#what I like about this character is these kinds of divisions

[freakartack]

Any warioware hot takes?

So so many. How hot are we talking here? Like room temp or witness protection?

I figure you guys have heard enough of my bitching and moaning about the same tired old hot takes so I will take this post in a different direction: sharing my thoughts on the most divisive character in Wariohead history

In Defense of Ashley

(ignore the fact that she's dressed up as wednesday addams i'm reusing this pic from october)

Is ashley truly the Lucario of Warioware? Yes. Would i rather have had a kooky old witch instead of her? Also yes. But now that she is here (i say, as if i am in 2004 addressing a board of disgruntled middle schoolers), I feel I must take it upon myself to plead her case.

Ashley is a character that is wildly incongruous with the world she lives in. At first glance she looks like the mary sue of a child who played warioware once and wanted to be a little "My Immortal" about it. However, not only is this 60% true, but it's also funny as hell. "But she's a massive asshole," you say, and to that I say you're right. But she's also 13. And you're not. So that's kind of unfair.

Despite all this, she does kind of fit the mold of your typical warioware character. "Looks cool as hell, actually quite lame" is basically a prerequisite for being friends with wario. And ashley passes this test with flying colors! She's lame as fuck!

If you know me, you would think i should hate a character who was introduced as trying to boil Orbulon, but if you REALLY know me, you know that this is actually my favorite part in the game. (I like orbulon because things are always happening to him.) But beyond that, also, since I have to fucking bring Orbulon into everything, there is a kind of foilage going on over here. Orbulon is a freaky weirdo who's been pretty much alone for one thousand years and is now desperately trying to learn how to socialize with humans, to mixed results. Ashley is a freaky weirdo who just got here and is instantly assimilated into a friend group that she has no idea what to do with.

And so she like, makes death threats at them. This would suck for any other character but because she is so young it instead feels like everyone is trying to rehabilitate a wildly poorly-socialized lapdog. Normally you hand this to the professionals, but instead we have Wario, so it is what it is. Plus also, it is really funny that the writers' insistence that you should actually think she's cute and nice manifests in her own personal hype man. Red, you deserve better, but keep doing you.

IN CONCLUSION:

[ladyazurith]

Thoughts on and Headcanons for Rook Hunt

Rook is a very divisive character for me, and I’ve gone back and forth on how I feel about him. I absolutely hate how he treats the nonhuman students. I also hate the vin where he comments on Vil gaining weight when it wasn’t even noticeable to someone with normal eyes. That’s not a healthy mindset. Nor can I ignore the wall of hidden photos we see peaking out behind the wallpaper in his (canon) room. 

I do not like how he handled the end of Chapter 5. The way he gushed about Neige and revealed his obsession, right in front of Vil, after everything that had just happened. I know people get upset over the fact he voted for RSA, and while I think it was a dick move for him to have revealed that it was his vote that cost them the show. It’s more that he hid something like that from Vil, and given how they talked about everything related to the theater together, and he knew Vil’s connection to Neige it just feels…really shitty that that's how it came out. 

On the other hand, I really do think he cares about Vil. I have never truly shipped them together (the only time I’ve written them in a relationship together was in a poly with Cater) I do think he loves Vil in a brotherly fashion. And I think they’re important to each other. Vil especially I think values Rook’s friendship more than he wants to admit. (This is also kinda why I think his actions at the end of chapter 5 were so crappy)

At the same time, I think he suffered from character assassination at that point. They needed Rook to do what he did to thematically fit the narrative and his role as the royal Hunstman. And they cared about that more than if it was something Rook would truly do. As much as I love twist and the story, I find myself having this complaint often. They’re more concerned about the overall narrative than what actually makes sense for the various characters. I could write an entire essay on this especially where Cater is concerned, with him and his interaction with the other characters and his place in the overall narrative. (Again a subject for another time)

On a less serious note, as far as romance goes, I’m reminded of a line from a very old Christmas movie called “White Christmas” where one of the main characters goes. "I'm not the marrying kind or the engaging kind, I'm more the I don't mind pushing my best friend into it but I'm scared stiff when I get anywhere close to myself kind" I can see Rook endlessly encouraging Vil to pursue his heart (With me it's him insisting to Vil he does have feelings for Cater and should give him a chance) But the idea of his own actual love affair terrifies him. He’d rather just watch other people fall in love. 

I do think he has several secret perches around campus that no one knows about. 

I also think he and Cater would be absolutely great and chaotic friends, that would strike fear into Vil’s heart. They both share a love of photography and him. I can just imagine Vil having to endure the two of them talking about him while he’s sitting right there lol. 

I also gave them an anonymous magicam account where they post pictures of student life on campus (Mostly taken by Rook, but some by Cater) 

I developed Rook’s Family for a fanfic I wrote a while ago. So some of this comes from that. I know if we ever get to meet his family this will all be obsolete but its still fun to work with. I also won't go into to much detail here, because his Family could be an entire post on its own. (Just like Cater’s) 

His father works directly for Leona’s brother (And previously their father) as head of Royal Wildlife Management in the Savanah, a position his family has inherited for generations after they made the move there.  A position his eldest brother will inherit one day. His eldest Sister I made a traveling exotic vet. 

Rook himself is a fraternal twin. Reinette (the name I gave her) also has magic but doesn’t attend NRC because it (appears) to be an all male school. But she acts much like Rook did in his Savanaclaw days. Longer hair, sunbaked skin, and loaded with freckles. 

His younger brother I named Florent and idolizes his big brother, and is the only other Hunt child to have magic. He’s set to go to NRC as a first year when Rook is a 4th year. 

His youngest sister and the baby of the family is Fleur, and shares Rook’s and their father’s love of theater, albeit for the more technical side, and also has more than a slight obsession with Vil.

At his core, I don’t think Rook really feels like he fits in anywhere. Pomefiore and Vil have come as close as it gets for him, but it’s still not right. He’s restless, and is still searching for his “home”. 

As an adult, I’d given him the profession of a wildlife photographer (French Steve Irwin is how I described it) It’s something I think he’s well suited for. 

That’s probably enough for now, thank you if you made it this far ^^

[cr0wprince]

Why does Google think I’m looking for jobs or how to go school when I try to research how things work in Japan? I promise it’s just to know how to imagine things in my silly little fictional fantasies.

[petruchio]

i get why a lot of people don’t like reading mockingjay as much as the rest of the trilogy, but i think it’s actually so essential to understanding the central thesis of the entire hunger games series.

the whole point of the hunger games is this: all human life is valuable, and artificial divisions between people keep them weak. and the only way out is radical love.

and this is something that is literally echoed again and again in the books. take, for example, gale. why is gale such an interesting, complex, and yet reprehensible character? yes, it’s because at the end katniss cannot separate his bomb from prim’s death. but it’s deeper than that. why does gale build the bomb in the first place? it’s because gale doesn’t see every human life as valuable. gale is willing to kill people and to deny them their humanity simply because they are his “enemy.” so, there’s the obvious example of his willingness to blow up the nut with everyone inside and his disregard for the human casualty. and the people in the nut aren’t even from the captiol, he just wants to do it because the stereotype of that district is their allegiance to the capitol, and gale hates that.

but there’s another scene, also in mockingjay, that i think goes under-discussed which is his view of katniss’ prep team. when katniss finds her prep team literally imprisoned in 13, she’s horrified and upset by the conditions they are in. but gale isn’t. and he’s confused about why katniss would care for them! her response is to say that it’s because they cried when she went to the quarter quell. and gale is like, “sure, but they’re still from the captiol.” and this argument is so important. because katniss argues that the prep team deserves to be treated as human beings, and when he presses her on why, she basically says because they treated her as a human being. but gale can’t see that--all he can see is that they’re from the capitol, and he’s confused about why katniss should care.

and this is, so crucially, what katniss learns in the hunger games. she realizes that she doesn’t want to kill the other tributes just because they are from the other districts. she hates the fact that they have turned her against people who are, in their core, just like her. frightened children who have been manipulated to kill other children against their will, all selected based on their district, a social divide that has literally been invented and imposed on them.

and another just absolutely essential thing to understand here is that peeta knows this all along. we talk at length about how peeta’s defining trait is his kindness. but what’s so important about peeta’s kindness is how it transcends any boundaries of social class or social division.

when peeta gives katniss the bread, it’s important to note that just before he does that, we hear his mother talking about “seam brats pawing through her trash.” peeta’s mother buys into the social divides in district twelve--she views herself as better than someone from the seam simply because of her standing as a merchant, and reinforces these class divides by refusing to extend the simplest humanity to a child from the seam. she literally refuses to feed a starving child on the grounds of a social divide, within a world that already has divided them into districts. but peeta doesn’t see it like this. peeta refuses to deny katniss food just because she’s from the seam. peeta gives her kindness. peeta gives her humanity.

and he does the same thing in the games! his entire first interview, the dramatic king focuses, not on the games, but on his genuine love and adoration for another tribute. how radical! to refuse to subscribe to a system which asks him to hate her? to want to kill her? and to instead confess his love for her? sure, katniss ends up being the mockingjay. katniss might have held out the berries. but peeta in that moment is the one who sets the rebellion in motion. peeta is the one who refuses to engage in the senseless hatred of someone who “should” be his enemy. instead, he reaches out in love.

and it all culminates at the end of mockingjay, when katniss votes for the capitol hunger games to gain coin’s trust. and peeta is utterly horrified by this. because he can’t understand how she could have been through everything he has been through and not understand that continuing to senselessly kill human beings (children!!) for some kind of revenge just reinforces these binary modes of thinking. but the thing is--katniss DOES see that. and when coin proposes it, that’s when she knows she has to stop her. because coin, like gale, like peeta’s mother, and like so others many around her, is still buying into these divides. is still viewing the captiol as the enemy. is still viewing a human life as expendable. 

and there’s a quote in mockingjay that i think lays this out pretty explicitly. katniss says, after she kills coin and is recovering, point blank: “they can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.” she’s realized the crux of the entire hunger games--that manipulating us to hate and kill our fellow humans, that drawing up divisions between people because of where they live and what they produce, that believing that hating someone on the basis of any of these is justification for their death, is all a farce. it’s all a distraction. it’s all pretend. she says, in the same chapter: “no one benefits in a world where these things happen.” not the districts. not the capitol. not the victors. no one.

the entire arc of the hunger games is really just about katniss catching up to what peeta has known from the start. katniss overcoming all the manipulation from those around her, all the glitz and glamour, all the artificial social and class divides to see what peeta has seen clearly from the start: love.

[melina-ya]

What they’re like as boyfriends;

Characters; Takashi Mitsuya, Chifuyu Matsuno, Keisuke Baji.

Warnings; Baji. Just him being him.

Takashi Mitsuya;

He’s a sweetheart.

He’s responsible, reliable and always busy.

From school to the sewing club to taking care of his younger sisters to Toman meetings. He’s always busy.

Of course he wouldn’t want to change anything about his life, he loves the people around him and usually doesn’t mind his responsibilities. But he’s still human.

After another long day he can’t wait to just go to your house and lay in your arms in peace.

When he’s with you time passes so slowly, he can finally relax. Give this man a break istg.

You could be the most energetic person in the world, but when he’s with you? You’re completely calm. He just has kinda effect on people.

In his free time that he doesn’t have he loves making clothes for you. He’s got your entire measurements memorized and everything.

On dates it’s the cutest thing to see his little blush when he notices your choice of clothing. One of his best designs.

He absolutely loves it. You’re the most beautiful person in the world in his opinion, but with his clothes on you’re just on an entirely different level.

Meeting his friends for the first time was definitely,, an experience.

When you met Mitsuya you never would’ve guest he’s the second division captain of the Tokyo Manji gang. You didn’t mind, of course, but it was still a shocker.

His friends tho? An even bigger shocker.

How can gang members with a reputation like Toman be so- i don’t know.

You thought Mitsuya was an exception, that he was one of the good ones, but they’re all so,,, nice? Except for Baji he’s just questionable.

Long story short, you get along great with his friends, especially Hakkai, which is super important to him.

Also super important is that you get along with his family. He’s such a family person.

Chifuyu Matsuno;

Dating this man is like living in a shoujo manga.

He’s read so many, he knows exactly what to do. From kabedon to pulling you back by your wrist. Sometimes you really feel like you’re stuck in a romance story.

That however doesn’t mean he won’t get flustered. Every action he takes is being escorted by a rosy blush on his cheeks. He acts so defensive about it too.

Doesn’t like drama tho. I’m mangas there’s always so much going on, there’s no need for that. Wouldn’t want you to find a second male lead lmao.

This man is your own personal Wikipedia page. He knows everything. Every information that he gets is saved in his brain like it’s a database especially made for you.

Tell him your favorite flowers once and your entire house will be full of them.

He loves giving flowers.

It’s a great way to show appreciation in his opinion. He gets a little shy sometimes so he just gives you flowers instead of talking.

Is a romantic and will take you on the cutest dates ever.

For example, one time he took you to a cat cafe. He loves cats and hopefully so do you. Watching you play with the cats was the most adorable thing in the world for him.

But be warned, it wouldn’t be the first time to get your date crashed by a certain black haired menace.

‘Oh, ur’e on a date? Cute, anyways, so what movie are we watchin-?’ Kick him out. Now.

Loves showing you off.

Keisuke Baji;

Wow. You are in one hell of a ride.

He’s convinced committing arson together is the ideal kind of date. Kinda is.

Doesn’t understand why you’re so against it. It’s so romantic, an act of love. Obviously.

Would call you nicknames like ‘baby cakes’, ‘sugarplum’ and so on.

In public too, knowing how embarrassed you get afterwards.

Absolutely loves teasing, and behind the bad boy act he gets flustered pretty easily as well.

He’ll turn his face away from you to try and hide his adorable blush. It’s so cute. Would never admit to it tho.

May not always show it, but values you a lot. Sometimes at night he stays awake wishing you were laying next to him and literally can’t fall asleep for hours.

His life wouldn’t be the same without you. He knows that very much.

His love language is physical touch. Words aren’t really his thing, so he shows his affection through hand holding, kissing and cuddling.

Whenever you make each other promises, you always make pinky promises. Always.

Let’s you bread his hair into cute hairstyles. He goes full tsundere mode and denies they look spectacular on him. Secretly enjoys it, and your complements.

Also always Carries one extra hair tie for you.

Toman always asked themselves why you’re with him, then they witnessed first hand how whipped this man is for you.

He’s canonly the best husband in tr and it shows.

His mom absolutely adores you. She invites you over to dinner at least 3 times a week.

Don’t break his heart, please. </3

Overall experience: 9,9/10. minus 0,1 cuz of ep 21.

a/n; thank you for reading.

[sinnersandsaints-linwrites]

Sinners and Saints

You live in Deadwood, an old town forgotten by the world, as it is isolated by thick forests, a river and a mountain. It is one of those places that trap their residents, if you don’t get out as youth, you will likely never leave. It also has the reputation for attracting the weird and morally questionable. You had the misfortune of being born here, not only that — you work here as a detective. Granted, you only got the job a year ago or so, but you are the authority.

Now, many things start to happen all at once. Your best friend is acting more and more strange, an attractive and charming stranger moves into the town and starts to fund the mayor’s projects and takes an interest in your division. Your criminal informant is keeping secrets from you. You’re assigned a partner — one that would rather claw your eyes out than say ‘hi.’ A old friend from your past comes rocking your world in the most unpleasant way, and as strange murders start taking place — a vigilante comes to clean up the streets by any means necessary. The cherry on the top is when your captain orders you to take on a consultant on the case - the local psychic - whose first words to you make the whole world spin.

Customise your MC; gender, pronouns, sexuality (including asexuality and being aromantic), nickname, appearance (hair color, length, texture and style, eye color, skin tone, piercings, tattoos, scars, glasses, freckles, head covering) etc. Additionally: your MC can: be trans (fully transitioned, on different stages of transition, or not transitioned at all; with or without gender dysphoria), experience body dysmorphia; you can choose how the MC deals with immense stress (fidgeting, smoking) or if your MC feels uncomfortable with crowds. (and more to come)

Find the secrets of the newcomers and old friends from Deadwood.

Work the case of strange murders, with the help of unlikely allies.

Romance any of the seven characters, or make them your friends, rivals or enemies. (You can select the gender of each RO, and there are 2 polyamorous routes.)

Choose what kind of detective will you be; one who bends the rules, or follows them.

Discover the second side to your home town, one that you never saw before.

Uncover your own secret -- one you didn’t even know you had. 

Rated 18+ as it will feature themes of; violence, murder, torture, alcohol, mental health struggles, abuse (including references and mentions to child abuse), sexual themes (not explicit), depression, references and mentions of suicide (nothing graphic), dying, blood, sleep paralysis 

“Just looking at you makes me thirsty, Detective.”

Sasha is your new Criminal Informant. You met them as they were working the street. When you were arresting them, they flirted with you the entire time, and they continued doing so during the booking process, as well as when they were finally in their cell. As they complained on being bored, they suggested working for you as a criminal informant. You agreed, and now they help you stop the crimes in Deadwood. As they work the street, they see a lot of what is going on and their knowledge comes at a price. For now, it’s always been reasonable, but you couldn’t help but wonder — how long before they become hungry for more?

“You had my interest, love, but now you’ve got my attention.”

Sage came to Deadwood from a big city, officially for a change of scenery, unofficially the whole town gossips about the real reason why someone so attractive, educated and rich would choose Deadwood of all places as their home. Sage has a close relationship with both the mayor and police captain, as they invest in many city and police projects. Extremely charming and seductive, Sage is one of the hottest topics in town — and fate would have it that they are looking forward to meeting the Deadwood’s youngest detective.

“I can respect your fire, little feather, but mine will get you burned.”

Ariel is a vigilante, taking justice into their own hands. As judge, jury, and executioner they rip through the crime in Deadwood, using questionable methods to achieve their goals. Legally, you can not tie them to anything, and they know it. Whatever mission they have — they are willing to die and bleed for it, and do not care for any human aspect of life as they do it. They do seem to respect you to a certain level, or just ignore your existence, as long as you stay out of their way. But what if you don’t?

“I work alone, kitten, I don’t make any exceptions, not even for you.”

Khari is your most recent headache, as they are your new assigned partner, and new to Deadwood as a whole. You know nothing about them, and they don’t exactly make it an easy job to work with them, as they would rather fight you and everyone in their line of sight. They do not like you and make it very clear from the start that they do not care for a positive relation with you. They prefer to work alone, and tend to keep it that way. But, you wonder, if there’s a chance to change that?

“It is good to have a little magic on your side, is it not?”

Roan is local good-luck charm, and coincidentally your best friend and your first kiss. You attended high school together, and went to prom as a date, on which the kiss happened. Neither of you spoke about it, however, and continued to be just best friends. They are always there when you need them, always text back, pick up the call from you, and never turn down a hang out session. You’ve seen them date many people after high school, but no one ever stayed for long, as Roan would always say they are looking for ‘the one.’ You can’t help but wonder, how would things be if you became something more?

“You make me want to go feral, and I just might let it happen.”

Riven is your childhood best friend. They used to live in the house next to yours, and would always sneak into your garden to escape their home. You never found out what made them want to run away — they never told you, and you never saw their parents nor the inside of their house. As a child they were quiet, even submissive, always wanted to please you and be on your good side, loud noises and too-fast movement made them flinch. They were, however, restless and would not sit in one place at the time, always multitasking, fiddling with their fingers, taking things apart only to put them back together. They were fiercely loyal to you, as much so that they were suspended from school for beating up a person who bullied you. When you were both 14, they disappeared along with their parents. Did they move and never said goodbye? Did something more sinister happen?

“The only happy ending we will get will be after our death, Detective.”

Morgan is a consultant, and assists police on more ‘strange’ cases. Most people of Deadwood call them the ‘Psycho Kid’ and prefer to avoid all contact with them if it’s possible. You’ve heard stories about them, it’s impossible not to. That they died as a child and now have a permanent connection with the other side — so much so that their own mother abandoned them as soon as she could, too scared of her child to stay with them. That they live in a haunted house full of spirits, and talk to ghosts, even see them all around. You never witnessed them doing anything too suspicious, but then again, you never worked with them, yet.

PLAY THE GAME HERE

more under the cut! <3

Morgan - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post

Khari - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post

Ariel - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post

Roan - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post

Sage - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post 

Riven - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post

Sasha - Playlist - Character Introduction Post - Old Info Post

Detailed physical descriptions of ROs

Skin tone references for ROs

MASTERPOST - ASKS

MASTERPOST - TAGS

GUIDE FOR ASKS

Personal blog

Discord Server

[merscylilith]

Tenjiku's Characters Book

(Most of thesw i found in Twitter, so, i will give a credit and include their username on the picture)

Hint or what ? I never thought Sanzu would get along with other people (?) Hanma looks delicious btw.

Cutie Ran ,AAAAAAAAAAA. His braids !!! They are so cuteeeee. I was expecting Ran in ponytail while running, but jeez, he looks fabulous.

They are so wild ? As expected from Roppongi's Ruler. They are living in Roppongi, known for a party life city AND RICH RICH. Were their party really happened just like what have been pictured by fans in fanfic ? You know... but i dont think so, they probably want to invite random people from their gang and have some fun, from the infos of Rindou, the one that drink a lot and love being a Dj and want to be a club famous owner is Rindou, so, i think the party people is Rindou but got scolded by Ran because disturbed his peaceful life.

Haitanis might just have some fun with their gang, i cant imagine them with anyone other than their prescious gang. I got the vibes from them, that they only hanging out with someone that worth it. They are kinda have elite vibe.

Now, i see. It is Ran's idea for them looks urban and stylish. He love attention. We both like Yves Saint Laurent. He preferred living with modern lifestyle.

Rinnn, why you have to be so cute. So, he afraid of Ran because Ran kind of a moody person, that's so funny. He likes DJ and alcohol so, that would be understable for him want to have a club, a famous club. Roppongi is his favourite, he must be proud to be born in Roppongi. He drank an alcohol while Ran in dreamland, he is so naughty little boy, no wonder Ran got worried so much about him, that's make why he admired Kaku because Kaku is obedient little brother., that's cute.

Ran is passive person while Rindou is active person, Ran like being all by himself, and Rindou still in his youngest sibling moments.

Basically, me and Sanzu share a lot same thing. My blood type is AB, i like magenta pink , i like cheesecake too, i hate spicy too because it make me uncomfortable and fencing is for life. I decided to come in conclusion about Sanzu's behaviour. I did some analyze about him, he sweet, blunt and a bit naive (?) He mostly did everything that suit with his feelings and need. Just like my theory before, the Tokyo Revengers characters appreciate childhood friend more than bestfriend, which is happened between Sanzu and Baji. Sanzu is weird and clueless (?) He violent but naive. Not to mention his blood type is AB, which is considered as 4-Dimensional person in Japan ( or other country in Asia). I really wanted to know how Mikey furious about the hair. Sanzu didnt understand the weird thing he did.

What makes me really sad that Sanzu taking care of himself since he was kid, he learned everything all by himself by watching his surrounding. When he asked about hair treatment, it seems like he curious person that love to do thing that make him attracted, he got no one that cared or loving him as a good family member, Mikey got Shin and Emma, meanwhile, Baji has his mom to take care of him. He hate traitor but not Baji ? Because Baji is not a traitor. He leave Toman not betray, different from just like how Mucho did. Sanzu really value someone that understand and see the worth in him.

The way he said "im going to miss you" to Baji *sob*sob*, he must really miss Baji. (Ps : he really did use soap to wash his hair and became mess, he's so prescious, he trusted people easily when he got comfortable, just like how he with Mucho) i can see that he really adored Mucho as his 5th division Caption but he chose what he loved the most.

Haru, honey, tell me you were joking to give Mikey a wrapped hair.

This kid fought people 24/7 BUT at least, he beat some deliquents. Kakucho is the one that invited all the Tenjiku member, Izana might the one who command it, and use the exvuse , " yoi are my servenat so, be useful" , thrn, i can see the bickering between them. Please, it's so funny how Izana knew Haitanis want the attention from the crowd, and he never liked it, because they are typical of competitive in the one who looks "different" in the crowd. That's the reaaon why most of Tenjiku comes with different style. I think Wakui doesnt want to give us Kakucho's birthday because he want to keep the flows that Kaku threw every information about himself.

Izana whipped out his ass is the most funniest, oh my, i rrally love them being together.

Well, everything is a fun for Hanma. Why Izana and Kaku always at the top worst when it comes to "money", i means, Izana literally the leader and can be rich at the same time, not to mention his executives bring a lot benefit towards him, but on the other side, it shows that Izana didnt care about money at all.

Help? They cant live without teasing Kaku at least for once. If i were there, i will definitly did the same to Kaku, he really easy to tease.

Haru's birthday 3rd July 1990, Cancer ??? I like most of my cancer friend, they are so great to be with.

[dommelody]

this fanfic is written while considering all of the characters being adults in another time line where everyone is living a peaceful life so don't come at me with that talk about "OMG THEY'RE MINORS" if u do I'll slap u with the slipper that im wearing lmao , anyways as if u see im hella lazy so im not that active in here, moreover i got alot of exams those weeks but finally im free for like 1 week ? two ? idk for niw im free af,so if someone got some ideas don't hesitate and send it to okay?(especially those hawt characters who seem to be submissive and breedable lol) i think there were few of u who send me some requests sorry for not replying I'll try to respond if ur idea is hella good hehu now even if u want to discuss anything about any topic about anime and stuff just ask haha need sone friends out here *crying while eating banana * shoot that was sus lmao ...

then~ enjoy ~ ♡

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cw: sub!draken , sub!mitsuya , dom!reader, public sex...

"master they might hear us~" mitsuya said with a shaking voice while all you can hear in the restroom were his moans and the lewd sounds u make while fucking him rough which were all covered with music ..

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tomorrow is a holiday so all the gang's division's captains decided to have dinner at a famous restaurant so you decided to go and have fun ,fun in ur own way♡

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when you entered the restaurant there was a big table beside the window, everyone was there and luckily u found a sit right in front of draken and mitsuya ,after u took your seat everyone started eating, laughing and drinking.. both of draken and mitsuya were forced to drink since it was a special dinner to celebrate pah-chin's marriage ..after the talk and all everyone was under the alcohol's spell,some slept and other got to the bathroom ,you started to get bored however seeing both draken and mitsuya fighting the urge to sleep was adorable,then you decided to tease them a little bit,you slided your leg that was covered under the table between draken's thighs reaching his dick then you started to move it up and down until he suddenly hid his face on the table ,with a heavy panting he whispered :"w-we can't do it here t-they will hear u-ahhhng ♡"

"since when did i have to ask for your opinion on each thing i do?,hmmm?" with that cold look on your face draken got red like a tomato ,"look at you draken,what should we do if someone sees you now at this state, do you even know what kind of face you're making~?".

with all that embarrassment and shame he said while trying to stop his moans from coming out:"what are you talking about, something like this is nothi-hmm♡",you shut his mouth with your hand"as i thought you don't get it don't you?right now all i can see is a slutty look that begs for my touch,but you know what? at first i was gonna be nice and gentle but now you will have to endure this erection of yours until we go back home,of course touching yourself is forbidden ♡",he didn't even try to reject your order he just hide his face on the table and started whining like a puppy.

a few minutes later, the other members came back from the restroom, then smiley asked:"did draken sleep already? that's rare!! ,alcohol usually don't affect him easily ,well we drank too much i guess haha,how about you mitsuya?"

"well,me? i'm a bit sleepy and-hnnn-"

"bro you okay? your face is so red "

"i-i'm okay hehe,i suddenly got a stomachache"

"is that so? then be careful if it gets worse just go home "

"y-yeah t-thanks"

however,probably no one was able to know what was going on in there ,surely it wasn't a stomachache but in fact it was your fault,you started touching his clothed dick with your feet ,moreover you unzipped his pants and started teasing his bare skin down there,mitsuya was always your obedient puppy,unlike draken who sometimes rebels on order you give him ,mitsuya will seek for your praise more than anything else .

then you whispered while covering your mouth from smiley who was two seats away from you ,"don't worry sweetheart i didn't forget you ,so i'm giving you all the attention you want ♡." then he smiled with blush all over his face then whispered back :"hng,d-do as you like ,master♡",as soon as he said that you stood up and said:"mitsuya you don't look well so at least let me sit beside you ,so I'll be able to check on you faster that way if you got fever "

"yea i think that will help"smiley said without knowing what was even going on ,poor soul lol.

there was a seat between draken and mitsuya so you sat there and started touching his dick with your hand gently and with the other hand you pretended to check on him by putting your hand on his forehead in front of smiley,then u said :"smiley i think i should take mitsuya to the restroom he's sweating alot ".

"yea please do , i would like to help but im already wasted lol"

"haha thats because u drank to much,you-,oh hes asleep haha,hello? yea hes absolutely wasted lol,so how about we go sweetheart ?"

while smiley slept the other members were already gone everyone got plans for the rest of the night so you were free to speak with mitsuya there without worries ~♡...

u turned to mitsuya telling him to stand up to go to the restroom but we absolutely missed something, well before i started speaking with smiley about going to the restroom ,i left mitsuya's pants open didn't i ?,while his hard dick out ofcourse what to do ?hmmmm?

as expected he was a blushing mess even though hes ur obedient puppy, walking the way to the restroom with his dick out will be hella embarrassing ,btw mitsuya was wearing an overcoat so u got an idea to tease him even more..

"mitsuya come here, if you stick to me with ur closed coat they wont notice right ?,come here sweetheart ,or~ do u want to be left alone like draken over there ?''

after hearing that mitsuya stood up and started walking while sticking his dick thats only covered by the coat behind u which is almost rubbing ur buttcheek ,just imagine him walking shyly behind u panting like crazy and all .....what a show 🖤

u got to the restroom and quickly found a stall and closed the door then,"mitsuya suck my dick,will u ?"

with this order he turned red but on the same time his body was honest because as soon as u showed your dick he started leaking precum, "enjoying the view from down there aren't u ~"

while he was on his knees u slapped him with ur dick getting a lustful look from him then u grabbed his head and started fucking his throat roughly ,quickly without mercy,then finished inside his mouth,while his face was a mess with ur cum he was panting and letting out some moans ,then when u realized .. u said :"pfft,seriously mitsuya ? did u come untouched while i fucked your throat?,i guess you're on heat lol ,what a slut ~♡,well unfortunately i didn't bring condoms so i can't give u what u want sweetheart,so let-??, mitsuya~, i see~ u are definitely in heat~"

after being told that u cant do it there he sat on the toilet while spreading his legs to u while getting out a butt plug from his hole then as soon as it was out his hole were leaking with some lotion he seems to have been preparing his hole for his master how naughty~♡.

"mitsuya u gave me an idea , do u know what u got urself into? " , then u got down alittle bit and whispered on his ear "im gonna fuck u so hard, ill fill u up with my cum and then since we're doing it raw ,we can't leave ur hole leaking with cum in from of others dont we?,sooo,we're going to plug your ass with all of my cum inside without wasting a single drop. and we will have u walk in public and in front of our friends with that hot cum inside ur belly ~,don't worry if we get lucky maybe u will get pregnant Haha♡ ",with u provoking him he started whining like an impatient puppy while squeezing his wet hole ,then u gave him what he wanted ,u slide ur dick in one go inside him,getting the lewdest look from mitsuya " master im so full with yours ♡,fill me up more pleaaseeee ♡"

"mitsuya you're definitely drunk ,but well im happy to see this side of u hehe,then lets get serious and finish it quickly before smily wakes up,what about draken ?,hes definitely jealous right now getting even harder while imagining us fucking in the restroom, haha maybe he came just from imagining about that♡"

u grabbed mitsuya's thighs then started fucking him dumb going in and out like there is no tomorrow then u leaned down kissing him to make him lower his moans which were filling the restroom, u tried then to pull from the kiss thinking that he needed some seconds to breath ,but then mitsuya suddenly grabbed u back ," master if u dont kiss me im afraid that ill get louder,ahnn-♡"

" i see~,our mitsuya cant help it but to feel so good when i fuck him roughly~♡♡"

then u held him up and made him face the wall after that u fucked him from behind while the lewd sounds are filling the restroom...

but i guess that wasnt a problem to worry about since the music was loud

then, u picked up the pace even rougher and faster while mitsuya was a drooling mess while his eyes rolled back from the intense sex u are having ,then u bited his neck leaving a kiss mark on it then u came inside of him . as soon as u finished, u said smirking ," haaa,that felt amazing sweetie ,but i think u shouldn't waste a drop of my cum ,right?, now show me what a good boy you're and plug it urself ♡"

as soon as u said that mitsuya grabbed the plug and put his knee on the closed toilet then he lifted his ass up then started inserting it while panting like crazy ,half of it was of course because of the intense sex u had but the other half was because u were staring intensely at him plugging himself just the thought of being seen by u while touching himself turned him on..

then to avoid accidents like having someone enter the restroom while u were in there u helped him dress up and then quickly got out safely hehe♡..

"hey guys u are lateeeee,heyy i think draken has fever he was mumbling alone with a low voice while panting heavily ,hes definitely in pain having a high fever,i tried to help him but he was weirdly agressive and stopped me right away ,well sorry guys i have to go angry is waiting for me outside sooo take care~"

u answered:" yea u too be careful on ur way home, and dont worry I will take a goo~d care of draken "

after smiley left draken lifted up his head to u , damn that hungry look on his face with drool from his red lips~ ,when he saw u, he let out some low panting sounds as if he was whining like a puppy waiting for attention ,then he grabbed u down from his sit and kissed u a real quick but deep kiss :"master ur so cruel having ur way with mitsuya while letting me here alone suffering from this erection",then u leaned down to reach his ear then whispered:"did u have fun while imagining lewd stuff about us ? hmm ,ur soo naughty draken " then u bit his ear ,while squeezing his left nipple which was covered with his shirt ,then he let out a low moan and as soon as he realized something ,he hid his face down and told u with a cracked voice :" u c..can go alone i..ill foll..ow u after i p..pay t..the bills,hmm♡", as soon as he finished talking , u sat beside him and slid ur hand below the table to quickly insert it down his underwear then as u thought he came from just those touches from u..:" u really keep surprising me teddy bear, pfft u came just from that haha, how can anyone believe that our strongest vice president is a slut seeking my touch,how cute~♡,well u will have to walk all~ the way home with that underwear of yours which is a mess with ur cum,well dont worry when we get home u wont need it anyway ~,i wont let u sleep tonight~"

then u were about to get out of the restaurant which was luckily almost getting ready to close up ,since there's not alot of customers there ,u payed the bills while mitsuya and draken sticking to u from behind

then the worker there noticed :"umm are they okay their faces are red ,maybe fever ? "

"yea i think so also they drank too much thats why haha ,right ? draken , mitsuya?"

while customers were all gone u started touching their butt from behind while speaking with the worker,then they said while trying to smile to them :"ye..yes w..we dran..k too much hehe"

" i see please take care then , i think u should take some medicines too, to get better, please come back again~"

then u replied :"yea,then we will be going, we will come back again~"

then u lifted ur hand and stopped teasing them then they quickly followed u,well it was night so i think no one will notice right ?

"hey , umm.. i mean what did u do with mitsuya ?"

"hmm ~ ,why don't u ask him then ?, hehe"

then he turned to him ,previously ,he didn't focus on mitsuya that much, but now seeing mitsuya's lewd face , that red face which were luckily hidden by the night's dark sky,he got it right away..

"next time don't let me alone like that i was lonely and scared ,that piece of shit smiley freaked the shit out of me ,when he stood up trying to check on me"

"damn we should drink together more often ur so drunk who thought that I'll get to see this honest and cute side u ,haha but well, that must've been scary , sorry maybe i pushed u too far but you know that was a punishment so its normal, maybe I'll reward u when we get home for finishing the punishment as i ordered, well ,u came even though i told u not to tho~lol"

"SHUT UP, WILL YA "

"but ur blushing ~", "IM NOT"

then you passed a hot night with ur precious partners, however, that'll be another story to tell♡..

[m-jelly]

Hi Jelly!

Can I request a oneshot of Captain Levi Ackerman x Anne Boleyn! reader who is bold, passionate, kind and intelligent, and speaks her opinions without a sh*t. Scenario: The Reader came from a noble, well-off family, and decided to run away when she heard that her father and uncle decided to used her to seduce the king and gain some political advantages, but she refused stating that she would rather die to be the mistress of the king rather than marrying a man she loved.

So she ran away from home, and decided to join the Survey Corps to which she ends up capturing everyone's attention including Captain Levi due to her bold, brazen & kind-hearted but witty and intelligent personality.

You can end how it ends, thank you :))

Sure thing. I'm going to contain a little information page about Anne Boleyn so people know a little bit more about my country's history. I will also be changing a few things with the plot, seeing as there is one King in AOT, people aren't allowed to get close to him. So, it'll be probably a rich merchant instead.

@kenkopanda-art Thank you, he's beautiful <3

Choosing a different path.

Pairing: Levi x Reader

Genre and tags: Canon AU, romance, falling in love, time skips, becoming a couple, being a couple, growing old together.

Concept: Sick of your father treating you like you're more of an object than a person, you decide to chase a dream of making a difference. You train hard in the main core, then sign up to the scouts at a much older age than most do (usually 15, but you're much older). You join during the time Levi loses his friends to the titan. You both don't click at first, but the way you are around people gets you noticed by the outspoken Levi. Levi helps you control your temper a little as you bond over the years. Eventually, you both fall in love, but it takes time.

First opinions

Levi watched you as you talked with a small group of scouts. He frowned a little at your outgoing personality. He liked that you could throw around a few dirty jokes, but you had this pent up anger inside you and it kept leaking out. He knew it was to do with your family background, but it was really none of his business.

He'd been watching you for a bit, mainly because you were confident and you happily put yourself in a lot of situations that others would run away from. He knew that you were probably going places and likely be a top scout in Erwin's division because you were a leader.

Levi stood up when you approached him. "Tch, brat."

You frowned at him. "Grumpy ass."

"You do know I'm a superior, right?"

You shrugged. "Then act like one."

He followed you as you walked. "I could discipline you for that."

You turned and walked backwards. "Then do it."

"Cleaning duty, for two months."

You stopped. "Two months? Are you serious?"

He walked past you. "You showed me attitude and you challenged me." He looked back at you. "Careful what you say, you're not at home with daddy with a silver spoon in your mouth. You're a soldier now, so act like it. It's about being a team, not a selfish little shit who wanted to rebel against daddy and now feels like they have a fucking right to rebel here against everyone."

You sighed. "Yes, sir."

He stopped and sighed. "Look." He turned to you. "I know you had a shit time with your dad controlling everything, but you joined the military and the scouts which are full of controlling people. You come here for order, to be disciplined, to work as a team and to save lives. You have to remember though that everyone is here for a reason and you are not the main character. Got it?"

You nodded. "Yes, sir."

"If you wanna make your mark here, don't do it through these means. Make a difference to people, work hard, work as a team and help others."

You gulped hard and felt a thick lump there. "I understand, sir. I'll do my best."

"Good, now get to cleaning."

Getting along

Levi smiled a tiny bit as you laughed hard at his joke while you were scrubbing the floors. Due to you being put on cleaning duty for two months, you'd been getting to know the Captain and he was getting to know you. You both had a lot more in common than you first thought.

Levi was getting on with you more because you were changing. After his comment to you, you'd been very proactive. You took on a lot of shifts and helped train the other scouts in your group. You supported your superiors with their paperwork and did what you could.

You packed the cleaning things away and sighed. "Is that okay?"

Levi looked everything you did over and nodded. "Good work."

You smiled in pride. "Thanks."

"Come on, we're going to have some tea."

You followed him. "Really?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

"I'd like to, sir."

He nodded and led you to his office. He made tea for you and him and put it all down on the coffee table. "Sit." He looked over at you. "Tch, you look like you can't shit. We're here to socialise, not a Captain and cadet, okay?"

You relaxed a little. "Thanks, sir."

He handed you a cup of tea. "Levi."

Your hands hugged your cup. "Thank you, Levi."

"Pleasure." He sat back and sipped his tea. "How are you getting on with everyone?"

"Good, better. I took your advice and I'm not so much of an aggressive ass." You looked over at Levi. "You should give it a try."

He snorted a laugh. "Funny."

You smiled a little. "You're a nice guy, you know?"

"People will think you're weird for saying that."

You hummed a laugh. "Why?"

"People don't find me attractive and nice."

You smiled. "Never said anything about attractive."

He blushed. "Tch, you know what I mean."

You downed your tea. "Well, if we're talking about attractiveness, then I think you're very attractive, handsome actually." You poured yourself another cup. You sat back and smiled at him. "You're a lot nicer than you think."

"Most people are scared of me, or they think the sun shines out of my ass."

You leaned and looked at his bum. "I don't see it."

"Brat."

You smiled a little. "That's me." You sighed. "Do you lash out at people because you're scared of them getting close, and being close means the greater the loss?"

He thought about your words for a moment. "I guess."

"Besides, it better to let people in and enjoy the time you had with them, instead of question what you missed."

He frowned a little. "What are you? Some feelings doctor?"

You laughed. "No, but advice is advice. Take it or leave it."

There for each other

Levi limped down the hall and only had one person in mind he needed to see. He'd just lost his squad to the female titan and his ankle was fucked thanks to him helping Mikasa. He felt like he was falling apart, but there was only one person in the world who could comfort him.

He lightly knocked on your door and opened it. He called your name and smiled a little. "Hey."

You looked up at Levi and gave him a pained smile. "Hey. Come on in."

He limped over and sat on the sofa. He let out a sad sigh. "You and Petra were best friends, right?"

You nodded as you fought tears. "Yeah." You frowned and cleared your throat. "I'm sorry for your loss. You had an incredible team."

"I did."

You turned your head away from Levi as you cried quietly. "S-Sorry."

Levi placed his hand on your back. "Don't be sorry. You have every right to feel this way."

You turned to Levi. "They deserved better, they did."

"I agree."

"Can I hug you?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

He lifted his head as your moved yours to just under his chin and nuzzled. He blushed as you held him and softly cried. He rubbed your back and sniffed back tears. He let himself grieve with you, he let himself feel the pain of loss. He closed his eyes and thought of his squad.

You pulled back after a while and sniffed. "I'll make us a cup of tea."

"Thanks."

You cleared your throat as you made a pot. "How's your ankle?"

He stretched his leg out. "Pretty shit."

You walked over with the tea. "Shit huh? Well, if it makes you feel any better at least it matches you."

Levi stared at you. "Are you calling me shit?"

You laughed and put the tray down. "Just lightening the mood."

He hummed a laugh. "Good joke."

You handed him a cup of tea. "You out of commission for a while then?"

"Yeah."

You smiled a little. "You'll bounce back. You're strong."

He looked down into his tea. "Strong..."

You leaned over and kissed his shoulder. "Yeah, strong."

Levi blushed a little. "Tch, you suck at aiming."

"What?"

He gulped. "You missed my cheek."

You leaned close and kissed his cheek. "Better?"

He nodded shyly. "Much."

Becoming a couple

Levi gulped hard and gave himself a little pep talk. He nodded to himself and walked right over to you as you sat on the wall looking out at the view the scout base had. He couldn't help but admire you in the light of the setting sun.

He sat down next to you and cleared his throat. "Evening."

You smiled at Levi. "Evening."

He shuffled a little. "About last night."

You laughed. "It happens Levi, people do randomly kiss others when they've had a few to drink."

He gulped hard. "Thing is, I wasn't drunk. I was sober and it wasn't random."

You looked over at Levi. "Meaning?"

"Meaning, the kiss was intentional."

You locked eyes with Levi. "So, you wanted to kiss me and you kissed me."

"Yes."

You moved closer. "Do you want to kiss me again?"

He nodded. "Yes."

You took the lead and pressed your lips softly against his. You smiled when he exhaled through his nose like his whole body relaxed. You hummed when he slid his hand along your cheek and deepened the kiss. Levi jumped off the wall and faced you. He stood between your legs and tangled his fingers in your hair. He pulled you closer and kissed you again. His tongue moved with yours as passion filled him.

He pulled back and panted. "I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me?"

You nodded a little and smiled. "Yes. Do you?"

"Yes."

Leaving the scouts

You put the last of your things in your bag before turning to Levi. You smiled a little at him. "It feels weird leaving the scouts."

He hummed and grabbed your biggest bag. "Yeah, you ran away from your family to be here, yet now you're leaving."

You hugged yourself with one arm. "I wish I could stay, but after getting injured during the Shiganshina retake, I have to leave."

Levi stared at you as he remembered how you looked with fresh burns on your skin. He stared at the bandage on your neck and knew the extent of the damage done to you. He was surprised you were alive. He still thought you were the most beautiful woman in the world to him. It wasn't your choice to leave, but in fact, you were told to leave due to being too hurt.

Levi wrapped his arms around you and held you close. "I love you. You know that, right?"

You wrapped your arms around him and cried a little. "Yeah, I know."

"I love you so much."

You sniffed a little. "I love you too." You gripped his back. "Thank you, for not giving up on me."

He pulled back a little to look you in the eyes. "I would never give up on you." He leaned closer and kissed you. "Come on, let's move you into your new home."

You sniffed and grabbed your lightest bag. "Yeah."

He walked with you through the base with people's eyes following you. He glared at the people who stared because he knew they just wanted to stare at the girl with burns. He wanted to protect you and make you feel beautiful because to him you were. He loved every inch of you. Having burns from titans and living was rare, so the fascination with you was going to be a long one, maybe for life.

You unlocked the front door of your cottage and let Levi in. "I was thinking about getting a dog and a cat, you know, for company. The cat can help keep the mouse population down and the dog can keep me protected."

Levi frowned. "I can do all that."

You laughed as you put your bags down. "You can't always be here. You are still a member of the scouts, so you're needed with them."

"You need me."

You sat on the arm of your sofa. "I do, but you're the best chance the scouts have at winning."

He walked up to you and kissed you. "I just want you to say you need me."

You smiled a little. "I need you, Levi Ackerman. I need you. I will always need you." You cupped his face and smiled. "Will you stay with me tonight? I haven't slept alone in years because me and you have always been together."

He held your hands. "I'll stay. I'll make dinner too. I made sure they stocked up your place."

You smiled as you watched Levi get food things out. You giggled a little. "I like this view. Makes me think we're a married couple."

Levi hummed. "Well, maybe we should do it. We should get married."

You smiled a little. "I'd like that. Only if you mean it."

"Oh, I mean it, Mrs Ackerman."

After the war

Levi leaned on his walking stick as he walked out into the garden. He smiled at his dog sleeping with his cat sleeping on the dog's back. He hummed a laugh, then looked over at you with your arms on show meaning he could see the burns that had healed up.

Levi frowned when he heard cooing. He leaned around and saw his baby strapped to your chest and wide awake. "Thought you were supposed to be asleep."

You looked down at your baby. "Hey, your daddy is right! You're supposed to be sleeping."

"Why don't I take them? You're working hard."

You stood up and sighed. "I was just finishing anyway. I'll put them in their outdoor bed." You unstrapped your baby and lay them in the bouncing bed outside. "There you bounce away little one."

Levi smiled down at his kid squealing with laughter as they bounced. "Beautiful." He looked up at you. "Just like you."

You wrapped your arms around his neck and kissed him. "You're so handsome."

"Look at me."

"I am."

He sighed. "My face is messed up."

You kissed along his scar. "I see a handsome man in front of me. You love me with my burns, and I love you with your scars."

He hummed a laugh. "I guess you're right."

You helped him to sit in his chair before sitting across his lap. You let out a long sigh as you cuddled up to him. "I love you."

"I love you too." He squeezed you. "What do you think about having another baby?"

You kissed your husband's cheek. "I would love another."

"Perfect."

[pawapoppet]

How much Reigen and Mob's relationship means obviously shapes up MP100, but I can't stop thinking about how that is shown in the show, storytelling wise. Their two-sided bond highlights kindness and valuing each other's whole person, flawed or not; and the structure in which it's written is masterful, like peeling an onion and sobbing at each layer of realization and enlightenment

Starting with the 7th Division arc, in the flashback where Reigen told mob "the truth behind one's charm is kindness. be a good person, that's all", it's shown how much Reigen means to Mob, how his words are literally roots of not only Mob's virtues and nature, but also the series' standpoint. It's foundation for Mob's 1000% gratitude for his mentor as well as Mob's growth into his current self.

And then comes Separation arc where we learn, from the same flashbacks from Reigen's point of view this time, how much Mob means to Reigen in return. As Reigen believes he's still 'nothing' despite yearning to become 'something', Mob shows that his true value lies in kindness - what makes his shishou a Good Person. From the moment Reigen could've just chased the weird kid away from his office, but he chose to give the troubled kid advice purely out of convenience, out of his own kindness. The student is literally returning the lesson to his mentor, but in a different context. They teach each other to be kind, to value that in other people and in one another.

But are they done teaching and learning - no!! In the very manga finale and Confession arc as we know it, Reigen once again reaffirms Mob the very thing he was taught in separation arc, except a little different - that everyone has two sides to him and Mob can learn to accept both of his, no matter how terrible he considers '???%' or his power to be. Just like how Mob accepted and valued both of Reigen's. In addition he also says, 'even without me, you can do it. Accept yourself!' Once again reminding Mob of what he said in that press conference - "you've grown up so much. Even without my guidance, you'll be okay on your own."

MP100 began with their relationship and ended with it. They grew up together but also on their own. The writing's very coherent and built upon previous parts - you thought they've learnt, but then they even learn more and grow into more. Anyway I love character development and Mob Psycho changed my life

[iredreamer]

Can I request you do an analysis of the last scene in season 2 episode 6? Where Anne is panicking because she thinks Ann is going to leave her for a man - as has happened in the past - And Ann reassures her that she’s not going anywhere with a gentle caress.

such a sincere moment and the scene makes me want to celebrate how far we have come as a society now that lesbians can have kids together (not that it’s very accessible for everyone), and legally get married (in most countries, we def have a long way to go still). On top of being such a beautiful moment between Anne and Ann!, they deserve endless amounts of kudos for the part they played in blazing a trail for lesbians today. I really loved this episode.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your breakdown/thoughts on the scene if you have a moment! Def the best GJ blog out there!

Okay, let's do it, let’s break it down!!!

First off I wanna start saying that that scene is long 6 minutes and 15 seconds and I want us all to appreciate this because, really, scenes this long are a real treat. They are so well thought out and they always end up being my favourite. For reference, the hilltop scene is 5 minutes and 45 seconds and the scene where the Ann(e)s argue at the end of 1x04 – one of my absolute loves – is 7 minutes and 38 seconds long. But, enough with data!

A couple of random things before going into it in more details:

I love LOVE the domesticity we see in this scene with Anne pouring tea to Ann, offering her some biscuits and the way in which Ann declines the offer just with a wave of the hand.

We can also subtly pick up how different Anne and Ann are in the way they administer the household, with Ann calling Hemingway by her first name – Thank you, Rachel – opposed to Anne who calls all the servants by their last name – Thank you, Hemingway – I love how this kind of details are woven through the dialogue and how, with just a couple of words or gestures, we’re able to pick up different dynamics between the characters. And of course small things like this, when they’re done right (like in this case), bring the characterization to a whole new level.

This is gonna be long so get yourself a cup of tea or coffee and let’s go!

As soon as AL sits down it’s clear that there is some tension between the Ann(e)s. Ann’s all fake smiles and from the way she looks at Anne, from the way she swallows before talking we can see that she’s thinking about a way to bring up what is going round and round in her head. Anne picks it up too – something is not right.

After a while AW says that she’s been thinking about the division of the estate, the problems with her sister and that she’s not sure what it is all for if in the end everything will go to the Sutherlands anyway...

– And without children, I’m not sure what it is all for. – This is where Anne starts being terrified. As soon as AW says this, AL is thinking what she will only say during the second half of the scene: We do things for us! – But here she keeps her thoughts and fears for herself. She wants to understand what Ann Walker really means. We’ve already seen in season one that it takes time for Ann Walker to really explain herself, Anne knows this and so, little by little she tries to understand more and more. Is Ann saying she wants children? AW not being sure what it is all for could mean that she doesn’t think that doing things just for the two of them is enough?

Anne is nervous, she puts down her cup of tea, she adjusts herself on the chair, she smooths her waistcoat... she pretends she’s calm.

– And is it not God’s purpose that we...people have children? – Is it tho?

We’ve heard Anne say before how being how she is is all natural, is God given, so can it really be God’s purpose for them, for her, to have children? When having children means being with a man? – It would be absurd, it would be perverse – No. Anne doesn’t think that that’s everyone's purpose. But what does Ann think?

– I suppose I’d always imagined that, one day, I would have children of my own, that’s all. – It breaks my heart how AW says this line. You can hear her voice almost breaking. She’s scared, just as much as AL is. She’s scared about saying this out loud, she knows Anne could take it wrong. And AL tries to understand and tries to bring everything to a rational, logical level. She doesn’t lose her temper here, even tho we can already see how scared she is to have this conversation. How could Ann want children when she feels a sort of repugnance to forming any sort of connection with a man? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

And here comes the conflict.

The way they think about things is very very different. Ann Walker imagines things without really thinking about the real, practical aspect of it all while Anne Lister’s goal is to make things happen. I love how this scene shows us how different the Ann(e)s are in the way they think about their future. On one hand we have Anne who is very pragmatic. She’s realistic and logical, she is able rationalise what things mean – You mean, you’d imagined children, but not marriage to a man? – For her this doesn’t make any sense. She doesn’t entertain impossible thoughts. Even in the way she says to Ann later on in the scene that being with her is a great sacrifice, she says – practically – what being with her means, it means they will never have children, it means they will never have a marriage certificate, it means they have to face public scrutiny, it means they have to make sacrifices. So they have to be certain of what they are doing, they have to evaluate everything.

On the other hand we have Ann Walker who’s the opposite. When she says that she wants to be with Anne more than anything in the whole world that is a very romantic thought but not a pragmatic one. She wants to be with her, but what does it really mean to be with Anne Lister? She’s driven by her love for Anne and that is really the only thing that matters to her. She says that but at the same time she talks about children without fully realising that the two things are not reconcilable. She can’t want both of those things, it’s impossible – and what if, one day, her desire of having children ends up being greater than her desire of being with Anne? This is what Anne Lister is thinking, and this is one of the things that terrifies her.

And here, here you can really see the terror in Anne’s eyes become greater and greater. She struggles to keep it together. The way she closes her eyes when she says – It does signify – is heartbreaking and it reminds me of the – What? – she shouts at the end of episode 4 in season 1. She immediately thinks about her conversation with Marian and, like with Marian, she can’t come up with a counter argument to what Ann Walker just told her. If she wants to be a mother, well then, what can Anne do? What can Anne say?

But Ann Walker wants her to fight for them, for her. She doesn’t like that Anne says that she won’t be an obstacle for something she has very much at heart. – Don’t say that – This season Ann has been feeling invisible, ignored, she’s seen her wife do 100 different things and she feels put aside at times. She also knows something happened with Mariana and she’s finding out all these new things about Anne – so, I believe, she wants to see Anne care for her, she doesn’t want to see her give up so easily.

But Anne doesn’t even hear that – she can’t keep it in anymore, she’s upset and she’s about to explode. I love the quote of the meteor and I love how she stands up from that table.

I love how she can’t keep still – she was so composed before but now her anger, sadness, fear are too great and they take over completely. She is so terrified that she’s actually shaking.

– Things like this, all my life. I pretend it gets easier, but it doesn’t. – What a confession this is. Anne who always rises above it all, who’s strong, who can’t be touched by the things people say about her, is admitting here that it all gets to her. With time she’s just become good enough at pretending it doesn’t affect her but in reality it does. And it’s beautiful how she lets Ann Walker see this very vulnerable aspect of herself. Now she is not alone anymore, now she has someone to share her fears and insecurities with. Now she has Ann.

The way AW says “Anne” right after breaks me – she is so calm, her voice is so steady – in her mind she hasn’t thought one second about breaking it off with Anne and you can hear it in the way she says her name.

And finally, Anne says what she’s been thinking from the start – We do things for us! That’s who it’s for. So that we can have a life together. We matter.

And, again, look how different her body language is here opposed to the beginning of the scene where she was trying to keep calm and they were sitting at the table. Her body shakes, she moves her hands around, she has a heavy weight on her chest and you can feel it by the way she breathes. She’s so fucking terrified.

Oh and here comes the line that personally speaks to me the most – Having children isn’t the only reason to strive and do well and better oneself and be happy – This right here. It’s amazing that today we have so many opportunities and something like this (having a child if you’re in a same sex relationship) isn’t impossible anymore but personally I feel that more than that the message I’m taking away from this scene is this: my relationship doesn’t need a child to have meaning or be considered “complete”.

Anne doesn’t want children, doesn’t care about children, doesn’t think about how having children would be, her life is full even without having children. She loves her life the way it is. She understands the desire someone else might have of being a mother, yes, but that’s not something she personally dreams for herself. And I just love this on a very personal level.

Even the way in which she speaks about it to Ann Walker –  [A child] It’s something that I can never give you – the focus is not on her, it’s on Ann. She’s upset and sad not because she can’t be a mother, she’s upset because in that moment she’s realising that Ann might want something she won’t be able to give her. And here’s another thing that terrifies her: not being enough for Ann.

Another thing that I love about this whole scene and about Suranne’s performance is the pauses she makes to breathe and the way in which you can really see Anne struggling to not break down even more and cry. It really makes you feel how scared and terrified Anne is during the whole exchange. I particularly love the pause she does before saying – I need to know about that now – I love how that line is delivered because you can really feel how scared Anne is to know the answer to that request. What if Ann Walker says to her that, yes, she might want children in the future? What happens then? Where do they go from there?

What the Ann(e)s have, what they really have, is the promise they made each other, in private, in secret, something only the two of them know about. That’s all they’ve got. They don’t have a marriage certificate – We can never have a piece of paper that says we have any kind of legal union – they don’t have a child to bind them. They literally only have each other and the promise they made. There is nothing “from the outside” that binds them together, no security, nothing. Imagine the trust they have to have in each other to be sure that, one day, the other one won’t just walk away.

– You’re frightening me. – I’m frightening you? – This literally broke me. Here, right here is when Anne admits to be frightened, terrified.

Ann Walker says “You’re frightening me.” and with that reversed question Anne is basically saying “Oh, you are frightened, well you have no idea how much you are frightening me. You have no idea how terrified I am that all this you’re saying could mean that you’ll leave me one day.”

– You have to be certain. That this, here, with me, is what you want. – Here is another bit that I absolutely adore for the same reason of the “I need to know about that now”. The way in which Anne says this, the pauses she makes, good lord, she is scared of finishing the sentence, she’s scared to hear what Ann Walker will say after.

And this all parallels to the hilltop scene, AL asking AW if she’s ready to take the sacrament with her, etc. etc. – and like then, Ann Walker is ready to reassure Anne Lister that this is absolutely what she wants, no doubts about it.

– I want to be with you more than anything in the whole world. You know that! – There is no hesitation in her answer. None. What I find interesting tho are the words AW chooses. She just wants to be with Anne Lister, whatever that entails. She doesn’t answer something like “Yes I understand and this is what I want”, she literally says that the only thing she wants is being with Anne, fuck the rest. AW doesn’t stop to think of what that could mean, of what sacrifices she'll have to make, she doesn’t stop to think about all the possibilities, she just knows that she loves AL and that she wants to be with her. That’s all.

And here we see the way in which Ann Walker shows affection and love. The caring touches I’ve already talked about, that were so clear in episode 1. Ann comes closer. She wants to both reassure Anne and smooth things over by getting close to her wife and comforting her physically and not only with words.

But Anne is too scared and she’s still pretending to be stoic. She’s also protecting herself from disappointment. We’ve already seen her have this attitude, on the hilltop scene when Ann walks closer to her and she instinctively takes a couple of steps back.

I love how here we see the same thing happening but it’s clear that their dynamic has changed. Ann’s bolder and goes straight for Anne’s hand – and Anne is not so gentle, she’s not scared to hurt Ann with her rejection. They are comfortable with each other and it’s clear they know each other in a more profound way.

Ann knows Anne too well, she knows what she needs and so she gives her space, at first...and when she comes closer again it is to show Anne that she is ready to make all the sacrifices in the world for her.

I love how Ann takes a moment to think about what to do, to think about what is the best way to reassure her wife. It’s almost as if Ann has learned from Anne what to do in these kind of moments. AW comforts AL in the same way in which AL comforts her – getting closer, kissing her hand, caressing her cheek, being physically close, words are not enough sometimes, and AW is not really good with words anyway.

There’s a little bit of a power struggle at the beginning – AW wants to mend AL’s wounds but AL doesn’t want to let her at first. But AW knows what Anne really needs and doesn’t let go, it’s as if she’s saying to Anne: “Don’t worry, you can be vulnerable with me, I won’t hurt you, trust me”. She takes Anne’s hand and I LOVE how we can see surprise on Anne’s face here.

And those hand kisses y’all!!!! Good God hELP – I’m perfectly articulated and focused discussing anything else but my GOD the hand kisses literally make me break down and cry and lose all ability to properly express my thoughts.

And this is all I’m gonna say about the hand kiss here...

...the last time Ann kissed Anne’s hand was when they were exchanging rings and here HERE, DOING THIS, ANN is bASICALLY renewing the promise she made – and the hand she kisses is the hand with the wedding ring!!!!! SHE’S KISSING THE RING!!!!!

Can we let this sink in??? Like, without saying anything Ann is saying so fucking much! She’s saying “I married you, I am your wife, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, whatever happens.” Can you hear me cry? Ann Walker owns my life!!

And then Ann puts Anne’s hand on her cheek, to feel her close, and she closes her eyes while kissing her palm and yall I CANT. And the way it all parallels to the chaumiere scene and to the hilltop scene like – I’m speechless!!

And when, finally, Ann Walker caresses Anne’s cheek, Anne can’t pretend anymore (and again beautiful parallel with the hilltop scene).

I mean, what we learned from all this is that when Anne’s not strong enough, Ann Walker will be strong enough for the both of them – You are stronger than you think. –

this show is a masterpiece

bye

[wygolvillage]

the way the warrior code has always been presented in the books is so fascinating to me because... its unjust and always has been. the books simultaneously seem to know this and deny it. i have Complicated Feelings about it

even from the first arc, we’ve got silverstream tragically dying and graystripe’s crisis of loyalty due to the couple being technically illegal, half-clan cats being injustly targeted during tigerstars reign, firestar breaking the code to feed yellowfang, who herself broke the code, and going behind bluestars back to do whats right. bluestar and her kits, too, were victimized by the restrictions of the warrior code. even firestars unresolved feelings for spottedleaf apply. and sympathy almost always falls upon the codebreakers and half-clan cats. theyre almost always in the right. and yet still the subtext of always having faith in starclan, the code being just and honorable and what seperates them from just being pack of rogues, is still very present.

in arc 2 our protagonists, who grow to become friends, are shortly afterwards seperated once the journeys over and its presented as tragic that they have to be split by clan loyalty. its an arc about how the clans must come together and unite in times of crisis... and yet at the end of the day, they must be seperated because StarClan Says So!!! this bleeds into arc 3, really, since its so connected to what happens in arc 2. lives are nearly ruined over the restrictive nature of the warrior code. squirrelflight does whats right even if it means crossing societal boundaries by raising her sisters kits, and the revelation that the three are leafpool’s is seen as so catastrophic that someone gets LITERALLY MURDERED to prevent it from getting out. leafpool even says that she finds death preferable to facing all the consequences the warrior code would impose on her for simply having fallen in love. hollyleaf, the one most adherent to the code as a moral guide, has to reckon with realizing that it technically forbids her existence, as well as that the three are, inherently, kind of above it since they hold more power than starclan, their religious authority. this is a Thing in power of three... and then arc 4 veers hard back into StarClan Is Always Right. its a straightforward good vs evil story and starclan are “the good guys”

i dont have that much to say on DOTC because the code hadn’t been established yet, but i do think its interesting that clear sky’s closed borders and territorialism, which is very close to modern clan tradition, is seen as unreasonable and restrictive by the other characters (it is, the divisions between clans are very arbitrary). i dont have much to say on AVOS either tbh other than that it does kind of have a “the youth dont respect tradition!!1!!!” undercurrent. “see if you undermine authority everyone is going to die and get killed by rogues!!!!” though interestingly we do get to see some cats change clans to be with who they love, like dovewing.

and then we get to TBC and ASC, which are interesting in that the code is being dismantled. a starclan cat, ashfur, the villain of TBC, uses it to leverage power against cats he dislikes by labeling them as codebreakers, the main romance of the arc is forbidden by the code (and this is presented as a tragedy that they could never get to be together). starclan encourages them to change the code, and it does criticize the way clan society, well.... works. and ASC is going to be about all the ways the code will be changed and altered! awesome! and yet i still dont think theyve gone far enough. ashfur being a starclan cat who exploits his position as a religious guide (and eventually as leader) is presented as an outlier, a mistake, not a “real” starclan cat (which is bullshit). dead cats who were once evil but switched sides in TPONS and ALITM arent allowed to leave the Evil Torment Dimension despite having fought to save the clans and showed genuine change, because “starclan said so, they dont make mistakes, especially not when they sent you to the dark forest lol”. its a bewildering decision and i wish they just decided to make starclan kind of morally questionable Explicitly. they keep dancing around this idea and never going hard with it. and i could go on and on about the unfair starclan trial in squirrelflights hope and all that but this post is long enough...

idk how to conclude this other than... i wish this was all intentional, that the erins had conceived the clans as a deeply flawed society that the protagonists try to navigate within and eventually dismantle, rather than kind of accidentally backflipping into having created a restrictive, shitty place without meaning to. the code throughout the series has caused tragedy after tragedy and yet solved very little. if this was an intentional narrative about questioning tradition and the constraints of society, warrior cats would be literally incredible! but in practice it reads like the erins trying to have their cake and eat it too. it makes warriors really weird to read as an adult with a critical eye. i KEPT noticing this over and over when i reread the series last year. hopefully ASC will develop these ideas further

[mishafletcher]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[realcube]

OVERHEARING SOMEONE TALK ABOUT THEIR S/O

characters ♡ baji, mikey & mitsuya

tw ♡ insults (in reference to the reader), violence & robbery 

KEISUKE BAJI 

♡ baji never mentioned that he was dating you to anyone in toman

♡ in fact, he hoped that none of them even knew about your existence, because that would only lead to trouble; and he was correct

♡ he was simply taking a puff on his stationary motorcycle, when members of the division started to filter into the parking lot that he was currently trying to relax in

♡ usually he’d try to ward off strangers so he could enjoy his time alone but he knew these guys from toman, so he allowed them to stay as long as they’d keep their voices down and not bother him

♡ most of his attention was on his own thoughts, but it was immediately redirected when he heard your name brought up in their conversation

♡ only your last name, so he wasn’t even certain whether they were talking about you, but still his interest was piqued 

�� “they are on shift friday night, the only one left at eleven,” one of the guys explained, gesturing to his bat with a wicked smirk, “we’ll break in then. i’ll drive getaway.”

♡ “what if they call someone? shouldn’t we wait until they’ve left?” another suggested but was quickly corrected.

♡ “once they lock up the security system activates and it’ll be impossible to get in without alerting the cops. so we may as well bust in, handle them, and then steal the bikes.” 

♡ baji cringed, since he was certain that they were talking about you —since you happen to work at a motorcycle shop on friday nights — he hated to think about what they meant by ‘handle’.

♡ “now stop askin’ stupid questions.” the same guy scoffed, twirling around his bat, “i used to work there, idiot, obviously i know what i’m doing.”

♡ the group of six all laughed at the one poor guy who asked the question, and baji did too

♡ he laughed at the irony behind how they were calling each other idiots, when they were all the ones talking about auto theft in broad daylight, and discussing doing unspeakable things to a person, when their boyfriend was standing in ear-shot with a bat and a motorcycle ready 

♡ he did give them the benefit of the doubt in the latter aspect though; how were they supposed to know that y’all were dating when you are never seen spending time with each other?

♡ baji suddenly felt bad; it dawned on him that perhaps he had been neglecting your relationship as of recently. of course, it wasn’t with poor intention, in fact he thought he was taking the moral course of action by avoiding a situation where you are harmed because of his ties with toman

♡ however, being in a gang was no excuse to be a bad boyfriend, he figured 

♡ for now, the least he could do was take care of these guys to save you the trouble 

♡ but perhaps that wasn’t his brightest idea, he realised as he stood amongst the dejected bodies scattered across the ground, “i know you are all alive, so consider this a warning.” baji chuckled at the grunt one produced as he kicked him aside to head back over to his motorcycle

♡ before he left the area, obviously he stole all the cash he could from those guys, which gave him enough to buy the thing he had been eyeing for you

♡ though it took him a while to get his hands on it, it left him with the perfect opportunity to give it to you 

♡ “oi, open up!” baji hollered as he pounded on your door; if baji wasn’t such a bruiser, you would’ve thought he was dying 

♡ “what!?” you hissed, throwing the door open to reveal your frantic state.

♡ you were half angry at how loud he was being, and the other half at how he has been ignoring you for the past two weeks and finally decides to show up just as you were about to leave for work, in fact, you were running late for your night shift

♡ “no need to rush.” baji said, an odd sense of sincerity in his voice as he motioned for you to stop putting your shoes on, “you’re not going to work today.”

♡ you simply laughed, ignoring him and gathering your stuff to leave, “and why is that?”

♡ “well,” baji started, rubbing his chin for effect, “these guys from toman plan on robbing the place tonight. i did give them a warning, but they might still do it. and you know i just want you to be safe.” he said with a mischievous grin, as you both knew there was no way your shop was getting robbed tonight, unless the dudes wanted to try it with both arms broken 

♡ “so did you just come here to tell me that, or is there something else?” although you tried to hide it, baji could tell by your subtle flustered expression that you were thankful

♡ “i found this.” he lied, cupping your hand to lift it and drop in a gold bracelet, “one of the guys had it on him.”

♡ you gasped, taking the bracelet to examine the fine details, and noticed how it had a small crystal heart attached, “yeah, i’m sure a member of toman just so happened to be wearing a charm bracelet.”

♡ “i never said he was wearing it!” baji spat, swiftly snatching it from your hand and holding it above his head, “i can pawn it if you don’t want it.” 

♡ “i like it, though!” you said, reaching up for it, only for him to grab your wrist and put it on you 

♡ “then forgive me for not hanging with you.” he muttered, angrily clipping the bracelet through furrowed brows, while you leaned in to plant a kiss on his forehead 

♡ “it’s fine. i forgive you.” you couldn’t help but snicker at his word choice of ‘hanging out’, which resulted in you getting a swift flick to the forehead

♡ but before you could whine, he quickly followed it up with a kiss <33

MIKEY 

♡ one day he was visiting mizo to find takemichi and he happened to walk passed a group of guys talking about how one of them planned on asking out a person from a different school 

♡ at first he didn’t pay much attention since it was none of his business after all, until he heard that the person’s name and description just so happened to match yours 

♡ so like any good boyfriend would, he halted and told draken to grab takemichi while he listened in 

♡ as he gained more insight into the situation, he learned that the person happened to go to the same academy as you and had the same bus schedule too 

♡ it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the person they were talking about was you 

♡ as it turns out, the guy who planned on asking you out had your bus times memorised so if he was able to run fast enough, he would be able to reach your stop before you got on the bus, which is when he will ask you out

♡ or at least, that is what he hoped would happen if everything went smoothly and there was no unexpected interference from a group of delinquents

♡ mikey had many options on how to deal with this situation

♡ he could ask you to take a different bus, he could do nothing (because he trusted that you’d reject the guy either way) or he could beat them up right now to save himself the hassle later

♡ however, he decided to go with a more peaceful approach 

♡ he continued eaves-dropping until everyone besides the lover boy had left, so he could have an amicable one-on-one conversation with him — definitely no threats involved — and advise the guy to stay in his fucking lane and never go near you ever again, kindly. 

♡ when the day of the proposal arrived, mikey paid you a surprise visit after school and offered to walk you to the bus-stop; not because he was afraid that the dude might confess, but rather since he had booked you both tickets to the movies!

♡ but once you both arrive at the stop, you were greeted by the guy standing there holding a measly bouquet of flowers, looking quite taken back by the fact you were with someone else; even though mikey had done him the courtesy of explicitly telling him to back off 

♡ though he must’ve not got message despite the hand-holding, and he obviously didn’t recognise mikey, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have continued to confess, albeit with quivering limbs and a black eye

♡ but before he could even stutter out a greeting, mikey hissed at him, “what the are you doing?” yet the guy only replied with a shrug

♡ upon observing the interaction, your eyes widen as you turned to look at mikey, “do you know him?”

♡ “never seen him before in my life, dear.” he smiled sweetly, but it was ineffective; you already knew he was lying as soon as he called you ‘dear’. 

♡ “(y/n)!” the guy yelled, trying to catch your attention, but only shaking even more as your gaze fell on him, “i was going to ask you, if—”

♡ mikey let out an exaggerated yawn, widely outstretching his arms to distract both of you, “this has been fun, but we’re running late for the movie.” 

♡ “but i’m not fin—” the poor boy was once again interrupted by mikey waving him goodbye, grabbing your hand and swiftly guiding you around him, back on the route to the cinema

♡ before he even got the chance to cry another plea, you had both already disappeared around the corner 

♡ once mikey had dragged you both far enough away from the bus-stop, you began your interrogation, “seriously, who was that? and what was he trying to say? did you give him the black eye?” you had to stop to take a deep breath, “also, you said the movie would start in the evening!”

♡ mikey brought your hand up —which he had a tight grip on — and kissed the back of it gently, “my bad,” he chuckled slightly, a mischievous grin playing on his lips, “i forgot to mention him. i met him a few days ago and he was planning to ask you out so i politely informed him that you were taken.”

♡ “for some reason, i don’t believe that last part.”

♡ he snickered, “and yeah, the movie starts in the evening so we’re not running late. but he wasn’t taking the hint!” he whined while clinging to your arm, as if you were going to run away from him at any second, “forgive me?”

♡ “sure, whatever.” you sighed, rolling your eyes as you watched his expression light up, “but next time, mind your own business! i could’ve just said no, instead of you beating him up, or whatever you did.”

♡ “noted.”

MITSUYA TAKASHI

♡ during his time as the second division leader of toman, he’s overheard all kinds of stuff that he probably wasn’t supposed to; awkward small talk, plans to commit felonies, deep conversations, weed brownie recipes, discussions about health issues — the list goes on forever!

 ♡ however, one topic he has never heard any one ever have the audacity to speak about (within a ten mile radius of him), is you. even though, your relationship was public to toman. 

♡ your name was often kept out of people’s mouth since you rarely interacted with any of the gang members when you visited, hence they didn’t really have anything bad (or good) to say about you. none of them knew you besides the title ‘boss’ partner’. 

♡ so, that’s why mitsuya had to do a double take when he heard someone in his division mutter to the guy beside him, “why does his friend keep visitin’? it’s annoying. plus, they just sit and don’t talk to anyone besides ‘im. they must think they’re better than us or something.” right after mitsuya mentioned that you were visiting toman.

♡ he couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow; did that guy really think that he was being sly and quiet? by the look on his face, he seemed pretty self-assured. 

♡ “um, i heard you, idiot.” he hissed, pinching his nose and shaking his head as he watched the knucklehead stare at him dumbfounded, as if the whole room hadn’t heard him too.

♡ “don’t say shit like that. they don’t think they’re better than anyone.” he scorned, balling his fist and almost twitching with anger, fighting the urge to pummel that guy for the sake of his own reputation in toman

♡ and that impulse almost immediately dissipated as soon as you entered the room; his hand loosened and opened to cup your cheek

♡ he was as sweet as can be for the rest of the night, of course, and he still managed to send that dude daggers whenever he got the chance. 

[furious-rogue-stuff]

Façade - A Dave York Drabble

So! This was originally a drabble prompt from my good partner in smutty crime, @just-here-for-the-moment​, but since this stupid hell site can’t work properly and allow me to copy this into my response to her ask, I’m relegated to posting it as a stand-alone blog. 

Pairing: Dave York x OFC | Dave York x Spitfire

Disclaimer: Written in 2nd person narrative, you can safely assume our heroine and love/lust interest is a Latina, written by a Latina. Here's my philosophy on my writing, for further context.

Rating: Mature/Explicit 🔞

🚨Author chooses not to include detailed warnings, but if you know the Equalizer universe and read Dave York fics, you know the kind of content to expect. This is depraved smut of the filthiest caliber, so you’ve been forewarned. However this story includes mentions of adultery/infidelity, allusions to violence, combative sexual dynamics, implied obsessive behavior, dominance fixation, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and unhealthy coping mechanism.

Word Count: 19,500+

Façade

It’s your assignment.

And you’ve had just about enough of him derailing it.

The conference room is charged with the acrimony that is incongruent with the affable expression plastered on the lead intelligence advisor’s face across from you. Yeah, fine – he’s the man who oversees all divisions of the agency’s work. And sure – the fact he’s the senior person in the room with the most awards and has the brass’ ear on almost everything doesn’t help, nor the fact that he’s Plummer’s favorite errand boy.

Nope. None of it bodes well in your favor, and that doesn’t help your simmering irritation from spiking sharply at the broad set of his shoulders or the aloof purse of his lips as he looks over the plans.

You don’t like Dave York.

Not because he was so well-liked around the building, or because he seemed to enjoy coming in and sabotaging your surveillance assessments or pulled the plug on special ops you’d painstakingly coordinated last minute because he ‘didn’t think the human intelligence data at its foundation was sound.’ Oh, no. All of that wasn’t new. You’d put up with plenty of C.O.’s and lily-livered analysts contracted by DOD who lived for leaving you and your team in professional squalor in the middle of hell while they fleeced the government by providing shit oversight and shoddy equipment.

You don’t like Dave York, because you see the real him he hides behind his sculpted façade.

Family man, jovial mid-leveler within the D.I.A. was his sanitized, 40+ hour week civilian day job. What he put on his taxes and got to sigh tiredly about with friends and family on weekend backyard shindigs or during Sunday football. The easygoing everyman swagger, the friendly regard of his smile, and the varnish of his deference for the people around him were expertly chiseled to hide the multifaceted truth of his character. It was an effortless camouflage – a blending in amongst the uninitiated. A decent fucking front…

How do you know it’s all a front? Because you have your own mask to wear, and the façade you’ve built is one you don’t like the likes of Dave York trying to fuck with by incessantly needling you with contrarian double talk.

After all, your meticulously crafted persona within the agency is that of the competently judicious yet charming field analyst who specializes in human and counter intelligence. For all everyone in the office knew, you went to the best schools, did a tour in the U.N. as an intern for a high commissioner through the Middle East, and were a convivial delight when you weren’t honed in on a delicate operation.

This specific operation is quite delicate, and having fuckin’ Dave York contradict you is testing your patience.

“—Looking at the latest reports, I don’t get a sense that there’s a need to hurry into the zone. Have you considered waiting until extraction is completely necessary?” Dave is cutting into your current remark justifying your timetable, and the way he flicks his gaze up from the satellite maps to glance at you?

Sure, to the rest of your team, it seems like just a musing look, waiting on you to share your thoughts. But you see it. How his dark brown eyes flare with something goading.

You feel the blazing disdain crest to the top of your head. Fuck it.

“That was the first thing we did, Dave,” you coolly scathe and cross your arms over your tight pearl-white silk blouse-clad chest, straining the fabric of your black blazer cinched snug to your biceps and slimming at your waist. “Are you concerned that my team is inept? Or are you merely suggesting you know more than us about this assignment?”

You can feel the other fellas bristle while the man stands straight from his leaning position to cross his own arms and jovially snicker, “Not at all! Really – this is stellar,” he’s gesturing to the presentation laid out on the conference room table before drawling, “But, timing is everything. And I don’t think yours is as urgent as you’ve outlined—”

“Look, I know it isn’t big ticket jihad-level stuff like you are always so keen to signoff on, but this is a dangerous cell of wannabe domestic terrorists going abroad for training on not-so-homegrown hobbies,” you contradict with a sarcastic edge, dropping your arms so one hand props at your hip while the other fans out in curt gesture at all of the work laid out before him. “The way things are going, domestic threats are going to blow foreign terror attempts out of the water—”

“And that is obviously on our radar, but not top priority,” Dave’s tone begins to dip from the practiced easygoingness to a sharper, terser quality as he eyes you now with a surly glint he quickly sweeps away by idly rubbing the inside of his palm along the line of his jaw while he flicks a glance at the others. “I know you all feel strongly—”

“What we feel has nothing to do with it, Dave. If you have another assignment you’re going to bump ours for, I’d rather you just say so and spare us the shine on,” you can’t help slash like a knife through a carotid artery.

He looks at you behind his mask as he trains his features into polished marble, where only the little furrow between his brows betrays his annoyance as he clears his throat, crosses his arms tightly over his slate-colored blazer and light-powder blue dress shirt before he stares over at your colleagues. “Foster, Hurley, Estrada – give us the room?” Dave asks in a firm baritone, shoulders squaring while a no-nonsense air about him fills the space.

The men nod and spare you varying glances of awe and appraisal before they head for the exit. Once the frosted glass door shuts behind them, you turn to eye him coolly. His stare is electric, charged with something cunning, lips pursing in what you would describe as a considering scowl before he exhales out his nose and leans edgewise on the table while he seemingly sizes you up.

“Besides the obvious, is there another reason why you feel compelled to buck every fucking thing I say?”

You hold his gaze as you sweep all your work up and stuff the files and maps into their folders before deliberately remaining leaned over the conference table in order to tilt your head in feigned contemplation at him. Dave fixes in on the soft way your full lips look when you feign a neutral smile.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

The cavalier tone of your retort? That seems to goad him enough to dropping the mask.

His façade falls away to reveal an etched expression of a man not amused by you, but also smug and exacting as he flicks his dark eyes down your blouse before perniciously snickering as a slow, sly smile quirks his pillowed lips and threatens to reveal the dimple in his right cheek.

“I think you know exactly what I mean, spitfire.”

Oh, yeah…the other reason you know everything about Dave York is simply a fucking front, is because you saw him.

That night over a month ago, when an interagency party upstairs went long and you’d found yourself wandering back to your floor and down to the secluded nook around the corner from the old emergency stairwell. The one that’s great for slipping away and being isolated enough from the foot traffic of the office compartments beyond the heavy interior door with the sidelight. You hadn’t wandered down there alone.

The threat-assessment analyst was a contractor Estrada knew and vouched for. The fact he was hot and bold enough to suggest going somewhere more secluded, compounded with the fact that you’d had a bad week and definitely needed to let off some steam, were enough motivation to take him up on the suggestions. So, you’d led the way to the secluded ante-room, pulled him along to the corner across from the door and leaned into the inset counter used to stack phonebooks and the like back in the day.

A heated make-out session and his discovery that you had a thin lace thong on under your black cocktail dress later, and he had you bent over the bulky chair adjacent the wall-backed couch, with him fucking you fast and hard. Your vantage point and grip on the chair would allow the best chance to maneuver into the blind spot of the room if someone was to walk in, and allowed you to keep an ear out for anyone approaching before then.

Or so, you’d thought.

When you’d gasped after a particular slam of his hips into you and looked up, you noticed the silhouette of someone standing just out of sight of the sidelight. Your hookup for the night – Samson, was it? – was too focused on railing you as best he could to notice if there was a fire in the room, let alone someone possibly watching you. No, only you’d noticed, and rather than the voyeur get spooked at you staring ahead at them, making it clear you knew they were there, the boldness of it all had been enough invitation.

Dave had watched you. His dark eyes cataloguing how your breasts bounced in your bodice while you got fucked from behind. He’d admired how you’d reveled in it without shame, and when you’d noticed him? Rather than balking or hurriedly stopping or alerting the guy railing you, he watched as you stared right at him, like you were daring him to come in – seemingly projecting with the unspoken heat of your gaze and pout of your parted lips, You want this? Come and take me, if you fucking dare.

Or so, he’d thought.

After all, you hadn’t shown any indication prior to being attracted to him, let alone being open to a sexual encounter. Was he reading what he wanted to from your unabashed reaction? Or did the challenging heat in your gaze as you stared sinfully at him come from true desire? In the moment, he burned with the allure of seeing what seemed to be the real you: a stunning vixen.

Dave hadn’t had much interaction with you, other than the occasional assignment assessments he’d undertake of your division’s work. You’d come in from the Department of State’s New York office. Once you’d gotten to lead your team and put in for assignments, he’d gotten to know the surface facts about you from others in the office. But, after that first time? When he’d scuttled a project from moving forward into an operational phase? He’d seen it plain.

Dave had seen your eyes sharpen, even though your frame had remained poised and your expression hadn’t betrayed any ill will. But he knew that searing disdain better than anyone else. It had been a flicker, the pinprick dilation and darkening of your eyes before you’d been able to catch yourself and flicked your gaze away.

It had made him hard, and he didn’t know why.

And when he’d followed you and your hookup down from the top floor? He’d expected to catch you fooling around. Really, he’d hoped to get a glimpse – to find out how reckless and filthy you’d be by your selection of venue for the tryst. So, peering into the sidelight and seeing you getting fucked from behind, all the while your gaze had gone faraway as you bit back your sounds of pleasure? It had made Dave’s cock fill out instantly, throbbing with the ache of wanting to be balls’ deep in you. Instead, he’d watched, wondering how he could maybe spin this in his favor – how he could ensnare you with it, when your gaze had cleared and looked right at him.

Dave rarely got a thrill when he wasn’t on a job, or expending his baser urges with his vetted resources suited explicitly for that. But the exhilaration that burned in his gut and made his heart race at you watching him play the voyeur? It was an undercurrent that had singed through him long after, and had left him wanting.

When you’d gotten off, your eyes had screwed shut in ecstasy, mouth falling open on a breathy gasp. It had been intriguing, wondering if you’d come because he was watching you, or in spite of it.

After, when you’d blushed and looked back at the sidelight, you’d found it empty – as if no one had been there at all and you’d made the whole thing up just to get that deviant thrill needed to make you climax. Samson had been mindful of the condom, tending to it and rambling about how hot that was. You’d gone to splash cold water on your face and got cleaned up in the ladies room before sneaking down to your car and getting the hell out of there.

But, you’d wondered. Wondered how long it would take until he’d make it known – that he’d validate once and for all that you had not conjured him watching you get fucked that night. And, you’d wondered what he would do once he did.

And now, here it is.

So, you sweep the folders up from the conference table and pin them in the crook of your arm while reaching for your phone you’d left aside, sparing him an aloof glance as you retort neutrally, “Only reason I can think of? Is that you devalue our work. And I didn’t much feel like pretending it doesn’t aggravate me today. That’s all.”

The smug smirk flints away at your dismissive remark, replaced by a surly glare and the clench of his jaw as his eyes narrow on you. Feeling accomplished, you hum and turn on your heel to head for the door.

“Guess you’ll have to try harder to prove your work is of any value to begin with.”

The dark mutter of his low tone makes something deviant curl inside the pit of your stomach while a flush of warmth zings through you.

With a glance over your shoulder at him, you betray a goading smile, one Dave feels equal parts incensed and enticed by.

“Well then, I guess we’ll both have to do a lot more trying to find a happy medium,” you silkily drawl, opening the door, and then sighing, “Although, I doubt you’ll be able to rise to the occasion.”

You’ve breezed out the door before Dave can snap his mouth open to retort. Fuming, he glares about the vacant conference room and exhales his testy umbrage through his nose before grabbing his own leather planner to stride out. When he does, the easygoing veneer is back over his features, but his eyes are flinty and dark. Fucking little bitch… Dave snarls in his mind, but then the scintillating look in your eyes as you’d smiled back at him flashes bright. How am I gonna get my hands on that sexy fucking bitch…

He couldn’t deny it now. Sure, he’d conveniently tried to glaze over his recollection of the first time he’d seen you. Of how bewitchingly gorgeous he’d found you then, as you’d chatted in the lobby and accepted the cup of coffee from the chain store around the corner the department rep offered you. While the two of you came strolling towards the elevator banks he was at with a small crowd of nine to fivers.

When you’d got onto the same elevator as his and kept amiable chatter going, he’d stepped to the back corner, using the moment to covertly admire your profile. And he’d been more than pleased when you got off the elevator on the same floor. But even then, the calculating voice in his head had chided him. You don’t fuck around at work. That’s what the escorts are for. Keep shit compartmentalized. Can’t have things bleeding into each other—

“Oh, Dave! Come meet the new analyst we poached from DOS.”

He’d glanced around and paused in his stride towards his office, easily smiling and putting on his seamlessly affable cover as he strolled back and greeted the rep before exchanging introductions with you.

You, on the other hand, do not like Dave. Sure, at first, you found him innocuous. But now, after every major interaction with him becomes a test of your will? No, you can decidedly say you do not like Dave York.

No matter how handsome he is.

Or how enticing his voice is hitting that low register when he’d sniped gruffly at you just now.

Fuck, fine…he’s sexy. You grumble to yourself as you get back to your section. Sure, there were plenty of times you’d clandestinely stared at his broad shoulders in his well-fitted blazers, and admired his chiseled features. And yes, there’d been several occasions when you’d passed each other and you’d gotten an appealing whiff of his cologne. Which, then had you absently wondering how warm his skin is, or if his natural musk matches the rich darkness of his deep brown eyes.

But, then you’d see him wearing the façade to hide the real man he was. And more annoyingly enough – and probably what should be quelling your terse attraction to him – was the glaringly obvious gold band around his ring finger. Normal people don’t omit that. And after everything…you shouldn’t either.

“Jesus, girlie. You got a set of brass ones on yah.”

Your wandering thoughts snap away to focus on the trio of gazes that are on you once you’ve turned the corner into your section of shared desks. The fellas are conglomerated around your workspace, clearly on pins and needles, so you scoff and shake your head derisively before giving them a good-natured smile.

“You’re just mad I got a bigger pair than you, Hurlz,” you joke as you shrug your blazer off and toss it to hang on the back of your desk chair, slink onto the seat, and let it spin, unable to not shoot Matt Hurley a silly glance. “Anyway…it had to be said.”

“I mean, did it?” Johnny Estrada can’t help challenge as he crosses his arms and leans his hip into the tall file cabinet that bisects your workspace from his. “York is easygoing, but no one’s cool with taking that level of shit from anyone, chica.”

“Yeah, and unlike you three? I get stuck working on a lot of processing requests with people who report direct to him. I’d like to not end up on someone’s shit-list,” Sam Foster grumbles at you before nursing his morning-old coffee. “So then? I take it the assignment is another dud?”

Grunting to yourself when you realize nothing netted out definitively between you and Dave regarding the matter, you reply neutrally, “He’s taking it under advisement.”

They exchange varying looks of bewilderment before you sigh and spin your chair to face your computer.

“Fine. Yes. I lost my patience. I’ll work on it. Sorry, fellas,” you yield tersely.

“Yeah, well, you’re lucky we like you,” Matt quips before loping back to the opposite workspace he and Sam share. “Oh! Tomorrow? I got an in on that happy hour I told youz about. All you guys are down, right?” he exclaims and enthusiastically lobbies, patting Sam eagerly on the shoulder and punching Johnny on the arm when they give lukewarm grunts in response. “C’mon! Fancy bourbon bar at the top of a high-rise overlooking the Potomac, aka guaranteed to be busting with singles, if not swanky elite connections.”

“Wanna carpool tomorrow?” Johnny nudges you platonically with the back of his hand at your arm. “Do that workout class in the morning, and we can try this foofy bar?”

“Sure, but I want that muffin from the bakery,” you haggle, smiling when Matt cheers and starts hassling Sam to cave. “If you go, I’ll buy you all an ‘I’m sorry for being sassy to the boss’ round, ok?” is your suggestion when you look impishly at Sam.

“Ah, fuck it, fine,” the man relents, comically shoving Matt along to get back to work. “We’ll all go right after work tomorrow.”

What had you been thinking about? Oh, yeah…Dave York.

As you zone out into your clerical tasks, typing away and staring at your computer screen, you can’t help try and drudge the foreboding feeling that you’re dismissing something you shouldn’t. What was it?

Your mind slaps you with Dave’s silhouette, standing behind the sidelight of that door. Oh yeah…I should feel alarmed by that, right? Earnestly, you insist to yourself that surely having a man you work with lurking and leering at you in such a vulnerable circumstance is something a normal woman should have been seriously concerned – perhaps even fearful of. But that anxiety never hits. Even when you’d rushed out of the building that night, it was more to get out of the awkward parting of ways with your hookup rather than being put out or mortified by being watched by the lead intelligence advisor you’d had to bury your rancor towards.

As the day goes on to early evening and each of the fellas file out and offer you their varying farewells, you keep working, and psychoanalyzing yourself.

And then, just when you feel obtusely detached from the inscrutable reason trying to cull you into concern, your mind skids to a halt on the sudden thought.

He’s dangerous. Something about him is familiar because he’s a threat.

Pausing to contemplate that, you lean back in your chair and dazedly look around to find the office and other workspaces empty. Checking the time on your phone, you realize it’s later than you’d intended to stay, so with a mind-clearing shake of your head, you logoff your computer, grab your purse and loop your blazer to drape over it as you hang the strap on your shoulder. The muted sound of your heels becomes a rhythmic click as you traverse through the office and out to the tiled foyer towards the elevator banks. You press the button and push your blouse’s sleeves up to your elbows before glancing at your smartphone’s screen to idly check messages while you wait.

The elevator arrives and its doors slide open smoothly, so you breeze in and with practiced sense-memory, press the button to the garage level without looking up from your phone. Just as you’re taking a measured step back towards the wall while the doors begin to slide shut, you make out the sound of footfalls in long strides across the tiled floor before the doors pause and accordion back when the person places their hand to trigger the safety sensor.

Once the elevator halts, you flick your glance up just as Dave steps in and settles to stand next to you, with a respectable pocket of space between you both.

For some reason, your pulse races, and that familiar tingle of trepidation flickers through you, but you don’t outwardly betray anything and simply resume perusing the article you’d begun to skim through on your phone. As soon as the doors slide shut, Dave shoots you a sidelong glance and adjusts the strap of his soft leather workbag higher up his broad shoulder before flicking his wrist up to glance at his watch.

“You make it a habit of working late on days you backtalk to superiors?”

That little deviant thrill buzzes through you at his menacingly gruff remark. You don’t look at him though. Instead, you flick your gaze from your phone to the floor number display on the elevator’s panel, seeing it’s ticking down slow and making it obvious it’s going to meander all the way down to the G-level, as it always does. You then spot the security camera mounted not-so-covertly in the ceiling corner of the elevator, and realize he’s being mindful of its watchful lens, hence why his body language and expression don’t match the provocative tone of his voice or the edge of his words.

With a musing sigh, you glance back at your phone and close out the article as you retort glibly, “I work late most days, Dave. In spite of whomever might’ve gotten my backtalk.”

It’s then you betray an aloof glance his way, and smile when he raises a stoically quirked brow while his dark brown eyes snap appraisingly along the length of you before boring into your now unbothered gaze. It’s fleeting, but you both see the flare of something charged in each other’s eyes before you turn to feign you’re checking the floor number display again. Really, you’re looking at how his jaw squares before the hinge clenches. Admiring his 5-o’clock shadow along his cheeks and jawline, as you watch the tendon in his neck flex when he grunts and looks down at his own phone he’s just pulled from his blazer’s pocket.

“You seemed to be incapable of backtalk when that prick was railing the fuck out of you.”

His voice is a velvet pitch, rich with surly wickedness. Dave said it with his features relaxed, tip of his tongue darting to dampen the top rim of his lips as he feigned boredom and looked up from his phone screen now to shoot you a carefree smile.

It shouldn’t turn you on. None of this should be something you’re entertaining. But then you offer him a congenial smile, the one you let reach your eyes. They crinkle prettily and make your lashes seem longer just as you bat them at him. Dave’s pillowed lips pull into a handsome, albeit amused smirk, so you slip your phone into your purse and coolly brush your fingers to tuck your hair behind your ear as you regard him with a heated stare.

“Hmm, I suppose that was the case, seeing as he was giving me something I wanted rather than pretending to appease me with his good-guy façade,” is your sibilant drawl as you give him an easygoing, one-shouldered shrug.

Dave’s expression darkens, and you can feel the rancorous windup radiate off of him and reverberate onto you just as the elevator dings, announcing you’ve arrived to the garage level. He’s hot under the collar now – cock thick and hard in his slacks in spite of his dueling outrage and wanton urge warring for dominance. It leaves him feeling like his skin is pulled too tight and the conflict of it has wound tight into the pit of his belly.

When the doors slide open, you politely nod in farewell and nimbly breeze out, intending to stride off to your car while nursing the gloating delight of wiping the smirk off his good-looking face.

Suddenly, before you’ve registered the shift, you’re whipped around by a vise-like grip snapping around the back of your arm. In a blink, you’re pressed up against the cement retaining wall that creates a corner separating the elevator banks from the approaching curb leading out to the sprawling underground parking. Your neck cranes back so you can stare up at Dave as he looms over you before he briskly presses into your personal space and causes your breath to hitch in your chest. His dark eyes unearth a shiver to skitter up your spine, and the imposing way he crowds you, leaning close enough for you to smell his mint-tinged breath and the intertwined scent that makes up the warm musk of his cologne, soap and skin.

“I guess I don’t have to pretend anymore on your account, seeing as you enjoy being a smart-mouthed bitch,” Dave growls darkly, adding in a hushed rumble, “The kind of disrespectful tease that secretly aches to be punished. That why you strut around, talking to me like you do? Because you wish I’d drag you into a dark corner and fuck you speechless, you wicked little bitch?”

Your thighs clench from how hard your pussy throbs at his nasty come-on, and you dimly wonder if he can smell how wet you are – well, how wet you’ve been since he stepped onto the elevator, because your panties are drenched through now as you press your shoulders back into the cement and defiantly stare up at him, hands snapping up onto his blazer-clad biceps. His arms are boxing you in against him and the wall, and he expects you to push him away, or maybe even dig your nails into his arms in retaliation. So, when you instead grip them and pull him closer, his surly expression cools long enough to take in how you’re looking at him.

“Is that why you watched? Because you wanted to be the one fucking me, Dave?”

His expression hardens, jaw ticking as he exhales harshly out his nose and glares scathingly down at you from how lilting and smug your tone was.

Humming a sultry sound of amusement, you gloat, “What, you can’t admit it? Is it too much of a dangerous threat to your dashing Dave shtick? Or you can’t accept that you want what you can’t have—?”

“Who fucking said I can’t have it?” Dave snarls turbulently as he suddenly un-shoulders his satchel and lets it plot to the floor. Your eyes flash with surprise when he grabs your waist, digging his thumb into your hipbone while his other hand clasps around your slender neck and pins you into place so he can tauntingly lean dangerously close. He ghosts the tip of his aquiline nose across your cheekbone as he husks, “From the way you were looking at me? I think you only managed to come that night because you were pretending it was me railing you from behind. Wishing it was my cock fucking your pussy raw,” he pauses to see if you’ll object, or try to contradict him. Your only reaction is for your breath to quicken, and he smirks maliciously when your eyes get dark and glossy as he lightly kneads your throat with his warm palm and thick fingers clasping threateningly as if contemplating squeezing. “Tell me I’m wrong, spitfire. Talkback. Say you don’t want it, and—”

Dave’s command cuts off when you swiftly maneuver your arm in a way that it sweeps his hand from your throat while your other hand snatches around his nape to hook and haul him down so you can challengingly glare into his wide gape. “You want control?! Then you say it,” you hiss daringly, heart pounding in your chest and core cloying with desire. Dave deliberates tensely as he wraps his arms possessively around your frame, so you airily murmur, “If you want it, then take it.” He bristles at your tone, so you sigh, eyes lowering alluringly as you whisper, “Drop the façade and show me…”

Fuck. Dave feels off-kilter and ravenously turned on by your defiant-yet-beguiling come-on. His eyes sear into yours as he leans into a breath’s width of your mouth and curls his palm up from your waist to drag up your soft blouse, fondling you over the thin material before he curls his hand around to grip the back of your neck and yank you forward to meet his bruising kiss.

After so long, and despite all the roiling angst that’s been crackling between you, your mouths are demanding and warm as the tether keeping you both at odds snaps loose. There’s no security camera to worry about now, so Dave revels in kissing you breathless after having longed to do it, and your mouth worships his with just as much gusto. It proves to him you’ve wanted him just as much, and he blazes with savage pride while you relish feeling so engulfed-yet-grounded in this all-consuming passion he’s stoking out of you.

You cling to Dave as his tongue plunders your mouth and his knee jams between your pencil-skirt-clad thighs to force you onto your tippy toes so you can drown and burn all at once. The heat of your clothed cunt as it grinds against his thigh makes Dave growl into the kiss before you suck hard on his bottom lip and gasp from how his other hand gropes the globe of your buttock and digs his fingers into the plump swell. Your hand tightens in the neatly-trimmed tufts of hair at his nape when your pussy throbs in response to him grinding his hard-on against your hip while he presses his thumb below the hinge of your jaw to pin it open when you mewl into the torrid kiss.

Just as your brain begins to haywire with debauched yearning and reluctant apprehension at being dominated by Dave out in the open like this, you hear the ding of the elevator chiming its sudden arrival.

With automatic force, you recoil and shove Dave back before snapping your purse strap up from the tangle it’s in at your elbow to snag on your shoulder as you agilely sprint off. He is equally swift in retrieving his satchel and scrubbing his palm over his features to swipe any possible remnants of your lipstick that may have smudged on him, as he breathes in a charged inhale and holds it the entire time he walks briskly to his car. As he hurries on long strides, he covertly watches you clear the expanse of the empty spaces towards your compact little sedan tucked into a spot across the way. You don’t spare a backwards glance at him, which Dave takes umbrage to and begins to simmer with disdain over while he stalks to his own black Mercedes in the top corner.

The office workers who’d filed out of the coitus interruptus elevator were now loudly saying their farewells as they broke off to head to their own vehicles just as you hop into yours. Dave scans your license plate as you back out of your spot and maneuver to pull out and cruise out of the level up towards the exit ramp. With a gruff grunt, he gets in his car and sits there while the engine warms up. He palms his hard-on over his trousers and feels himself throb while his face flushes with surly frustration.

Fucking Christ. What’re you doing – what the fuck even was that?

With a huff, Dave snaps his seatbelt on and notices the damp spot on his pant leg, just above his knee. Don’t blur the fucking lines, dammit. Keep shit separate. Work. Family. Hookups. Contracts. Each walled off so one doesn’t fuck with the other. His palm rubs the spot clean enough to not be traceable to the naked eye. Before he puts the car in reverse, he raises his hand to his nose and breathes in the scent of your wet pussy. Blood rushes to his groin and his hard-on strains in response. Fuck…you have to keep it all compartmentalized. Fucking a hot piece of ass from the office is not the way to go about it…

Annoyed, Dave backs out of his spot and heads home, intending to force his wanton desire for you into the dark pit with the rest of the things he can’t have.

But then the drive is filled with snapshots of all the things he’s catalogued about you. His mind falls into the loop of things he finds the most enticing. Starting with how good you looked getting fucked. He’d always wondered whether he’d misread the standoffish vibe he kept picking up from you, but since that night, it had become clear that you were on guard and perceptive. Like you’d seen something in him that he actively worked to conceal.

It’s now that he realizes it: Whatever you’d seen in him? He got a glimpse of the same thing in you that night, and today. But rather than put him on guard like it had for you, Dave felt some subliminal gravitation towards you. Reckless, fucking wild energy…but with something else teeming just beneath the surface…

You’d been strong. No hesitation in your movements, and the way you’d shifted his hand away? It was practiced and fluid. Self-defense courses? He hummed to himself as he drove down the suburban block, nearing home.

He tries to snuff further impulsive scrutiny on the subject – Fuck, she’s going to be trouble – as he idly scrubs his hand over his face, rubbing his fingers absently at his nose before exhaling a tense huff while he concentrates on the road, but his mind just keeps snapping back to the standout things he’s found so alluring; that had left him simmering with intrigue.

Your impatience and sheer inability to keep your umbrage at bay today, when he’d shut your team down. How you smiled deviously the few times you’d walked by each other, when you thought he wasn’t looking. The way your eyes heated when he’d talked dirty to you.

And, unbidden, his mind starts fixating on how your mouth tastes and the way you fit against him when you’d made out.

By the time Dave gets home, it’s late enough that the girls are tucked in, so he walks into his bedroom, kicks off his shoes and hurriedly strips his blazer and tie before rolling up his sleeves.

He eyed Carole intensely as he prowled up to her on the bed and yanked her down onto her back before he shoved her nightgown up so he could bow his head between her thighs. He fucked her the way he reserves only for her – passionate, present and pent-up as he loomed over her. Dave wrecks her easily with his wound up need, and he makes her come a second time before he pulls out and finishes on her nightgown. The pressure of the frustration of before eases with the needed release, and he’s able to easily put his façade back up as he settles down into bed post-coitus.

Still, when the lights are off, he lies in bed with her sated and curled up against him, blissfully oblivious while Dave becomes still as he stares into the dark.

Compartmentalize.

He wonders if you’re touching yourself, thinking about him…

***

The entire ordeal had been something visceral for you. One moment you were at the safe distance you figuratively always demarcate between you and a perceived threat. And the next?

You shiver. The heat of it – how much you’d wanted it, has you still tingling with a libidinous urge. Never have you felt that jolt of sheer panic the way you did when that elevator had chimed. It had flooded you so fiercely that you’d pushed Dave back and practically broken into a mad dash to your car. Your face had burned with your mortification, and the shame of it had been so potent that you couldn’t muster the gumption to look back at Dave, fearing he’d be able to see it plainly carved in you. That you would become a pillar of salt if you looked into his dark brown eyes and etched features.

You were also so turned on that you weren’t sure what you would’ve done if your eyes had locked onto those dark brown pools of his – that they would’ve stripped you to the fibers and rewired you to let them sway you the way they had into whatever the hell that was. So, you’d gotten in your car and made your needed exit before the impulses that had gotten you into so much trouble to begin with further wrought you into an even precariously reckless state.

The next morning, you are more than able to make the early wakeup call to meet Johnny at the curb in front of your apartment building for the kickboxing session. After all, you’d spent the entire night tossing and turning, with Dave on your mind.

Sure, you’d touched yourself in the shower after trying to rinse his cologne off of you, but the desire you have for him was a molten well you’d sprung, and even when you’d gotten off, it hadn’t been enough. You’d wanted him curled around you from behind. Ached to be pounded mercilessly into the bed. To walk around with the burn of his cock having stretched your muscles, and throb with the sting of his rough touches. To feel that stabilizing bliss of being dominated seep deep to your bones and soothe the roiling darkness you.

He’s dangerous. That was unsustainable. You can’t want him. You don’t even like him, remember?!

It’s the mantra you harangue over and over in your mind as you nibble on the muffin Johnny got you from the bakery around the corner from his place while he drives you both to work, chatting amiably.

You keep it on repeat as you ride up in the elevator, and then stroll to your workspace. But, when you log onto your computer and pull up your email, all the heckling grinds to a halt.

“…He approved it…”

“Huh?” Johnny spins sidelong in his desk chair to peer over at you. “What’s that—?”

“Holy shit! Did you read your email?!” Matt suddenly pops up from behind the divider separating he and Sam’s workspaces from yours. “The assignment got approved!”

“Oh fuck, really?!” Johnny balks, surprised. “He really took whatever you told him under advisement, chica!”

“Sam!” Matt is shouting and waving enthusiastically at the man as he emerges from the reception area and lopes down inquisitively towards your group. “Check it out, man! ‘Assignment Approved,’ so no more sulking into your mug. Tonight we’re definitely celebrating!”

You’re bemused and concealing it expertly from the fellas. After all…what was this? Did Dave really approve your assignment as what – some kind of show of goodwill? An olive branch? A way to kowtow you?

Was this some sort of quid pro quo?!

It eats at you all day.

So, by the time you’re heading out to happy hour a little after 5-o’clock, you feel unsteady and unsettled. But, you’re a master of guarding your true self and exuding unruffled ease, so you summon that and head up into the glass elevator with the fellas to the top floor of the building.

Matt is true to his word, and you’re all able to get in and take up vigil at a bar-height table before they muscle in to get the drinks ordered. You’re able to admire the elegantly timeless ambiance of the exclusive bar, then move onto the sprawling view out at the Potomac River as the early evening sun reflects across it, backlit by the highways and other glass buildings flanking it. Johnny comes back and hands you a martini, settling in next to you to kill time people watching and commenting on the swanky vibe of the place. Once Matt and Sam shuffle through the crowd to park around the table, you all share a toast.

“—To a hopefully more promising future in getting shit done!” Matt cheers and you all exchange good-natured clinks of your drinks before sipping.

“How’d you get us in here, by the way?” Sam asks as he swirls his old fashioned.

“The hostess is dating my brother!” Matt drawls and grins as he gestures to the back corner across from the bar, where cozier seating options are, away from the bustling bar patrons. “And it’s a total bonus that I got word that they’d be here.”

Following his stare, the rest of you turn to see that Susan Plummer and the usual suspects of her inner circle are sitting around a circular dining table, shooting the shit over side plates and aged bourbon.

You can feel you pulse race and that wanton desire spread a dull ache in the seat of your core at seeing Dave with the seasoned lead within the agency. What the hell?!

“Dude, don’t tell me this is gonna be your attempt at worming in there to network with the head honchos,” Johnny can’t help deride Matt as he nurses his beer.

“C’mon man, you wanna stay on an assignments team forever?” Sam mutters, taking Matt’s side. “This is actually not a shit plan—”

“Jeez, thanks,” Matt elbows him and bounces his brows triumphantly at you when he adds, “Besides, wouldn’t it be awesome to get some face-to-face time with the boss lady? Let her get a good look at the badass who wore York down?”

You snicker and finish your martini, outwardly humored, but internally ready to shrink into the shadows and get the hell out of there. “Well, count me out on that. I don’t think rubbing that fact in will improve any of our standings, but feel free to go over, if you dare,” is your amused retort as you idly glance towards the illustrious group of senior-level leads to find that Dave has spotted you. “I’m gonna see if they’ll make me a martini with vodka next,” you announce as you slink away and weave through the crowd to what you hope to be a secluded spot you see open up at the bar.

The boys exchange looks and decide to go for it, and you watch them stroll over to the wood paneled section of the bar to introduce themselves to the top brass. You watch as Dave turns on the affable charisma and waves them over once he spots them, giving each of the fellas a friendly handshake before gesturing to Plummer as everyone shares greetings. Satisfied to have avoided that, you turn your focus to the bar and wait to be attended. After several unsuccessful attempts to flag down a bartender over the bustling and chattering din of the crowd, you’re weighing giving up and just leaving your empty martini glass on the bar top. Just as you consider whether you could get away with doing the Irish goodbye on the fellas and going to a normal bar to decompress, you feel someone tall sidle up next to you at the counter. The warm, spiced hints of a familiar cologne filter over your senses when they lean their large hand on the counter top and authoritatively whistle for the nearest bartender’s attention.

“Hey, I’m switching to a whiskey. Neat.”

The face of the watch peeking from the suit’s sleeve and the gold of the wedding band glint under the pendant light directly above this corner of the bar, and you steel yourself, despite the deviant thrill that surges through you. Arousal tingles through you and throbs wet heat to radiate through your pelvis before zinging into the clutch of your pussy, which makes your thighs clench and breath flutter.

Guardedly, you glance up at Dave and silently spectate how the bartender attentively backpedals and takes his empty glass with a curt nod, about to hop to it when Dave flicks his dark eyes down at you before nodding in your direction as he drawls, “And whatever she’s having.”

You tap the rim of your empty martini glass and order smoothly, “Vodka martini with a twist, please.”

Nodding, the bartender grabs the glass and goes off to make your drinks.

You feel the heat of his gaze flick away as Dave neutrally glances over the crowd to where your happy hours have seemingly merged. “I would’ve figured you for a dirty martini kind of girl,” he drawls in a laconic mumble.

Unable to suppress your devious smile, you try to conceal it by busying yourself looking through your purse for your phone. “And I figured you for a light beer type of guy,” you offer glibly. Checking the time on your phone, you spare a craning look towards the fellas, hoping they’re not going to just camp out with the big wigs now, and frown when you see they’re pretty much settled in at the large round table, talking congenially.

“So is this standoffish attitude just for me? Or do you have an aversion to networking and getting in good with the bosses,” he queries sarcastically as he leans his elbows over the countertop.

He’s in a nice dark gray suit, the knot of his burgundy tie loose and the top of his crisp white dress shirt collar unbuttoned, hair looking like he’s run his fingers through it a few times in the last hour. He looks good enough to eat.

Slipping your phone back into the purse, you covertly glare at him under your lashes. “You’re quite vain, Dave,” you chime deridingly, glance daring now as he flicks his intense gaze down at you. “Maybe I just want to get my work done without you derailing it on a whim? And perhaps I don’t want to suck up to you and the bosses on my time off?”

He looks stonily at you, about to say something, but the bartender appears with your drinks, so you accept the martini and hold it up in gesture of thanks before motioning with a tilt of your head that you’re going back to your table. However, you find your plan to abscond from him thwarted when you clear around enough of the crowd to see the bar top table has been taken over by other patrons. Goddammit…

“You have a bratty fucking inability of showing gratitude, you know that,” Dave mutters darkly, close to your ear before covertly herding you by the back of your hip to return to your spot at the counter. “And this trying to have the last word before strutting off bullshit is not gonna fly with me anymore…” is his warningly low rumble before he turns back to his drink and takes a long pull from the amber liquid in the glass.

Your eyes flash with something searing, and he smirks around the rim of the glass.

“Oh, there you are!” You turn to see Johnny approach with a glass of bourbon in his hand, so you shoot him a mocking look, as if to say ‘Really? You’re a bourbon boy now?’ “I saw we lost the table, so wanted to make sure you were good.”

“Yeah, sorry. Took way longer for me to get a drink. Luckily Dave here has the gravitas to have the bartenders at his beck and call,” you can’t help charmingly quip and raise your glass to Dave before taking a sip.

“Is she always this mean?” Dave jokes and gives Johnny a faux-forlorn headshake.

Your friend and coworker laughs. “Pretty much. Don’t take it too personal.”

“Oh, nice. Thanks for selling me out, Estrada,” you comically hiss and punch him lightly on the arm.

Dave chuckles, but secretly catalogues your seemingly platonic, carefree ease with the other man. He wonders if you two fuck. If after the bar, he’ll take you to his place and make you whimper and come as hard as he’s fantasized about when he’d thought about you every time he’d jacked off since watching you get railed that night.

“—C’mon, chica. Won’t hurt to make a round and say hello!” Johnny is cajoling, and Dave drains the remainder of his glass before gesturing for a refill by holding his empty tumbler up for the bartender to see.

“Ugh, fine. You’re all a bunch of social climbers!” you heckle and goofily thread your arm through his as you taunt, “Lead the way, then.”

You don’t spare a look back at Dave, but you can feel his stare rove your indigo-blouse-covered back and invisibly fondle over your black-pencil-skirt-clad ass as you go.

Feeling pretty good about extricating yourself from that possibly sticky situation before it could become as torrid as last night’s brief encounter, you let Johnny take you over and introduce you to the legendary Susan Plummer and the other department leads. She’s friendly and boisterous, telling you to pull up a chair and join them as she put in another round of bourbon servings for the table. You do, pleasantly joining the conversation.

“That martini looks awfully good. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one from here,” Susan is commenting as the server hands everyone their bourbon drinks. “I’ll have one of those, please,” she impishly tells the server and smiles broadly as Dave appears with his whiskey and shakes his head at her while he lopes around the seated parties. “What?! It’s Friday, and I got a driver!”

“I didn’t say anything,” he quips, pursing his lips derisively at her as he takes the vacant seat next to the chair you’d pulled over to sit in. “But since I do have to drive, this’ll be it for me,” Dave remarks glibly as he tips his drink at her and takes a swallow.

“Ah, well then, one of you boys, don’t let Dave’s bourbon go to waste!” Susan chuckles, and you amusedly reach for the filled glass and slide it over to Sam – who’s sitting on the other side of you – while finishing your martini with a pristine gulp. As you settle back and push your empty glass to the center before you scoot your chair further into the table, you grab for the glass of bourbon that’s your serving, internally grimacing and squinting at Matt and Johnny when they shoot comical looks at you. Snickering, you cup the crystal-carved glass in your palms and try to steel yourself to drink it when you suddenly feel warm, deft fingers skim over the outside of your knee before a large palm wraps around it and squeezes possessively. Your pulse jumps and your pussy clenches, but your expression doesn’t betray a thing, which is good, since Susan asks, “Aww, are you not a fan of bourbon? We could get you something else—”

“N-No, it’s fine. I’m just cautious with dark spirits. They tend to go to my head and flush my cheeks,” you persuasively assure before taking a fortifying breath and drinking. As you do, Dave chooses that moment to glide his hand up your thigh, pushing the hem of your skirt in his wake. It makes it easy for it to slip between your thighs and clutch your supple flesh until his fingertips are kneading greedily enough to make your cunt pulse and a rush of arousal ache down with it.

It steals your breath, and you fight the urge to gasp out by hiding it as a little hiccup into the glass before you place it back down on the table.

Mercifully, the fellas and the other leads at the table keep the conversation flowing, so you’re able to feign like you’re shifting in your chair when you’re really grabbing Dave’s wrist and doing a pressure-point squeeze to it, manipulating the joint and causing the tendons in his hand to jolt.

He bites back his hiss and shifts his hand away, but you think the action will bring attention to you both, so you bump the back of your hand against the appetizer dish and cutlery closest to you. “Ugh, I’m such a klutz! Sorry,” you exclaim as you grab the cutlery that clattered and busily straighten it while Dave clandestinely studies you, cataloguing what you did. “Told you the bourbon would go to my head,” you chime self-deprecatingly before shooting Johnny ‘the look’ and excusing yourself.

Dave watches as you get up and head out to the main bar area with your workspace mate following you as conversation around the table resumes as if uninterrupted. He realizes you’d snagged your purse and taken it with you, making it all the more likely that you would be once again absconding from him.

And that was totally your intention. You of course make up an excuse to Johnny and assure him that you’re just really tired and will grab a cab home.

With a cool smile and pat of his shoulder as you lean in and kiss his cheek, you drawl, “You just keep schmoozing! Fill me in on everything Monday?”

“Sure thing. But if they ask where you went, I’m going to tell the table it’s you pulling your infamous Irish goodbye!” he jokes and smirks. “Pick you up for kickboxing early Monday.”

Winking and nodding, you turn and saunter out, intending to make your escape. Don’t look back. Don’t fucking do it. After all, you don’t want to keep sending whatever signal Dave keeps pinging onto, and while you can’t deny getting a rush from it, you know you can’t entertain whatever the hell this is. That you shouldn’t be entertaining his lascivious and intense brand of courtship, no matter how much his dark eyes flaring at you, or his pouty, tight-jawed scowl make you yearn for his wickedness. He’s married. You work together. And also: YOU. DO. NOT. LIKE. HIM.

With the new mantra, you successfully weave through the crowd towards the foyer and slip into the first elevator going down. With a stop at the ladies room, you brush your wispy hairs back from your face and undo the top two buttons of your indigo blouse’s collar before shouldering your purse and heading out the lobby towards the glass doors out front. At this time, traffic is bustling and it’s a competition to get a cab. Most are running off the curb, flagging the taxis down and hopping in before they’ve even fully stopped.

You frown and pace towards a less crowded corner of the curb, next to the underground parking ramp for the building you’d just exited. Looking up and down the avenue, you spot a cab cruising your way, so you enthusiastically wave to get the driver’s attention, but he jets right by, and you see there were already passengers in the backseat. Huffing, you pull your phone out of your purse, rescind to opening the rideshare app and seeing what your options were as you step back onto the curb when the parking exit’s security arm lifts and the sound of an approaching car accelerating up the drive echoes over to you.

Distractedly checking the rates for the ride home, you’re idly kneading your bottom lip between your teeth when the car pulls up and halts for the inbound traffic. The sound of the power window lowering is in your peripheral attention when you suddenly feel that sensation of someone staring at you.

“Need a ride?”

Turning swiftly at the smugly purred offer, you hesitate as you eye Dave in his sleek black Mercedes, arm folded over the window’s panel as he smirks at you.

Tersely, you pivot sidelong as you evade, “…No, thank you. I was just about to punch in for—”

“Meaning, you haven’t booked it yet, so you can hop in and let me save you the rush hour rate,” Dave cuts in with a honeyed baritone. When you give him a sarcastic look and quirk a brow skeptically at him, he adds amusedly, “C’mon, spitfire. It’s getting dark, traffic’s a bitch, and I wouldn’t mind going somewhere for a nightcap. It’d be nice to have the company.”

You know alarm bells should be going off, and that some visceral part of you senses the mystique of something deviant and domineering in the way his dark brown eyes are looking at you. But it doesn’t scare you. If anything, you’re feeling a pull, and you can’t deny how he has your heart racing and heat tangling in your core with heady, lurid anticipation.

A car pulls up behind Dave’s and honks, so with a ridiculing tilt of his head at you, he mocks, “You’re holding up the line, buttercup. Get in while you still can.”

Pursing your lips at him, you throw caution to the wind – rounding the front of the car to open the front passenger door and hop in with a derisive snicker.

As you’re snapping your seatbelt on, Dave can’t help internally gloat, pleased to have had made the smart decision to call home and tell Carole he’d be working late and would probably sleep on the pullout couch in his office tonight. She’d affectionately lamented him spending another Friday night hard at work, but was always none the wiser to ever suspect a thing. He knew he was too wound up to go home after the tug and pull at the bar with you, so he’d rescind himself to stewing about it alone, and was analyzing how adeptly you’d applied the wrist pressure move – She’s gotta have learned that in some self-defense class – when he’d driven up the ramp and spotted you on the corner, idling on your phone.

Pulling out onto the avenue, Dave drives through traffic and watches you out of the corner of your eye as you lean back in the leather seat and adjust your purse to sit on your lap. “So? Where to for this nightcap?” you query and glance over at him as you tuck a rogue strand of hair behind your ear.

“I have a place,” Dave retorts, driving expertly to weave in and out of traffic as he heads southbound.

Cataloguing the streets and landmarks he drives past, you figure he’ll take you to some more secluded spot, perhaps in DuPont Circle. But when he keeps going without taking any of the routes into the trendy area, your next guess is that maybe he’ll take you to some posh place in Foggybottom. You don’t feel like filling the quiet with inane questions or idle chatter on the matter, though, so you appreciate the silence and the hum of the air-conditioning and smoothness of the car’s horsepower. The radio isn’t on, and you wonder if he just turned it down before he’d rolled down the window to call out to you.

“Are you and Estrada a thing?”

The absent train of thought of your mind derails, and you blink the faraway contemplating to absorb his question. Part of you is annoyed he would ask. It wants you to snap, ‘Are you and your wife a thing?’ with a snarky edge, but you dismiss the bratty impulse. Glancing over at him, you give him a puzzled look instead, arching a delicate brow as you size him up.

“I’m curious, is all,” Dave mutters, as he continues to head southbound, sparing you a mocking glance. “Wondering if there’s some reason why he wasn’t the one doing the railing that night—”

“Did you approve our assignment as a quid pro quo?”

His mirth cools as he snaps a perturbed glance at you before glaring ahead. “You think I need to exchange favors like some hard-up fucker, desperate to get his dick wet?” is his low grouse, jaw tightening and shoulders winding back stiffly.

“Well…do you?” is your mischievous murmur, and when he shoots a glare your way, you smile – a genuine, brilliant smile that knocks the umbrage loose from his chest and makes heat rise to the back of his neck. “No, Estrada is just a very good friend. And no, I don’t think you’re a hard-up fucker. Just…an instigating asshole who uses a façade in order to keep up with the Joneses, when he’s really the opposite,” you find yourself volunteering evenly as you realize he’s driving you way out of your normal stomping grounds. “Where are we going?” you ask, gaze sharp as you catalogue your surroundings. He’s heading into Navy Yard.

“I told you. I got a place,” Dave rumbles flatly, still stuck on your assessment of him. It’s grinding his gears how accurately you pegged him. Tersely, he retorts, “And no, it isn’t a quid pro quo—”

“So you admit you’ve been just fucking with me,” you cut in and cross your arms, eyeing him wryly.

Dave grunts before sweeping his tongue across his top teeth before answering, “Not yet, I haven’t.”

You scoff and turn your face away, hiding the sardonic smirk tugging at your full lips. “Where are you taking us, Dave,” you ask again, staring narrowly at him when he deadpans a wordless hum. “This is literally how every Dateline starts—”

“Is that a fact?” he sneers in a gravelly drone, brows quirking sarcastically.

With an impish smirk, you chime, “Yep. Suburban husband takes colleague for a drive. She’s found in a ditch, or a swamp. Brutalized beyond recognition, and they come up with a catchy episode title. Something like, ‘She Never Came Home’—”

“Fucking Christ,” he heckles, grinning derisively at you as he looks over with a scathing quirk to his features. “That’s twisted—”

“Look who’s fucking talking,” you deride, licking your lips and snickering, “I’m being driven to an undisclosed location by Mr. Nice Guy, who turns out, makes it sport to fuck with my work, and is holding over my head catching me having sex in the office—”

“When did I do that?” he interrupts acerbically as he pulls down a side street and cruises towards the back entrance to what looks like a former factory warehouse-turned loft spaces.

You hum thoughtfully, turning your attention to the enclosed garage he’s driving into at the base of the building before he parks in a marked space. Cutting the engine, he snaps his seatbelt off and grabs his cell phone from the cubby in his center dash before looking over at you.

“I’m not going to Dateline you, little minx,” he tells you in a velvety scoff and gestures for you to come along before he opens his door and exits the car.

Good to know, you snicker to yourself as you exit the passenger seat and shut the door. He locks the car with the press of the key and pockets it along with his phone as he watches you take quick stock of your surroundings while you stroll to head towards the elevator banks that flank the interior of the garage’s back wall. You can smell how close to the water you are, figuring you’re less than a block from the river.

As he punches the button and slips his hands into his trouser pockets, your mind tries to counsel through these choices you’ve made. What are you even doing? You shouldn’t be here. There’s still time for you to leave. Whatever this is, it’s a stupid, reckless thing to keep walking into—

The elevator arrives, and Dave sidesteps to let you enter first. You walk in without hesitation, and are followed by him. He uses some kind of sensor keycard before he hits the button to a high floor, and as it slowly ascends, he turns to eye you.

He’s internally enthralled that you’ve come this far and not peppered him with the laundry list of questions so typical in this situation. Before he can linger on why that should be equally as alarming, you lean back into the elevator wall – purse hooked onto your shoulder as you rest your hands on the rail at your back. Your gaze is measuring him thoughtfully, and not for the first time, Dave wonders what you’re really thinking behind those stunning eyes. Striding over to lean into the opposite corner, he eyes you with intense want now, head tilting as he stares down your body before flicking his brown pools of desire back up to your face.

“Come here,” he suddenly beckons, thick finger gesturing for you to come to him. When you defiantly stare back at him, his eyes get dark and he pushes off the wall to crowd you. “I don’t make it a habit to ask, spitfire—”

“And I don’t have it in me to come when called to, like a pet. No matter how handsome or fucking sexy the guy doing the calling is,” you tell him silkily as you crane your neck back and grab the sides of his waistband and tug him into you.

He growls and clasps a possessive hand around your throat before engulfing you with a barbarous kiss. The kind that is more tongue, nips, and scrapes of covetous want fueled by surly disdain than amorous passion. But then your hands grip his back, and your breathy gasp make him burn with a base desire that has him throbbing to be buried inside you with his teeth marking into your neck. You’re both getting drunk off of the heat of your torrid kiss and the sharp aftertaste of the happy hour drinks you each have flavoring your mouths. He’s rock-hard against your hip, and you’re so wet that you dazedly wonder if he can smell how bad you want him.

When the elevator arrives to the floor and the doors slide open, you both break the kiss only long enough for Dave to herd you against his side and escort you down the wide hall towards a numbered door that matches the marked spot in the parking garage below. You notice how quiet the hall is and idly wonder if the building is the go-to for recluses and adulterous spouses while you impulsively brush your tousled hair back as you watch him put in a code in the doorknob’s keypad before slipping in his key. He unlocks the door swiftly and sweeps you over the threshold before slamming the heavy door shut.

You don’t even have an opportunity to take in the layout of the high-ceilinged, modern and sparsely decorated loft apartment’s main room before Dave is tossing the keys and his phone onto the nearby kitchen counter, shedding his blazer to be tossed onto the back of the couch. He’s then on you, backing you into a wall in what is a hallway off from the kitchen space to grab you roughly by the waist and haul you up against his hard, strong frame as he kisses you with voracious hunger.

Gasping, you break the kiss by carding your fingers into the back of his hair and yanking so you can stare incandescently into his etched features as you hiss, “You said a nightcap—”

“You’re really gonna deny me now after all the shit you’ve pulled?”

His tone is dangerously calm, and it makes that deviant thing curl intriguingly within you as you shoot him a faux-berating stare while you mock, “When did I do that?”

His features darken, and you scoff and grab his hand to guide it up the front of your skirt so he can feel between your thighs. He didn’t expect that, so his breath hitches as he touches you over your drenched panties. “Jesus, you’re fucking soaked,” he husks and stares openly at you.

“Been wet like this since you stood next to me at the bar,” you confess unflinchingly, tone pitched and airy as he hums appealingly and nudges his forehead against yours in a show of pleased dominance. “Since you must know, I’ve wanted you. Both when I saw you that night, and begrudgingly several times before that,” is your murmur as you curl your other hand around his neck and anchor to him. “I know I shouldn’t—”

“Why shouldn’t you,” he grouses, surly glare crinkling when he leans back to trace his brown eyes into reading your features.

“…Really? Why?” you narrow your eyes incredulously at him as you exclaim, “Well, firstly, you’re a lead I work with, and you’re happily married husband and father, and model fucking citizen, Dave. That’s the cover, anyway, right?!”

That snaps him to stand away from you and war with the impulse to slap you across the face for your audacity to throw such things in his face so cavalierly. But then he sees you looking up intensely at him. “A wicked little tease like you? Quibbling asinine shit, as if you were some demure, chaste fucking angel?” Dave scoffs and scornfully sneers at you. “It seems I’m not the only one with a cover, sweetheart.”

“…This is bordering Dateline again, so I’m going to go unless you quit treating me like a fucking pet,” you snarl and push past him to toss your purse onto the counter next to his phone so you can angrily start looking through his cabinets for a liquor to pour yourself a helping of. “And seeing as you fucked up my happy hour, I’d like that nightcap.”

He is disarmed for a moment before seething in a grumble, “The one over the sink is the liquor cabinet.”

You indeed find a half-full bottle of whiskey and an untouched bottle of vodka, and proceed to pour yourself and him a drink into the glasses left to dry next to the sink.

Dave watches you retrieve ice cubes from the freezer and drop them in your glass before you take a swig of your vodka on the rocks and hold out the whiskey for him. He takes it and downs the whiskey neat before sliding the empty glass onto the opposite counter brusquely, glaring at you with his cold guard up.

Leaning into the corner of the counter, you stare at Dave contemplatively before finishing your drink and leaving it on the counter in order to round the kitchen island separating you from him. He’s wound up, and you know you should tread lightly, but that pull has you gravitating to him when he’s at his surliest like he is now. So, you approach him, and surprise him by reaching up to cup his cheek and stare with barefaced attraction into his handsomely moody regard.

It should unnerve him, but Dave instead finds himself leaning into your touch and closing his eyes to huff his pent-up breath out through his nose.

“I don’t even like you,” you sigh sardonically and brush a soft kiss over the corner of his mouth.

“Good. I think you’re a fucking little upstart bitch,” he grouses, but is chasing your lips, enjoying how you teasingly brush your soft morsels over his. “But I fucking want you,” is his terse murmur as he pulls you close and kisses possessively along your jaw.

You melt into his arms and tangle your fingers into the loose knot of his tie, pulling him down towards your mouth as you purr, “I wanted it to be you. I came on the thought of you dominating me. Pictured you fucking me on all fours, making me come all over your cock before you flipped me onto my back and made me watch you shoot your load over my pussy—”

As you tell Dave this, he feels filled up, yearning to give into the pull that exists between you. The one that’s magnetically charged and lures you both in once your guards are pulled down, and the darkness within you both becomes entranced, like a sated predator under a still night.

“I want you to be mine,” he husks, tone charged and guttural as he envelops you in his possessive embrace, butting the side of his head against yours in a show of dominance. You shiver, and he revels in how your mouth seeks his out when you loop your hands around his neck and pull him to meet your scintillating kiss.

Dave’s hands grab you up and lift you onto the kitchen island so he can stand between your legs as he suckles a searing path down your neck and hurriedly yanks your blouse loose while you’re simultaneously undoing his tie and unbuttoning his shirt with breathy haste. Before you can yank his shirttails from his waistband, he impatiently snaps your blouse open and sends the last button at the bottom flying. You gasp as he manhandles you out of the soft garment and yanks at your skirt until you feel the zipper strain.

“Fuck, Dave—”

“Shut up and get out of this fucking thing right now, or I’m going to rip it to shreds,” he growls as his hands unceremoniously snatch your black bra’s clasp undone and discards it from your torso by whipping it off your arms before he cups your tits and squeezes them together so he can lick libidinously over your studded nipples.

You arch and cry out, struggling to snatch your skirt down your hips and shove it off. Impatient, Dave snarls and manhandles you – tugging you off the counter to yank your skirt down and spins you around to bend over the island as he peels your black lace panties off to bunch around your heels. Just as you’re trying to catch your bearings, Dave kneels at your feet and licks up into your cunt from behind.

“Oh—my god,” you ramble out and arch back, gasping airily as he shoves your thighs roughly apart so he can lewdly lick a hot swipe of his tongue up from your clit to your tight clenching hole.

He growls and suddenly slaps his palm sharply over your ass to watch you jolt and your pussy drip with slick. Drunk on the sight, he suckles a nip into the swell of the cheek he’d spanked, and you mewl so prettily that his brain trips over itself with what to do to you next.

His cock is throbbing, but before he uses it to split you open, he wants to revel in the heat and wetness of your juicy pussy, so he brusquely forces you to stand from the island and spin on your heels so he can shove you back to lean against the counter as he forces your legs over his shoulders so he can devour you and keep you pinned open for him. Your mound is smooth and hairless, and while he prefers to eat out a snatch with a nice little bush he can bury his nose in, he can’t help appreciate your silky flesh and its velvety glide as he runs his lips down your wet seam before sweeping in tongue through your folds.

“Oh fuck,” you moan and toss your head back when Dave hums and nuzzles greedily into your cunt, laving liquid fire tingles with the tip of his lasciviously tongue grinding, licking, flicking your clit before messily rolling the wicked appendage in time with the squeezing of his possessive hands he’s gripped over your tits. He squeezes and kneads them to the point of making you squirm from the dull sting, and when he sucks hard on your clit and pinches your nipples meanly, you cling to the sides of the kitchen island, and cry, “Jesus Christ! Too much—too much, Dave, ple-please—!”

One of his hands abandons his rough touching before suddenly buffeting his fingers down over the top of your pussy with a thwack. You keen and writhe, pain punching up into your pleasure and making you whimper from the aborted orgasm.

“I’ll tell you when it’s too much,” Dave grouses darkly and gruffly shoves your legs back, pushing you further up the counter as he stands to survey how sinful you look sprawled out naked and wet on his kitchen island. Your body has a thin sheen of sweat, pussy shiny and gleaming under the dying light coming from the expanse of windows across the way in the living room, glistening from being fucked by his mouth.

When he looks at your face, a shudder skitters down his body, and tingles excitedly into his cock. Your eyes are glossy and wide, dewy lips parted breathily and skin overheated from your salacious arousal for him. It’s a sight that’s now seared into his memory banks, and he wants to make more visually stunning moments of glorious obscenity, starring you. So, he cards his fingers through your pussy as he rumbles, “Gonna stretch this cunt out to take my cock, and you’re only allowed to scream a safe word once, so now’s the time to pick it, little minx. Tell daddy what it’ll be—”

You sputter a laugh and sit clumsily up to balk at him. “Fuck me, Dave. I’ll literally throw myself out the window before I ever call you ‘daddy’!” you exclaim and grab fast at the front of his open shirt to yank yourself to the edge of the counter so you can wrap your legs around his waist when you see something scathingly furious burn in his dark brown eyes before it begins to tick his features. “I’m sorry. I will do anything for amazing, filthy sex with you, but I won’t do that,” is your daring quip as you bat your lashes and snake a hand down to the front of his pants. When his expression pinches with truculence, you yank his belt loose as you seduce, “C’mon. Don’t get surly with me. Not when all I want is to make you feel good,” you pause and brush your lips over his. “Let me suck your dick, boss. Please?”

His eyes darken and get heavy with want. Boss. Fuck…I like that.

Dave gruffly grunts and nods before fisting a hand into the back of your hair and pulling you from the counter to slink down his body. “For being such an insolent little bitch though, you lost out on your safe word privilege tonight,” he husks grumpily, eyes casting a moody glare when you smile before angelically nodding and shoving his shirt off his shoulders and arms so you can finish stripping him of his clothes.  

“…I didn’t really wanna use one anyway, sweet boy,” you tease in a smoky purr before shoving his pants and tight blue boxer-briefs down as you crouch to kneel before him. At the sight of his big dick standing flushed and rock-hard for you, a spasm of anxiety flinches into your pussy at the realization he’s going to wreck you. Shit, I’m going to be sore for days…

Unaware of your excited anticipation, Dave huffs testily at your saucy remark and pet name, but when he stares down at you like this? Naked, with just your heels on, and his hard cock jutting thick and ruddy with need mere centimeters from your wet lips? Any outraged grievance stoked by your insolence is forgiven.

Your hands caress up his hips before fanning down to admiringly differentiate the smooth plane of skin on the sides of his toned belly with the coarse trail of dark hair that becomes a thatch downwards to frame his cock. You nuzzle into it and take his velvety erection into your palm as you stare up at him and lick a swipe along the side, smiling as the warm length twitches and he exhales a charged breath.

When you toy your tongue around the sensitive tip and purse your lips around it like he’s the best thing you’ve ever had in your mouth, Dave grabs you by the back of your hair and grips the counter’s edge. “S-Shit! Mmmph,” he hitches between clenched jaw as he clutches the back of your head and starts to buck his hips against your mouth, eyes falling shut as he groans, “Could blow my load just fucking this mouth.”

You hum around him, delighting in having this effect on him as his cock stretches your mouth. He hears the gloating rumble in the bass of it, so he stares down to drunkenly watch you blow him, and makes out the movement of your hand between your thighs. You’re unaware of him watching, too captivated by the steel-wrapped-in-velvet feel of his cock on your tongue while his heady, salty tang makes your senses buzz. You want to breathe it in, to bask in it and feel him tense and whine while you suck his cock dry. To own him while on your knees, and feel the rush of having him desperate for you.

But the sight of you touching your dripping pussy, rubbing your sweet little clit while you start taking his cock down your throat and fight the burn of your gag reflex threatening to well your eyes over? It snaps something viciously sadistic to spring up in Dave, making him seethe from the debauched urges you’ve let loose from where he tries to keep them buried deep.

The sting along your scalp is the first thing that jolts you, and then your world spins as Dave yanks you by the back of your hair off of him so he can haul you up to wobble on your heels before he forcefully pushes you up against the counter again and slaps his broad hand across the tight lower juncture of your rump, millimeters away from your crotch.

You yelp and dissolve into a reedy mewl as your pussy clenches from the sting before throbbing for more.

“I didn’t fucking tell you to rub your wet cunt, darling. You were supposed to be choking on my cock, not getting distracted with getting yourself off,” he menacingly husks against the back of your ear before nipping the shell.

You squeak and flush when a gush of arousal dampens your pussy anew. “Pl-Please, babe—”

“Please babe,” Dave mimics in a mocking croon as he leans to loom over your prone form. “I should smack this needy little ass of yours raw. Make it so you can’t sit for a week without thinking of me,” is his depraved growl as he emphasizes his point by pulling his hand back and spanking you hard across the plump ridge of your ass.

“Nnngth!” you mewl wordlessly and squirm before gasping as the hand that spanked you jams between your thighs and starts grinding the pads of its fingers along your pussy from behind. You moan when two fingers deftly press past your drenched folds to plunge in and curve up away from your pubic bone before flicking a rough throb, receding, then shoving back in to the knuckles. “Mmmmph, Dave!” you hiss heatedly as you involuntarily begin to rock against the counter, seeking the rough, thick stretch of his fingers as they fuck you.

He watches you writhe and chase the plunge of his fingers while he shamelessly strokes and toys with his hard cock, fisting it and hissing just when you arch against the counter and crane to look at him over your shoulder. Instead of umbrage at witnessing his double standard, you smile and stare dreamily at him.

It’s enough to make him feel turned inside out with the wave of arousal that lances through him.

The wet squelch of his fingers plundering your cunt ceases abruptly when Dave yanks his digits out of your rippling heat to suck them into his mouth as he taps your ass in silent command for you to turn around for him. Your legs are trembling though, so you whimper in protest. His hand claps across your cheeks again, and you sob a little sound of frustrated need.

“Dammit, Dave, give me a minute,” you complain huffily as you try to find your center of balance on your heel-clad feet before you stand.

“You have ten fucking seconds to make it down the hall to the bed, or else I’m gonna fuck you wherever I find you,” he warns in a low growl as he moodily toes his dress shoes off in order to kick out of the tangle of clothes at his ankles. When you pout defiantly, Dave steers you to turn and face the hall before he swats your ass and drawls mockingly, “Hop to it, dewdrop.”

You squeal and scamper away to be out of his reach. He chuckles nastily as he watches your ass jiggle from you strutting off, but as he’s reaching down to tug his first sock off, he looks up to see that you paused midway from the hall and kitchen to turn back to him with a coquettish expression pulling at your full lips.

He makes for quite a sight – backlit by the cresting sunset coming through the windows, as its bleeding rays dim along the horizon line. His broad, toned frame shines golden, thick cock blushed with his throbbing need for release, muscles in his arms flexing while his abs tense when he straightens to eye you. Shit…he’s really handsome.Your pussy clenches, want tingling down from the seat of your cloying core as you admire his chocolate-flared eyes and tousled hair.

“Can I take these heels off, boss?” you sultrily query, shoulders rolled back and smugly preening naked in the hall. Smile impish as you begin to gripe, “They’re pinching my toes—”

“No. Keep them on,” Dave orders firmly as he yanks off his remaining sock, kicking his pile of clothes onto yours, and rumbles, “Keeping them on’ll be your punishment for being a naughty little bitch—”

Dave pauses when he sees you cheekily step out of one heel, then the other before sweep-kicking them aside, smiling rebelliously at him the entire time.

His eyes narrow, so you fold your hands behind yourself and teeter precociously on the balls of your feet, silently daring him. Dave burns with sadistic delight at your defiance. It’s not something he’d tolerate if he were blowing off steam with one of his paid hookups, preferring to use that time to vent his frustrations and take out his lurid sexual urges in a manner of his choosing and domineering direction. But with you – in this unguarded, de-compartmentalized moment – after the simmering buildup in the gravitational pull between you? He wants to savor every fucking moment.

So, he lets out a drawn out hum, shoots you an intense look of amused disapproval at your cheekiness, and starts stalking towards you. With a wily grin, you spin on your heel and book it, sprinting off like the hare from the fox. You squeal a peel of excited laughter when you hear Dave gain on you, and before you can turn the corner to cross the threshold into the bedroom, he’s caught you and effortlessly swept you up with a strong arm lassoing around your waist before he hauls you up to be tossed up onto his shoulder.

“You silly little thing,” he chuckles sadistically as he pins your legs in place with his forearm in order to spank your ass gloatingly with his dominant hand as he carries you over to the large bed with the classic metal headboard before he flings you onto it and watches you bounce until you sprawl out on the mattress with an excited laugh. You’re so fucking playful, and he loves it, especially when you roll onto your hands and knees to try to scamper up out of reach. “Hah! Get over here,” he hisses as he snags you by the ankle and hauls you down to glide across the bedding back to him.

“No! Dateline-Dateline!” you goofily declare as you playfully wrestle with him before he easily pins your wrists together in one hand and holds them above your head, pressed against the bed, then snatches his other hand around your throat in order to angle your jaw up so he can boastingly grin down at you. “Dateline!” you coo beseechingly and wriggle in his grasp.

“What the fuck? What’s that even—wait…Jesus, is that your safe word?!” Dave derides and looks at you with obnoxious incredulity as you smile triumphantly up at him. “You twisted fucking lunatic—”

“It’s a good safe word, though,” you cut in and clutch your knees around his hips, smiling brilliantly as you add, “It got you to stop, after all.”

He scoffs and tucks his chin against his chest to try and conceal the stupid smirk your audacious ridiculousness has unearthed from his usually mercurial or easygoing-trained regard.

Letting out a wry huff through his nose, Dave tightens his grip around your pinned wrists and manipulates your jaw down to meet his punchy kiss, and you hum lusciously when he swipes his tongue into the cup of your mouth before sucking hard on your lower lip. You moan, chasing his wicked, pouty morsels when he pulls back from the kiss and stares cockily down at you, relishing the lusted out look softening your gorgeous features and fogging your gaze with yearning.

“Tell me what you want, spitfire,” he purrs against your jaw before releasing his hold on your throat to fist his cock and so he can press the blunt, pre-cum slick tip against your pussy, rutting through your delicate folds as he growls, “Want me here?”

“Yes, yes, w-want your cock buried in me—” you breathily hiccup.

“Tell me how bad you want it, and I’ll fuck you so hard, until I’m balls-deep in this needy little pussy. I’ll make you ache for days. Will fuck my cum so deep in you that you’ll taste me in the back of your throat when I shoot my load,” he grouses in a husky octave, and slaps the top of your mound lightly with the underside of his cock in a nasty show of dominance. You mewl and pull your knees up to spread your thighs wider for him. With a croon of your name, Dave husks, “—Behave, tell me, and I’ll make you my girl.”

You writhe at the depraved delight his petition ignites in you.

“I want it so bad, that all I want is to be your girl, Dave,” is your reedy whisper as you gaze beatifically up at him while you utter your filthy desire as he stares incandescently at you. “Want to get lost in you—consumed by you. Get pounded so good that I’ll only ever need your cock. To belong to you and feel you every time my pussy clenches.”

The depraved praise fills a hole in his chest he had forgotten existed, but now that it felt sealed over, Dave wants nothing more than to keep the source of the miraculously grounding sensation tethered to him for as long as he can. To pour all his power and worship into it, until it overflows and radiates the way it deserves. So, he lines himself up, pulls his hips back and punches them forward, effectively spearing his thick, straining cock in one rough swoop deep into your molten cunt.

The way you light up – how your mouth falls open on the moan of his name while your torso snaps taut off the bed as your cunt ripples – straining around his cock slamming into you? Dave will never feel a more magnificent wave of savage pride as good as he does right now.

He fucks you like a man desperate to hold onto that sensation, to lasso it and ensnare himself so it can’t ever get away from him.

His hand lifts you by the small of your back so he can angle his thrusts into you and have you arched into the bed. You grip the bedding as soon as your wrists are freed, moaning when Dave sets brutal pace, fucking you so hard that you swear you feel him hitting something new inside you that makes you panic. “D-Dave, Dave!” you keen, feeling frazzled and twisting into a tizzy when he bows his head to roughly suck on one of your nipples before nipping on it with a growl. “Dave, I can’t—can’t!” you cry out and screw your eyes shut as you feel flung about by the whirlpool of pleasure roiling in you as he keeps pounding into the ruinous pleasure point crested deep inside you.

Suddenly, he shifts to hover over you and grinds his pubic bone into you as he fists the back of your hair to yank you to crane taut as he sharply slaps the top of your tit before be laves his warm wet tongue over the rising sting. You sob a flustered wail and squirm, features burning with a shameful blush at how overwhelmed and pulsing he’s made you from the inside out.

His thumb roughly presses down into your chin to force you to tip your head down. “You can’t?” he mocks, tone maliciously intrigued as he swivels his thumb over your lower lip before jamming it into your mouth beyond your gasping lips. “You can’t…what? Take it? Get enough?” he purrs hoarsely, grunting in approval when you suck on his thumb. “Aww, did my girl just need to self-soothe? Her little pussy get overwhelmed from getting pounded by my cock so hard?” he rumbles tauntingly as he leans forward to nudge his temple against yours in a show of dominance. “Well? Daddy asked you a question—”

You sputter and graze your teeth over his thumb before he’s able to slip it out of the wicked vise of your mouth. “Fuck’s sake, Dave—!” you snarl and grapple to toss him off of you, but he anticipated your irate reaction. “I was so fucking close, and you just had to drop that goddamn ‘Daddy’ shit on me—?!”

“It’s a force of habit, spitfire!” he chuckles obnoxiously, smiling crassly when you give up and flop onto your back testily. “But the bonus of getting you all bitchy over it is becoming worth it—”

“Well, if your intent is to make my pussy go dry and not come, then mission accomplished, soldier,” is your snarky scoff as you shove at his shoulders for him to get off of you.

It was a button you had no idea you even pushed, not until his eyes went dark and the mirth flinted away from his features. Before you could comprehend it, Dave shoved himself up on his haunches and brutishly flipped you over onto your stomach to flop breathless onto the bed. His hand cracked a slap across your ass, making you jolt forward with a startled shout, leaving you reeling while he forcefully hauled you up onto all fours before he dug his fingers into your hips as he grips them possessively and shoves his cock back into your pussy.

Your gasp becomes an inarticulate series of whimpers and mewls, head tossing back as he mounts you and bites the slope of your neck. Your arousal gushes into the vise of your cunt, wetting over and making a lewd sloshy squelching audible in the room over your moan of, “Oh my god, Dave—!”

“You feel wet enough to me,” he growls dangerously against your ear before suckling on the lobe. “Pussy flooded over just now, proving you a fucking liar, baby,” is his harsh husk he punctuates with a hard slam of his cock into you. “Just can’t help being a goddamn, nasty little brat, can you?”

“D-Dave, please—” you begin to whimper as you buck backwards, seeking more of the plunge of his cock into your most hungry center.

“Please Dave,” he mimics deprecatingly and sneers a grunt as he adjusts to grab the back of your shoulder and clutch your waist while he starts rocking into you, hips snapping brusquely against your ass with a sharp slapping staccato rhythm. “Should just leave this fucking pussy empty. Hold you down – pin your wrists down and force you to choke on my cock while you squirm. You’re such a filthy little bitch though, so you’d probably love it—”

You’re bowled over, at Dave’s mercy as he fucking rails you into the bed now. “N-No! Need you, Dave. Please, I need you to make me come so bad. P-Promise! I’ll be your good girl, please babe, please! I promise,” you’re rambling raggedly, hands reaching backwards to stabilize your carnal mania by grounding yourself with touching him – with clinging to the forearm of the hand gripping your waist and clasping over the one clutching your shoulder. Thighs splayed wide and slick dripping onto the bed with every hammering pulse of his cock in and out of your cunt, you bow your head and sob, “Please, Dave—m-make me yours!”

Hearing you say that with such desperate yearning shreds his sadism into incinerated ash, making that expansive heat sear through his chest, tethering him into the need to do as you’ve begged.

Dave forces you to bow under him as he unleashes his pounding thrusts up into that devastating cluster of ecstasy inside you in time with his fingers rubbing wantonly over your clit as he nuzzles you and groans, “You belong to me. No one else. You’re mine, sweet girl. All mine—”

You cry out and go taut under him, muscles locking up as you gush your climax to squirt all over his apex, mindlessly rocking against him as you dissolve under the onslaught.

“Jesus,” he marvels gruffly, awed by how hard you came, hips picking up intensity again as he chases his own pent-up climax now. “Fuck. That’s it, baby. Such a good girl. Bet you have another one ready to go. Want you to squirt right when I come. Take me deep so your greedy little cunt can soak up my cum—”

“Oh, Dave,” you moan at his filthy order, arching into him, so blitzed out that you want to obey, to melt down for him and settle him deep into your center. “Please! Need you. Please hold me. Can’t…can’t hang on without it,” you gasp out, earnest and genuine in your desperation.

Without even thinking to leverage it against you, Dave envelops you in his arms and pins you to him as he keeps fucking you, cock plunging into you while he holds you and buries his face into your neck to muffle his guttural groans. Having you beg for this kind of intimacy while he’s balls-deep in you sends him into a frenzy that he can’t keep himself from succumbing to, so, he scrapes his mouth over your pulse point and grazes the edge of his teeth against your trapezius as he pounds into you with vigor.

You scream, “Oh fuck, mmph—nngnth! Dave!” as your orgasm hits, then dissolve into reedy little whimpers as you clamp around his cock and slot it home in you just as Dave snarls into your neck and comes.

Overawed, you moan at the incredible sensation of him holding you tight in the vise of his embrace as he shoots his load deep inside you, quivering and mewling when he hitches your name out gruffly before groaning a drawn out husk as he prolongs his pleasure by rocking into you until his hips stutter and your fluttering sheath clings to his dick as you both collapse forward onto the bed together.

“Fuck…oh fuck. Holy fucking hell,” Dave exhaustedly huffs between hearty gulps of air, feeling dizzy and delirious from how mind-blowing that was. He’s never come so hard, or felt so complete after sex, and it leaves him incredulous as he tries to scrape his composure together. Jesus Christ, that was fucking amazing…

You’re so blissed out, that you simply clutch at his forearms to keep them looped tightly around you, not wanting to part from his strong embrace, or the heat of him curled up against you. His breath is hot against your nape, pulse thudding in his wrists under your touch, and chest rising and falling against your back. Feels so good…

You don’t talk. There’s nothing to say, anyway. At least not when you both are so at peace, wrecked, sweaty, and tangled up in each other while your comingled fluids messily cling against your pressed-up flesh.

No, there’s nothing either of you want to say that could shatter the moment. So, you remain in sated post-coital repose until Dave feels you doze off in his arms. With the opportunity presented, he noses into the back of your hair like he’s wanted to do for far too long, then gently loosens his hold from around you so he can skim his fingertips over the smooth skin of your back while he internally snickers at how dark the room is. Didn’t even get to turn on the lights…

When the pads of his fingers brush along your ribs, you sleepily murmur, so he pauses until you settle back down and your breathing softens again. It’s then he feels them.

They’re light, feeling superficial, but they’re there.

Scars. He frowns and fans his fingertips away to wrap around your hip, thumb soothingly brushing along the contour of it as he settles against you and rests his head for a moment. Contemplating for a few silent minutes, Dave decides to ease out of your warmth, biting back a hiss at pulling out of your pussy before carefully untangling his limbs from yours to shift back and out of bed.

You roll with a little mewl of protest when the bathroom light turns on, drowsily curling into a ball to stay warm in the cool air-conditioned room, missing the heat of the body that had been holding you, but too exhausted to move in search of it. But then you feel a warm hand guide you to roll onto your back and unfurl you like a delicate flower, before something damp and cool is caressed gingerly over your thighs, gliding between them to tend to the sticky wetness dripping from your puffy and sore pussy.

You sigh softly and struggle to open your eyes. “…What…mmm, babe—”

“Relax. Almost done,” Dave murmurs in a hushed tone.

You settle down, eyes closed while a serenely sated smile eases over your features as you susurrate, “…Thank you, sweet boy.”

Dave smirks, despite himself. Once he’s cared for you, he flips the washcloth around and scrubs the sticky residue of your comingled fluids from his apex and nether regions before returning to the bathroom to toss it to the floor and shut the light off. With a few adjustments of the covers, he manages to tuck you under before sliding into bed with you, spooning you and pressing his nose to the nape of your neck.

***

In the cold morning light an unmeasured amount of time later, Dave wakes to find you sleeping soundly turned away from him on your side with an arm tucked under the pillow and the forearm of the other folded over it.

It’s a beguiling sight – you in his bed, after he’s pined for you, begrudgingly wanting to make you his. And now…here you are.

And now that the early twilight of dawn chases the penumbra away, Dave can make out more clearly the blanched traces of old scars long heeled along the trunk of your torso – across the costal region. They’ve been worn down fine, barely traceable. He resists the urge to brush his fingers over them, and forces himself to get out of bed.

***

Drowsily, you start to wake up at the sound of running water, and when you stretch and nuzzle your yawn into the pillow, you realize you’re alone in bed. Cautiously, you shift up and peer around the room, trying to get your bearings. The bedroom is sparsely decorated, with just the large bed, single-drawer nightstands on each side of it, and a big armoire dresser up against the wall adjacent to the slightly ajar door leading into the stark-white bathroom. Shit. You fucked Dave and then slept with him all night?!

You’re disarmed – truly befuddled by yourself, which is enough to propel you out of bed on protesting joins and sore muscles as you carefully stretch your arms and scrub at your eyes. Bemused, you ignore the ache in your thighs and tits, feeling tender as hell all over after last night as you toss the bed covers away and shimmy gingerly to the edge of the mattress. This is fucking weird. You need to get off your ass, get dressed, and get out of here before he comes out of the shower.

With the proclamation, you hurry on nimble footing to sneak out of the bedroom before rushing down the hall to where you last remember your discarded clothes being. The view of the glassy riverfront across the way out the large loft windows is a nice sight to peer out at while you hastily rifle through the pile of clothes to separate your garments from Dave’s. Your heels are still flung into the side of the hall, so you collect your blouse, bra, skirt, and then pause as you toss Dave’s slacks and shirt out of the way in search of your panties. Huffing, you wonder if you accidentally kicked them somewhere else while mindlessly in the throes of passion with him?

You look around the kitchen floor and find nothing, so you scoff and wander back to the bedroom to give it a discerning glance over. From where you’re standing, you can glimpse the back of Dave as he stands in the shower stall reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror over the sink. Water is running in rivulets down his broad back, and you can make out the shadow remnants of scars over his back and dusted along the curves of his sides. It gives you pause, so you end up having to tear your gaze away and force yourself to start getting dressed. They must be tangled up in his clothes, and I just didn’t shake them out well enough, you rationalize as you slip on your bra before shimmying into your skirt. Then, a lewd thought pops into your head when you catch sight of the slightly ajar nightstand drawer on the bedside Dave slept on.

Tiptoeing over to it, you yank it open, expecting to see your panties neatly folded over a Bible or something, but instead see a pair of handcuffs, lube, condoms, silk bindings, a ball gag, and a 9mm handgun – all aligned to be within easy reach from the bed. You blush, despite yourself, and shrug into your blouse, judiciously buttoning it closed while ruefully shaking your head at the missing button closest to the hem.

You go back out to the kitchen to sort his clothes, going even as far as to fold each garment and leaving it on the kitchen island as you make one last pass in search of your black panties. Annoyed when you don’t find them, you go to the fridge and retrieve a bottle of water, deciding to quench your rabid thirst as you stew about where the hell your panties could’ve disappeared to in the crash pad. You then remember your purse on the counter, and grab for it to retrieve your phone.

There’s a text from Johnny, checking in to make sure you made it home ok. You unlock your phone and quickly type an excuse back, settling on, ‘Sorry! Yes, I did, thanks. The liquor really went to my head, and I crawled into bed first thing.’ It’s not really a lie. With a sigh, you slip the phone back into your purse and decide to go check in the disheveled sheets on the bed for your undergarment. Maybe he tracked it in by accident?

He’s still in the shower, and you can make out via the fogged up reflection what looks like Dave rinsing suds out of his hair. Humming, you check the sheets, tossing them about and patting your palms along the surface with a fanning sweep. Nothing.

He must’ve taken them. It’s the only explanation.

Feeling a wave of umbrage, you start looking anew, opening the opposite nightstand drawer and finding a silver flask in it. Shutting it and striding over to investigate the armoire next, you miss the sound of the shower cutting off as you pull open the dresser’s door and see your own well-fucked reflection staring back at you. Your neck is dusted with scrape marks and shadowed welts from Dave, hair wild and lips kiss-bruised. Tearing your attention from the mirror to the interior of the dresser, you look through the racks of hung up clothes and notice it’s all varieties of suits, similar dress shirts in varying tones of blue and white, and tie options. Nothing casual. Duh. He needs duplicates of what he wears to work to change into when he comes here and fucks whoever else he has revolving in and out of his bed…

The wave of disappointment surprises you, but you shove it away and go back to searching the closet, and find a curious concealed cabinet within that spans the height of it. When it clicks open to reveal some tactical gear, rolled up set of black underclothes, gloves, and a very familiar case – one that would house the parts needed to assemble a sniper weapon that’s likely military-grade, you still, staring at it and getting hit by a wave of déjà vu.

“What’re you doing?”

You whirl to see Dave standing in the doorway of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, shoulders and hair still damp from the heated steam lingering in the enclosed space. His features are scowling, etched guardedly while his brooding brown eyes glare at you.

“Did you take my panties?”

Dave deadpan stares at you before shifting from one foot to the other as he scrubs his palm over his stubble-covered cheeks while huffing an exasperated sneer. “I have no fucking clue what that would have to do with you snooping in my closet—”

“I looked for them everywhere, and this was the last stop,” you assure and put your hands on your hips as you add, “I suspect you, boss man, of pilfering them at some point, but you must have a special safe for your dirty conquest trophies—”

“You’re a silly nut,” he cuts in and scratches at his damp scalp as he glances over at the nightstands. “…You checked everywhere for ‘em, huh.”

Something about this? Dave being standoffish, you feeling out of your element, and like you’re being pulled into some weird loop spurs you to sigh a miffed exhale before grabbing for your heels and hastily yanking them on.

“Never mind. I gotta go,” you dismissively remark as you turn and storm out of his bedroom.

You don’t make it very far, though. Not when Dave stalks after you and stands moodily behind you when you grab your purse and turn to see him there, looking unpleased, in the way of your exit path. “So, you’re gonna revert to fucking brat mode now?” he heckles angrily, grabbing your arm when you scoff and try to storm past him. “C’mon—”

“No, I just need to go. I shouldn’t have come over. Let alone have spent the fucking night,” you tell him and shrug his hand away. “I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t enjoy it. But let’s not start pretending here, ok?” is your curt reasoning as you look up at him while shouldering your purse and absently brushing your tousled hair back behind your ear. “This was a one-off. We work together, and…” this is something I shouldn’t do. Not after… “And it’s better to not get pulled into something—”

“You said you were mine,” Dave cuts in, resolute and unrelenting as he leans close and cups his hand to the small of your back as he murmurs, “That you wanted this. You can’t just take that back.”

You’re surprised by the genuine umbrage in his tone, in the furrow of his brow as he glowers haughtily at you. Cupping his cheek like you’d done the night before, you resist the urge to kiss him, and instead sigh, “I’m not taking anything back. Just leaving it where it is. We can’t do this—”

“But you want to,” he presses as he shrugs your hand away from his cheek. He’s so close that you can feel the heat coming off his freshly showered skin – can smell his soap and shampoo as they mute the spicy musk of his natural scent. You resist the urge to lean into his broad, bare torso as your eyes stare up ambivalently into his.

“Dave…” you trail off, unable to think of how to articulate what’s in your head, when his cell phone suddenly buzzes loudly where it sits on the counter. You look over and see the email alert light up across the lock-screen image of his wife holding their two little girls while sitting on a porch, smiling at the camera.

He sees it then. The self-preservation-triggered mask that comes over your features and turns your eyes to marble, coaxing a semblance of trained blankness over your demeanor; that shields all on the outside out from the fury you swallow down to be fed to the roiling darkness deep in your core.

“Sweetheart, c’mon—” Dave starts to grouse and tries to tow you into him, but you pull away and breeze to the door on the swift clicks of your heels. “You can’t fucking avoid me, spitfire,” he growls, which makes you pause with your hand on the doorknob. “Shit can be compartmentalized. You and I at work, is separate to us when we’re together. When you’re fucking mine.”

Opening the door, you chime, “I was yours, sweet boy. Just for the night,” then turn and smile at him. “Be satisfied knowing I’ll be aching for days with you. I liked seeing you without the bullshit façade. It made me start liking you,” you purr before winking at him and strutting out the door, sparing him an alluring glance back as you exit.

Dave goes over to lean back against the counter with a surly huff, shooting a moody glance at the cabinet above his phone. He opens it and retrieves your panties, bringing them to his nose and inhaling your sinfully divine scent. It shouldn’t center him – soothe his surly mood as good as it does, but he’d be damned to ever part with the illicit trophy now, let alone admit to taking it.

He picks up his phone and checks his messages while he toys with the lacy garment, already thinking of the request he’s going to put in. “Such a silly, sweet girl,” he rumbles amusedly to himself as he walks down to his bedroom to pick out a matching duplicate to his clothes from yesterday so he can head home.

***

As you ride in the car back to your side of town, you have Dave on a loop in your head. The crush, the voyeur, the asshole, the gaslighter, the stud, the seducer, the everyman, the adulterer, the sadist…the dark eyed addiction that made you yearn and feel safe, even when he was depraved and domineering. You weren’t lying. Seeing him, the real him, made you like him. And the fact he’s the best fuck you’ve ever had; that he’s sex on a stick, intense and sexy, and sadistically funny – not to mention kind of sweet? You sigh, fawning a little, the way you haven’t in a very long time, knowing how stupid and reckless it is, but not really caring right now.

Daddy Dave York.

You snicker at yourself and shake your head.

Sweet Sadistic Dave York. Yeah, that works way better…

_____________________________

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[yokohamapound]

Hiya! Could u do Ranpo headcannons where his s/o is a mechanic/builder for the ADA. Like they make things for Ranpo that can protect him on missions

Oh man, I love this. You could be the Q for the ADA!

Characters: Edogawa Ranpo

Content: gn!reader, made-up engineering stuff

Edogawa Ranpo

Ranpo loves smart people. He doesn't expect other people to match up to his intellect (that would be impossible, of course~) but he gets excited when he meets someone who's competent in areas he doesn't know anything about, like engineering or other creative or techncial fields.

So, let's assume you're the Q of the ADA, providing them with defense items, gadgets, and weapons. There's a limit to what Kunikida can make with his notebook or concieve of, so you won't be overshadowed by his ability. Maybe you've got a related ability, maybe you're just really damn good at what you do. Fukuzawa figures you'll help them keep an extra edge over other ability users like the Port Mafia, the Guild, and the Decay of Angels.

If they can't afford to employ you full-time, then the ADA will still be the lion's share of your work. They'll have some kind of exclusivity contract with you, so the things you make for them can't be reproduced or sold to other organisations—except perhaps the Special Division for Unusual Powers.

Ranpo loves your gadgets. He always calls dibs on them first, except the lethal weapons, because no one would put anything more deadly than a taser in Ranpo's hands. Not because he's violent or unpredictable, but because he'll probably leave it behind on the train, or swap it for a box of Pocky. Seriously.

Other stuff, though? Pen lasers, knock out cologne, voice recorder cufflinks, a necktie that doubles as a phone charger, an EMP disguised as a book (Ranpo nearly left that in a library). Just don't disguise anything as a snack or he might mix them up with the real ones. Firecracker Pocky didn't go down so well, literally.

Ranpo was very sad when what he thought was a tube of Pringes folded out into a mini satellite dish. It was cool, but it wasn't BBQ flavoured.

He's an incredible problem solver, so if you run into any issues, you can lure him over with kisses and snacks, and get cajole him into looking at your blueprints. Normally he doesn't pay attention to anything that doesn't interest him, but everything you do interests him, so he never refuses. He takes one look at your design, shrugs, and makes an offhand comment that solves your problem immediately.

Ranpo spends a lot of his downtime in your workshop, lounging on a chair and playing video games. But every so often he wanders over and watches you work, resting his chin on the table. Keep snacks in the fridge for him, it keeps him happy.

You're one of the few people he has the patience to stop and listen to. Normally he sees a hundred steps ahead, and is too bored to listen to what is basically the catch-up exposition. You're an exception. Even if he already knows what you're doing, he wants to listen to you explaining it.

"Tell me what you're doing."

"What, you can't figure it out?"

"Ha! Of course I can. Just wanna hear you say it."