#and academic achievement is not the be all end all by any means | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heesdreamer · 1 year

Text

AS LONG AS YOU’LL LET ME

PAIRING ➩ heeseung x reader

SUMMARY ➩ prone to a bad reputation and accepting your friends ridiculous bets and challenges, you’re hit with the task to take the virginity of your schools number 1 student

WC ➩ 15k

WARNINGS ➩ um sex

AUTHORS NOTE ➩ no part 2 to this reader sucks most the time sorry.. not proofread but when is my work ever and slightly repetitive if ur a fan of my other works but what can I say i like this trope! this took me forever and not even sure i like it but hope u do

There was something about a challenge that just drove you absolutely crazy. You never cared too deeply for most things, preferring to take a casual approach to whatever life had to offer.

Yet something would awaken in you when presented a challenge, whether as serious as an academic achievement or as stupid as chugging more weekend poison than the frat boy sat beside you. Your skin would light up and your eyes would go hazy and wild at the prospect of competition, of successfully doing something that people doubted you were capable of doing.

It wasn’t any surprise to you when your friends took advantage of this, using your little quirk for their own amusement whenever school days got too slow or weekends started to hit that point of boredom. All they had to do was lay a challenge in front of you and you’d put your all into completing it.

This ended you up in numerous stupid situations, breaking into the locked school during spring break and leaving your mark for your friends to confirm once the doors opened again, flirting with the older cashier at the local liquor store while they stuffed their shirts with cold bottles, even at one point being escorted out of a crowded movie theatre by security after you managed to disturb the peace more than usual.

There wasn’t a line they wouldn’t set and more importantly, there wasn’t one you wouldn’t cross.

You felt it coming most times now, being able to sense the shift in the night and their demeanors before it actually happened. You were sat at some random party they’d dragged you to, smoking on the couch of a dirty living room and paying no attention to the ever changing crowd or the loud bass that was sounding throughout the house.

You sighed softly when you felt one of your friends nudging your side, glancing over at him with low hazy eyes and a bored expression while you waited for him to set tonight’s standard.

Sometimes you wondered if they actually were your friends, if they liked you even a little bit for your personality or if you served more so as an entertainment monkey, a circus animal for when they needed some excitement in their life. You especially thought this now as you watched him turn back to look at the others who were giggling that mean laugh they do often did when they landed on a truly rotten idea.

“I bet… you can’t take that kid home.” He said the words deliberately slow like you were stupid and incapable of understanding a faster pace.

You watched him for a few more seconds, trying to explode his head with your mind before you were following the direction where his arm was raising to point at, a cigarette loosely hanging from his fingers as he shook with laughter.

The kid in question was definitely around your age, potentially even older judging by the few people he was stood around, boys you recognized as some of your seniors at school. You didn’t recognize him however, scanning him for a while to try and decide if he was from a different part of town or if you just didn’t pay enough attention to your surroundings.

It made sense to you immediately why they had pointed him out, why he would be considered a challenge to take home.

He was stood awkwardly against the wall despite his friends clearly trying to get him to have a good time, staying near him and whispering into his ear every few seconds like they were giving him a play by play on what you were supposed to be doing at a college party.

He was clearly attempting to feign casualness, holding a cup that you were pretty certain was completely empty, and taking mock sips out of it every few minutes like clockwork. Behind the facade of his eyes that were scanning the crowd anxiously, you could tell he was extremely nervous and not used to the scene he was sat in front of.

“Oh you’re crazy dude.” Another one of your friends was talking now but you didn’t even spare her a glance, knowing she was just trying to fuel your fire more like she always did. “Him of all people? It’s impossible.”

You wanted to laugh at how obvious she was being in her comments, purposefully throwing the information towards you like you were a starving dog with snapping jaws. You’d already started to feel the competitiveness spark low in your gut the second you looked at the boy despite how annoyed by and aware of their antics you were.

“Just take him home?” You were questioning in a low voice and you finally glanced back towards your friends who were eagerly watching you. “Isn’t that a little tame?”

You liked to up the stakes with them occasionally, making sure they never got bored of you or underestimated just how far you’d take it if given the opportunity and right motivation.

You knew right away you wanted to take this one on, liking the way the boy nervously glanced back and forth or looked down at his shoes every time somebody passed by him and got a few feet too close. His friends were still glued to his side but you could tell they were itching to enter the mass of sweaty bodies, you found it interesting they’d be willing to give up their own enjoyment for their buddy.

“Not challenging enough for you? Shit you’re crazy.” Another one of your friends was laughing and patting you on the shoulder, shoving it slightly so you moved forward a bit on the couch. You shot her a glare and she leaned back with an awkward chuckle.

“Fine then I bet you can’t..” The first boy, who had started this topic of conversation in the first place, was starting up again and you watched him with an uninterested stare. “I bet you can’t take his virginity.”

This caused you to falter for a split second before regaining you composure, cocking in an eyebrow at your expectant friends before looking back towards the boy who was still uncomfortably shifting against the wall. He definitely didn’t want to be here and his little round glasses didn’t do him any favors in the feigning cool department but you weren’t sure where exactly they’d found the evidence to determine he was a virgin.

While he was definitely nerdy and awkward, he was still tall and lean with a handsome face. Plus, judging by the company he was with that was continuing to speak to him in low encouraging whispers, he had a good social circle.

Park Sunghoon and Sim Jake were definitely not losers and absolutely not virgins. You’d heard plenty of rumors about the two boys and a few others that ran with their group, ranging from your schools most established jocks and going all the way up to your class president Yang Jungwon.

“Why do you think he’s a virgin?” You were mumbling as you watched him, regardless if your friends were right or not you had your target officially set.

“It’s pretty well known.” One of the girls was shrugging her shoulders and frowning slightly, leaning against the wall behind the couch. “He’s pretty much a genius and doesn’t have time for that stuff, he’s rejected anyone who’s even slightly tried.”

“You’d know.” She was sneering and shoving an elbow into the boy next to her who started to laugh at her comment and the saddened expression on her face. You glanced at her curiously, slightly surprised she had even attempted with him considering her usual type normally fit your own friendship circles look and attitude.

You looked back over towards the boy and his friend with a raised eyebrow, trying to figure out what exactly you were missing. Why hadn’t you’d seen him before this considering the fact all of your friends seemed to know him and various details about his life?

It didn’t shock you to find him already looking at you this time, you had been staring daggers into the side of his head for almost twenty minutes now and he was bound to feel your gaze on him eventually. He was tensed as he looked at you, more so than he was already and you cocked an eyebrow in his direction at the fearful look in his eyes.

His friends seemed to realize something had caught his attention and they were following his line of sight optimistically. Sunghoon tensed up too slightly when it lead him back to you, still lazily sat on the couch off in the distance surrounded by your friends that almost resembled a pack of hyenas. You knew your reputation probably proceeded you judging by the fact he was starting to shake his head and whisper something to the boy again.

Jake, however, ever the bouncy jock seemed ecstatic that you were watching his friend so intensely and he was carrying a big smile as he leaned in to say something to them, most likely countering Sunghoon’s warning.

You watched him wrap an arm around the boys thin shoulders, patting him encouragingly before dismounting and dragging Sunghoon away into the crowd. This left the boy alone and for a second he took a few steps forward in panic like he was going to follow them but he quickly stopped as they disappeared amongst the masses, looking ten times more awkward now that he didn’t have his bodyguards sat next to him.

He met your eye again for a second before he was flushing again and looking away quickly, eyes shooting to his shoes as he nervously shuffled in place a few times.

Your friends had been talking during this, possibly to you and maybe they were upping the stakes of the bet, but you’d stopped listening a few minutes ago and only noticed they were speaking as you stood up from the couch and left them mid sentence, heading over to where the boy was standing.

You imagined you looked like a wild snake stalking it’s prey, licking your fangs as you slowly slithered closer to it until you finally snapped your jaws around his neck. He seemed to be thinking a similar thing judging by the way his eyes widened with fear when he went to look at you again and realized you were approaching.

You didn’t immediately greet him, leaning against the wall he was on with your shoulder so you could face him. You watched his side profile and scanned down his chest as it lifted and fell with heavy breaths.

He eventually mustered up the courage to look at you and only then did you give him a smile, letting it slowly take over your face as you cocked your head slightly and studied the way his nervous eyes darted all around your features.

“Hi.” Your voice was breathy and sweet but he immediately furrowed his eyebrows and looked away at the sound of it, picking at the rim of his cup that you now could see was in fact empty. “What’s your name?”

He glanced at you again and you realized you’d probably said the wrong thing judging by the fact his anxious eyes suddenly hardened. You assumed that he knew of you enough that you should’ve known him or you’d possibly met before hence his extreme reaction to your question.

“My memories bad baby I’m sorry, just remind me.” You were pouting slightly and cooing at him, shifting closer on the wall so you could reach up and place a hand on his shoulder gently.

He was glancing at it with wide eyes, staring at the way your fingertips just barely pressed onto his shirts fabric, then he was back to looking at your face again but thankfully he had lost the offended look. You noted that you liked how big his eyes were as he peered down at you, still taking those deep and shuddering breaths to try and calm down his nerves at your sudden close proximity.

“Heeseung.” He was whispering out, almost afraid to speak any louder considering how close your faces were now that he had turned his head to face you more directly. You smiled at the sweet tone of his voice and nodded your head in recognition.

“Lee Heeseung.” You repeated back to him, adding on his last name to show him that you did in fact know who he was.

You weren’t lying either as you came to the realization, knowing now why he felt so familiar yet unrecognizable. Lee Heeseung was the top of, not only your class and year, but the entire school and it was no doubt that he’d graduate miles above everybody else. His friend group was full of overachievers in their respective fields and now you understood the presence of the two outstanding jocks from earlier.

He seemed slightly surprised that you knew who he was and he was still watching you with those large curious eyes, gulping a bit when you instinctively curled your fingers into his shoulder like a kneading cat.

You were half expecting him to push you off, to reject you and make some excuse that could allow him to leave, remembering what your friends had said about his habit of shutting girls down early in their advances. It surprised you a bit when he was turning slightly so he could face you more, almost like he hadn’t even realized he was doing it as he took in a deep breath.

Your smiled widened, knowing from experience that you occasionally had a certain addicting aura to you, something that made boys lean forward instinctively or follow you around like a lost puppy.

However your obvious expression seemed to wake him up to your attempts and his face dropped into a small frown, leaning back far enough that your hand was falling from his shoulder and you were losing your smile as you watched him visibly grow uncomfortable. He watched you with a weird expression before he was turning his body again and avoiding looking in your direction.

“Did you need something?” He mumbled out and you frowned at the change in his tone, not as smooth and sweet as it had been when he said his name.

You were shaking your head even though he wasn’t looking at you anymore and trying to think of another route to take since this clearly wouldn’t be as simply as you originally thought it would, eyes lighting up again when you got an idea.

“A tutor.” You rushed out, trying to keep your voice casual and not make it sound like you’d just thought of that on the spot. He gave you a disbelieving look and you nodded in earnest. “I’m serious. I’m flunking bad.”

“Last I checked you didn’t care about school.” He was mumbling and you furrowed your eyebrows at his statement, wondering just how much he apparently know about you.

“Only one more year.” You were shrugging at him and your eyes shot down to his lips and neck for a second before you were meeting his gaze again, trying to hold your laugh when his eyes widened a bit at your wandering gaze. “Time to get serious I guess.”

He didn’t say anything for a few beats and you resisted the urge to push his glasses up his nose as they slowly fell while you talked, watching him take a deep breath as he contemplated what you were saying. You’d never heard of him tutoring somebody before but you also weren’t sure if anybody had ever asked, not paying him much mind once they realized he wasn’t going to do their homework or let them cheat off his test.

He was finally looking at you again with hesitation in his eyes and you offered him another small smile, trying to look as least devious as you could possibly manage.

“If you’re serious we can meet in the library on Monday.” He was muttering and your face lit up which caused him to let out a small sigh.

“Not somewhere more private?” You couldn’t resist teasing him further considering how unnerved he already seemed, touching his arm softly as you purred the words again. He winced slightly at your sudden change of tone but didn’t take a step backwards like he had before.

“I said if you’re serious.” He warned in an awkward voice and you nodded your head in understanding, squeezing his arm quickly before retracting your hand.

“Trust me. I’m serious.”

——

You would’ve thought the world ended judging by the stares you were getting as you entered the library.

It had taken you longer than you originally planned to find it and then make your way to where Heeseung had told you he’d be if you wanted to show up, so now you were going to be a few minutes late. You hoped he would still be there and had planned for the fact you obviously didn’t frequent the building enough to get around swiftly.

Luckily, you caught sight of him the second you finished climbing the stairs to the third floor and your stomach turned in excitement.

It put a damper on your plans for your meeting to be so public but that didn’t deter you much, the familiar buzz of adrenaline running through you as you took in his appearance from a distance. He had clearly gotten there way before your meeting time and he seemed engrossed in whatever text book was laid in front of him, possibly not even realizing you were late.

You were approaching him slowly to see how long it would take him to notice you but he didn’t pick his head up from the book until you were standing in front of him and clearing your throat.

You smiled at him when he jumped in his seat, lifting his head so fast his glasses bounced on top of his nose. He immediately looked awkward and apologetic at the sight of you and you pulled out the seat next to him so you could sit down. He seemed surprised you weren’t taking the one across instead and stiffened up in his seat.

“Hope I’m not too late.” You greeted him casually and turned in the chair so your knees were pointing in his direction and you could fully face him.

“No you’re perfect.” He was shaking his head and peering at you intensely like he was in a daze and not thinking clearly. When you smirked and cocked your eyebrow at his wording he immediately flushed. “I-I mean like… t-the timing is perfect. You’re on time is all I meant.”

You laughed at him softly and he shook his head to himself, turning and sternly facing forward so he didn’t have to look at you as he closed the book he was focusing on and started to pull out the ones pertaining to what you had asked him to help you with. You didn’t pay any mind to which ones he was opening up, not having any plans to pay attention anyways.

He seemed to notice this after a few minutes and he slowly trailed off on his introduction statement when he realized you weren’t even glancing at the books, just watching the side of his face as he rambled on.

He was glancing at you from the side of his eye to really confirm what you were looking at before he sighed softly and turned his head so he was facing you more directly, shying away from your intense gaze slightly. “I thought you said you were serious.”

“I was serious about meeting you at the library.” You explained to him, shrugging softly when he furrowed his eyebrows and sighed again. You shifted your knee slightly so it was bumping into the side of his chair and he glanced down at it, snapping his head back up when he noticed the bare skin of your legs below your skirt. “It’s hard for me to focus.”

“How can I help?” He eventually asked after he took a deep calming breath and the question would’ve sounded sleazy from anybody else, like a sly pick up line. Paired with his gentle tone and earnest eyes though, you almost cooed at how eager he was to help you.

You hummed softly and pretended to think for a few seconds, liking the way he got more nervous and kept fidgeting in his chair with every passing second.

“How about we make it a game?” You were eventually stating, letting your voice come out excited and breathy like you’d just thought of the idea. “Every time I get something right, you have to answer one of my questions.”

He seemed hesitant at this and thrown off like he didn’t expect you to suggest something like that, a game that didn’t benefit you in any way and only served for you to get to know him better. He was eventually agreeing and you smiled softly as you watched him push his glasses back up his nose and try to think of something to ask you.

You liked the first few questions he asked because he was clearly taking it easy on you, stuttering out simple things that were basic knowledge and trying not to look at you when you intentionally got them wrong, wanting to drag out your game and get to listen to his smooth voice more.

When you got the first one right he was taking a second to take another breath before glancing at you curiously, slight fear in his eyes like he was worried you’d ask him something inappropriate or uncomfortable.

“When did you meet your friends?” You were eventually saying and he visibly relaxed although he had a suspicious look on his face like you’d thrown him off with the easygoing question.

“Middle school.” He mumbled out and you nodded softly, putting your elbow on the table and leaning forward onto your hand so you could be closer to him. He flushed bright red but continued with his answer. “We p-played basketball together sometimes.”

Your eyebrow quirked up in surprise at the new unlocked information and for a second you wanted to ask him if he still played but he was continuing on with the next subject question before you had the chance, shifting uncomfortably when you immediately answered it with ease and gained the opportunity for another inquiry about his life.

“Was that your first time at a party?” Your voice was lower now since you were closer and he was watching you intensely, stiffened by the way your eyes went from holding his gaze tightly in yours to watching his lips as he spoke.

“Yeah I guess so.” He shrugged softly but you could tell he was feeling anything but casual. He almost looked transfixed by how close you were getting to him the longer the two of you talked. “It wasn’t yours though.”

You smiled softly at his comment, knowing for sure now that he clearly knew of you and your reputation. You thought it was cute that he seemed unnerved by the mere mention of a party yet you found yourself in the same position as last weekend, just different couches, almost every single night you had available. You wondered if this made him less likely to answer your next question or more so.

He was asking it slowly like he had realized you knew more than you let on, giving you a rather hard one just to test his theory and sighing softly again when you answered it much quicker than it was delivered to you.

“Has anybody ever kissed you before?” You finally asked him something that slightly toed the line he originally expected you to cross.

You were leaning even closer as you said this, voice low and eyes hazy as you watched him. He wasn’t moving but he was watching you closely with that same hypnotized look in his eyes, shaking his head instinctively like he answered you without meaning to and then immediately flushing when he realized that he had.

You let your lip curl into a half smile as you looked at him and neither one of you made any move to continue on with the game, just watching each other in tensioned silence for a few beats before you were clearing your throat to try and catch his attention fully again. His eyes that had fallen down to the lower half of your face shot back up to your eyes and you cocked your head slightly.

Heeseung was trying not to shift away from you out of embarrassment but it got even more difficult when you were moving closer again, your free hand that wasn’t under your chin coming up to rest on his knee. He was suddenly glad he had worn jeans and not shorts despite how hot the weather had gotten in the past few weeks.

“Why not?” You were whispering to him and squeezing his knee softly, watching as it took a second for his dizzy mind to remember what you had even been talking about before to try and figure out what you were referring to. “Why hasn’t anybody ever kissed you?”

He just flushed more red as you assisted him in remembering, repeating the direct words as they fell casually off your lips while simultaneously causing his entire nervous system to light up.

“I’m not sure.” He whispered back, his voice wavering slightly with nerves as the conversation and tone changed quickly. “I-I don’t really know I guess.”

You hummed softly like you didn’t really believe him, thinking about the comments your friends had made about him turning down any advances. You had a feeling that was more about their own advances and judgements about him rather than him just simply being a prude. You felt like your theory was right the more he stared at the way your hand was squeezing around his knee.

“Do you want to come back to my dorm with me?” You were whispering to him suddenly and his eyes were back on yours, widening in shock for a moment before glancing around the empty library like he was worried somebody could somehow hear what you said.

This seemed to awaken him from his spell and he was leaning back a bit, aggressively popping the bubble you had fallen into with each other. You’d crossed the line enough that he was doubting your intentions again and he shifted his leg enough that your hand fell from his knee, landing lifeless on the side of his chair instead.

“For what?” He was asking with a frown and the fact that he was even slightly curious reassured you a bit that he wasn’t fully rejecting your advances, just being cautious.

“I can’t focus here.” You were explaining simply and he glanced around again like he was confused on what you meant, especially since it was pretty much completely silent and empty outside of your whispers to each other. “Too much on my mind.”

He didn’t verbally agree but he was closing the book in front of him and giving you a nervous look that made you smile, knowing he was accepting your offer to go somewhere more private. You tried not to be offended as you walked in silence, even more so because he kept looking over his shoulder like he was afraid to be seen leaving with you.

His anxiety didn’t cease as you crossed the courtyard over to your side of the dorms, if anything it just amplified the closer you got to your room and the more students you passed by.

You didn’t blame him considering you could only imagine the rumors that would blossom from him being seen with you, considering your reputation and overall look, especially since you were leading him back to your room in the middle of the day. It almost made you laugh to see how unnerved he was just to study in private with you.

When you finally got to your dorm, he still hadn’t calmed down and he awkwardly looked around the small room like he was in search of a place to sit. You’d forgone the usual desk and chair most dorms had and instead only had your bed as a resting place, raising your eyebrow at him when you walked past his stiff body to slowly lower yourself onto it, patting the spot next to you.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come here.” He was shaking his head suddenly and still standing in the middle of your room but you frowned softly at him.

“I don’t bite you know.” Your voice was soft and innocent, teasing him for his assumptions about your intentions and he gave you a disbelieving look before eventually taking a few hesitant steps and sitting as far away from you on the bed as he could possibly manage.

You watched him intensely as he took his backpack off and placed it on the floor, in between his feet. He was bending over to rummage through it and search for the subjects you were previously talking about and you scanned his frame and side profile as he did so, liking the way his turtleneck was stretched and pulled tightly against his back muscles because of his movements.

He was sitting back up and beginning to talk again but you were zoned out as you watched him, trailing down his neck to the way his hands tried to explain the subject to you.

When he eventually caught on to the fact you still weren’t paying any attention, judging by the way he asked you a question and got no response, he looked over towards you and let out a soft sigh when he realized you weren’t even pretending to be looking at the textbooks.

“You’re still not focusing.” He was mumbling to you and shaking his head, closing the book on his lap and picking at the cover with anxious fingers. “I thought you said you’d be less distracted in private.”

“Must be something else stealing my attention then.” You were shrugging and leaning back on your palm so your body was more angled towards him, smiling when his breath hitched slightly when your position made your skirt ride up your legs.

“What do you want from me?” He was eventually asking in a low, nervous voice and you cocked your head at him.

For a moment you contemplated playing the game a bit longer, telling him you didn’t want anything and this was just an innocent study date. You considered what your friends had said about him never paying any mind to any advances or attempts but then you thought again about the way he instinctively leaned closer to you and followed you back to your room despite knowing your reputation and bad habits.

“What do I want from you?” You repeated back to him and he nodded softly, eyes going to your mouth when you kissed your teeth. “Who said I want anything?”

He didn’t say anything for a few heavy seconds, tension in the air almost suffocating both of you as you waited for him to give you any signal that he had fully caught on to your intentions and didn’t mind them. His body language didn’t do much to help you, shifting uncomfortably but still watching you with an intense gaze that kept exploring around your face.

“Y-you.. I’ve heard some stuff about you, I guess.” He was eventually saying and you tilted your head as he played with his fingers anxiously, avoiding looking at you completely now as he brought up the subject.

“What have you heard exactly?” You shifted closer to him on the bed and it caught his attention again, stiffening although you still were a few feet away. “Good things… bad things?”

“I don’t know.” The way he paused, calculated and awkward, made you believe he definitely did know and just didn’t want to say. He seemed to notice you caught on to that and he sucked in a breath before pushing up his glasses. “Just the stuff you do with people.”

“I do lots of stuff with very little people. I’m picky.” You were scooting closer to him again as you said this, letting a purr seep back into your voice and he gave you a disbelieving look.

Heeseung was cute, that fact didn’t pass by you from the second you saw him, but you were a bit taken back by how handsome he looked the longer you spent with him. Despite being awkward and avoiding your eye contact like it was a devious act, his gaze was strong when you held it and he occasionally lifted an eyebrow almost like he didn’t realize he was doing it.

He had a sort of arrogance about him, something he possibly hadn’t noticed he carried. Maybe it stemmed from excelling academically or being desired for his skills, for his brains.

The other side of him, the part that was insecure and fidgeting, letting out small stutters and choked breaths was attractive to you too. You didn’t necessarily have a type, gender or appearance, but you were drawn to the fact he seemed almost drunk every time he looked at you for too long.

“You don’t believe me?” You questioned him when the look didn’t leave his face, doubting the fact that you were apparently picky yet still deciding to obviously flirt with him.

“Jake said you normally go for like.. I don’t know people like you.” He was mumbling out, his eyes still scanning your face mindlessly.

“You asked your friends about me?” You tried to keep the teasing tone out of your voice but he definitely caught on to it, flushing and stammering for a second like he hadn’t meant to give you that much information.

“J-just at the party.” He was quick to explain as he shook his head, glasses sliding down his nose bridge again. “You were l-looking I think and Sunghoon said something about it and I don’t know, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

You ignored the fact he was rambling and attempting to backtrack on what he said, leaning forward off your palm so you were closer to him again. He froze up at the sudden proximity and watched you with widen eyes when you reached over to push his glasses back up on his face, tucking some of his hair behind his ear afterwards.

“I think maybe you’re picky too.” You told him slowly, watching the way his eyes trailed from your wrist that was practically touching his cheek now, all the way up your arm before it was landing back on your face.

“I’m not.” He was shaking his head earnestly like he was trying to convince you and when you raised an eyebrow, he realized he had misspoken in his desperation. “I m-mean.. I guess I am. I just don’t think girls really would get what they want from me.”

He was saying it slow and awkward but you could sense the fact he had been thinking about this a lot. Your mind flashed with how fast he was to answer your questions even when he was feeling awkward, the way he stared at your hand that squeezed his knee in the library.

“What do you think they want?” You were muttering and you could tell by the look he gave you, incredulous and knowing like he already realized you had noticed his behavior, that he wasn’t going to tell you so you finished your sentence for him. “You think they want you to be in charge? To lose your resolve and snap, bend them over.”

He was watching you intensely as you spoke and something flashed past his eyes, dark and heavy but ashamed at the same time. You kissed your teeth again and pet his cheek softly, almost forgetting your hand was resting there until he subtly nudged the side of his face against it.

His skin was hot to the touch and still red like it had been from the moment you’d brought him back to your room, fidgeting with his fingers and not breathing as you shifted closer again so the sides of your thighs were pushed tightly against each others. He only sucked in a fast and panicked breath when your hand traveled down his cheek and stopped at the base of his neck, turning your head at his reaction.

“Such a pretty boy.” You were whispering and your voice shocked the both of you, coming out just as breathy and transfixed as his was previously.

You couldn’t help it as you studied his expression, his big eyes peering at you with hesitance and curiosity behind the thin framed glasses. He was a lot bigger than you but he seemed small and fragile with the way he shrunk in on himself, shoulders pulled forward in an attempt to disappear.

His eyes were going down towards your lips again and when he saw the corner of them pull up into a smirk they immediately left, meeting your eyes in embarrassment.

“Do you want me to kiss you?” You were asking him in a low voice and your faces were so close all it would take is a slight rock forward from either of you.

“I d-don’t know.” He whispered back but his eyes went back down to your mouth as you smiled, telling you he definitely did know. “I’m not sure how.”

“I can teach you.” Your lips were grazing against his as you spoke and a shudder ran through him, his glasses sliding forward again and touching your forehead. “Let me teach you baby.”

He was hesitating for a second but his eyes widened a touch at the pet name and then he was nodding his head, his forehead touching yours because of the movement. You were pushing into him before he could change his mind and he stiffened at the feeling of your lips against his.

He wasn’t lying about not knowing how, completely frozen throughout the kiss until you were pulling back and laughing softly, his eyebrows furrowing in an upset expression at the sound. You kissed him again before he could think too deeply about your laugh and get insecure about you making fun of him, this time bringing your hand up to his face again to try and help him add some movement.

It took a few seconds but he slowly got the hang of it, pushing against your mouth desperately once he realized he could move with you.

You pulled back out of the kiss for a second to look at him, his eyes still shut tight and his cheeks almost as red as his swollen lips. He fluttered his eyelashes open once he realized you weren’t kissing him again and gave you a confused look.

You couldn’t help yourself from pushing your hand off his cheek and into his hair, brushing it back and admiring the way it immediately flopped back into place, soft and fluffy. You were turning your head to kiss him again, a small peck that pulled a little noise from him.

“What’s wrong baby.” You practically cooed at him, adjusting his glasses and watching the way he went slightly cross eyed as he followed your fingers movements.

“Please, again.” He breathed out and you felt a pull in your stomach at the whiny tone to his voice, leaning back into you desperately and seemingly forgetting the resolve he was showing earlier.

You didn’t bother teasing him further, pulling him in for another kiss and letting it deepen quickly this time. He made another noise into your mouth as you did this, half surprised and half grateful when you continued to move your lips together at a slow pace.

His hands were shaking in his lap and you reached down blindly to grab one, bumping against his stomach on accident and feeling it harden at the touch. You ignored it for now and took his hand in yours so you could place it around your body, letting it settle near your back.

You were slipping your tongue into his mouth softly and he froze again, eyes opening for a second but immediately shutting again when you closed your fist in his hair in warning.

He let you lick into his mouth a few times, getting used to the feeling and then he was pushing forward again so he could kiss you deeper. You almost laughed at his excitement but you were stopped by the feeling of his tongue brushing against yours, experimenting for himself what it felt like.

Heeseung let out a low groan that vibrated against you and your free hand slid forward to grab near his knee again, bunching up the fabric of his pants absentmindedly.

You sucked on his tongue for a few beats before you felt his spit dripping down his chin, pressed tightly against yours considering he wasn’t allowing either of you room to breathe. You pulled back just slightly and he opened his eyes to watch you, letting out a gasp when you were turning your head to lick the wetness off his chin, your tongue trailing up until it was back in his mouth again.

His gasp made you smile into the kiss and you could feel his large hands squeezing your side, shifting slightly at the feeling.

When you were finally pulling away to try and take a breath, he was giving you a panicked look and trying to lean in again. Your hand in his hair tightened to stop his advances and he frowned deeply.

“W-why?” He was whispering and his face fell into a pout, an expression far more vulnerable than you’d ever seen him carry.

“Don’t want you to get too excited.” Your tone was teasing and your eyes dropped down to his lap, an obvious tent in his pants although you had barely touched him and just kissed a little bit.

He was clearly mortified and leaning away from you a bit, eyes darting around awkwardly like he wanted to disappear into the mattress. You were petting his hair again to try and soothe his embarrassment.

“Just messing with you baby.” You were shaking your head and trying to reassure him, your hand kneading his knee for a second before sliding up and down his clothed thigh, caressing it gently.

“It’s not funny.” He mumbled back, watching you carefully like he was waiting for you to burst out laughing at him. You frowned again at his hurt tone, wondering what past experiences he had that would lead him to he so defensive.

You were scooting closer to him again and now your legs were hooked over him, thrown over his lap so you could hold the side of his face and turn his head so he was looking at you. He froze at the feeling of your thighs pressed ontop of him but didn’t make any move to scoot away this time, just watching you with a guarded expression.

“I like that you like kissing me that much.” You were whispering it to him and his eyes went to your mouth at the reminder you had kissed. “You make me feel good too.”

“I do?” He sounded breathless at that, eyes opening up a bit in shock as he waited for your confirmation.

“Yeah baby, you’re so pretty.” You kissed your teeth softly and pushed his hair back again, taking in his features and the way he instinctively pushed his head against your palm.

You were kissing him again before he could say anything else, cupping his face in your hands and parting your mouth in shock when he was squeezing your legs, seemingly forgetting they were still in his lap until his big hands made contact with your bare skin.

He was freezing up at the realization he was touching your thighs, your skirt rolling up more to an almost dangerous height and he pulled away from the kiss to stare at you, removing his hands so fast you barely registered that they were there.

“I-I have to go.” He was rushing out and you frowned softly at his nervous tone, not saying anything as he was suddenly scooting away from you and gently placing your legs back on the bed so he could stand off of it without jolting you around.

You wanted to ask him what had happened to scare him off, mouth parting in the beginning of a question but he was throwing his backpack over his shoulder before you could form a syllable, disappearing out the door with a slight stumble that almost sent him flying into your bedside table. You sighed softly at the fact he had completely ran away from you, realizing this would be a lot harder than you thought.

——

The next time you saw Heeseung was the following Thursday morning, despite wanting to immediately seek him out once you entered campus you thought it would be better if you have him a few days to calm himself down and lessen his nerves.

This plan didn’t seem to work considering he immediately stiffened up when he caught sight of you entering the classroom he was sat in, some lecture you didn’t bother checking the subject for, asking his friend Jake in passing where you could find him. He shifted awkwardly in his seat, the front row of course, and tried to avoid looking at you.

It didn’t work considering you stopped directly in front of him, eyeing the small girl who was sitting in the seat beside him until she was glancing up at the feeling of your stare and immediately faltering before getting up and going the row behind.

Heeseung sighed softly when you smiled at her and slid into the seat, scooting the chair slightly so you were closer to him.

“What are you doing here?” He sounded exhausted and completely thrown off, facing the front of the classroom and whispering out of the side of his mouth.

“Am I not allowed to attend a class?” You were whispering back to him, still holding your smile despite the fact he was refusing to look at you.

“So you’re interested in physical anthropology now?” His tone was sarcastic and he finally spared you a quick glance, faltering when he saw your smile and the way you leaned forward with your chin on your palm so you could be closer to him.

“Maybe I just wanted to see you.” You were shrugging softly and tapping your foot against his, staring at his clean tennis shoes for a second before looking back at him to see him holding his gaze on yours now.

He watched you for a few beats, you could tell he was holding his breath by the way his shoulders were tensed and then finally releasing in a small shuddered exhale. You raised an eyebrow at him and went to speak, stopping when his eyes dropped to your mouth for a second before he was flushing and going back to staring at the empty chalkboard.

You smiled softly at the realization he was clearly replaying the other day in his mind, more awkward than normal now that you’d caught him zoning out staring at your mouth.

The professor was coming in now and you stiffened slightly, Heeseung’s foot trapped under yours. For a second you considered staying and teasing him a bit further but considering you definitely weren’t supposed to be here and you were directly in the front row, you imagined it would be easier to just leave before you were removed.

You were gathering your bag, slipping the strap back over your shoulder as Heeseung watched you from the corner of his eye.

You leaned down towards him, letting your lips graze against his ear and trying not to laugh at the way a shiver wracked through his body as he clenched his pencil tighter.

“There’s a party tomorrow at Beomgyu’s place. You and your friends should come.” You didn’t give him the chance to say anything about your invitation, knowing he was most likely to decline while in your presence.

You could feel him watching you still as you turned to leave the classroom, waving slightly at the professor who was giving you a confused look.

——

“Wait, you’re actually thinking about going?” Sunghoon was raising a dark eyebrow as he sat up to look at his friend, not paying attention before but now on high alert as he tuned into the conversation. “Are you fucking insane?”

“Dude when has Heeseung ever been invited to a party by a girl.” Jake was rebutting and wrapping an arm around the mentions boys shoulders, shaking him slightly with an excited grin. “And she’s hot.”

Heeseung groaned softly and pushed his friends arm off of him, flopping on the couch and trying not to think too deeply about the reason his jaw clenched at Jake’s wording. He had decided to confide in them after your interaction in the classroom, leaving out the details of what happened in your dorm.

He could hear Jake’s mocking tone now, scolding him for running away from you the way he did.

“Yeah exactly. I mean no offense but do you not find it slightly suspicious that Y/N is suddenly interested in Heeseung?” Sunghoon was speaking slowly like he was worried about hurting his friends feelings, eyeing him carefully.

Heeseung didn’t say anything still, regretting bringing it up at all. He had blurted it out awkwardly after they’d questioned his red blushing face, still replaying the feeling of you whispering in his ear in a classroom full of gossiping peers.

“Hee is a smoke show dude, it’s about time ladies started to notice it.” Jake was shaking his head and pointing a stern finger towards the other two boys who were watching him from the couch.

Heeseung sighed again when his friend turned on his feet and disappeared into his closest, muttering something about making him look as sexy as possible for when he saw you. Sunghoon glanced over at him when he heard the small noise and raised an eyebrow.

“I can tell him to chill out if you want.” He was offering, noticing how tense the oldest boy looked.

“Do you really think she couldn’t like me?” It was slipping out before he even decided if he wanted to say it or not, wincing at how insecure and nervous his voice sounded and hoping Sunghoon didn’t pick up on how totally distraught over this he was.

He knew Sunghoon wouldn’t make fun of him like Jake but he felt embarrassed over being so inexperienced and awkward around girls still. He’d had bad experiences that only his friends really knew about and hadn’t really planned to ever make another attempt until you’d approached him, charming and devilish while smelling sweeter than any person he’d ever encountered.

Sunghoon seemed to finally notice that his protective behavior was furthering his friends insecurity and he sighed softly once more before patting him affectionately on the knee.

“Let’s get you dressed.”

——

Despite only coming to the party to see if Heeseung would come, you weren’t expecting much. You highly doubted he would actually attend or if he did he’d most likely not be okay being seen with you after the stunt you had pulled in the classroom.

So you were you completely, and uncharacteristically, frozen in the middle of the room when the crowd had slightly parted and you caught sight of him leaning against the wall. He was with his two friends again and you could still see the nervous twitch in his hands but his visual had taken a complete 180, almost not recognizing him for a split second.

You were making your way over there before he even realized you were approaching, eyes widening slightly when Sim Jake was nudging him in the ribs to get his attention and nodding his head towards you.

“Your glasses.” You breathed out once you were in speaking distance, almost toe to toe with him and staring at him with slightly amazed eyes. He awkwardly looked to his sides at his friends and Sunghoon cleared his throat before pushing off the wall and waiting for the other boy to join him.

“Hey.” Heeseung was greeting now that they were gone, trying to carry a casual tone despite the fact he was picking at the skin around his thumb.

You scanned down his outfit, tight ripped jeans with a simple black shirt tucked into the belt but he looked nothing like himself, missing his usual sweaters and loose fitted pants. Not to mention the most jarring part, his lack of glasses sat against his high nose.

“Are you… wearing eyeliner?” You were instinctively leaning forward to get a closer look, too invested and intrigued in his new look to realize how little space you were leaving between the two of you.

He stiffened at the fact you were swaying closer to him, your nose brushing against his for a second and your mouth twitched downwards at the fact his glasses weren’t hitting against your forehead anymore. He must’ve misread your reaction between he winced slightly and looked down towards his feet.

“You look sexy.” You blurted out when you realized his insecure expression, your hand coming to grip his arm and trying not to look down at the feeling of his bare skin under your palm, forgetting about his top of choice.

“D-do I?” He was muttering out and then quickly clearing his throat and attempting to steady his expression. “Do I?”

“Can you see?” You ignored his ask for reassurance and smiled a little bit, sliding over so your back was against the wall too and your shoulders were pressed together.

He tensed again at the way you moved away which causes you to furrow your brows, assuming he would have rather you not be all over him in case anybody was starting to pay attention to the two of you. You nudged him softly with your hand to try and bring his attention back to what you were asking him.

“No, not really.” He flushed as he said it, embarrassed to be admitting that he had forgone one of his senses just to look nice.

“You’re not missing much.” You mumbled back to him, looking out into the surging crowd and scanning the faces, some familiar and some empty and blending together the longer you watched. “Other than a few girls eyeing you.”

“Seriously?” He was glancing over at you with an interested expression and you scoffed while turning your head to face him better, eyes dipping down to his mouth for a second before meeting his gaze again. He seemed more relaxed now and he was smirking slightly while looking at you.

“Oh so you’re interested?” You teased him back, liking the fact he wasn’t immediately looking away from you at the soft purr seeping into your voice.

“Not necessarily.” He was answering swiftly and your stomach swooped at the familiar breathiness in his tone.

You were turning towards him more and he was looking at you with low eyes, stiffening slightly when your hand was coming back up to rest against his arm. You were softly touching his skin before dragging your hand down towards his wrist, squeezing it tightly and pressing against the bone there. He squirmed against the wall but didn’t say anything, looking at you with a curious expression that was slowly merging into the one he had after you kissed him.

You could tell he was thinking about it judging by the way his eyes kept darting around your face, seemingly not even realizing the way he was instinctively leaning towards you.

“Who did your makeup?” You were asking him in a quiet tone and it took a second for him to respond, not registering your voice at first considering how transfixed he was by your presence. “Was it Jake?”

He was nodding softly at your suggested answer, looking sheepish again at the reminder of his changed appearance. You were humming under your breath before letting go of his wrist, bringing your thumb up to your mouth and wetting it slightly with a flick of your tongue. He watched you in amazement as you brought your wet digit to his face, carefully cleaning up the messy lines.

Your other hand was also coming up to his face to cup his jaw in an attempt to keep him still so you could avoid poking him. He held his breath the entire time you were touching him, gently wiping your wet thumb along his waterline and giving him a more smudged and smokey look rather than the amateurish lines his friend had attempted.

When you pulled back from his face, he remained still as he watched you with an almost drunk gaze, completely floored by your actions.

“Would you let me kiss you?” You were whispering to him, just barely reaching his ears over the loud music and the crowd talking and laughing but he managed to catch it and he glanced behind your shoulder awkwardly like he was afraid somebody was watching.

“Not here.” He whispered back nervously like he thought you’d get upset. A small pang of hurt hit your chest but you tried to ignore it, knowing your reputation was your own doing and nobody else’s fault.

He hadn’t declined your proposition however and that fact didn’t miss you, grabbing his wrist again and tugging him gently off the wall so he could be dragged behind you as you made your way out of the main section of the house and towards one of the halls. You passed by his friends on the way out and you ignored the glare Park Sunghoon sent in your direction.

You entered a dark room in silence and he was flustered for a moment when you immediately pushed him against the nearest hard surface and kissed him, not giving him any time to panic or hesitate before he was attempting to unfreeze and kiss you back.

The kiss was deep and filthy and you felt a pull in your stomach at the way he dipped down slightly, knees going weak at the feeling of you pressed against him. You pulled back for a second to look at him, only slightly able to see his face in the dark and you almost frowned again at his lack of eyewear.

“Wear your glasses next time.” You instructed him in a breathy tone, stern in your words even as you leaned forward so your front was completely pressed against his.

“N-next time? Yeah.. yeah I will, I promise.” He was nodding earnestly and you smiled slightly at the giddiness in his voice at the prospect of you both continuing to meet like this.

You were kissing him again to try and distract yourself from how cute you found him, how much you liked the way he reacted to you and the charming carelessness he carried once he was comfortable. It’d been a long time since you were interested in somebody but you were going to steel up and remember that this was simply a challenge, nothing more.

He was doing his best to kiss you back and you could feel his chest rising and falling against yours, his hands resting against the wall to try and keep himself standing upright. Yours were traveling down his stomach until you could grab the belt loops of his pants and tug him off the wall slightly, turning your bodies in a circle so you were pressed against a solid surface instead.

He let out a small gasp and pulled back for a second to see where you had moved to, eyeing you curiously when you finally flicked on the lights and he realized you were inside a small bathroom.

You kissed him one more time briefly before raising yourself up onto the marble sink, pulling him forward again by his pants and laughing softly when you heard him shriek a little at the sudden movement. You trapped him between your legs and held his face softly, watching his big eyes for a second before kissing him deeply again.

“You can touch me.” You were whispering into his mouth when you realized his hands were nervously clutching onto the counter, warm mouth moving down to kiss against his jawline.

“R-right.” He was nodding but not making any move to do so, stiffening slightly when you started to suck on his neck softly, one of your hands tangled in the back of his previous styled hair.

When you bit down slightly on his tan skin, he was finally moving. He instinct lurched forward with a groan and gripped onto the closest thing, which happened to be just above your knee. He seemed like he wanted to flinch back once he felt your skin under his hold but he didn’t, taking a deep breath and keeping it there.

“Don’t be nervous.” You mumbled against his neck and you tightened your legs that were around his waist, pulling him closer so he was flushed against your lower half. “It’s just me.”

You were moving your mouth back up to kiss him again and he sighed into, leaning forward against you so you swayed backwards slightly and you felt your head pressing against the mirror placed behind you. He was pulling back to look down at you, staying pressed against you so the two of you were breathing into each others mouths.

“You have no idea how nervous that makes me.” He was speaking in a low breathy tone and your stomach dipped at how dark his eyes had gotten, still awkward but definitely feeling the effects of being around you now.

“I want you.” You tried your best to reassure him despite it not being something you usually ever did, curling your hand in his hair slightly just enough so he could feel the pull. His hand was sliding up from your knee slowly but he completely skipped your thigh, hesitantly placing it against your waist.

He was nodding slowly and surprising you by initiating another kiss, his big hand tightening around your hip bone like he didn’t even mean to do it. You hummed softly against him and spread your legs more so he could keep pressing against you.

You could feel him getting more desperate the longer you kissed, licking into your mouth and letting out small little needy whines while trying to remain quiet in case anybody passed by drunkenly looking for the restroom. When you first rolled your hips against him, he was completely faltering and he released a small shout into the kiss, freezing up at the overwhelming feeling.

You waited for a few seconds before doing it again, trying to encourage him to grind himself against you, clearly able to feel how hard he was just from kissing.

He took a while to follow your silent instructions but the pleasure overwhelmed his ability to think straight and he forgot about his insecurities for just a moment, his hips stuttering into yours as he groaned lowly at the feeling. You were moving your foot up on the counter so your legs were completely spread and tugging his hair again in an attempt to encourage his movement.

Heeseung was hesitantly fucking himself against you, losing focus and completely forgetting about the fact you were kissing, his hand kneading against your side almost painfully. He was pulling his head back away from your mouth and lowering his forehead onto your shoulder instead, more groans falling from his lips.

“That’s good baby.” Your voice was breathy and you were nodding even though he couldn’t see it, your hand holding his hair tightly from where he was resting in your neck. “Does it feel good?”

“F-feels.. fuck.” He trailed off after that and you almost laughed at how wrecked he sounded, hearing him swear for the first time from how overwhelmed he was getting.

You could imagine how he must be feeling, how addicting it would be to go from never being kissed to suddenly experiencing pleasure so intense for the first time. He would most likely do anything you wished here in this lowly lit bathroom, including helping you succeed in winning the challenge.

He was pulling his head up for a second to look at you, eyes watery and affectionate before he was surging forward for another amateurish kiss and you responded quickly, feeling guilty for your line of thinking and deciding that if you were going to win then it wasn’t going to be somewhere this desperate. Despite only being a pawn in your ego filled game, Heeseung was still a person and deserved better than a quick fuck on top of a bathroom sink.

“Let me help you cum and then let’s go back to your dorm.” You were whispering into his mouth, hands moving down out of his hair to fidget with the metal button of his jeans and he was stiffening up.

You looked at him in confusion when he was gripping your wrist tightly, stopping you from unbuttoning his pants and awkwardly avoiding looking at you. At first you assumed he was just uncomfortable with taking it further and you were fully prepared to back off until you noticed how red his neck and face were getting, embarrassment and shame rolling off him in waves.

“Oh.” You accidentally let the exclamation fall from your lips, mouth parting in shock at the realization he had came in his pants despite you not even touching him.

He was backing up from you quickly at the sound and clenching his fist together with anxiety, not looking at you and instinctively bringing a hand up to fidget with his glasses even though they weren’t there. You didn’t say anything for a few seconds out of shock, watching him panic.

“That’s okay.” You were attempting to reassure him but you could tell the damage was already done judging by the disbelieving glare he sent you, shaking his head and biting the inside of his cheek like he was trying to stop himself from crying. “Heeseung, it’s fine seriously.”

He didn’t say anything else but he was giving you a heavy glance, eyes upset and frustrated at himself before he was taking a deep shuddering breath and turning to walk out the door, leaving you awkwardly sat on the counter top still trying to catch your breath.

You unfroze after a few seconds and went to go and follow after him, surprising yourself as you ignored people’s questioning stares at your worried expression as you stood on your tiptoes and tried to find him inside the crowd. You were having no luck and you figured he must’ve just left completely until you spotted one of his friends standing by himself in the kitchen, refilling his cup. You made your way over to him quickly.

“Park.” Your voice was raised so he could hear you over the music and he turned at the sound with a raised eyebrow, face hardening in worry when he realized who it was that said his name. “Did you see where Heeseung went?”

“What happened?” He was rushing out and his face softened in concern, reaching down into his pocket to grab his phone and you assumed he was texting or calling the boy. “What did you say?”

You were slightly offended that he assumed you had hurt his friends feelings before remembering the whole reason you were messing around with him in the first place, leaning over his shoulder to try and see the text message he was sending Heeseung. He glared and turned his phone screen away from your nosy eyes which made you sigh.

“I didn’t say anything.” You spat out at him, glaring back in his direction and crossing your arms. “It’s none of your business what happened but I really didn’t do anything.”

He was sighing and putting his phone back into his pocket. “He’s leaving with Jake.” You were nodding and turning to leave him alone but him clearing his throat stopped you and you glanced back at him in confusion. “Whatever you’re doing, I really hope you’re not messing with him. He’s been through a lot and I don’t know if he could handle it.”

You tried to keep your expression stony, knowing that he was particularly perceptive and he’d definitely catch the flash of guilt passing through you if you let it show even slightly. You didn’t say anything and his eyes grew more suspicious at your silence, shaking his head in disappointment and wandering off before you had the chance to.

——

You showed up to classes early the next Monday, standing in front of Heeseung’s first one of the morning and waiting patiently for him to arrive so you could talk to him.

You caught sight of him not too long after you got there, walking in with Jake and Yang Jungwon. He immediately froze when he saw you and his eyes widened, turning around swiftly to try and go back down the hallway but he was stopped by his friends holding his arms tightly and walking him towards you.

“Delivery for Y/N.” Jake was smiling at you when they approached with him captured and you gave him a sheepish one in return, feeling slightly awkward with the way the other two boys were eyeing you with excitement. It wasn’t like you to get easily embarrassed but you weren’t sure how much they knew about you.

They were ditching him with a pat on the back and a knowing look, disappearing into the classroom and leaving you stood in the hallway with a frozen Heeseung.

“Hey.” You were mumbling to him and he glanced up at you, cheeks already reddening despite the fact you didn’t say anything of substance yet. You were tucking your hair behind your ear uncomfortably and he stiffened up at the realization you were also feeling embarrassed for once.

“I’m sorry.” He was rushing out and shaking his head, looking around the hallway like he was worried somebody was going to overhear him. “I made a total fool out of myself and I get it if you never want to see me again.”

“Heeseung.” You cut off his rambling abruptly and gestured around yourself with a raised eyebrow. “I’m awake way too early and stood outside a class I don’t take… I think it’s pretty clear I don’t mind seeing you.”

He reddened more at that but for different reasons now, complete struck and confused by the fact that somebody as charming and experienced as you would want to spend time with him even after he’d came in his pants like a 14 year old boy. He itched the back of his neck nervously and you watched his glasses slide down his nose, smiling softly without realizing you were.

“Not too happy about being left in the bathroom of a shitty frat party.” You made sure you kept your voice light and teasing despite the actual hurt you’d felt that night, tugging down your skirt and awkwardly pushing past drunk college students to call a cab home.

“I’m sorry.” He was mumbling but he sounded honest, taking a step closer to you at the look on your face and you gave him another smile, reaching forward to grip onto his sweater sleeve before glancing around the way he always did when you interacted.

However this time was different apparently considering he was keeping his eyes down at you, not caring who saw the two of you talking at such a close distance. He felt stupid for last night and being so wary about being around you in public, for doubting your intentions just because you had a poor reputation. You were smiling at him and holding his wrist gently in your hands, forgetting your reasoning for coming here for a moment.

Movement behind him was catching your attention and you moved your gaze around his tall shoulder, freezing completely when you caught sight of a few of your “friends” laughing and snickering meanly as they watched the two of you interact. You were dropping his hand and his eyebrows furrowed, following your line of sight and awkwardly shifting when he saw the people watching you.

“Are they your friends?” He was whispering to you, sensing how uncomfortable you were and also remembering how little he actually knew about you. He was slightly intimidated by your friends and their habits but he’d felt the same about you before he got to know you more, almost waving at them until you were grabbing his arm again to stop him.

“No, they’re not.” You were sternly shaking your head when he looked back at you with a confused glance, remembering them sitting beside you at the party where you’d first talked.

You felt sickness in your stomach when one of the girls nudged the others with her sharp elbow and gave you a knowing look, starting to approach the two of you. You recalled her being the one at the party who said she’d attempted to get with Heeseung before and he rejected her, fearing what her ego and pride would cause her to say to him now.

“Hey Y/N.” She was smiling when she got closer, the others trailing behind, but her grin was mean and telling. She had trouble growing in her eyes and you didn’t like the way she started at the tall boy who was getting more uncomfortable by the second, sending you panicked gazes as he realized her tone wasn’t friendly. “Is it going well then? Did you do it?”

“Wonyoung.” You were warning her with a shake of your head, squeezing Heeseung’s wrist without meaning to. Normally she listened to you well, whether it was because respect or fear, but you could tell she was picking up on the emotion in your eyes and using your rare show of vulnerability to her advantage.

“Do what?” Heeseung was whispering from beside you and you could feel his gaze on you, only asking you and not paying the other girl any attention.

You didn’t respond to him but you sighed softly and squeezed your eyes shut for a moment, stomach turning painfully as you tried to think of a way out of this situation. Sunghoon’s words from the other night were ringing in your head and it was coupled with the soft look Heeseung had given you before kissing you again.

“So no then?” She was pouting and kissing her teeth softly like she was disappointed, a low hiss dragging out and filling the heavy silence that was taking over everytime somebody stopped speaking. “You could always give up you know, if he’s playing hard to get.”

It was clear what she was talking about now and you felt Heeseung stiffen in your hold, you wanted to drop his hand but you couldn’t move your body in fear of giving anything away or seeing his reaction. You could hear his breath catching in his throat in realization and you started to shake your head but he was tugging his arm away from you and taking a few steps backwards.

You finally looked at him and your expression crumbled at the look on his face, partially hurt and disgusted but you could tell he mainly felt embarrassed and humiliated for thinking you actually had liked him, his eyes darting all around and cowering away from the amused looks of the people gathered around Wonyoung like he was afraid of them.

“Hee.” You were breathing out, surprising yourself at how quiet and weak your voice was coming out.

The sound of you talking seemed to snap him out of his panic and he gave you one more heavy look, eyes watery and clenching his jaw before he was turning on his heel and disappearing down the hallway.

“He’s missing a class? I guess he’s experiencing at least one of his first times.” She was chiming out and the group behind her let out approving laughs, sounding ridiculous and practiced in a way that made your lip snarl up in disgust.

“Why the fuck would you do that?” You were spitting out at her and shoving her shoulder slightly, fear flashing through her face for just a second before it was hardening back into a mean glare as she sneered down at you.

“Did you forget what you are to us? What you were doing with him in the first place?” Her words were direct and harsh, confirming your initial worries that they hadn’t actual ever cared about you outside of needing some entertainment. “Don’t tell me you actually managed to like him?”

She said it like it was something ridiculous, like he was impossible to have feelings for or rather you were incapable of feeling things towards anybody and you felt sick again at the realization she was right.

You had started to like Heeseung, way more than you had even realized until he was walking away from you and giving you such a broken look. You’d never felt this terrible about hurting somebody before and you would’ve immediately chased after him if it wasn’t for the anger coursing through you keeping you rooted to your spot.

“Don’t talk about him again.” You were spitting at her, taking a step closer and her eyes looked hesitant for a second like she had just realized how serious you were about this. “Don’t even look at him I mean it, all of you. Leave the both of us alone.”

You expected her to say something else, to not let you go that easy but she seemed surprised by how genuinely upset you were, not used to you actually caring about the people or situations they challenged you to put yourself in messy environments with.

You were turning and following down the hallway before you could think about it more, picking up speed until you were almost in a jog although you were pretty positive he was long gone by now. When you pushed outside a cold chill ran through you and you sighed softly at the barren campus, his long legs and habit of running away giving him the advantage.

It was embarrassing how upset you were getting, your eyes watering now as you decided to just head back to your dorm, wiping your teary eyes with your sleeves and keeping your head down incase anybody walked past.

——

A few hours of wallowing in your own self pity and you quickly realized how absolutely idiotic you were, not even capable of texting him and asking to talk considering you’d been so inconsiderate you’d never even asked him for his number. He had little social media which didn’t surprise you and you almost messaged one of his friends out of desperation but decided against it knowing they most likely were already wishing you the worst.

It was extremely rare Heeseung ever missed a class and you imagined they’d been weirded out enough to pry the truth out of him, hating you more than they already had.

You hadn’t even realized you’d fallen asleep, tightly laid in your bed trying to pretend the day hadn’t happened and going over every possible way to get Heeseung’s trust back. You must’ve dozed off considering you were waking up in a jolt at the sound of rough knocks on your door.

You were frozen for a few seconds in tired confusion before you were rushing to get up and answer the door, briefly catching the clock on the wall alerting you to the fact it was the middle of the night. You felt anxious swinging the door open, knowing it must be important if they were here this late but you froze when you saw who it was standing at your door.

Or more accurately, crumpled in a messy ball on your door mat. Heeseung’s large frame was slumped down on the dirty cement and for a second you thought he might be unconscious until he was picking his head up, eyes hazy with big tears streaming down his red cheeks. He let out a small sob when he saw you looking down at him with worry and you crouched down quickly.

“Hee, what happened?” You were rushing out although you had a pretty good idea, your hands coming up to rub his back gently knowing there was no point in attempting to lift him off the ground. “Are you drunk?”

He was shaking his head to say no but you could smell the alcohol rolling off of him in waves, heavy and gross like he’d been drinking for quite some time before ending up at your door. Your heart ached again thinking about him uncharacteristically getting wasted because how badly you’d upset him. “Can you stand up?”

“Why don’t you l-like me?” He was hiccuping out and totally ignoring what you were requesting from him, gripping onto your arms that were still trying to gently rub his back and he was looking up at you with his big round eyes full of fat tears.

“Heeseung.” You were sighing softly and not answering him, patting him on the back slightly to try and keep his attention on what you were originally saying. “Come inside with me and then we can talk, we don’t want anybody to complain.”

He clearly wasn’t coherent enough to comprehend the second half of what you said but he perked up at the idea of being invited inside, using the support of your doorway and your body to stand to his fully height, wobbling slightly as you helped him inside and lowered him down onto your bed. You tried not to think about the last time he was in here, watching him with tired eyes and frowning.

You were reaching down into his pant pockets to try and find his cellphone, feeling slightly sick at the soft cries he was still letting out as he drunkenly lost control of his emotions. You finally found it and pulled it out, swiping up the screen and pleased to see he didn’t have a password set.

“W-what are you doing?” He was mumbling out as he tried to watched you, not able to keep his head still. You sat beside him so he could see what you were doing on his screen, not saying anything when he rested his head gently against your shoulder. “Jake?”

“Yeah baby, I’m calling Jake.” You sighed softly and rubbed his knee for a second, trying to calm down his sniffles before you called his friend and accidentally caused a panic at the sound of him blabbering in the background.

“Why can’t I stay with you?” He was asking and his voice cracked in pain, the smell of liquor on his breath making you wince. “You d-don’t like me.” He was repeating what he had asked you earlier and shaking his head against your shoulder.

“I do like you.” You eventually managed to say, knowing he most likely wouldn’t remember this conversation in the morning anyways. He didn’t stop crying but he didn’t say anything else for a few moments, just leaning his weight against you as you held his phone and contemplated what to do. He watched as you pressed the call button and didn’t say anything else.

“Dude, where the fuck did you go?” Jake’s voice was slurring through the phone on the second ring, clearly worried and searching for the older boy. “Heeseung?”

“It’s Y/N.” You awkwardly interjected and the silence was heavy. You could vaguely hear him repeat your name to somebody and you assumed he was telling Sunghoon who it was on the other line. “He was outside my door, I don’t know how he got here.”

“We’re on our way.” Jake sighed back but he sounded more frustrated now, maybe at himself for letting his friend drunkenly crawl back to the person who had hurt him so bad. Heeseung cried harder again when he heard his friends comment from where he was laying against you and Jake didn’t say anything for a second at the sound.

“He doesn’t want to go.” You explained in an awkward whisper, not wanting to get in between whatever agreement they had come to about you.

You knew you deserved the harsh tone of his voice and the prolonged silence over the phone while he decided what to do, holding your breath and waiting despite not being too sure yourself what you wanted his answer to be. He was clearing his throat suddenly and Heeseung perked up at the sound.

“I can drop by in the morning and grab him.” He was letting out slowly and he sounded hesitant, Heeseung nuzzling against your neck contently at his friends words. “If that’s okay with you?”

“Yeah.” You were rushing out before you even realized you were speaking, squeezing the boys knee again when he hugged your free arm that wasn’t holding up the phone. “That’s no problem. Thanks Jake.”

Your words had a double meaning and you had no doubt the other boy had picked up on the relief in your voice, humming softly before whispering a goodbye and hanging up the phone. You kept it against your ear for a few seconds longer before turning it off and placing it gently down on your bedside table, looking over at its owner.

He was watching you with a saddened expression and you gave him a smile that didn’t meet your eyes, eyeing his outfit and lack of glasses.

“I lost them.” He mumbled when he noticed you looking, able to hold contact with you better considering he was wasted and not able to see properly. You felt relieved he had somehow managed to safely get to your dorm in this state, thinking about asking him but realizing he probably didn’t even remember. “Sunghoon said I should try to have fun.”

“Did you?” Your voice cracked as you asked him although you already knew what his answer would be.

“Did you ever like me?” He was ignoring your question and spinning it back on you, his eyes sad again even though he had stopped sobbing after getting confirmation he was allowed to spend the night.

You considered not answering him, already having a difficult time admitting it to yourself let alone telling him so directly. Liking him meant explaining yourself, having to tell him why you had talked to him in the first place and just blindly hope he would trust you enough to believe it had become real for you along the way despite having no reason to think you were telling the truth.

“I do like you.” You told him sternly, ignoring how uncomfortable it felt to express your feelings so directly.

He deserved to know it was possible for somebody to like him, he deserved far better than you and the games you had played with him for the amusement of other people.

“I’m not that drunk.” He was shaking his head, potentially figuring out that you were being so honest under the guise he would forget it all in the morning. “We started drinking forever again, I’m just a lightweight I think. I was just upset.”

You could tell he was under exaggerating a little bit considering how he was still rocking back and forth slightly and his eyes were red and glossy but now that he had calmed down he was definitely more coherent, the alcohol just helping him speak more confidently rather than put him in a totally messy blacked out state.

“Ask me again tomorrow then.” You were telling him softly and turning to face him better, cupping his cheeks in your hands and giving him a sad smile.

He seemed to notice the slight tears in your eyes and the heavy guilt you were feeling for hurting him this bad and he stayed silent for a few beats, watching you like he was trying to decide what to say. His drunk mind had brought him back to you but you weren’t sure if he’d want to stay once he was thinking more clearly.

“And you’ll say it again then?” He was eventually asking you and the familiar hint of insecurity was seeping into his voice again.

You knew you’d made it worse, added onto whatever issues the situations he’d dealt with in the past had created but you felt deep in your heart that if he would give you another chance, if he decided tomorrow this was worth a shot, you’d spend as long as he’d allow you trying to fix the damage done.

“I’ll say it for as long as you let me.” You were whispering back to him and his face softened slightly, lips twitching up in a small grin as he nodded softly and let you wipe the remaining wetness from his eyes.

The two of you crawled into your small bed together, clumsily helping him out of his uncomfortable clothes and not feeling any sensual energy whilst carrying out the domestic act, just laughing together under your breaths as you tried your hardest to get him out of his tight jeans.

You were tucking in underneath your blanket, the unfamiliarity of having somebody in your bed with you being overwhelmed by the comfort his presence brought you, his hair messily sprawled against your favorite pillow and looking at you with low and tired eyes. You weren’t sure if he’d feel this content in the morning, if he only accepted your words because the high in his system or the longing he felt for you due to his own sadness.

But you were happy with your situation for now, knowing that if you needed to do it all again for him tomorrow you would. Continuing on for as long as he needed, for as long as he’d let you.

#enhypen #enhypen drabbles #enhypen fanfiction #heeseung #jake enhypen #heeseung drabbles #heeseung x reader #heeseung smut #sunghoon enhypen #enhypen smut #enha smut #enhypen hard thoughts #enhypen hard hours #heeseung fanfic #heeseung enhypen #lee heeseung #heeseung imagine #heeseung fic

3K notes · View notes

csuitebitches · 9 months

Text

Two Week Maslow’s Pyramid Challenge

You might have come across Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It basically talks about all the needs a person generally has in the life and as they scale up.

It starts with physiological needs (food, water, clothing, shelter) at the bottom. Next is safety, followed by social needs (friends, family), then esteem needs (reputation, competence, achievement), and the last one being self actualisation (self fulfilment, growth, etc).

I’ve thought of using this structure, tweaking it slightly and setting a two week challenge for you.

“Count” in this challenge refers to the number of times you’ll do that activity in those 14 days.

If the count = 14, that means everyday. They’ll be marked in green because you absolutely cannot skip them.

If the count = 3, it means you pick any three days over the course of your challenge.

I’ve attached a bingo because I thought it would be more fun to cross something out and see how far you’re getting along. You’ll see it at the end of the post.

Save the image and tick it off as you complete it- or better yet, print it out so that you get the satisfaction of really crossing it out with a pen!

This is what the CSB take on Maslow looks like:

* Physiological: you will eat two nutritionally dense meals and at least 1.5-2L of water. This could mean adding a salad or juice to your diet; or practicing healthy eating habits; intermittent fasting; whatever works for you. Attempt to not eat any junk or sugary drinks during this challenge. (Count: 14)

* Safety: (here, employment/ personal growth) Read at least two case studies/ research reports/ academic articles in your field/ the field you want to be in. (Count: 2)

* Social needs: reach out to a friend or family member who you have been contemplating of reaching out to/ haven’t spoken to properly in a while and ask how they’re doing. (Count: 2)

* Esteem needs: create a list of 5 affirmations you think are the most relevant to you at THIS moment. Say them out loud, to yourself in the mirror, every single day. (Count: 14)

* Self actualisation: we’ve got a few here, so let me list them down.

1. Meditation / mindfulness yoga session (count: 6)

2. Creativity: a little activity of your choice. It can be colouring books/ solving a puzzle, crossword, anything of your choice. (Count: 1)

3. Beauty: spa day of your choice. I like to go all out with facial and full body waxing, a face mask or even a massage. (Count: 1)

#c suite #powerful woman #strong women #ceo aesthetic #personal growth #that girl #productivity #q/a #getting your life together #balance #challenge #routine #beginners challenge #lifestyle #healthy

353 notes · View notes

antiporn-activist · 1 month

Text

I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

#phones are bad #childhood

114 notes · View notes

sjweminem · 3 months

Text

Baby Academy Hoffman & Professor Strahm (ft. FTM hoffman ❤️) fic FINISHED

18+!!!! 🔞🔞🔞

short excerpt to (hopefully..) pique some interest:

original inspo: this ask

(DISCLAIMER: i am skilled mainly in technical/academic/speech writing and haven't written a fic in like 14 years so please be gentle 😭)

admittedly he was distracted. as usual. mark tolerated most classes in the academy as obligatory lessons to endure in order to, some day, achieve his dream of working in homicide, but for now he was stuck with all the other twenty-somethings learning the basics of police work, seemingly over and over again. well. at least he had something to keep his mind occupied during this lesson in particular. however repetitive the coursework may be, mark couldn't deny the eager anticipation he felt upon entering professor strahm's lecture.

mark could watch those hands for hours, even at the expense of learning whatever new information might unexpectedly, miraculously, be introduced in yet another of his many repetitive classes. he followed those hands- his instructor was one for dramatic gesticulations- and willed himself not to imagine how they might feel on his body. willing, however, not necessarily implying success. no, mark still, despite his best efforts, frequently stared until his imagination led to thoughts of those strong-looking palms at his throat, gripping his thighs, perhaps tracing his lips with a rough finger before shoving the others into his mouth.

suddenly the bell rang, indicating the lecture's end, and, once again, mark realized his complete failure to pay attention or take any notes whatsoever. maybe this little crush was getting out of hand. but how was he supposed to pay attention when strahm seemed to regularly, coyly, meet his eyes mid-lesson, in a stare that felt so unmistakably provocative- appealingly domineering, even- and surely was not wholly imagined, not a product of wishful thinking. no, he was certain that if only they could get each other alone...

"hoffman," an unmistakeable voice cut through the silence of the now-empty classroom, just as mark was headed for the door. there was always something about strahm calling him by his last name that tickled him, although he couldn't fully place why. perhaps it was the possessiveness in his voice. "stay back for a minute or two, yeah?" the request sent a small wave of panic through his body. he swallowed hard; surely he was facing a chewing-out for his increasingly noticeable disinterest in, and distraction from, the course subject matter. his nerves only intensified as he observed his professor rise back up from behind the desk and walk towards the door, at which mark was frozen in place.

his nerves fell away momentarily when strahm closed the door in front of them, replaced suddenly by an onslaught of confusion. however these waves of emotion were superseded by something unidentifiable when he heard the distinct sound of the door being locked. his heart raced. strahm was mere inches away from mark now, standing several inches above him, looking slightly downwards with a smile. "lunch hour," he said in a low, near-whisper. "no one's coming to look for me. or you, i'm assuming." mark shook his head, nervously, in affirmation. strahm looked him up and down, conspicuously, before breaking the tiny distance between them in order to walk back behind his desk. he made a casual "come here" motion with his hand as he did so.

"i'm not stupid," strahm declared, now seated relaxedly in his chair. "and i don't think you are either." mark felt heat rising in his face and prayed he wasn't becoming visibly flushed, but the cheeky smile which spread across his teacher's face suggested otherwise. "but," strahm continued, "you're not exactly subtle, you know that?" mark stood firmly in place. "i don't know what you mean," he replied with all the courage he could muster, trying to maintain eye contact. strahm briefly tilted his head back and laughed before looking mark back in the eye with increased intensity. mark could have sworn there was suggestiveness in that stare. sworn it wasn't his own wishful thinking.

"sure," strahm retorted, dismissively, before making a "come over" motion with his hand, beckoning his student to his side of the desk. mark swallowed hard again, making his way behind his professor's workstation. that flush he had prayed earlier hadn't made its way to his cheeks now felt unmistakably present. that heat in his face only deepened when he felt strahm grip his shirt collar, pulling him closer. with their faces now mere centimeters apart, mark felt a hand on his chin- one of the very hands about which he had spent so many classes fantasizing. strahm held him by the jaw to turn his face to the side. he proceeded to lean in close, lips brushing his student's ear. "don't play dumb," he whispered. "you're not good at it."

mark's lips parted as his breath hitched, a visible shudder running down his spine. strahm took the opportunity, this momentary weakness, to grab him by the sides and pull him into his lap. mark sat, straddling him, legs on either side of his professor's. immediately strahm took the opportunity to run a finger over is needy little pupil's full lips, then pulled mark in even closer to move in for a kiss, but not before biting his lower lip, eliciting from him a half gasp-half moan. mark opened his mouth eagerly, allowing strahm to take full control of the kiss. several times he had to wonder if he was dreaming, however his teacher's hands on his hips and thighs felt all too real.

strahm thumbed at the waistband of mark's pants, brazen enough to undo his belt buckle with one hand. mark shivered despite himself and unconsciously spread his legs further to the sides. his eyes were now closed, but at the sound of a zipper they shot back open. oh shit. shit. he forgot to tell- should he have told? how was he supposed to remember under these circumstances? he shifted nervously but made no attempt to remove himself. he was in it now, for better or worse. a hand- that large, strong hand, god help him- made its way under his now open fly and below the waist of his boxer-briefs. he shuddered, despite himself. a look of confusion painted strahm's face as he reached lower but, to mark's relief, his confounded expression fell away, replaced by that coy smile.

"well isn't this interesting," strahm spoke in a low, half-whisper. he ran his fingers through the wetness that had by now undoubtedly soaked through the fabric of mark's underwear. his student barely had time to process the sensation before he felt two long fingers push roughly inside him, followed soon after by a third. "never really took you for a whore," strahm teased, "but, shit. this wet already, i don't know what else to call you." he was smiling and looking up into mark's eyes as he slid his fingers in and out. mark's eyes fluttered shut, breathing labored, sounds he desperately tried to suppress now escaping his parted lips. it was already too much, the precision finger-fucking, but when strahm began to thumb at his clit during his efforts mark felt the little control he had left fall to pieces. he gripped the chair's armrests and buried his face in the crook of the other man's neck, more whining than moaning.

"i should report you for this, you know," the young cadet breathed out with all the strength he could muster. strahm laughed, increasing the intensity of his ministrations. "and will that be before or after you come, hm? before or after i fuck you like you need?" there was a brief silence. "i- i guess," mark replied with an audible shudder, "i can... i can wait 'till after." "good boy," strahm praised. "tight little thing, too." mark lost himself; control and self-respect flying out the window all thanks to the skilled hand of his teacher. "i can take it," he insisted. "take you. anything." he couldn't even care that he sounded desperate by this point.

"anything," strahm repeated suggestively. without warning he removed his fingers and inserted them roughly into mark's mouth, nearly gagging him. "clean up this mess you made," he continued, "and maybe i'll think about fucking you." mark didn't need to be told twice. he sucked each finger clean, tasting himself on each one, maintaining eye contact the whole time. once strahm evidently deemed his ministrations satisfactory he abruptly pulled his hand away from mark's mouth, earning a choked gasp from the young man, and grabbed him by the hips. he eased him off of his lap in order to stand up and once again face his desk, which he cleared of papers and supplies with two swipes of his arm, files and teaching tools rattling to the floor. just as abruptly he grabbed mark's waist- much more firmly than necessary- until he had brought him into a sitting position atop his work surface. now the height difference wasn't so glaring, and as strahm once again gripped mark's jaw to bring the eager student into a kiss, it was as though their lips fit much more nicely together. this kiss, compared to the last, was far more desperate, hungrier. overflowing with need from both parties.

strahm deepened the kiss to forcefully push mark back until he was lying flush atop the desk, his teacher's arms braced domineeringly by each side of his head. strahm moved lower to kiss his jawline, his neck, before pulling back to crouch between mark's legs. impatiently he pulled both shoes off in order to yank his pants the rest of the way down, and ultimately off. mark's heart raced from a mixture of anticipation and exposure. his thundering pulse only spiked further when he felt strahm's tongue on his cunt, dragging its way up to tease his clit. mark swallowed the moan rising up in his throat. "i wish we were somewhere more private," his professor spoke quietly between licks. "want to hear you." he buried his face back between mark's legs before the young cadet could reply. truthfully it was becoming harder and harder not to be heard.

despite strahm's admission there was something about the semi-public aspect of their affair that both parties rather enjoyed. yes, the locked door freed them from worry over any intrusion, but it wasn't as though no one could be right outside. at the thought mark became acutely aware of his labored breathing, as well as the moans which insisted on escaping his throat despite his best efforts. his thoughts were cut short by strahm's low voice. "i'm a man of my word, he said. "i thought about fucking you... seems doable." mark gasped briefly. "please" was all he could say.

strahm stood up to hover over his supine student and reached for his belt buckle. mark thought he was going to pass out, but perked back up, hearing the zipper. he felt a sudden heat blossom low inside him as strahm took his cock out, moaning softly at the sight- god help him he was big. mark was already lost in thought over how good he must feel when he felt strahm slide the tip of his cock slowly up and down his slick cunt. mark shivered and arched his back, further spreading his legs invitingly, parting his full lips in an enticing manner. soon enough he felt strahm push in.

mark inhaled deeply at the sensation and strahm wasted no time pushing all the way in. mark buried his face in the crook of his neck, hands reaching up and around to claw at his professor's shirt, fingernails digging into his muscular back. he threw his head back as strahm leaned down to kiss and bite his throat, stopping to put a hand around it, keeping him in place. his other hand gripped mark's upper thigh. mark groaned, barely believing that what he had fantasized about nearly every day had become a reality. he couldn't control the sharp moans escaping his lips as strahm's thick cock hit and dragged against his G-spot with every thrust. truthfully he felt a bit embarrassed- there was no way he could last. not for any respectable amount of time, anyways. fortunately for his ego, judging by his labored breathing his teacher wasn't far behind.

"son of a bitch. i've been missing out on your pussy all this time, huh?" strahm exhaled. "it's only fair," mark retorted breathlessly. "been missing out on your dick, after all." he noticed himself tightening around the cock inside him, desperate to feel anything and everything. strahm groaned at the sensation, lowering his head to plant another desperate kiss on his student's perfect mouth. mark could taste himself again on his tongue and his breath hitched, tears stinging his eyes. he could feel himself getting closer, that unmistakeable, throbbing heat between his legs. "professor... mr. strahm," mark breathed out as seductively as he could, "i'm- i can't," he continued in a whimper. strahm looked him in the eye. "go on, baby," he half-whispered, "hard as you can. let me feel you."

the pet name sent mark over the edge, clawing at strahm's back and burying his face in his neck in an attempt to muffle the noises he was now helpless to control. "that's it," strahm whispered, "that's it. good boy." mark nearly sobbed as he felt the shudder run through the older man's body before he came shortly after. mark swore he could feel the heat of it fill him up and moaned at the sensation. "you like that, sweetheart?" strahm panted into his ear. mark nodded eagerly, unable to even make a coherent sound at this point. he whined again as his teacher pulled out, bracing himself atop his student once more to place kisses on his neck and lower stomach. they both rode out their high as they steadied their breathing together, taking their time. mark couldn't help but smile, placing his hands on strahm's face to pull him in for one last tender kiss before they both redressed. mark would never admit it but he was looking forward to feeling his teacher's cum inside him for the rest of the day.

the tone changed suddenly; strahm backed up with a look of concern on his face. "wait," he began. "you... you can't get pregnant, can you?"

mark laughed at his nervousness and shook his head with a smile.

#mark hoffman #peter strahm #hoffstrahm #coffinshipping #saw #I DON'T KNOW HOW NOT TO WRITE AUTISTICALLY

102 notes · View notes

actuallysaiyan · 1 month

Text

We Can Do Whatever You Want To Do(Ishida Uryu x Fem!Reader)

warnings: smut, handjob, talk about virginity, kissing, alcohol, semi-public sex, Uryu and Reader are in University word count: 1.3k pairings: Uryu Ishida x Fem!Reader summary: you and Uryu are in the same classes in university and you thought at first his arrogance and attitude pissed you off, but it turns you on. taglist: @beneathstarryskies. @seireiteihellbutterfly @misty-angerose. @yeowangies a/n: My first time writing Uryu, so I hope it's good <3

You met him when you were in your first year of university. Whispers of his academic excellence and many scholarships due to his achievements follow him around, though he doesn’t show any kind of real reaction to it. You found yourself so intrigued by Uryu.

After a few months of being in the same classes as him and trying to get to know him, you find out that he tends to keep to himself. And Uryu doesn’t really bother to make too many friends. You’ve noticed some people coming to visit him from time to time, but the relationships he has with them seem deep rooted in something you can’t quite understand.

Even as time continues on, you find yourself way too curious about him. What kind of thing does he do in his spare time? What kind of interests does he have outside of science and medicine? Did he have a love interest? Has he ever had a girlfriend?

Everything comes to a head when you and Uryu are at the same party. He’s keeping to himself in the corner, talking a little bit to a few people here and there that are in the same class as both of you. You take a drink from your beer and you head over to him.

“Hmm?” he barely acknowledges you, which makes you even more turned on.

“You’re Ishida-san, correct?” you ask him, your stomach doing flips.

He smirks at you, “Yes. Good to know you can recognize your classmates' names.”

That comment has your blood boiling. How could he say something so rude to you like this? You roll your eyes and finish off your beer. Despite the way he acts, he holds himself with an air of someone who knows it all. Something about this suggests he’s not too lucky in the love and intimacy department. Meaning….he’s probably a virgin despite being in his early twenties.

The next time you meet up with him, it’s at the end of your class for the day. You make your way over to him, tapping him on the shoulder. He turns around, towering over you and sports that same smirk as he always does.

“Yes? What is it?”

His tone is just driving you insane, “I was going to ask you to help explain something to me, but honestly if you just want to act like a self-centered jerk,, nevermind.”

Students are walking past you and him, making it seem like there’s just no care in the world for something like this. It’s like you and him aren’t even a part of this student body right now. There’s this tension that grows around the two of you. He takes your hand and pulls you just a little closer. Your heart flutters and your stomach does a flip. Why does he keep making you feel like this? He’s just an asshole classmate.

“Listen, if you really want my help, I’ll help. Just ask nicely.” His tone is authoritative and it makes you want to slap him.

“F-fine…can you help me with today’s lecture?”

He smirks again, “Of course. It was rather easy.”

The urge to push him off you and to just give up on your plan was strong. Yet you followed him into an empty classroom. He sits at the teacher’s desk, opening up his notebook. You close the door and without him noticing, you lock it as well.

Innocently as you can, you make your way up to him. When he looks at you, you flutter your eyelashes flirtatiously. He falters for a moment, freezing completely. He’s wondering why you’ve changed your attitude towards him completely, but he finds it endearing that you’re trying to be kinder to him.

What you don’t realize is that you’ve been invading his every thought since that night at the party. He loves the way you take his attitude with a grain of salt. He keeps up these walls for a reason, though he’s ready to tear down some of his walls to show you his real self.

Suddenly, you’re backing him into the corner. His eyes widen beneath his glasses, his cheeks reddening at the way you’re so close to him. Your actions are so bold and brazen..

“Uryu,” you purr softly in his ear. “You’re a virgin aren’t you?”

His heart skips a beat, “H-huh?”

You laugh, “I know you heard me. Answer the damn question.”

His mouth gets dry as his brain short-circuits. Uryu thought he had really hidden that aspect of his life so well. How could you tell just by being in class with him and the few interactions here and there that he was a virgin? How were you so clever?

He’s about to answer when your lips come crashing down onto his. Your hand drags down his chest to his waist, then down below his belt. You squeeze softly the growing bulge. He moans against your lips. Slowly, you begin palming him through his jeans until he’s rock hard.

“Let me have a little fun, hm? I bet you’ve never even had a handjob before!”

Your words sting and hit him right in the heart. .It was true, he was a virgin and he had never even kissed before. You were taking a lot of his firsts. He can barely believe his own eyes when you unbuckle his belt and unzip his pants. His cock is throbbing and twitching. There’s a precum stain on his underwear now.

“Awhh look at that, you have to be a virgin.” You tease him as you pull down his underwear.

His cock slaps against his lower abdomen as you release it from the cotton confines of his briefs. The thick precum smears against his button-up shirt. You smirk when you gently graze his cock with just your fingertips and he lets out a whimper.

“Oh you’re gonna blow your load so fast, aren’t you?” You taunt him.

He shakes his head, “N-no. Shut up!”

You wrap your fingers around the throbbing length. He’s shuddering as you begin to stroke him. You make sure to go slow. You aren’t convinced that he won’t just pop within seconds.

“Look at you, trembling and shaking. What a pathetic little virgin you are,”

Your words are turning him on more than he’d like to admit. It’s making him angrier but also his cock keeps throbbing every time you call him a virgin. He’d love to lose his virginity, but he’s so wrapped up in his studies and academic career that he forgets to make meaningful relationships. He just thought he would end up having to marry someone first to lose his virginity.

“Shut up,” he spits at you. “At least—ahhh fuck— ‘least I’m not failing.”

You squeeze his cock a little harder, “I’m not failing. You really think I’m failing? Let me tell you something,”

You lean in closer, and you start to stroke him faster. Your other hand comes down to massage his balls and he knows he’s done for now. His eyes roll back in his head and his knees begin to buckle. It’s all too much.

“The only reason I asked for your help today was because I wanted to jerk off your cock. You got that?”

He can’t even reply. You’ve rendered him into a blubbering and whimpering mess. His glasses are all fogged up that he can barely make out the blur that’s your fist stroking his cock. You tug on his balls ever so gently and that’s all it takes for him to fall off the edge.

“Fuck! Fuck I—I’m cumming!”

His hips begin to buck up into your hand, spurts of thick cum beginning to coat your fist and the bottom of your shirt. You smirk as you help him through his high. Then you slow down your pace, but never stopping it.

“Listen to me,” you begin. “If you wanna fuck this pussy, you’re going to have to be a lot nicer to me. Got it?”

He nods his head, “Yes, yes…I’ll be nicer.”

And that’s how you ended up with Uryu’s balls in the palm of your hand.

#bacon.writes #uryu x reader #Uryu x you #Uryu Ishida x you #Uryu ishida x reader #bleach Uryu #Ishida Uryu x reader #bleach x reader #bleach smut

96 notes · View notes

ir0n-moon · 8 months

Text

Dethklok + random things I think they've never experienced

Nathan: Having to get an orthodontic device (braces/retainer/etc.). His canon aversion to dentists probably started when he was very young! It's sensory hell for him, and I imagine that visiting the dentist as a kid constantly ended in tears, wails and panic; at some point his parents must have agreed to a truce. Luckily for him, his teeth weren't all that crooked to begin with, so it wasn't unreasonable for him to do without braces and just try to have a decent hygiene.

Pickles: Owning a pet— and therefore experiencing the loss of it. His parents would never allow him to have anything that would bring him happiness. Mordhaus has got yard wolves, sure, but I don't think he's all that involved in their care (I, like others, assume it's Skwisgaar who's closest to them). In fact, I headcanon that he used to have a phobia of cats, but Twinkletits helped him overcome it during PerformanceKlok. Anyway yeah this man has no clue what it's like to love and be responsible for a domestic animal.

Murderface: Receiving an award at school for anything. Not for sports, not for attendance, not for any after-school club, and certainly not for academic achievement. You'd think he might have been voted "Most likely to [whatever mean thing]" in the yearbook, but the sad truth is that he wasn't even acknowledged beyond his student photo among the rest of his classmates. (Note: I've never lived in America so I don't know how yearbooks actually work. I'm only going off of what I've seen in movies).

Skwisgaar: Having his mom attend any of his school events. Plays, Christmas shows, bake sales, probably even graduation— Serveta was nowhere to be found, as she was probably too "busy". She hasn't even attended a single Dethklok concert, not even while they're playing in Sweden.

Toki: Licking the spoon when someone is baking. Whatever sad, ascetic dishes were available to his family during his childhood, I doubt he was ever allowed to hang out nearby while they were being cooked, let alone offered to have a taste. In the present, he doesn't do it either, because it's never even occured to him to ask. And Jean Pierre is much too professional to offer the spoon himself, anyway.

#a big thank you to my pals on Discord for helping me workshop this post #It had been sitting in my drafts since may and I couldn't have posted it without all your help #that said if this flops i will fistfight god #metalocalypse #mtl headcanon #metalocalypse headcanons #dethklok #nathan explosion #pickles the drummer #william murderface #skwisgaar skwigelf #toki wartooth #herrera.txt #hc

165 notes · View notes

sophiamarieispinkbunny-chan · 4 months

Text

SXF Novelization Fave Parts and some Analysis because I love Analyzing (Overthinking) Mission 1

I finally got my Spy x Family Family Portrait Novel and immediately finished reading it in one day, so without further ado, here are my fave parts, lines, dialogues from the first mission which is centered around Anya and Damian and this chapter just gives me diabetes 😭 (I've been shipping Damianya, yes but all this time it was like an innocent ship and it's not like making me feel butterflies since of course they're just children, but here in the novel, I actually got butterflies in my stomach, they're just so cute and precious here ❤️)

MISSION 1- THE EDEN ACADEMY NATURE CAMPING

-Yor thinking she needs to teach Anya a lot of survival things about camping because she's worried if she can handle the woods (Yor is such a great mom, worrying for Anya's safety always and I think this just shows her experience regarding the wilderness revealing that her hometown might've been near the woods and she did experiencing hunting for food when she was young)

-Loid hoping that the trip could bring Anya and Damian closer (Be careful what you wish you for Loid 😂)

"Wonderful! That's my girl. You can do it, Anya," Loid said.

I just love it when Loid calls Anya his girl, for she will always and forever be his little girl.

-Loid and Yor sort of having a gentle argument on who should get Bond's milk 😂

Loid: I'll get you some milk Bond

Yor: No, let me do that for you.

Loid: No, I can do it, just sit there and relax

Yor: You're the one who should relax

They ended up getting the milk together. These two idiots. 😭❤️

They remind of that, you hang up first, no you hang up first couple exchanges when they're on the phone. These two are so good in this married couple thing without even trying.

And then stabbed me in angst in the next paragraph.

Ever since escaping from the facility, Anya had bounce between orphanages and foster homes. But now she'd finally found someplace worth treasuring, and if she could bring about world peace, then they'd all be able to keep happily living here together.

She clearly doesn't know about Twilight's plan to leave them after achieving his mission. I wonder how she would react to that. I've written a fanfic about it so if you can check it out if you're interested😊. Sorry for the shameless fic plug.

But I hope that after the success of Strix, Loid would stay with them. Could he really leave them? Can he really do that? He can't even let Anya go during the first week they've been together and he has the choice to just ditch her, choose another child and it was the practical and safe thing for a spy for him to do when Edgar knew about his location. But he saved her and took her in despite his reservations about endangering her and all. Now could he let this little girl go after all this time?

-Anya reading Damian's mind and seeing his thoughts about him drowning when he, Emile and Ewen went camping with Mr. Green, made fun of him and even acted out his lines when he thought that he was really drowning in that shallow lake (She loves trolling Damian that she forgot that doing that could give her off as a telepath😂)

"Lovey-dovey couples are nice, but there's something extra special about bickering, will-they-won't-they romances."

I gotta agree with Becky on this one. Bickering makes any romance stories a thousand times more investing and entertaining to read. That's why academic rivals to lovers is an s-tier trope for me.

-Becky partnering Anya with Damian to fetch some water. Becky is also a fan of forced proximity trope, I see.

-Anya's telepathy elicited a sensation on Damian and it said that it wasn't the first time. I really bet that Damian would be the first to know about Anya's mind ability.

-Anya being confused about her left and right hand 😂 (I mean kids her age really do get confused about that, I don't blame her)

-Damian being gentle in his way of speaking whenever he sees Anya distressed or in tears. I'll never get tired of Damian being soft to Anya, he's really a sweet kid.

"Hey, keep it together!" commanded Damian as Anya started to sob again. He grabbed her arm and squeezed it tightly, pulling her close to speak in her ear (because the rain is loud). "I saw a small cave a ways back. Let's head there."

I don't know why but this scene, because of the way it was written, gave me butterflies.

-Anya calling for her Papa to save her when she was so scared. Loid said that Yor was the one that makes Anya feels safe, but she wasn't the only one whom Anya considers to be her safe place. He was also his baby's safe place and she trusts that Papa will always be there to save her.

-My favorite moment: Damian holding her hand and comforting her so she won't be scared, even though he, himself, is terrified too. Ugh, if that wasn't love, I don't what is. And when Anya gripped his hand back to comfort him too, he stopped shaking and Anya thought that his hand was warm. Awww, so preciouss❤️😭

-Anya letting herself to get the blame and willing to be punished but Damian not letting Anya to get the blame for them being lost in the forest. These two are like mini Yor and Loid haha, just young, energetic and extroverted versions of the two 🤣

-Anya being ashamed to face her Papa, because she thought her Operation to get close to Damian failed (since after that incident Damian went back to his mean self again but of course she didn't know Damian's crush on her just get massively deeper after that) but Loid wasn't even worried about that at all, nor did her ask her about Damian when she came home. When he had noticed she was sad, he immediately asked if she didn't have fun at their camping event. And when Anya said that she did, he smiled and said that he was glad that she did, because it's his daughter's happiness that's important to him (Because if she's happy then it would be good for my mission, I can imagine Loid telling this to himself when he just genuinely wanted her to be happy and enjoy her time at school since he never had the chance to do that as a kid)

-Yor and Loid preparing food together for Anya's return. Loid telling Anya that the food was safe to consume when she saw her face that is prepared to face death because he helped Yor to prepare. It was peak father-daughter moment 😂 But he let Yor cooked her specialty dish Southern Stew all by herself since she's the one who can make it the best ❤️

I wonder if Anya told him about her and Damian getting lost in the forest and Damian held her hand to comfort her. I wanna see Loid's reaction to that 😂

So that's it for Mission 1. Up next would be the chapter that got me laughing the most, Mission 2, Yuri babysitting Anya

#spy x family #spy x family manga #loid forger #spy x family anime #twilight #sxf anime #sxf manga #yor forger #anya forger #twiyor #sxf novel #sxf family portrait #sxf novel mission 1 #sxf analysis #forger family #spy family #damianya #damian desmond #becky blackbell

103 notes · View notes

tswhiisftteedr · 4 months

Note

Can you do a smut of Ashton Vargas x reader? Please?

Personal ‘Training’ ☆ One Shot

☆Mean!PE Proffesor!Ashton Vargas x Senior!Fem!Reader:

After seeing you excel in his class, Coach Vargas interest had peeked. It’s not like you were as athletic as the beastmen students, actually muscle wise, you were quite the scrawny one. But it was your determination in completing an exercise that he set out, that he found admirable. One day after PE you had forgotten your gym uniform jacket behind, and being the great teacher that Ashton Vargas is, he ought to give back to you. After looking around for a bit, then spotting in the courtyard talking with your friends, he happens to overhear about your secret thoughts on him…

Warning: Mature content, Dub-Con, Stuffing Panty In Pocket, Spanking, Fingering, Mean Dom Vargas, A little Degradation, Unprotected Sex, Humiliation, Degenerate Fantasies, mentions of; blackmail. READER IS 18 AND VARGAS IS CANONICALLY 30, KEEP THIS IN MIND BEFORE READING. Not proofread.

Note: The ask was pretty vague, so I kind of went with my gut. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I hope you do!

☆ More under the cut. ☆

Ever since starting classes at NCR Wonderland, you felt off about begin your academic journey as a senior. Sure you were the right age for it, but wasn’t it a bit to much of an ask to start with senior courses, especially with most of the mediums being different from your world? But at last you had no choice but sucking it up, working harder than any other student in your year to keep up. Though you did enjoy some of the classes, just because they had familiar concept. Alchemy was like chemistry, you also had music which was the same as back home, and of course there was PE…

You relished when one of your periods was physical education, despite any thoughts of the course back in your world. That was for 2 reasons, #1 it was one of the only classes you didn’t nee prior knowledge or magic to participate in. And #2… The professor teaching it made you feel wild and crazed, just a look at his body, strong grip, flexing muscles, would bring a rush to your brain ending with you being flustered whenever he would address you.

You could swear on your life that ‘it’ was big, like it had to be, this huge man must have a huge c- Uhm, where were you again? Ah, right, PE had just ended and it was time for lunch.

Upon realizing the class was over and you had been staring at your sexy teacher, you quickly rushed back to your dorm for a shower, grabbing your bag but forgotten your gym uniform jacket on the ground.

After cooling off and dressing back into your school uniform, you had joined your friends Vil and Rook in the courtyard for an outdoor lunch. And of course your daily rant about your professor!

Meanwhile Aston noticed your jacket laying on the field, he knew it was yours just by the fact that it didn’t display any of the 7 dorms colours.

As some sort of reflex, he had brought the article of clothing, to his nose, smelling it. The scent was a mix of salty caramel and vanilla. ‘One of your little Pomefiore friends must have given you a nice expensive perfume for it to smell so fragrant, but yet sophisticated.’ He though to himself, and after being in his head he had realized that he still had the jacket close to his face.

He knew it was a bit weird for him to smell someone’s clothes like that, especially yours, his student’s. But the fact that it was your scent lingering on the clothes, and that your body would surely smelled the same, drove him wild.

I mean ‘he was a man after all’, and seeing such a pretty little thing working their bests, toughing it out to achieve greatness in such a new different environment, especially in his class. He had to admit it, it did something to him.

Plus the fact he felt your gaze on him constantly during his lessons didn’t help to keep him ‘non-riled up’. He did convinced himself that you were staring for purely innocent reasons, but the state you always were whenever he talk to you made him doubt that fact. You just acted so flustered, even when he just glanced at you. ‘And I mean, you were of age, so was it so bad? Yes, yes it was,’ the man face palmed himself.

But no matter, it wasn’t like anything would actually happen. Plus he had to get your jacket back to you, no time for naughty thoughts >:(

But that all changed when he finally found you, sitting with your two friends, enjoying the fresh air and talking about how bad you wanted him, — wait what?

A little earlier,

You had rapidly rush back to the school building after Vil had texted you that him and rook were eating lunch in the courtyard today. And of course you had a skip in your steps, you were so excited to thirst over your hunk of teacher to your two friends, one of them less entertained about the idea from the other.

In about 10 minutes,

You had arrived to the courtyard, sitting between Vil and Rook, chatting while eating lunch.

“I can’t get over the fact of how fine that man is, like, god really has favourites.” You tell the two,

“And I can’t get over the fact that your thirsting on one of our professors.” Vil said snarky.

“Thirsting, how dare you. I am but a pure maiden showing my admiration towards an amazing role model of physical health!” You replied all dramatically, this made Rook laugh.

“But seriously, he’s really, really hot.” you continue,

“Uh-huh” Vil says not looking up from his phone.

“Like I really need that man to bend me over the nearest sur-“ you begin but your friend cuts you off. “Yeah I’m done for today, it’s never innocent with you.” Vil says standing up, and starts walking away.

“Wait Vil I’m not done telling you about the 15 other positions I want him to put me in and how big I think his dick is!” You semi-shout, giggling.

“Yes, come back my Reine, our dear trickster is only showing son amour in a different way. After all one’s désire d’autrui is part off of the thing we call love, elle est just en grande romantique when you think about it!” Rook follows your lead, encouraging your little delusions for the heck of it.

“You say that every time, but it’s been over a month.” He finally says, disappearing out of sight.

The two of you knew that despite him leaving compl , Vil would return in a matter of minutes, he just left to state a point.

Unbeknownst to you and your hunter friend, the very man you were lusting for happened to overhear your conversation.

Slowly lurking out from the corner, Ashton approach the two of you. “Uh-hum, excuse me. Y/n, you forgot your jacket back in the field. So I brought it for you.” He says, his husky voice making you and Rook turn around to face the man.

“O-oh th-thank Coach Vargas!” You croak out, your face heating up, scared he might have heard what you said about him. Meanwhile Rook could help but snicker at your change in demeanour. A second ago you were talking about how much you wanted that man to fuck you, but when actually met with him, you became as quite as a mouse and could form a proper sentence without stuttering.

“Um, I also need to talk to you about something, would you mind following me back to my office.” He told you, and your heart dropped. ‘He definitely heard what you had said, and now he was going to lecture you about it, maybe even get the other teachers involved!’

You were so nervous on the walk to his office and he could sense it.

As you enter the room, he locks it behind and perform some sort of spell.

He pointed to the wooden chair sitting on one side of a desk, motion for you to take a seat. And to avoid anymore confrontation, you do so quietly.

You had expected him to seat on the opposite side of the desk, on the velvet office chair. But instead he just stood in front of you, hands resting on the desk for support. Despite the situation, you couldn’t help but notice the fact that your face was at crotch level with him standing up like this. But before you keep staring at his clothed front, he broke you out of your trance.

“So,” he says and you look up. “You might have an idea of why your in here, after all you are doing excellent in my class so no reason to call you to discuss about it… This about what you said to your little friends a couple of minutes ago.” he states and your suspicions were confirmed.

You look down at your feet, and you choke out. “I’m really sorry Coach Vargas it will never happen again. I apologize for making you uncomfortable.”

Now he was about to correct, explaining that he wasn’t feeling uncomfy at your comments, on the contrary he was flattered and glad you felt the same. But seeing you in trembling state, tears beginning to form in your eyes. It was too much, he had to play with you, at least for a bit.

“Mmh is that so.. well I don’t believe you.” He says, pretending to be hurt but just a look at the grin on his face would tell you other wise.

“W-what?!” You ask confused, tears starting to roll down your face. He grin even harder at the sight.

“Well like I said, I don’t believe you. It’s simple really, after all Mr. Schoenheit mentioned you had been having those lustrous talks at my expense, for over a month. Plus you didn’t seem to have any shame or care in the world when you were chopping it up with your chatting buddies. What’s to tell me, you won’t just go back to your friends after this meeting, and continue your lewd rants,”

He pauses, bending down forward to get close to your ear. “I could even bet that you’re getting off on this very situation.” he says than pulls back to get a good look at the expression on your face.

“N-No, that’s not true!” You deny, though even if your professor said to tease, in reality you were getting off on his action.

In your mind, you knew you shouldn’t. Being caught saying such scandalous things by the same person you were discussing, was but an ideal situation. Yet, you couldn’t help but agree mentally that you had fantasize about a moment like this one. In your head things would go like this;

Coach Vargas would stumble on you talking about your deep desire for him, bring you to his office.

But instead of reprimanding you, he would bend you over his desk and teach you about not being such a ‘lewd minded brat’, fucking you so good as you would babble apologies he didn’t care for.

In all honesty he just wanted to fuck you and he now had the perfect excuse. This fantasy would continue with him taking you almost everyday, with the pretext you still were thinking like a pervert, and as an educator he couldn’t have you distracted from your studies.

So he would take it upon on himself to satisfy your lust, so you could ficus’s on your classes.

Knowing damn well it did the opposite, and that after each session you could only think about him more.

But at last that was just a fantasy, this fact was reinforced when he spoke his next words. “I guess I’ll have to inform the headmaster about this.”

Obviously you panicked, and he loved you in that state. “Please sir, don’t tell Crowley about this, I’ll do anything, I can clean your office for free, I can help with you with paperwork, I can-“ As you begin listing off things you could do to compensate the man for your behaviour, he motioned for you to stop with his hand.

And you did so right away, become quiet as soon as his order came by. This made him feel extremely good, not only did have you at his beck and call in this moment, but if he played his cards right he could make it last way longer.

He grabbed you chin to make you look right into his eyes, “There is something you can do, though you might not be as ready as you think you are to do it.. Do you still want to try though?” At that you only nod, not sure your words could carry what was needed to be said.

He smiled at the obedient response, “Okay then, stand up and bend over my desk for me.”

“W-what??” You look at him very much so confused, he only chuckles at that.

“You did say you were ready, sweetheart. Well I guess I could just inform Crowley instead and leave you in his care, it’s still a viable option if you’d prefer it.” He tells you smugly, knowing you would pick anything he asked of you instead of telling Crowley.

“No, that’s alright, I’ll do it...” And so you did, bending over the wooden desk, feeling your skirt hike up.

You were so anxious but at the same time exited about what would proceed. Would he spank you? Would he touch you? Finger you? Fuck you just like your dreamed about? Or would he just laugh at you, only wanting to see you bend over his desk so he could mock you then just send you on your merry way out, never to speak of this again?

Before you could continue your internal ramble, you felt his big rough and warm hand pushing your skirt, your ass was now in plain view.

“You know, I had myself convinced that your little staring habits was something unadulterated, but turns out the part of my conscious that told me otherwise, was right. You’re really a slutty little girl that has been making eyes at me since the beginning of the semester.” He accentuate his last sentence with a harsh spank to your bottom, making you whimper in pain.

He spanked you again, and wailed with new tears forming in your eyes. “Yeah, that’s right. That’s what a naughty little thing like you deserves, talking to your friends on the daily about how much you want my cock.” Another spank came by, “Be a good girl and maybe I’ll give it to you.”

You winced from the impact of his hand on your sensitive behind, and let out a small whimper. "Y-yes sir," you managed to choke out between sobs. You knew what he wanted now—to hear you beg for more punishment and eventually, release.

Your heart raced faster as anticipation built up inside of you.

"That's better sweetcakes," he praised, reaching down to grab hold of your hair again, yanking hard enough to lift your head up forcefully. His cool gaze bore into yours, searching for any trace of defiance or resistance. But all he saw was submission mixed with fear and desire radiating strongly from those green eyes. "Tell me you want me to claim you right here, right now."

Your voice quivered as you spoke, "I-I... want you to claim me. Please sir..." Your words came out in between sobs and gasps for air, body still trembling from the previous spankings.

You couldn't help but squirm slightly against his hold on your hair, wanting more of his rough treatment.

He released your hair suddenly, causing your head to whip forward violently before he grasped onto both of your wrists tightly behind your back. Pulling them roughly upward to avoid you slamming your face on the desk, keeping your breasts pushed forward prominently. "Good girl," he praised again, running his hand over your chest unbuttoning your shirt, now exposing your whole top area. "Now let's see how much you truly enjoy being owned by your professor." With that, he spun you around forcefully, pushing you against the desk hard enough to leave a mark on your back. His lips crashed hungrily against yours, demanding entry into your mouth as one hand cupped your breasts through the thin layers of fabric separating them.

You groaned into the kiss, unable to resist his aggressive advance, he quickly made way of your bra. Your body arched into him eagerly as he groped and fondled your bust roughly, pinching your nipples cruelly between his calloused fingers. You moaned softly against his lips, letting out a deep-throated moan when his tongue forced its way past your teeth and into your mouth. Your tongues tangled together in a messy dance of desire and submission.

You felt your panties being yanked down forcefully, leaving your bare pussy exposed for him to claim as desired. "Please..." you whimpered again, your voice hoarse from their passionate exchange.

He pulled away from your kiss slowly, his eyes blazing with lust as he looked down at your naked front.

He chuckled darkly, reaching between your spread legs to slide his hand underneath your skirt. His rough fingers explored your wetness greedily, rubbing circles around your entrance before slipping inside of your tight hole.

Your body jolted at the sudden intrusion, your hips pressing back against his touch hungrily. Your moans turned into high-pitched whimpers as he finger fucked you hard and fast, hitting spots that made your knees weak.

"You like that don't you? Being so dirty in public?" He asked, thrusting deeper into your tight channel, stretching your opening wider. "Telling everyone you belong to me now."

Your mind was lost in the sensations he created; every thrust of his finger inside of you, pushing against sensitive spots that sent waves of pleasure coursing through your body. Your moans grew louder and more desperate as he continued to abuse your exposed flesh.

"Yes! Please... Sir..." you panted between heavy breaths, feeling your climax building rapidly within reach. Your squirmed under his hold, begging for release but knowing he wasn't done with you yet.

"That’s my girl," he praised, withdrawing his hand from your dripping wet pussy. Turning around once more, he positioned himself between your spread legs, his member already fully erect and throbbing with desire.

Without warning, he pushed hard, splitting your tight entrance on a single thrust.

You cried out in mixture of pain and pleasure as he began to pound into you, claiming your body brutally yet expertly.

His hips moved in a rhythmic motion, driving deeper than you thought possible, hitting all the right spots inside your core. Each powerful thrust caused you breasts to bounce wildly against his chest, nipples standing erect and begging for attention. Sweat trickled down your bodies, mixing together under the harsh florescent lights above them.

"You like that don't you? Taking my cock right here in my office, where anyone one on the others side of the door could hear your moans?" He growled, while continuing his relentless assault on your tight hole.

Your moans turned into incoherent sounds of pure ecstasy as he continued to ravage your body. Your nails scratched at his back through his shirt’s fabric, leaving shallow marks that only fuelled him further. "Yes! More... Sir..." you begged between heavy breaths, struggling against the hold on your wrists but unable to break free from his vice-like grip.

The combination of pain and pleasure was becoming too much for your fragile mind to handle, and soon enough, you felt the intense orgasm building up inside of your like a volcano about to erupt.

Just when you thought you couldn't take anymore, he slowed down momentarily, teasing your sensitive spots mercilessly before picking up speed again.

"Cum for me, you filthy little thing," he commanded, his voice low and husky with desire. And with those words, you lost control completely, your body convulsing violently around him as waves of pure bliss washed over you. You screamed his name, your climax crashing upon your like a wave crashing onto rocks.

Your entire body shook in the aftermath of your intense orgasm, your legs weakened by the forceful thrusting. Your pussy clamped tightly around his member, milking him dry as he continued to pump into your until finally, he groaned out his own release. Pulling out slowly, a thick stream of hot cum spilled onto your stomach, painting you with his seed.

Panting heavily, he finally released your wrists, allowing them to fall limply beside you. "That was amazing," he complimented, reaching out to stroke your hair affectionately.

He stepped back, admiring his work on your flushed face and disheveled appearance.

Reaching down, he grabbed your discarded panties from the floor and stuffing them nonchalantly into his pocket "Now go clean yourself up in the staff bathroom, before anyone sees you like this."

You nodded weakly, still feeling lightheaded from your intense encounter. Slowly, you wobbled forward, your legs shaking beneath your skirt, and made your way towards the restroom.

By the way, remember the spell he used before anything began, yeah? Actually it was 2, on that block out noise from escaping a finite space aka his office, and the other is one that recorded the events that took place in a selected area.

Was he going to blackmail you with that recording? No. But he might threaten you with it once in while to tease you.

Thanks @hipsterteller for requesting!

Tip Me (Ko-Fi) & And support my art account @maviscarlettie

You can now commission me!

Reblogs help!!! (Request Are Open)

#tswhiisftteedr #twisted wonderland #twst x reader #twst #twst smut #twst x y/n #twst x you #twst x yuu #disney twst #twst wonderland #twst vargas #ashton vargas smut #ashton vargas #ashton vargas x reader #twisted wonderland smut #NCR staff #night raven college #teacher x student #teacher x reader

102 notes · View notes