you, settling into his lap more firmly so that the split of your cunt presses against him. He’s trapped there, between your heat and his belly, the whine that slips out of him involuntary but solid. 

When you start to move, working up a rhythm, he spits out something like fuck, fuck yes and you nod to feign understanding.

“Oh, is this what you meant? You wanted to be inside here?” You rock into his hips with purpose, the thick shape of him rubbing at your clit like it’s all he was made for, like being inside you wouldn’t even be an idea if he couldn’t take care of you in every other way first. 

“No.” 

“First yes, now no? You have to make your mind up, baby. You’re not giving me enough to work with, here.”

“Yes. This is–yes.” 

He starts to meet you halfway without thinking, grinding up into the cradle of your body in search of a better way to communicate than words. 

“So you don’t want to fuck me?” 

Mike whines at that, the breakout of red reaching the very edges of his face, bleeding down into his collarbones. He regains some sense of his own body, then, hands fumbling up until they slot above the crease of your thigh, rubbing firmly at your hip bones. Pleading.

You tuck your knees into his side to help him along, ribs stinging where your efforts begin to hurt, happy anyway to push him closer to the edge. A thick lick of heat rises in your chest, the seat of your pelvis, flaring white when you watch him fight for something to say.

“I do—I did, I just. This is perfect. You’re perfect.” He’s panting in between each word, pressing himself to you to punctuate his point, “I’m going to come just like this, if you’ll let me.” 

It’s not so spelled out, but he is asking for permission—as he always does—and it sounds like an apology more than anything else. For being selfish, you know he’ll say; for taking his pleasure exactly like you’d asked him to.

You swipe at the curls that are starting to twist at the base of his neck, both for leverage so you can match his pace and to point out another facet of him that falls perfectly into your liking, the glide easier with how much you’ve coated him in that same favor. 

The hand you’d hooked into him earlier finds his lips again, slipping in with no resistance, passing harshly against his molars and tongue. 

Mike is eager to glean as much fondness as he can off the skin, closing his mouth and sucking fervently. 

“Go ahead, then. Said you needed to relax, didn’t I? We’ve got all morning.”

Something flashes in his eyes that reads horribly like but what about work?, as if now would be the time to worry over your schedule—as if anything could be more important than the way his cock swells in anticipation despite the thought. 

You redirect the anxiety, not wanting his orgasm to fall flat after all the convincing it took to lead him here, “You have all morning to make it up to me.”

His grip around your middle tightens, suffocatingly so, brows drawing tight, tilting his head so he can take in more of your fingers to slide his tongue against the underside of your palm as he comes in warm threads of slip. 

He makes a mess of your chests and the already soaked-through film of your underwear, legs shaking under you as he breathes his way down. 

You release yourself from him with a pop, squeezing lightly at his cheek as he cracks a meek smile. 

“Thank you,” he murmurs, freshly shy like he hadn’t been aware of what just occurred, so inside his mind he’d left his body, “I didn’t mean to not be able to, um—” 

“Fuck me?” 

He’s fully glowing by now, this time because of the weight of your accusation, loosening a little only when he sees you grinning back at him. You lean in, pecking at the corner of his mouth to not interrupt his irregular breaths, allowing him just a moment of error before appealing to the side of him that rids him of his nerves, “Get to it, then, if you’re so worried about it.”

[nocturnalfandomartist]

A commission I did for @jdetan, in which OoT Zelink watches a new dawn rise over the beautiful kingdom they've saved. Featuring some fun outfit designs I got to mess with, as well!

This commission is for JDetan's fic on ao3, A Destiny, Retold in Time. It is rated M, for language and violence (could essentially be rated T, for some). The title gives a decent hint on where the inspirations for these clothes came from. ;)

Time Elapsed: 8 hours

Program Used: IbisPaint X

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