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capslocked · 19 days

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PRAXIS

male reader x irene

23k words

"A girl could walk in and mistake this for an affair," you remark, and Irene smiles up at that.

The sound of city traffic underneath your open window makes for an uncertain backdrop - though the browns of her eyes glimmer caramel in the dying light. Something sweet, the beginnings of an addiction if you’ll let her.

"A girl could walk in," Irene says, "but, she never does."

It was not a good idea, of course, to keep doing this where the whole world could see, where your shadows and silhouettes make lurid shapes against the blinds, but your office is small and the lighting is soft and Irene keeps pushing up onto her tiptoes, pressing you flat against your desk, trying to kiss you, and you won't be able to stop her - or want to, not when she's already leaning into you with her arms loose around your hips, her eyelashes heavy, her mouth a pink line of want against her smile.

It’s inevitable, maybe.

Here's what they might catch in the exact moment, in a not-so-distant memory:

Your heartbeat, quiet and slow and distant, like there's too much blood for it in your veins, your skin electric-pulsing underneath Irene's, the feel of her leg hitched up your waist, your hand wound tightly in her ponytail. The tiny sigh of a smile at the corner of Irene's lips, like you're tickling her somehow - you'll stop if she really wants you to, but - she doesn't. She never does.

Why wouldn't we want to be mistaken for something? is what you’re supposed to hear; she's too haughty, too proud. Someone could catch you. She’ll never come out and admit, just what would anyone do, if they did?

So yeah. It’s complicated.

You give a little, Irene pulls back. You do your damndest not to push. You hate how goddamn easy it is to convince yourself of anything, everything - whatever the lie. Irene isn’t ignoring you. She doesn't ignore the texts you send her. You don’t need to make plans more than two hours in advance. Mixed signals are such a misunderstood phenomenon: she can just be shy, sometimes. Maybe she doesn’t want to intrude. She was nervous, but she felt really fucking good on top of you - maybe next time, the guilt will be a bit less for both of you.

It’s just sex, she says once to you after; there’s no strings attached. How could it get ever more perfect than that?

(And she’s right. You know she’s right, or at least you very well should.

See, you’ve been talking for hours about how you shouldn’t be talking for hours on end. Kissing her after a conversation you’d had around the fact you’d both be better off as friends.

So how's that gonna sound, anyway? Here, go on, try saying it:

Bae Irene? Yeah, met her on the subway - that's the story, the reason you know her; you got on a train one day and she was the prettiest person there. You were both headed to the same place. You’re just not sure when that's gonna change.

And well, the way you see it: you’d feel so much lighter, like a feather, with her off your mind.)

To be candid, you can't really pin down how any of this started. The logistical details, sure. However the suggestion, the sex, the seclusion - these things, not so much.

Somedays, if you squint, it plays out rather predictably. You’ll be going about your business, a particularly average day everything considered, or - well, mostly. Today, there are just the two minor caveats:

First off, your key grinds in the lock when you jam it in. That part is pretty normal, but to your surprise, the door is already very much open.

So, that's odd, you think. That's very odd. You slide inside, cautious, and as you call out an even more cautious "hello?" you realize all the lights are on - so either you've been robbed or are currently in the state of being robbed by someone with suboptimal visual acuity. A disability-washed-burglar. Not to minimize crime, of course, but that'd be interesting, you think, or representative perhaps? Maybe.

Alternatively,

Irene's let herself into your apartment again. It’s quite plausible.

She's not great at the whole 'asking permission' thing, though she swears every time it'll never happen again. You peek around your foyer: there’s her coat, her heels, her shirt, a handbag - all strewn about the hall like she’d been raptured and left a delicate trail of destruction, which does sound a lot like the Bae Irene you've known forever.

(Okay, six, seven months isn’t forever - but you get the gist; the general principle still applies.)

Now another, horrifying option is that both theories are true, simultaneously. A home invader has in fact gotten to Irene. In the middle of robbing the place. How terrible, how awful, how genuinely macabre, what a genuinely-

"Yeah, hey," you hear, followed by a heavy, sloshing thunk. "Welcome home or something."

Sure enough, as you enter the kitchen you spy your truly awful vision being confirmed. One of them, anyway. There is your incredibly hot (this is in reference to Irene), extremely fashionable (same boat as before, honestly), dangerously intelligent (yes) and notorious rulebreaker of an (it really bears emphasis on how hot and fashionable and stylish said rulebreaking often is) acquaintance as per her standard. Irene. A roguish and impossibly captivating conglomerate of trouble with a mild attitude and perfect posture; as a collection, she's a collection you want, a package you intend to keep, an accessory you'd die for. That, and a kettle on the stove apparently, so she can make you tea while you languish on the floor, and you could live like that forever, or so the dream goes.

Also right, the second caveat: there's the robbery. She's stolen a button-up out of your closet.

And look - she's actually so much prettier than she has any business being. Hair up in a messy bun, lips painted light. Nail polish starting to fade. She's still in her nylons and a tight little pencil skirt and you can't really complain. You'd need to be legally dead.

"Hi," Irene says, and the burner sputters to life. "Where'd you go?"

"The bank. And then I had to return books," you say, shucking off your jacket. "You know, I wasn't aware anyone else was living here."

"Excuse you," Irene replies. She turns, leans her forearms on the counter; the shirt buttons are misaligned, but she makes it look like a stylistic consideration - how the sleeves are pushed past her elbows and the neckline has already slipped down one of her dainty shoulders.

She has your clothes. She has an irritatingly winsome half-smirk. The clock above the stove says it’s barely even 9 PM.

"Do you get your mail forwarded here, too?" You shuck off your jacket. "To further clarify, why not call first? Maybe text? Hell, smoke signals could do."

"Because it's a hell of a lot easier to ask you for forgiveness," Irene tells you, knowing, "asking for permission gets me nowhere," and then grabs a mug from the cupboards. She seems to know where everything is already. "I don't know why you get so bothered about it, honestly, what should I do? Call you and say, wow, babe, I am planning on letting myself into your apartment, sorry, yeah, I was thinking we could - ah fuck - you know what, I am irreparably, incomprehensibly horny."

"Nice vocab."

"Thanks," Irene says, beaming, and even tips up her chin to show it.

You notice that you actually match right now, since it is, technically, your shirt. Sure, your collar’s a little stiff - and she’s barely able to keep the fabric from folding and spilling over her lithe frame, but that hardly matters. It's so ungodly hot. She could wear anything - or, probably, nothing, if you're being honest.

And you are, mostly.

So you pad into the space right behind her to tell her some truths, the things you think - but she spins on her heel before you get the chance to grab her, which is a pity; you'd love to do that, maybe just push her flat to the wall. You know, if she'd let you. She would. Probably. You'd ask, definitely, but you’re thinking you wouldn't even have to.

Irene crosses her arms. The collar keeps slipping. You see her collarbone, smooth. She is flawless, no fucking wonder. You are almost terrified of her at times.

"How do you know I’d have said no?" you ask, and it sounds a little sweet - then there’s you noticing an old bruise along her throat, where her shoulder dips down; that was probably your doing, probably from this week, last Saturday maybe? Her skin seems softer somehow, looks like her makeup was fresh at the beginning of the day and the end of the night, that kind of evening smudging. She's smiling with her nose crinkling up.

She doesn’t react when you press in closer.

"Really." You’re waiting for her. Probably waiting for her to kiss you, to reach up on her toes and latch her wrists behind your neck, to reach her mouth to yours - though, she doesn't. Her breathing picks up, so it's almost like she doesn't have to, she's smiling at you so sharply. It’s a rare win for restraint as far as your apartment is concerned.

"So then where lies the issue?" she asks, and then she simply waits on this smoldering sort of glance.

You can’t help the laugh that follows. "I mean it's the principle of the thing."

Irene hums at that. She glances to the side. Toward the windows, back to you, and then all over your face.

"Then, allow me a principle," she finally says, staring straight at your mouth, real subtle-like. "Yes, I'm going to keep coming here. Probably a lot. I mean, unless you have an actual issue you'd be hardly one to talk: Mr. Keeps Do Not Disturb Active At All Fucking Times. I bet you're the last person to go through their voicemails, too."

"Guilty, but look - I hit critical mass, like, a thousand unheard messages ago. It’s untenable and unreasonable. You should be offering me pity."

"You are ungovernable." Irene sinks back a bit against the countertop, slow, smooth and sinuous. "You're basically a hermit." She smiles at her own assessment, the grin growing with its truth. Her eyes sparkle in the low-light and her teeth bite at the bottom of her lip. The tea kettle starts to rattle.

"I think we’re supposed to be discussing the breaking and entering here," you correct, dryly, and step a bit closer, "also just for the record, hermits are implied loners. And yet."

"And yet," Irene echoes, letting her voice trail away.

There's an uptick in the corner of her mouth, and she glances at you, quick, momentarily mirthless. You wait for the punchline, the verbal parry, the expertly timed jab-

"What?" asks Irene, and her face instead is all soft edges, light pink lips, and clear, uncomplicated eyes. She grabs for the end of her sleeve and folds it one more time down the slender length of her forearm. The watch on her wrist catches the light. "It's a decent theory."

This almost feels normal, you think, like a routine, something domestic - Irene leaving her things all over your apartment, Irene occupying your bathroom cabinets and the space on your shower rack that used to belong to a singular bar of soap. This is a tale of a typical hookup arrangement gone absolutely off the rails: sex for a night here, a dinner together there, a break from the monotony. You shouldn’t even know Irene that well, you think, or nowhere near as well as you do - and somehow that didn't stop you from giving her a spare key to your apartment - or it didn't stop her from wanting the damn thing.

You try not to read too far into that last one, since you're probably the only idiot that hasn't noticed how smitten Irene has been from day fucking one. It’s your fault, it’s hers; there’s a case to be made for either.

"You can see how a girl might walk in and jump to the wrong conclusions," you remark.

Irene laughs at that, "Oh yeah?" and her eyebrows raise, her lips pursing in an immediate half-smile - this hot little line that’ll get kissed right off her mouth if she’s not careful. She doesn’t even pretend to react otherwise: that same brand of pleased, almost flirtatious - a bit unyielding. Pragmatic, maybe. Not fully on board, still keeping a distance, just an inch outside of what it could be. She never stops fucking with you. She's never anything but beautiful.

It's very unfair, if anyone’s keeping track.

"You mean like an affair?" She laughs out loud. The mark at her temple dots the expression like an exclamation point. "Like me, as your mistress. That’s fucking crazy."

"Satisfy my ego. Pretend that wasn't, in any conceivable world, the worst possible phrasing, but yeah. More or less," you say, "one which would, mind you, seem very poorly planned on both our parts, all things considered."

There's a pause where she scrutinizes your face; you stare evenly back. It's kind of a bluff. You are sort of a self-centered prick, on occasion, but you are not lying to this woman; you have no reason to. Maybe it's a gamble: to hope she understands you better than she ought to, or to wish she'd accept you in spite of that. To want her, in your home, at your leisure, a friend or something more.

Trying to materialize words for the immaterial is largely the dilemma.

"An affair, huh" Irene repeats slowly, tasting the word carefully, like she's trying it on for size - and she cants her hips towards yours. Her fingers had wrapped around the bottom of your tie at some point. "My goodness, that’s like, so, so romantic of us."

"Also jesus, please, ‘mistress’ is horribly gauche," you say, and Irene tugs a little too hard and you step forward. The smug look on her face suggests, not entirely unpretentiously: how else, then, shall we call it?

"But look at me. I am in your kitchen, I’m wearing your clothes," she reminds you, with another tiny pull, which draws you so much nearer. You can feel your neck prickle. "That makes us quite close, wouldn't you agree, darling?"

"Dial it back," you tell her, because Irene's the only person in the world that can put so much stress on a single fucking word and get away with it.

But she's watching you, watching you still, intently. She looks good, smells somehow even better, You inhale her. There's this cloud of shampoo, fragrance, whatever she's decided to wear - citrus today, light. God, she's so fucking gorgeous.

"I'm still trying to scold you," you end up adding, because it won’t go without saying.

"And I'm waiting for you to."

It's not the right answer, though your annoyance dissipates almost as quickly as it rises: Irene could probably charm her way out of anything if she really tried, maybe, and still make the entire world like her even better - so instead of responding, you just sigh, and sink further into her. She wraps your tie once around her knuckles, and tugs again, harder and pointedly, but it's not so hard that it hurts; you know she could manage that if she wanted. Irene just grins up at you, rosy in the face and pretty: no pain, just fun.

"Are you mad?" She tilts her head in and places her exhale right over yours. You could count her lashes if they’d stop fluttering. "Are you going to tell me you'll send me packing now? Just order me right the hell out of here and change the locks, do you mean it?"

"I would, definitely," you say, without so much as a beat missed. "If I weren't so busy being inconvenienced by the fact you're so goddamn pretty."

"Mhmm." Irene fits her lips to yours, murmuring, "exactly."

Her body presses and pushes up against you, and you're thinking again about Door A, Door B. Thinking about your future, her future: it doesn't mean anything. Who needs to dream, when Bae Irene's already such a walking daydream? Hypothetically - a wicked little fantasy if nothing else. She still can't fucking resist pulling away after just a second, just a touch too soon, and laughing right against your lips - even though, when you open your eyes again, her eyes are softly closed and she’s leaning in for more.

The reality is: the two of you, inextricably, are bound in each other's pull. A binary star of (1) extremely talented, (2) equally charming colleagues that only accidentally get lost inside the same room: (3) office, (4) storage closet, (5) bedroom, (6) living room, (7) kitchen, (8) the little-used laundry nook. Your list keeps growing. It is exhausting, but maybe not the worst: not, actually, so bad-

Your hands flatten against the cool material of her skirt.

"I could," you mutter, trying so hard, "you know, stop this. Maybe."

"I actually happen to believe you," Irene's saying. Her teeth graze your chin. "But maybe you can try," she offers, not so helpfully, "just this once?"

The hem of her shirt slips up the long stretch of her leg. It doesn’t move far before the bend of her knee has her pinned, skirt pressed flat to her thighs. You aren’t exactly a gentleman, so you pull it to her waist as you press even closer. The nylon feels wonderful against her legs.

So you let it boil down to the instinctual, the obvious. To physicality: her hip against your own, her soft sigh as the kiss grows in strength. You wrap an arm around her middle; her hands cradle the sides of your jaw - the tip of her tongue brushing yours - then her fingers find their home on the nape of your neck. When you touch the inside of her thigh, across the smooth fabric, ghosting over the center - where the tension is tightest - her lips part a little. She shivers. You try not to smile about it.

"Slow?" you ask her, and the amusement feels unfair to her, even if it is your best attempt to appear thoughtful. She sinks her nails into your skin and her eyelids open slightly. They gleam. "Told me to try," you point out.

You touch her, feel the heat as she says, a little strained, "I did." She swallows. "I'm allowed to change my mind later, though."

"Fine," you relent, "then so am I."

She considers this briefly. Her lashes lower and raise. She nods.

And the teasing has to go somewhere. "Well," you murmur, and kiss the hinge of her jaw. "Mistress it is. Guess there isn't much left to work with, huh." And in any other context, these are the things that earn you another patented-glare, a toss of a pillow over the bedspread, a hard swat on the chest, an indignant 'well fuck you, I can't believe we're having sex!', an abject departure, a million things all at once - at its most dramatic and emotional: a maelstrom of verbal riposte.

Here, though-

She hikes her leg even higher around your hip. Her fingernails clench even sharper. Your tie falls down a button, to the crook between her neck and shoulder, and her hair comes free of its messy ponytail. The line of it skims over her breast, just so.

Irene sighs louder, and does that thing, a deepening in the middle of the noise that lets you know exactly how badly she wants you - this, you're getting familiar with, or the start of it at least, that fine-tuned way Irene wants someone when she doesn't even hesitate to show it. It was odd, and at first almost embarrassing to see. That might've even been part of the charm, you think: Irene could want to devour you. You were you - slightly interesting, and in her eyes, probably the most intriguing fuck - but whatever her reasons, it all clicked for Irene. She had a system to evaluate and adjust and execute. There wasn't room for wasted effort.

"Hey," she hums, low in her throat.

"Yeah," you say, lifting her right up onto the counter.

And see - there are these gestures, reminders, not always in good faith, where you make her feel small: Irene's wrists are suddenly so narrow, one right at the surface of the counter, fingertips cool at your collar, and her nail polish chipping a little at the edges. Your palm is larger, enveloping the high, broad arch of her hip, the sharp line of bone to muscle to sinew. She feels fragile, is what it is, a fine-boned little bird, a thin silhouette under her loose, borrowed shirt - it's almost poetic, a regular old fuckbuddy - a physical habit, and you know her, know how many inches, and you can find your favorite parts of her in the dark, but-

"Want your mouth," Irene's saying now. Her lips glistening, eyes liquid; you want to tell her that that's an indisputable victory, just objectively, even before the clothes fall.

"Tell me where to put it," you offer back, and watch the corner of her lips twitch up.

She runs her hand through the back of your hair, mussing it, the lazy drag of her nails, her heel right to your lower back. The light from the stove is doing her wonders, gold catching off the paleness of her skin. "Make yourself useful, I think, like on your knees."

You raise an eyebrow at her.

"Don't give me that look" - and Irene shrugs her shoulders back - the shirt falling more, the flat plane of her stomach - this jut of bone, the pretty contour of her ribcage, the stark outline of her body just under a few too many buttons.

"It just comes off a bit greedy," you say, letting the words twist, playing with the hem of her skirt between your fingers.

"Maybe because you reward that kind of behavior," Irene retorts immediately.

"You’re spoiled," you laugh. "That’s all. Just spoiled. Life must be great for you, do nothing and let someone else do everything."

It's another one of those, 'you fucking like it', and Irene smirks like the shape of her mouth here is foreplay enough alone. She might be onto something. Like the easy back-and-forth - how she's sharp as razor wire underneath you - a double-edged sword if the weapon knew the sheath.

You lean in. She places her palm flush to your heart, like she can measure exactly how long you’re drawing this out with its steady thud. You know she’ll repay it in turn: she thinks it's hot to jerk around with your emotions before she fucks you, like playing roulette with her orgasm, yours - a slow crawl, a nice burn. Her fingers curl.

"And here you said I was ungovernable."

Irene huffs, slightly. "You are still fucking talking."

"If I shut up, will you scream for me, sweetheart?"

You run a hand up her waist. There's this whiny intake of air. Then Irene says, soft and slow: "earn it."

(Maybe you shouldn’t keep enabling her. Therein lies the problem. Okay, so maybe you like this particular problem.)

But she's tugging your tie out of the way before the words leave her lips. The distance you have between is scant, which seems to be fine, with the way she leans in as the last syllable drops off her tongue, kissing the corner of your mouth, impatient.

It takes approximately zero convincing to drop to your knees; that much has not changed. You glance up at her. Your hands curve to her waist, sliding up. It's funny - how your fingertips just brush under the billowy fabric, how the taut skin over her ribcage fills the length of your palms, and then a touch further. Perfect proportions, as Irene usually is; you're on your knees and that's by design.

Your thumb rolls over the outline of her nipple and it peaks, draws into a quick, rosy point beneath the flimsy cotton, like an open invitation.

Irene smiles lazily, gorgeous - and sinks back again against the countertop. Her feet land on your shoulders. The nylon in the bend of her ankle slides soft at your throat, gentle. "Waiting." She sighs a little. "Still, waiting."

You press a kiss over the nylon, the fabric underneath, teeth barred and tongue pushing. "You said slow," and the rest of you might as well catch on fire, just for borrowing a moment’s composure. You can see yourself bringing her down to the floor, the kitchen tiles, spreading her legs and fucking her into the linoleum, scratching them up, making her cum as many times as she asked. But there's this heavy drag down your back, the nerves blooming. "So let me. I won't get distracted," you murmur - or don't, really - into the softness between her hip and waist, along her navel, the tight planes of her tummy. "I promise, I'll get there, baby."

She hesitates. The breath she holds back is a telltale pause.

And the first thing that really sinks into Irene's skin, besides yourself, is this: every last shred of hesitation she was waiting on, the self-control? Now gone. You've done nothing but serve its loss. She seems to sense her power; and in one blink, the act is apex. In a beat her nerves are recovered, and the nerves are fuel. A natural killer, an organic toxin, that same smile curving her lips, a pointed glint to her eyes.

"Baby, your mouth," Irene insists, her knees falling to the sides, "open. And yes," and a pause, or maybe an addendum, a double meaning in the downtime, "to be perfectly frank: free for me to use. To come and go as I please."

"Haven't left my fucking mind for a minute, sweetheart," you offer up right back, not bothering with restraint.

Irene clicks her tongue. "But yet, you don't ever do exactly as you're told-"

She hiccups, or something close to it - because you grab her ass, bring her hips closer, until you can sink your nails into the firm give of flesh.

Irene looks down at you, eyes just wide, and - ah.

She sighs. Sighs because she knows - you can find god in everything; that’s the goal, that’s the creed - and maybe Irene wasn’t your original way, maybe you were always meant for a different sort of holy figure, but the words you choose are doctrine in the end; that first prayer you got down on your knees and said to her was no less truthful for its betrayal. There are rules to it: this is faith, the religion. This is her. You belong to Irene, and she belongs to you.

"Um. Did you just tear my stockings?" she asks, like a sudden realization, her mouth still dropping.

You nod, because, well, yeah, and pull her panties to the side. "Permission, forgiveness, et cetera."

In lieu of a reprimand or a rebuke, she lets a shockingly pretty little moan when her pussy gets stretched by a finger, two - and they're wet, slippery, easier than the lace had ever expected, and she's already so plush, red and rosy. Irene has always gotten wet quickly, with your fingers, your cock, your mouth on her - and her head falls back in one languorous stretch. The tightness around your finger is dizzying. You'll never grow tired of watching her: a sudden shift, the spine so pretty when arched, the pulse of blood under her thighs, the fluttering of her cunt as it comes to the very precipice of letting you in.

"Do you understand me, baby?" she's asking you, and her breath seems to pick up and the muscle flutters again.

You waggle your eyebrows and lean in, and whisper against her skin, "better than anything."

Your mouth attaches to her clit and never lets go. You fuck her, all sweet, on two fingers. Down to the last knuckle. You curl your fingertips, and she's gasping. The scent of her drives you fucking crazy; this is what paradise has always tasted like, and heaven's the press of her thighs - your name spilling from Irene's mouth. She gets wetter, and wetter - you lap as it floods out of her, down her thighs. You lick it, taste the salt and her bitterness and her arousal, how her pussy grows slick in an instant, swollen under your touch, wanting, aching. Her heels press over your shoulders and dig in, tight.

When you look up over the tight spasms in her diaphragm, you realize she's got the shirt unbuttoned, finally. Fabric spilling down to the granite, skin and bra and sheen; you wrap your arms around the perfect curves of her thighs, the nylon shifting soft on your hands and bringing her closer, hitching up to your shoulders. This is only part one of what you owe Irene - the easy part, actually: you can see her clench in the same breath that she's straining - the need and want to fill her up a sin, the wet smack as her folds are pried apart by the flick of your tongue, the sounds of your hands, the desperation. She'll want, and you'll get, until she can barely handle it. Until the tremors overwhelm her, until it is too much and it never will be, ever enough - until she's left so gorgeous like that, shivering.

The kettle's got the pitch to its scream now, and the volume. The sound makes you grind your teeth. Lick harder, suck longer, kiss a bit deeper - her clit, the pink tip of your tongue pushing in past the folds, between the ring, deep and heavy. Fingers moving slow, almost absent-minded, flitting across her breasts, pinching a nipple - Irene groans. The metal rattles louder, louder.

The shirt's rumpled, tangled, bunched up between Irene's elbows. You lean your teeth to the crease of her hips. You lick, the smell filling your nostrils, her fingers threaded in your hair - holding you where she wants you to be:

"And fuck, ah, do you, oh god- fucking do you- have an," she sighs, trembling as the movement of your jaw sends her shuddering, as your mouth runs and your hands open her legs. She pants. "Oh, darling. Have an honest-" she laughs and the sound pitches too, "-idea, I mean-"

Irene has started grinding against you. Your heart is thundering.

"-of what I'm-"

A moan finally breaks from her lips, so disarmingly beautiful. Irene grabs for the edge of the granite counter; she can hardly seem to make out what she wants. Her orgasm is cresting higher, each flick of your tongue and soft sound of you bringing her there, near. You like that she needs you, like that the word 'insatiable' becomes an insufficient assessment. You push, you move - her hands tug you. You taste her: a warmth, the depth, the pulsing.

"-what you're" - a gulp, a gulping swallow - the fridge keeps beeping, the front door sticks, and it'd be so perfectly quiet if not for the fucking tea kettle. It keeps boiling and boiling and you are drinking your fill, drowning. Her skin smells fucking delicious. You can feel her heat pooling. "Fucking, o-oh, fuck- fucking doing-"

You smile into it. Against her messy, quivering cunt. You are: unashamedly smug.

And fuck. She's gone, swept away, carried off, the pressure of your lips sending her crashing back down with a moan - the kitchen still buzzing and the steam a bit of a haze, and you haven't even finished bringing her through the dying breaths of her orgasm before she's gasping, pulling you back up on your feet:

"I need you, I- right now. Up here-"

Irene tries to grab for your neck again. She doesn't seem to mind her own lack of strength, though. In any other circumstance you'd think she'd look a bit pathetic: her shoulders curved, chin resting in a hand, a absent, pleasantly confused grin, legs and hair a complete unmitigated mess - and here: her lipstick wiped, mostly smudged, her wet, glistening thighs-

"Tell me," you say, and a thousand possibilities are imagined. To get inside of her, feel her nails dragging across your chest, her teeth at your throat, her moan as you slide into the very heat of her - fuck, you cannot stop. She's got you spinning and you’ll gladly lose this particular battle; a typical Bae Irene ending. "Please, tell me."

The water boiling over has begun to crack; and the first tendrils of steam begin curling into the air.

"God," says Irene, shaking with her body so desperate, her hand still grasping you back. The look in her eyes seems so beautifully wrecked, but in no hurry to show it. She smiles, because she wants that over anything. "Don't you fucking listen?"

She grins.

"Ah." Irene shakes her head, pulls your head back, staring, but does not rise to a sit, just slides herself out. One leg kicks, one, then two, from the corner of your eyes: her nylons shredding down their long seams. You're on your feet; you're not really standing, but then you have no real bearings to start with. Your cock is throbbing.

She just scoots on out, and shuts off the stove, and sets the kettle a step back.

"Maybe," you say, pressing your thumb to the seam of your pants. You could probably die of lust right now and have no regrets. "Maybe not. I think I need more convincing."

It would probably also help if your thoughts could stop racing.

"Huh."

She turns - though not with the skirt. The hem has fallen to the floor. A puddle at her ankles. She's only slightly out of breath; the wet between her legs gleams. The slick, smooth fabric of her lingerie sticks to the swollen outline of her pussy. Her fingers dip down, playfully, so she's leaning over the counter. She tugs, and it presses and plays and sticks at her center. You're obsessed, half-crazy from it. Her expression twists; it's fucking bliss. She smiles, one breath, then two - the house settles. You cannot stop staring; you can't. Your mouth feels hot and dry and sticky, wet from her cum, and your pants, you can't quite breathe and the view's only getting better: Irene naked, against the counter, the jostle of her breasts as she strums herself, as her breathing catches and rises, and those nails digging deep into her clit as her eyes drift shut-

She's biting her lower lip - but she looks at you and - stops, her toes pressed to the linoleum.

The moment is suspended, and suddenly the words do not fit anywhere in your throat.

"Want it?"

"Fuck," you exhale, and maybe she isn't just asking that out loud, she's the embodiment of the fucking question: the need between her legs so vivid. She laughs again, licks the taste of herself off her fingertip, sucks at the curve of her nails - she touches the tip of her tongue to the very edge of her upper lip. Her smile, in its sharpness and precision, remains unswayed.

"Bend me over?"

And then, very quietly, and without so much as a scoff in disappointment-

"Fucking christ," you mutter, and nearly fall in a heap towards her.

It's borderline unhealthy, that this happens as often as it does: sex that leaves you breathless, sex that shivers across every inch of your fucking skin, sex that aches afterward, that drives your lungs to strain, a moan trapped forever just behind her teeth. Her hips were either made for your rough palms, or you’ve worn them down to your grip. Softened all the edges. Her thighs open to you like you own her. The ridge down the center of her back, your mouth trailing down every vertebrae - her pussy. The inside, the depth - and everything she doesn't mean to let out: all these little notes she's learning with each thrust of your cock into her, and you think you should just say yes, give in.

Let it go, and just trust.

Sex as routine? A repetition of desire. What is routine is that, with Irene:

There's always a new discovery. She has you when she's bent over and you're pounding her knees into the cabinets. She has you on the floor with her. She has you when she's bent over and you're eating her out again, then on top, and on your couch, and with her legs kicked high on the shower wall, and - you fuck her, you find room for her on the bathroom sink. You cum all over her stomach and she just smiles dreamily. You fuck her until she’s almost sobbing, and then you're saying her name like she has your life and your attention, for everything and nothing at all. And after an hour of letting her have your patience, and your dick, your face pressed against her throat, and her nails deep in your back - you tell her she needs to stay.

It’s a hell of an admission, apropos of nothing.

"Oh? Say that one more time for me," and she's half-covered, the comforter pulled up over her the gentle slope of her breasts, the bedsheet tucked around her waist. "Again," and you have no real use left, you're certain. The most recent orgasms have nearly shattered you both in half: Irene can barely focus on your mouth, where your hips had slammed hers into the bed and - you are pretty certain - definitely did crack her skull right off the headboard.

"Yeah," you mutter face down into the duvet, "you should stay."

"Then it's decided," Irene says out loud, rather victorious, and drops a hand down the span of your back. She's there still, fingering her own cum from inside her pussy. The look in her eyes, sly. The message in them could not be any clearer: what an excellent suggestion, since you both know she'll have no shortage of reasons to keep coming back, anyway.

It all feels rather satisfying, pretending not to like the girl. It feels good not caring where she is at night.

As she had said, like an affirmation, a real statement: "this thing, between us, is so uncomplicated. It's so easy."

And she’s right:

She fucks, and you cum. She looks pretty. That's what she wants to show off, she does and does it well, and as long as you don't pay attention and pretend like it doesn't matter to you, it's an absolute fucking win-win. That's it: that's exactly why, when she calls, when she comes around and asks about dinner, you ask how far you're expected to go for her. What'll earn you her gratitude? Her pleasure's a quick hit, and it's free - if she asks nicely, if you're up for it, if it isn't the same bullshit, same scene - and the night's never a big deal to waste. That's her script; there's your line:

"What's your endgame here," is a thing you're always asking.

She tips her head, her hair falling off her shoulder, that old cliché, those large brown eyes, batting and fluttering. Just curious, but also to draw attention; what a killer pair she has, they're gorgeous. Your eyebrows raise, and your mouth falls open as her fingers dance over your chest, playing with the collar of the button-up that you aren't entirely convinced doesn't belong to her.

"Who says I have to have my mind made up right this second?" is Irene's usual comeback - a favorite - followed by another favor, then an expectation. Then, as your hands fall to the small of her back: "for you, the point is probably the chase," she reminds you, a low little murmur.

Your heart thrums with the little spike of anger. Then again, your cock's feeling the yearn ahead of everything else already; it’s a bad habit, and not getting anything you need. Or, there's a tumble, a mutual surrender in this somewhere.

"Sure, says you."

You kiss her so easily. Run your fingers through her hair and drink down her sighs, pull away and pretend. Pretend to dislike how pretty she looks when you do things like this. Pretend like you haven't missed her, that there is no desire, not to run your touches down the back of her knees, or sink your hands into her perfect little ass.

"Didn't need me to," she points out, the lick into your mouth. And her finger curls right under your chin, nails a pretty, perfect oval shape, manicured and soft at your throat, that way she loves - the angle intimate. "And yet. Not stopping me, are you?"

Which you're not. Neither of you is fool enough. You don't hate yourself, she doesn't hate the truth. So, whatever, sometimes you give in to it - if you could call this a 'means to an end', you suppose that might just about cover the ground, because her plans, her reasons don't matter to you, and vice-fucking versa: just to find an answer, or to find a few dozen, and that's enough.

You're no good at love; she says she's not looking for it either, no heartfelt romantic shit to get a tear out of you, she'd tell you at the start:

"Let's just play it by ear, how about that? I could surprise you. You could surprise yourself."

(But fuck: Irene's surprisingly full of surprises.

Take when she texts a few days later.

Hey, a blip on the screen, an innocuous string of numbers you refuse to mark a contact. There's too much power, and leverage. She isn't asking.

It's been too long.

A winky emoji.

I think you’re able to do me a big favor.

A period. It is imperative. She would tell you, with an authority she certainly isn't trying to front or to prove: she likes her punctuation.

I could really, really do with that same favor that you gave me back when we went to that housewarming party, you remember. It'd really be the best thing you've done with your evening if you could help me out. Call it the nice thing to do.

Is your vibrator out of batteries? you text back.

You are a genius.

Thanks.

Let’s go somewhere.

Just this once. But dinner's on you.

A selfie. Slippery fingers, glued to her pussy, running through the glisten-

Oh. Actually, it'll probably be twice.)

So. ‘Surprise yourself’ was, naturally, the key.

It's difficult to have a notion as to how exactly you might surprise yourself - but here you are a little later; she's dressed and in heels, and that's a relief, or rather a delight: this woman looks devastating with her hair down. But still, like this: the hem to her slacks that draws her thighs down to an elegant peak, the nice blouse she's got her buttons done to the top, and one less: this cleavage isn't wholly visible but the shadow is still a tease, her thin jacket only pinning in how her waist is cut into such a deep arc. Irene had asked if this looked too formal, and the second response in your brain was to ask why: her normal wardrobe's worse - less clothing, more fucking exposed. Then again, you might not mind watching Irene work so hard if it meant your hands get full quicker-

"That is absolutely no way to put it," she admonishes.

"Come again, Mistress?"

"Ass," she mutters. It's not even a reprimand so much as an agreement, you can see where the smile is trying not to crack open. "No," she corrects, and smiles anyway. She pushes a lock of her hair behind her ear, "I just mean- fuck you and your terrible metaphors. Anyway, we should go. You drive, my car is a total mess."

You take her out. There's dinner. There's drinks. It's something like a date, because that's what she wants. The hostess smiles politely. The waiter raises a suggestive eyebrow at your fingertips grazing Irene's leg underneath the table, and you both ignore the interest. You pass him her credit card without comment when you go to settle up. When you stroll about, the sun is going down and the dying light paints her skin orange, yellow, and red. She tells a story about work. You manage to get a few of your own. Your fingers loop through hers and the action makes her do this lovely smile.

So the gist of it is: you have a fling, her name is Irene, there’s some vague cohabitation occurring, and - oh, she's an absolutely fantastic lay.

It's the sort of thing that on the surface level sounds like a total and complete win, even for all its contradictions, flaws, and pitfalls. She fucks, and you're willing. She looks pretty. You keep her content. That's enough, as a friend-with-benefits; more of the benefits than anything else, she always reminds you. And every now and then, when Irene starts making demands of your time, of your availability - making plans, making reservations, making the expectation known that the two of you have a standing obligation, ‘benefits’ penciled into your schedules every Tuesday and every weekend (and Thursday, too, if neither of you is booked) - she suddenly becomes more complicated than she should have any rights or reason being. There's a kind of security you take away from it.

Irene's holding her clutch in the parking lot, posture perfect. The sky's on fire and the setting sun is burning down the horizon all around her.

"Can we do it in your car?" she's asking, totally nonchalant.

"What?" "Sex," Irene repeats, like you didn’t understand the question. Her expression is bright, seamless. She holds her wrist behind her back, and twists a little on one heel. "I want to get you off."

This is a case study; you’re walking, breathing empirical data. You’ve gone from wondering to knowing about what they say in regards to women of a certain age. The appetite. The inexplicable desperation. It used to be a joke. Maybe it's because men in their 30s are unusually relaxed with their dating life, or all of their friends are talking about wedding rings, kids, a white picket fence - with life a non-event to handle with finesse and a delicate grip. Or: maybe Irene simply isn't complicated in the ways people seem to expect her to be. She’s needier for sex than usual, for starters. "Are you expecting some urgent business meeting, or an important call - any sort of personal news, maybe - like, in the next half hour?"

"Are you serious," you manage. Fuck her, actually.

"I don't know why, I just feel like you might appreciate the cramped quarters. We can make out while you cum and stuff."

You almost snort, but - her hips have that sway. The door’s unlocked. You stare. The purse settles on the passenger's seat. This girl is so stupidly pretty.

"You, uh, wanna get on top?" you ask, voice already slightly drying at the sound.

Irene reaches over and traces your jaw. Her thumb feels lovely pressed to the seam of your lips, rubbing over them slowly. Her mouth is this gorgeous color and you just can’t stop staring. "So cute. What’s your best guess, sherlock?" She pats the roof of the car, gently. "Get the fuck in."

Irene is, at her most shameless, a list of demands: give me your fingers, touch my clit, do it now; take my wrists, fuck me faster; don't you dare fucking cum - there's no rush here, so put in the effort. You have a basic idea of where you're both headed, and the situation demands you to, um, obey. The sound of her wet cunt fills the tight confines of the car.

"Fuck, Irene."

At her most elegant, she's pretty much the same, but she fucks like a total dream:

"Slow, yes," she'll coo into your ear, in the early stages, before her head starts falling back and her chest rises, and all the sweet notes from the back of her tongue get driven to the fore, and there are moans instead of directions, groans and cries. "Feel me. Deeper. Fuck, babe, just like that."

Her nails drag deep, and that's not usually the plan - the start is fast and easy; her pussy drips like she's soaking a cloth, a fresh layer every second, and a clench that swallows every thrust; and somehow the friction's good enough that if you stick around and keep your focus, you get Irene begging for mercy by the end of it, just to savor and relish the sensation, the motion of your body into hers.

"There," and her eyes flutter, "yes. You are so fucking hard for me." She leans in, kisses the shell of your ear: "you’re fucking stretching out this little pussy, baby, you know that?"

"Jesus. Fuck, please-"

"Should we? Should I let you?" She clenches down, "fill me up, babe? You think you're worth the privilege?"

"If you'd let me - Irene, the things I could do," you don't breathe, "jesus fucking christ."

And she looks at you with wide, honey-smudged eyes. Pretty even when fucked; especially so. Her fingers get wrapped in your collar and she’s nodding her head in rhythm with her quick little bounce. The snapping of her hips. Up and down, and up and down like she’d be insulted if you didn’t drain your balls into her perfect little womb right then and there. She says don’t do this, don’t do that - and then she fucks you like you’re supposed to.

"Yeah, that’s right, be a good boy for me," her mouth whispers, even though there is no one else in her car, you're pretty sure. Her voice is like a vice, just you, with her hips, her hot little hands pushing you down so she's riding the top of your head. You can hear her dripping down into the space, a new leak.

"How're you gonna deal with it when I'm filling your tight cunt?" You thumb at her ass, squeeze. "This pretty, round ass? Want me to cum inside you every which way, huh? Marking up my territory?"

You hear her stutter on a reply, as her pussy gives a particularly strong flex, another contraction.

"All those wet loads, dripping out your cunt, down your thighs... on your lips... you gonna taste every last one, princess?"

She has a face like she wants to hurt you for that one, the moniker - you have a sneaking suspicion there's nobility in her blood, laid deep somewhere in her veins, another lifetime lived far from this one: she'll have a predilection for thrones, diamonds, queendoms to rule. And if that were true - well, you'd be downright lucky if she consented to an audience, even less entitled to her hand. She's out of your league regardless. Or maybe, she's the furthest thing from royalty and she just knows the script better than anybody. Kneel, she'll say, and you find yourself obliging; give me your mouth, your fingers, she'll ask, and you're compelled. It's all ingrained.

"What was that?" she asks, incredulous, riding your cock so hard the seat shakes instead.

"I said: this cunt, christ-"

You bring her closer to your face, have to feel that clasp of heat with every stroke - and when it is so fucking deep, her hips lock up, clamped, thighs quivering - you just hold her in place, give her a few breaths, let the satisfaction really sink in, even if she's already moaning.

"Well, I guess you got me there, huh." Her mouth gives her away, the lopsided-grin. "Yeah. So cum, give it." And then it twists. Her face looks so beautiful in distress, and you're certain you've had that thought many times since: if the situation demands it - maybe it would be just fine to push a little bit more? It's a neediness that doesn't go understated, even when Irene's more whining for it: like, the fuck are you waiting for, her tits out, panting, sweating, cursing and moaning at the slow drag through her slippery muscle, a grip like satin, like velvet.

You’re a total mess:

"Breathtaking, the faces you make for me" - "you look so good, like that, so handsome" - "has anyone ever fucked you this good?"

It’s official. She'll have to scrape you off the leather.

And as if to add insult to injury, Irene’s hands come up to her hair, holding it up into a messy bundle above her head. There’s a tilt of her chin, a bite into her lip. She’s bouncing fast, taking your cock deeper on each twist, and it’s all very performative. Fucking Irene is as visual an experience as it is visceral, because chiseled into her figure, the lithe frame, are these model-esque proportions - like she’s not actually five foot nothing in her socks.

(A beautiful little paradox. She’s showing off here. She’s showing off, simply because she can.)

"And you’re the one always calling me greedy," she breathes, like the punchline, as she takes the next inch, the wet slapping of skin. There's heat. So much fucking heat - she's got a pulse that pulls you forward and won't let go, your balls hitting her ass and thighs soaked, so red and plush and beautiful, a softness that takes a second and an elbow's reach and, fuck. Her thighs on the dashboard. "You've been-"

Your palms fit into the curve of her ass. How a small, fragile, dainty thing like her can have so much to grab onto remains a mystery and a fucking miracle.

"-a bit of a prick, honestly, for a minute-"

But she's so responsive - and you want to wring it out of her, really, a desire to destroy and savor, even when that sounds a little wrong and too close to sacrilege - you really ought to just call her the ultimate fantasy: she has the cutest tits, soft creamy thighs, tightly wound curves and a sexy-as-sin attitude; and when she sits heavy on your cock, wiggling her hips in a circle, you lose the plot and a little bit of your mind.

"-have to say, it's been getting to me."

"Here's hoping it doesn't give," you grumble as your arms tense and your back aches, your shoulders strain. Irene seems unconvinced, and she usually is, but the drive is relentless.

"Then you'll have to hurry up," the rake of her fingernails across your neck, "won't you?" and she is too slick and so eager, "because you’re gonna cum for me, sweetheart, just let it all out, baby." Her cunt and her heels in the upholstery and the stinging welts draw you deeper-

Your hand braces around the center console.

She has her lips on your temple, your hairline: "I’m imagining how my pussy will look, all creamy and used and pretty - all because you fucked it nice and hard and raw - no matter how many times I fuck myself with my fingers, I'll keep feeling the ghost of this fucking perfect cock."

The noise that leaves your lips is a full, throaty, ragged groan, your muscles shaking and skin burning. "Irene, god," you sputter out; it's not super attractive, you think.

Irene kisses the juncture of your shoulder and neck like it’s music to her ears, her jaw against your jaw:

"You've got to stop edging me, love, my little pussy was made to get stretched by your cock, show me-"

You thrust in deep.

"Fuck."

"Oh," she whispers, eyes hooded and lashes sweeping low, an awe so thick to her voice. "Such a good boy for me - now. Make me cum, yes - make me cum all over you - mhm-"

You jerk your hips again - your pants hanging around your thighs, her blouse pushed up around her waist. You've twisted and knotted the fabric over and over into something you can pull or hold onto - it's not clear to you yet which idea's more pressing.

Because there's no breathing room. You need to twist your hips just to fuck into her - her lips are parted with this insatiable moaning, and it's sweet and pretty and filthy. She wraps one knee higher. There's the lock to your ankle, but she's grabbing the lever and trying to pull your seat down, the rest of it; you absolutely let her. All this in heels that would be impressive without a tight wet pussy pressing down on the length of your cock, begging for what seems like an endless number of thrusts into that delicious heat, the perfect clutch. She rides you rough: the leather beneath your knees shifting with the constant scuffle. Her elbows bent, a thumb grazing her tits, pushing up the silk and the lace.

Her soft, pale skin is spilling all over you, her limbs finding purchase as her mouth slides against yours on a new rhythm of need and want: "that's the thing, right? You're such a delight when you put your mind to it." She's pressing a kiss against your temple - her tone, this intimacy, a hotness between her thighs that leaves you breathless, dumb - it's the only sort of inescapable validation that might suit.

You had the perfect view as she shrugged the jacket, unbuttoned the blouse, sat the bra over it, just undid her slacks: this perfection, laid bare, exposed in your passenger seat with her tits squeezed in both palms. Then it was her hand tugging at the zipper to your pants.

So - you're fucking her harder than you have any business doing. Her nails are digging trenches in the skin of your forearms and you have the slightest sense of everything she has, wants, demands; you've had her under you, bent her in half, folded at the corner of your bed. You’ve fucked her with your cock so far into the slick-dripping hole of her cunt until she can't stop cumming - or begging - or the Irene-equivalent.

"There you go," she says into your throat, like it's nothing, and sags a little further into your chest. "There we go," she repeats. Her brow is glistening with sweat, and you kiss it: hot, and a little bitter. You can't help it.

You're fucking her harder than she can handle. You're filling her. She's stuffed to the fucking brim with your cock, bulging at the folds of her insides.

And, christ, her fucking waist. She is so small, so fragile-looking. You wrap both hands around her middle, and as her hips grind forward, meeting the roll, she grabs your wrists, holds your hands up her ribs and gets, and gets - oh, just where you fucking left her. Your knuckles are left digging to the silky skin, bruises dotting purple across her back, her neck, her tummy and her thighs, every surface - you're grasping and claiming what she has to give you, just a hint. There's a million and one ways to love, to give back, to please a partner - but you have one goal: you're not an artist, you're not a philosopher, or a poet - so you’ll leave physical marks, reminders, of everything you've done and will do. You’ll make her cum. Just hold her still and make her cum again and again and again. The weight, the lift. If she asked, you would. Fuck. You would. She rides your cock and rocks you into the upholstery of the passenger-side chair. She sinks down and presses her mouth to the edge of yours, just shy, her own teeth pulling at her bottom lip-

"Your cock feels," and here Irene takes the moment for a heavy, contented sigh. "-ah, fucking unbelievable. Your fucking cock, jesus."

Her voice is… it's really so dreamy. The praise does strange things: you reach down and pull her thighs so they tighten at your waist. There are no illusions here, she's found something worth chasing. The bare-boned desperation drives her insides wild, you can feel it. The clench, the pulse, the absolute slutty-slick dripping, a real, honest, aching cunt, warm and clamped at the hilt of your cock - it's obscene, and your patience is stretching paper-thin. You aren't asking any questions; she's not taking them.

It’s just you and this petite, absolutely stunning, heartbreakingly gorgeous girl sitting in your lap and working herself on you like a doll, and- oh. She really does look great. It's impossible to look away.

The windows are fogged, and her cunt feels divine as she runs you further into your car seat. Her hips snap up, back down - the soft drag and then the cinching flutter. The inside of her, a total fucking delicacy. One of your hands slides across her back, counting the rise-and-falls of her spine. One, two, three, and so on. Her lips are flush at your throat. You feel her whimper.

It’s the most perfect noise you've ever heard.

"Baby," she mouths at your collarbone, her movements becoming more spastic, more erratic. "I can feel you throbbing."

The encroaching dark keeps threatening the corner of your vision, so much tighter each time.

"You're going to make me," you're gritting through your teeth - this feels a little insane, a little irrational. "Irene you- you’re going to make me fucking cum."

"Oh?" Irene’s reply is immediate. She slams herself down on your cock, hard. "Then cum."

Your patience is truly nothing at this point. There is not a single breath left inside her either: the heavy swell of her chest is proof enough, those eyes fluttering shut, the angle shifting as her ass meets your thighs. "Seriously, I'm going to fucking fill you, and it is gonna slip all down the back of your legs - Irene - sweetheart, I’m going-"

Her fingers curl behind your head. "Cum," and she groans, "I know- I'm here. Take it. Use this perfect little pussy, I want to feel you cum." and you pull the pace up into a frantic tempo. The metal beneath your back creaks with the strain; the bounce of her ass against your groin. The moan, it pitches: a need, a lust, and she is rolling, rutting her body in circles on top of you, a wild gasp and then a beautiful cry, almost in pure unbridled ecstasy.

The angle shifts and - fuck. You’re able to fuck up into her so easily. Her cunt is hot and soft in all the right places, wrapped around your cock, tight and snug like she was made for you. Every drag of slicked skin and clenched muscle sends you both reeling.

"Irene," you barely say, and you're cumming, you’re fucking filling her up with cum - the only possible endgame. You can’t stop fucking into her even though she's just been fucked senseless, stuffed with your cock: little helpless noises, squeals and yelps like they're being tugged out of her. She goes limp on you, and then she collapses, shivering and whimpering with every deep-bore pulse: you're going to mark every inch of her body, claim every part of her soul.

"Oh my god." A groan. Another. It's coming off her like a wave - like a river, really, you're drowning. "It is so, so fucking hot. Your cum, in my pussy..." She trails off.

Her tight cunt twitches: pulsing with every motion. She squeezes down - hard. It takes a great effort for you not to let out a loud, embarrassing whimper. Your fingers dig into her ass, her hips, steadying her grind.

But you're looking right into her eyes when she falls apart, too, that long, tensing shudder, the gasping groan - fuck - because she feels exactly like everything that you've done, you know: Irene's tight cunt has kept your cock perfectly in place. She was just waiting for the spill of it before the final, hardest crest. The smell's in the air and the haze is all through her expression and, god, you want her, you could just sink a million words into that, every possible adoration and every bit of yourself and you still wouldn't be getting the entire story; just fuck - you can never not be fucking her, never not want to have her riding your lap, moaning out and falling and dragging every part of your body deeper-

"Mmmmm," Irene lets out, soft and satisfied, a tiny whimper in the way that she goes all soft around your cock and comes down and presses a wet, tired kiss at the base of your throat.

"Mmmm-m?"

"Thanks, I think." Her blouse is falling off one shoulder, the material crumpled. There are creases all across it. She's biting on her lip, flushed. "Thanks for that."

It has to be said, here - because you know, because the sun is setting on your open window and your arm is snug at Irene’s waist and neither of you even have to mutter a word to acknowledge the fact that it will inevitably rise across your living room carpet again.

Irene is everything you might have been running from, everything you’ve ever chased - and you’d never ever stand a chance.

Greedy, however, just isn't the right word for it. Not really.

It's the way she leans in when you kiss. The way she fidgets. The way her tongue brushes across her bottom lip. So no - greedy isn't quite the right way to say it. It's more: instinctual.

She's this not-so-subtle tincture of want and desire, in its most basic form - and that makes this all so dangerous, isn't that right, miss? Because want isn't something to toy with; want is, by design, something measured in its inability to be indulged.

(And for the record, your car hasn’t even moved from the lot. You were supposed to get frozen yogurt but that's looking less likely, judging by the way Irene's fingers are tapping lightly across your shoulder, your own clamping down on her chin.)

It’s just so indulgent. Irene hasn’t left your lap, blithely warming your cock for you. Stealing kisses while the day’s last light bleeds low over the buildings. Soft sighs. Whimpers, mewls, muffled little keens of, "oh, oh, please." You trace the edges of her, where your body becomes hers, and her movements are fluid - supple and knowing and just this side of eager.

The car feels now even more cramped and narrow than advertised, the sweat in your skin starting to bloom. The musk of sex, a creeping heat: "go ahead," you rasp out.

She nods, a helpless dip, and that comes with a sigh, "yes, fuck, right there," her cunt squeezing, a hot, slick little velvety clench; there's something about being buried inside her and seeing her fall apart. This slow rock and build-up. All the hard edges worn to a perfect point. Her dark eyes are glowing, her clever little tongue darting to her lip.

You hold her, slumping together in the front seat. The leather squeaks with the gentle shifts, the slides. The color rising in her cheeks. She likes when your breath catches; her smile goes sharp, a hint of teeth: it's very obvious that she is very very drunk - on control, on cock, it doesn't seem to matter.

A beat passes before the architecture returns to her muscles. She's sitting up, and with your hand firmly cupping her ass, and your teeth pressed to the flat of her breasts. "You," she gasps, the most unironic and unexpected reply. The corner of her eyes is still glistening, still dazed, still blissful. "Don't play dumb. Fuck - no, don't stop."

"Sorry, say that one more time for me, miss."

"You- ah." She grins, and her hip shoves your cock out with a filthy wet sound in accompaniment.

The air of the car is sticky, and her slick is still covering your waist, so the discomfort makes the little groan extra appreciative, anyway.

"Fucking god-" she grumbles, and the whine that escapes is an order for attention.

You take her jaw with both hands. Pull her, and look her right in her eyes and kiss her. Not slow. Not gentle. Thoroughly, so the tip of her tongue reaches the very roof of her mouth. She ends up with her back shoved roughly into the dash, and your fingers tangled through her hair and tugging. And her laugh turns to a whimper, her eyes a half-closed - you fingerfuck her cunt open. Thumb pressed tight to the clit. Two, and the palm of your hand smacks between her thighs, resonating all throughout the car. It's your own hot cum coating your knuckles and drip-dropping off your wrist, so she's melting and needy. The evening's passing, her hands go to her bra, so she's twisting and slipping, the orgasms strung together like the pearls on her bracelet.

Her fingers squeeze yours, then let go.

She licks into your mouth. "Jesus, you're way too good at that," is what Irene murmurs, when you're both just left breathless, half-shivering, merely recycling the same torrid air.

"Let’s get you home, princess," you kiss into her skin, joking. "Before curfew."

She sits up. "Shut the fuck up."

"Sorry," you lie, smug - not sorry at all. "Can't help it. You're too pretty when you get like that."

"What, when I'm cumming for you? When your cock is inside me? When you're fucking my brain to mush?"

Her heels clack to the ground.

"You’re gross," she adds, and shoves your arm.

"You like it," you say to her, "don't lie."

"Because I’m just this sweet innocent thing, right? I can't be held accountable for anything. Look at you, fucking me like this - corrupting me." A flutter of eyelash, and she leans forward to meet your eyes. She's adjusting the straps of her bra. She's a picture-perfect pinup girl. "Is that really what gets you off?"

"It's not bad." You let yourself soak in it, for a second, just staring at her. "The whole naive, helpless schoolgirl act. It's a classic for a reason."

Irene snickers. It's sweet-bitter, and that's fitting. You like how her blush is red and stubborn.

"Goodness," she says, like you can't see the dust of a smile, of a smirk, take shape on her swollen mouth. "Okay sure, let’s get into that; say my dad is sitting up with worry." Her head cocks, playful. "My family probably sent a search party out for me," and her laugh's lighter than air, warm, a few shades shy of ridiculous - if you thought that the sound could make you as much of a fool as she does - then yeah, that’s pretty accurate.

"What - like in a rocking chair, with his shotgun and everything?"

"Yeah, you’re so fucking dead. He's so going to shoot you on sight when he sees the absolute state you're returning me in. His precious little girl, " Irene picks at her bra, tucks herself back in, adjusts her hair. The last of her hairpins drops, falls to the dash. It rolls back, between your legs. "Pull the trigger and turn you into swiss cheese. Last rites, eulogy, the full nine yards." Her makeup's smudged - red lipstick, the tip of her nose - and you just don't feel like pointing it out yet.

"Cremation, most likely?"

"Eh, who knows," she smiles, and now, more than ever, there's not a sign of hesitation in her face, her voice, the light and effortless way she drapes across the interior, stretches. "You’re so cute though. Maybe he'll give you a chance and let you run."

It hadn't really occurred to you until you arrived onto the front steps of Irene’s apartment and watched her sink back against the door, exhaling softly in the fluorescent light, her eyes heavy, but you have a sneaking suspicion that you're doing everything completely out of order.

You aren't in some trope-addled tv drama, and Irene isn't your childhood-friend or your slowburn-material, someone with a sentimental backstory.

Maybe in a parallel universe, some twisted alternate ending, where she's in this long, silky wedding gown, both sides of the aisle are watching you commit sins the way people can't resist doing in those fuck-it stories, all heat and sex and dopamine without remorse - but not now, not yet.

(Probably - probably not ever, and if that's a cop-out you can't help it. Because isn’t it silly, the things the people will do. Pretending to not be in love, all for the sake of the chase - getting themselves hung up in this world of digital advances and missed connections.)

You'll regret it later, you think. That's an unforeseen variable you should've predicted, though, isn't it?

Because you've both loved before, both been hurt, the excuses are all in the chamber: all the mixed signals and stereotypes. How she looks at you - or doesn't, some days. Your past, hers, the differences. You've never known exactly how this should go, if there even is a best version of this love to pursue, the idyllic happily-ever-after, that perfect white dress. Fuck, that is not the daydream you're supposed to be having.

The story instead, is like this: you drive her home. She sings along to the music on the radio. She kisses you over the console at a red light. Someone honks. You walk her to the door, because you're old-fashioned when you think it’s useful. You're a charmer, she's yours. You grab her by the chin and probably end up making out for far too long.

Just imagine if it had all been by the book:

A first date, then text messages. A second, where you're supposed to invite her to dinner, drinks. You’re supposed to call her, on the phone, with your voice and everything - low, a little assertive - not bossy or controlling, no: that's what the third date's for. There's a checklist for what to do, what to say; how you're supposed to kiss her, and why she's supposed to act all shy, the picture of demure - like she's innocent, though she'll be anything but. At the end of it, you're supposed to pay. She won’t let you. You're supposed to walk her home. She's supposed to linger, put the keys in the door and ask you what you're doing next - she's supposed to look over her shoulder as she walks inside and say goodnight, be coy, let it dangle on the edge. And that's supposed to be that. All of it: quintessential.

Nowhere in that manual does it say anything about pinning her up against the door and slipping your hand into her slacks either - underneath the soft, dark lace of her panties and placing your other palm over her mouth so the neighbors don't hear what a little slut she can be when she wants to.

Just this side of coquettish. A total delight.

Irene practically sobs into the side of your hand. Her mouth drops open, and you haven't even really touched her; she's wet already, soaked - well. She's always wet for you.

"I'll catch you later," you breathe into her neck, letting your fingertips skirt the puffy lips of her cunt on the drag back up because you’re actually not old-fashioned, like at all.

She tosses her hair, lets a sigh run through her smile, the blush, the creased eyes - and disappears through the door. It's the simplest way you two will ever say good night.

Ignoring all the rules of engagement, you and Irene never actually tiptoe around each other.

There's never even been a third date because the lines between hanging out and fucking and hanging-out-fucking blur with astounding ease. It's no real shocker: it's the little details in the way you find her sitting next to you at work, hips shifting minutely from side to side on the stool as she sifts through sheet music, sipping her latte, just barely making a sound.

It's the little details in the way she shows up, dresses to all the events, hands brushing yours to call attention to the ends of her fingertips; it's how every camera in the room seems to favor her.

If any of the 14th-century courtship philosophers could ever weigh in, now would probably be ideal. You’d be grateful, sure - because Irene is the epitome of entanglement. And that's your excuse. If anything's going to kill you, let it be her.

The texts do dry up for whatever reason.

Three hours between replies just to conceal a bit of earnest emotion or whatever. You wonder what that's called, wonder when it gets so boring - why all these steps had to be so dull, and why you can't do without them. The modern era has, after all, rendered the ancient rituals pretty fucking pointless - you could both use a time machine to the medieval ages, then you could get the fireworks. The gallant. Some declaration or betrothal - maybe a show of sword, a fistful of your bride's maidenhead. Or whatever the fuck they were calling it in those days, it all sounds a bit crude-

When it really comes down to it, this is less about the charm, the proposal, or the lack thereof. Less about the dear Irene, will you be mine, and more about the want. Want that's palpable, messy: about shedding decorum together and feeling filthy and rough, taking, receiving, biting into the sweet skin of her inner thighs and spanking her so hard she can't walk the next day.

That's all it is, you're pretty sure.

And look - she still attends a majority of your work functions even though, strictly speaking, she has no reason to. Everything is relatively normal, or maybe you don't know how normal is supposed to look, and that's alright because you're trying - and all you really care about is Irene smiling at you with that one knowing tilt of her mouth - and - and she does.

Hey, you're not entirely hopeless.

(The toxicity, the slammed doors, ignored voicemails and belted taillights zooming off into the night - look, not everyone is built for all the drama, not everyone feels the thrill at the tip of their fingers when they cut their losses and move on to the next. Floating through the memories thinking, wow, what a waste of time.

That's not you, you're aware. And Irene’s seen it before, probably, had a story just like it in her own life, maybe been there, maybe not, but isn't it fascinating how all of it always sounds the same no matter how the story gets told.

So, keep it simple stupid. It's easy that way. Don't confuse her, or yourself, don’t fuck it up by demanding more.

Afterall, it feels good, pretending not to care where she is at night.)

So - take some credit, you do something right for once. You call her.

It’s a Saturday and she’s working late because she’s a singer. She's between hair, makeup and costume. Bored. Or, pretending she is, and if you were a lesser person, the type to lie to yourself, you'd let the pretension sit as-is. It's not even difficult: no effort required to sit back, close your eyes, and listen.

"The way he was just staring at me was so embarrassing," Irene is going on about this production assistant, and her voice is always light, playful - it doesn't matter who, it doesn't even matter what, it's the cadence to her speech that lulls. "Like I could read his mind."

"Can't you?" you ask, indulgently.

"Okay, don't try being cheeky, mister," Irene scolds into the phone, but it's hardly stern; her tone's the softest kind of sultry, like caramel, dripping. "He wanted to bend me over the table. Get some nice little marks in."

Hey, who could blame him? She exhales, almost sounds annoyed - the pout on her face is practically audible.

You are not a good person by the longest stretch of the imagination. "Then what stopped him, princess?" you question, not a hint of chivalry left in you. "Fooled me - isn't that your kink? Fucking men you've barely just met."

She laughs - once, breathless and abruptly; something sharp. You're not actually joking and she can't pretend otherwise. "Fuck." The word is a sigh, the suggestion is all over the air. You aren't blind. "You would, wouldn't you? Probably love to see me bent over, too - and split in half on some stranger's cock. Worshiping it like you've taught me, or whatever the fuck."

You hum in amusement, putting the pieces together from what she hasn't said. "Aw," you coo. "Missing me already I see."

"Don’t flatter yourself," she shoots back, all quippy, fast: quick reflexes, the stuff of her brand. "What am I meant to be doing while I'm waiting for the crew, huh?"

And well, that’s the thing - you end up on the phone for far too long, far too late: she leaves you to wait a minute when someone knocks on the door, and you'll have her later, probably, but what's wrong with dreaming of fucking her in one of those dressing rooms, pulling that corset down her curves and kissing her silent in case someone walks by - leaving teeth and nail marks across the tops of her breasts. You expect her to bring the conversation to something a little more in the moment, but her voice carries back into the room and she's asking you, casually, what's for dinner, how was your day. You laugh, tell her a funny story that happens, talk about everything that's mundane, everything she should know and would know about you if you actually spoke all the words in your head.

"Hey," she says, at some point, quiet and suddenly gentle, and you're already wrapped around her finger and you've yet to tell her. "I like talking to you. Keep calling."

This isn’t like you, really. Or it hasn’t been - not in a while.

"As if that's up to you," you shoot back, your voice so dry you know she can see straight through it, but maybe you're doing alright, making leeway - because at least, it's a placeholder. Irene seems to understand what you can't explain.

"Ha." Another laugh, airy this time: easy-breezy. A vocal shrug. "My hair is way too cute right now to deal with your smart mouth, anyways - they're waiting for me." She hesitates, but the gap isn't uncomfortable, a space to breathe. "Let's just say you'll get tired of me before I get sick of you."

"Do you want me to see?"

"Later," says Irene, almost hurriedly, like an excuse, but in a pretty way, and the click on her end of the line is still warm.

(You hang up, stare at the wall and take deep, shaking breaths: in, out, hold - when you don't, you can taste her. But still, you wait for the feeling to subside.)

At first, she had seemed entirely untouchable. It’s funny. At first, you were convinced she'd look right past you.

She sends you a video, no commentary: the pretty, delicate sweep of her mouth brushing her shoulder. Her arm casts a shadow down the rise of her hips and your eyes trail that shadow south, across the soft planes of her stomach.

There are no questions after it, no words or emojis. Just her. In lingerie and no fucking context. The sound of her inhales.

(She says things with her face like that - or rather she says nothing at all. There isn't a hand-written translation key, though she leaves clues. She's playing it up, knows how you like her when she gets mouthy, lips glossy, knows how you like her panting. It wouldn't take much if she put her hand between her legs for you: you'd suck on her fingers, clean them off. You'd do anything.

The sound she does make eventually is low, frustrated. It's filthy - just thinking about her, all alone and barely touching herself: waiting for your reply.)

And yeah, it'd feel good not having to think about the bullshit anymore - you’d do your best to convince everyone that it's casual: the looks, the touches, all of it - the two of you together. It'd be a total lie, and you'd know it: everyone would know it, but that doesn't really matter. Because keeping things careless works. Never had it been about the feelings, and it's a cop-out, sure, that old cliché, but look - there's a really good chance you'll muck this up if you're given the power to put a name to the way her pupils dilate a half second before she grabs at you. Or the way you always fall a little more for her.

You think about that, about the worst of it: that she could ask you the most invasive question on her mind and instead, you'd answer, honestly and willingly, just like that: "hey, do you want to stay the night?"

But here’s the thing: she's a singer and she's got all these friends. Colleagues and acquaintances from work who are, in her words, also 'friends' (code for: people I am required to tolerate by contract.)

Hey, you're no marriage counselor - you won't try to figure out the etiquette. And her labelmates aren't a total disaster.

It's only fair to make an appearance, meet all these alleged Bae Joohyuns. And - she likes it, in that way Irene likes a lot of things you do to her. She’s texting you a new address every few minutes, texting nonstop by the time you've matched a tie to a shirt and are actually considering heading out. It's this afterparty, or wait, sorry, we're actually at a bar now - no, scratch that, it's a friend of a friend's place, you'll love it, I think? - and you can't really picture her stumbling through the city at midnight like she is, but there's a blurry photo of her and Seulgi and Wendy crowded around a mess of champagne flutes on a counter. An outdoor patio, a rooftop garden somewhere downtown. Her dress is breathtakingly gorgeous. There's an arm snaked around her waist and that's - hmm.

Wendy wants u here lol, the next text reads, and okay, you can't actually be bothered to give her shit for that right now. She can't be helped.

Someone's having fun, you type out instead.

Maybe I'm bored, comes the reply, just as fast, and then a few seconds later: i don't think anyone knows me here.

You roll your eyes. You'd love her despite, or maybe because of, a personality like that. "Never took you for anything like a celebrity."

Fine. I'll have to think of something to do, then, Irene responds, almost lazily, the following text-delete cycle appearing under your thumb like some new and innovative high-speed braille. Maybe.

But you could also come over and get me off, you think she should add. That could be fun, too.

No dice.

Meet me soon, she texts, and maybe a drunk mind speaks a sober heart, but she doesn’t even know what it does to your stomach when she follows it with, I miss you.

You wonder, a little, how you got here. You wonder if things like that ever just become normal.

Kang Seulgi is standing out front when you spill out of an uber and onto the sidewalk, all stooped over under the yellow haze of the streetlight on the corner, smoke coming up off a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

The chill night wind picks up and the edge of a leather jacket flaps behind her. It's almost eerie in how mundane the sight should be - and you think it's funny: Seulgi can make herself at home, anywhere.

"Hey," the brunette calls, stepping up. She's tall in her heels, the crescents under her eyes deep. The stars in the sky are shining against all the bright signs and street lamps, and it's hard to spot them. "Haven’t I seen you before?"

"Around the office, probably-"

Seulgi's eyes light up - she's not as drunk as the photo suggested, you think - and she gives a bright smile. Her eyebrows jump in recognition: a blur, the glimmering pulse of neon over glossed eyes and a lip caught by a canine. "You're Irene's-"

"-work friend," you answer quickly, before she has the chance to finish. It makes her laugh, which you weren't really counting on, and pocket her hands. You have enough bad ideas; you don't need hers as well.

"Oh. So you’ve got an arrangement," she suggests.

"It's an occupation," is as much as you'll tell her. "We all have one."

"Mhmm," she agrees, the wince on her face passing as a thoughtful hum. She shrugs.

"Did you-?" You clear your throat, don't know why it's hard to get out. "Is, uh, Irene in there?"

She takes a slow pull, long eyelashes sweeping over her cheekbones. Smoke spills out over her top lip. "Of course," says the girl, with all the attitude. "Just, not so alone."

"So," you start, cautious. "Do I even want to..."

Seulgi waves her hand, drops ash off the cigarette. "Nothing to worry your little heart over, friend," she mumbles, shrugging. Her fingers are delicate as she blows smoke between parted lips, eyes angling up at the city lights. "She said she was meeting someone cute. And I’m left wondering, if that someone could be you."

"Um," you respond. "Could be."

"Hm." The word is loaded, considering, and when she takes another step forward there's a smirk painted to her mouth, the deep red cut in the center of her lips almost reflective. She tosses her cigarette aside: a clean arc into a storm drain. "Interesting."

Seulgi's fingertips brush your collar as she ducks into the door in front of you.

"Later, pal," she tosses over her shoulder, and doesn't look back to see what happens next.

(You’d feel so much lighter, like a feather, with her off your mind.)

A crowd's scattered around the rooftop, now spread a bit thin - most of the people you recognize from tv screens and billboard ads, and everyone else seems a mix of other media. They're talking to each other in hushed tones about some shoot-down, this piece of gossip. They're comparing agent fees, checking the pockets of their jackets, flicking gold-plated pens in their designer hands. The whine of a power drill going a mile a second comes from over the railing: a few shots left to take. A skeleton crew works behind a camera, behind the glass, but no one seems to mind the business of film in the midst of celebration. They really are a different breed, aren't they?

You pick her out of the crowd instantly - in a white silk cocktail dress that costs more than a college tuition and no sense to act the part, Irene is seated among all of them like she fits. It's never a surprise, her at the center of things.

The seam at her hip rides up when she turns to reach for her drink, her leg extended long: overstretched, one toe pointed elegantly as if she could place her full weight onto a thin little stiletto heel and not snap both ankles. Her bottom lip is coated with bright gloss, pink smearing as it pulls at the straw.

There's a pause where everything slows down: she licks the crease of her mouth, sucks something golden and sparkling down, swallows, blinks - slow, pretty, perfect. Her hair is dark, cute, spilling onto her shoulders, and it brushes a collarbone, slips a little into the slit between her breasts. She's looking for someone, gaze traveling across the patio, swimming through the party - searching - and then, suddenly, those deep-water brown eyes catch yours.

They shine just a little bit brighter.

And then, the only logical thing: Irene smiles, before her feet carry you right in your direction.

Inside, things aren’t so loud. The night had gotten its worst out of the way early, the only source of music low and reverberating through the walls, the ceilings - all dark and liminal spaces; you and Irene find one to spare and fall into each other there, slow and searching and full of everything. It would be enough to get lost in her completely, this sweetness. You, and the kiss, and nothing else.

It's almost private enough to call it quiet; you're both out of sight and hidden, but there's voices, drowned noise all around. The bass can be felt through the floorboards, underfoot, but you can only focus on the rhythm that thrums from inside of her chest.

There's a disarm, here, too:

"I kissed someone tonight," Irene confesses, and then there's this break, a fragment where neither of you knows who you are to the other, what any of this means - if she'll bite down, be that sore reminder of a few unspoken words.

"Did you."

"Yeah," she says, exhale tickling your jaw. Her lips drag on skin, trace bone - and maybe it should bother you, but either way you can't help it: a thought finds purchase. Irene in someone else's grip, just enough a squeeze. Someone she'd like, or someone she could put herself back in a relationship with, or whatever they're calling this - and all at once, she's trembling.

The revelation is a bit like getting shot through the heart. A simple, awful: fuck. You think you might be bleeding.

Irene pulls the strap of her dress back up her shoulder and explains how it happened, out in that patio garden: a closed-mouth thing, some fleeting nothing, really, a bold dare on his behalf and her lack of inhibition. No, she assures you - he tasted like vodka and it was boring. She kept his hands off her ass, just in case you wanted to know. But still, the blood pumps harder in your veins knowing what she has and hasn't done - and what's wrong is how you only hear her confession in the middle of feeling something envious, a sudden, strong, profound desire to mark your claim: you'd leave this bruise, something ugly at the hollow of her throat. It makes you a possessive, possessive kind of person, and the sentiment, you figure, can only end in trouble.

"Sorry," she sighs, tipping her face forward to brush her forehead against yours, her eyes scrunching as she apologizes. "I don't think you wanted to know, but-"

You're trying to distract yourself; she's pressed between you and the wall, arms circling your neck as her spine bows under a bit of pressure.

"Yeah?" you question though. You can't not. There's this telltale roughness, the need to breathe: you'll hold on too long, take her mouth the way she deserves, keep her quiet, and let your tongue flick across hers until her lips are numb. "What then - should I care? Am I meant to?"

She swallows. It's all reflex.

"He kissed me," is all she says, and then her palm is stroking against the shell of your ear, soft, quiet. "Then he kissed me again."

She shivers, eyes wide, wet and round and wanting: you could say you understand how he could only dream of being the one to turn her head and bring out her charm, the easy way she smiles, but-

"All I could think of was you."

There was never a chance to compete; this star whose shine eclipses. Your binary system was never quite fair, was it?

Your hands are on her wrists then, trapping them at her sides; her eyes smoky and dark and looking straight up at you. She can't breathe like that, mouth agape as your nose brushes hers, your words blowing straight against the heat of her lips:

"Are you still thinking of me now?"

It's only that - though you can hear a sound building up from her lungs. You kiss the line of her jaw and whisper things into her skin: you have me, you can have me, you've always had me. The truth.

And her eyes are slipping shut: mouth curling into the kind of smile that drives you crazy; half the reason why you're all over her in the first place. You don't care where she's been so long as this is where she ends up, your face brushing hers, the kiss held just out of reach - you press into her forehead, her nose, her cheeks; she tilts her chin towards you, begging you to just - but your mouth is on her, feather-light, not near enough: she chases the pressure, gasps your name as your lips find hers, tongue sliding right past, and oh-

It's fast. It's heavy: you take, you push; her whole body shifts and shudders when she finds a grip, one hand braced on your shoulder as the other swung upwards, pulling you closer by the jaw. Your hand runs up her thigh and you hear her inhale, deep.

Irene kisses you like she was made to. She makes sounds with her tongue against yours, ones that twist in you, wind, undo. Like this, it'd be so easy to just let it go - take, take, take. There's not an inch to hide as your hand climbs her bare skin, feeling a shiver rise as her breath rushes hot against your cheek, over and over and-

"Breathe, baby," you mutter, and Irene huffs like it's a game, one of her soft shuddering hiccups, like there's something you should've known - the gasp when you kiss her mouth open, how it was getting easier to drown. She's not drunk, but she's getting there - and she doesn't ask to take it back when you both tip and crash into the wall beside. The reverberation of her back hitting the surface is nothing like the rest.

You take her arm, press her further against the space.

"Bedroom," she barely manages to request. Breathes, the sound shaking and short, almost - almost a plea, or a prayer. A beg. "Somewhere quiet, please. Anywhere. Please."

There's nothing Irene doesn't do without grace - but how she needs you: her limbs give, and she sags, falls against the line of your torso. There's this full, bordering helpless sound as you find her waist, holding her up, pulling her closer. You're kissing in this empty corridor, knocking on doors, jiggling locked door knobs and wasting time, barely, maybe, forever until you can step back into some stranger's guest room: some hallway hideaway; the unoccupied kind of paradise.

"I want you," she mutters when your hand traces the slope of her neck, and then her face is burying against the space below your ear, her open mouth skirting across the sensitive skin there. "So bad, so much. Out of these clothes."

Her neck tilts and you lick. You find a place beneath her ear, kiss - hard. Irene says please. You leave a mark. You know you’ll leave more.

An unlocked door, and she shoves you into a bathroom instead, fucks you in there with her underwear tugged to the side and her skirt rucked up her thighs: the mirror reflecting back every whine, the squeal you draw out of her when your teeth dig too deeply, the shock, the undiluted want in her eyes when she leans up against it. You have her half on the sink, your arms a cage around her lithe waist, your grip white-knuckled in the silk outline of her dress; she cums around your fingers, cunt slick and slippery, gasping your name so loudly that you have to shush her; and even after that, when her gaze locks into yours, the pretty round of her cheeks all red and her lashes stuck with her tears: when she tugs your zipper down, fits you between her legs and pleads for you to fill her with your cock until the tightness around it is unbearable, fucking her just as you're pulling apart her clothes, the clasp of her bra snapped so hard she curses - even that doesn't stop. She doesn't ask you to stop - she's incorrigible, needy, practically begging.

"Please." Again. Again, as she touches her cheek, fingertips on the skin that's already turning a deep crimson, all shades and blooms; and then she touches the lipstick-smudged prints at the top of her breast, and all the ones on her jaw. Your teeth, where it was light, and your tongue where it was hard. You took, and you marked, and the way she is, her thighs quivering like an aftershock; her body pliable, barely-breathing: that was almost all of what she asked for.

Your hips snap, and the impact jolts through her: ripples sent into the curves of her body from the pleasure, the pain. You try not to listen, not to look - not the obscenities leaving her mouth in a steady stream as you press her down against the counter: every hiss and moan, your name, jesus fuck-

Irene cums a second time with a wail, like someone's hurt her, like she's been set free, like she'll never again breathe so well as she does when your lips catch the scream and hold down the sobs, fingerprints at the faint, fragile curve of her nape.

"God," she whimpers into your mouth; and the sound, that voice, as she moans it to you: "your cock - is gonna kill me, baby."

Her cunt is tighter around your cock than it's ever been, this total vice grip, her hips lean and arched upwards where she lies, slick-dripping onto the bathroom counter; the edge of her heel catches on the marble-topped basin, and her ankle knocks over the handsoap - the whole of it hitting the floor and shattering.

She doesn't care. She can’t. She's a fucked-out mess: her black hair in knots, sticking to her hairline, her face flushed with need.

"Darling," the sweetest, her soft voice cracking with a laugh, the tipsy tilt of a joke; she's begging with it, some lazy, pretty curl of a request, some pretty plea that turns around into a bite, the heat, the feral - you kiss her harder. Take her harder. Leave a few more marks: just so you know she'll still feel it later, bruised and sore and sorry, and it might be too much, but oh, the way Irene grabs and pulls and fights and tries to cling when it crosses the line; she'll be feeling this tomorrow, a sharp tugging at the inside of her chest as she rubs circles into the scrapes and imprints on her hip bones. This reminder; of what's right there, if only-

Mine, you bite against her skin, and the voice in her head might scream with it.

You can see the fantasy in her eyes: her standing here in the mirror after you've filled her pussy, fucked your cum back into her cunt and had your fingers inside her for so, so long that she'd been soaking, dripping with it - your palm pressing firmly on her swollen, desperate clit, two fingers hooking deep, right on the spot that makes her twitch, tremble. Her jaw goes slack, eyes fluttering and back arching as you watch her drip with the mess you've made of her.

"It was always, I think-" and she hiccups, a small pained sound, "it was always gonna be you." She says it like an apology, voice quieter, more uncertain, a little shaky. "I just can't get you out of my head."

Your hips are reckless, a little mean - but your mouth moves slowly across hers. It's tender. It’s everything.

"Baby," you plead back: and it's something soft and small when you sigh it into her mouth. Your fingers tracing her ribs and feeling how she breathes with your every motion; how you're filling her so deep she almost can't. Choking, with a whimper, like it's hard - and then her jaw goes slack, eyes snapping shut - her knees bend - like she'll give up on the control. Her body slackens and gives under you; her legs widen to fit your hips, all her weight sinking backwards on the marble-top-

She keens when you bottom out, a high, delicate noise. Whimpers at how full she is of you; she must've felt your rhythm slipping and letting it run too rough-

And even then. She asks, totally breathless, panting: "Right there," and fuck, god, please. "I love this," she whispers, the sweetest, the most gorgeous, lips moving as slow as a prayer - "and you fuck so good. And-"

Irene swallows; her chest expanding and then halting, shallow and deliberate. Her chin turns; her mouth opening in some expression of yearning before the word comes; a gasp, and she can't - she can't quite-

"Keep- baby, please." Her throat makes a noise and all the words taper. "Please, right fucking there."

She makes another sound, strung out and desperate - and she keeps gasping the faster you thrust your hips. Each drag through her hot, wet cunt has you both clambering closer.

"This," Irene's panting, this terrible, wonderful realization in her mouth. "This feels like-"

A stutter. A strangled sound: you don't even catch a full breath before she's trying again.

"-like us."

Oh, Irene, her heart murmuring. Like something soft, like something hard - this burn, this hurt; Irene, in her prettiest, highest pitch - the way she speaks, the way she breathes, her voice dropping a decibel like some clandestine secret. Like sin, a honey-coated whisper in the space between you two.

"Irene," you say, and she melts like you’re inscribing it into her skin. DNA-deep, carved into her bones. She takes it like a baptism, something in it an invitation, a promise to hold her dear - and all at once, that smile grows, blooms.

It's intimate. It's affectionate. Fuck, it's true.

You break open her world with her own name, spoken like a sigh and sounding like sin.

There's this hollow, raspy sound she makes. Beneath the shallow of her clavicle. When your fingers push down, her nipples pressing back into your palm - there, as her breath hitches, as she quivers - right there; her cunt trembles around you, eyes wide-open, and you're just watching each other lose yourselves until Irene has to beg for another kiss, and the next, her fingers grasping at the collar of your shirt as she slips her tongue into the corner of your mouth. You wonder why she bothers with perfume; when all she is is vanilla and cinnamon, a saccharine so sweet with a touch of spice; she murmurs the words into your ear: I want your cum. Fill me up. Use me.

You think:

God, her body; god, the feeling. The sound.

Think, still:

Look, your hand. At her waist. At her pussy. Right here. The place where you're connected. Flesh, bone, a stretch of skin - the raw, obscene mess you make; when all it takes is a rock of your hips, a thrust upwards and in to dismantle everything that is her, everything that is Irene, until her entire world is centered around you-

It could be a chorus, a refrain:

Let go. Let me see. Drown me out. Kill the lights. You’ll take three hours over three weeks where you pretend she doesn’t exist. It's simple. It’s, it’s-

It’s this: the press of her to your skin. The nails to your scalp, down your neck. The splay of her legs across your thighs. The sweat - hers, yours - all of it together; your mouths meeting and meeting and meeting. Again and again.

God. It’s the entirety of you which you were hoping to avoid. You love this woman. You fucking worship her, all of her, every piece and the whole - that she's making that noise in the back of her throat, soft; that her breathing is rising, ragged; that you do this to her, just this.

It happens in a blink. You tell her to turn. Tell her to bend.

She ends up over the counter, gripping the sink, and you lift the fabric up to bare her ass and keep fucking her, deep, deeper. This sound is all you need, this whine that Irene makes, like you're reaching even her furthest, hottest spots - and then the push through her sopping cunt, how she spills around you and the slickness smears at the insides of her thighs; she clings and squeezes and fucks back against you so wildly, she doesn't even recognize her own name. It's the moment when she loses all sight: that's when you bury inside her, pull back her hair, wrap your hand around her throat, and she's under you, on you, body angling upwards like a flower to the sun. She cums so easily, shuddering into the pull of the climax; her pussy tight around the throbbing swell of your cock - the deep and penetrating pain of that desperate pleasure, like a flash-flood, an earthquake, oh, the grip, the warmth-

The moment stretches, just like that.

Her heels kicked off and toes arching to scuff at the cool, tiled floors; she's sensitive; she wants to play dirty. Your grip loosens, that same tender thing when her throat bobs, a little movement, swallowing for you. She knows exactly what she's asking for, exactly what this all means - Irene begs so prettily: "put it inside me."

There's a few seconds in which you feel nothing but the heat and the way she flinches, like a reaction that's programmed straight into all her nerve endings; the raw instinct; the shudder from deep within her core when your hot cum finally starts to spill thick and heavy inside her - it's been too long since your last proper fuck, and her moaning in the mirror is, how do you say: an incredible inspiration.

"Your pussy," you can hear yourself say, throat gravel-dry. "Is so fucking tight, baby, shit-"

And she's nodding, voice ripped to ribbons. All the words liturgical, a prayer. She's begging with them; yes, please, fuck, god yes, give me-

Her thighs press together, but her eyelids have begun to fall.

"Use me," she mutters. Her breathing begins to even out - the very real sign she's spent, near unconscious. "Want this, want you - so fucking bad."

And the evidence is there. Irene is falling apart beneath you, hands fisting and legs spreading even further as she's braced against the sink, bent, and presented. All of it makes a beautiful sight: the spread of her toned, ivory thighs; her ass pale and her folds so pink; how she's bent, waiting. Everything about her is an artistic consideration, designed, purposeful.

"Christ," is all you manage. The strain is evident in how your tone rasps.

Because your hips are still pumping Irene’s cunt with cum. Fingers wrapped around her tiny waist and pulling her ass flush against your hips for good measure. Again and again and again; no room for doubt: you've missed the warmth, the fullness. Soaked to the hilt as your length curves within her; she coos, and she loves it. She says it’s ruinous. She says it feels incredible. She says it around the shape of your name and with no hint that you should ever stop fucking her apart.

"Feels so fucking amazing." She's panting and she can't say another word for a while; it's a fact and the other is simple. "It's - so good."

She can't stop moaning.

You’re both breathless, watching her reflection in the glass, a study in motion: the soft bounce of her breasts in the mirror, the cords of muscle tensing in her abdomen, the small, pinkish mark blooming below her left ear. There's her lower lip, pinched between her teeth, her eyes flickering shut as her hair drapes across her naked shoulder and her skirt rolls higher on her waist. She doesn't try and muffle herself: you could hold her down, or even give her your fingers to bite down on - let her go a little wild as she wrestles against the instinct to stay silent, keep quiet. You plant an open-mouthed kiss against the side of her neck and look up, see her watching the movements, her dark eyes lidded, dazed, fucked-out-of-her-mind content as she smiles - lidded and lovely and impossibly knowing and rocking her hips into the moment.

"You are unbelievable, you know that?" you're murmuring, your palm on her shoulder. Pushing her flat. "Absolutely breathtaking."

You rub a thumb against her cunt, pull at the outer, exposed, sensitive parts as Irene's smile falters. You just keep pushing.

"Oh, baby," she whines, pleading for more. For one more press, another, anything: she begs you. "Your cum feels" - she swallows hard - "so fucking warm inside of me."

A shush, the palm soothingly pressing between her legs, and she bites her lips hard. Still trying.

So - you push it all deep into her cunt.

There’s this beat, this moment, this quiet - where her eyes pinch tight, voiceless, speechless.

And right after, Irene is whimpering: her body seizing and shaking and arching away from the viscous slickness that just keeps building with each and every drag; the cum left on your cock when you pull it out, leaving Irene on the verge of sobbing, collapsing on her stomach, trembling. Your fingers are covered in her cum. And this is how she likes it, stretched and sloppy. The shudder through her body is proof: all over her nerves, electrified. Irene’s shoulders go limp when she feels the push - then your knuckles, curling. The gentle touch, the pressure, the fingers spreading her slit.

She asks what else, anything, please, and hints at wanting more; so much more.

“Irene,” you say, smiling into the ends of her hair. Maybe, you consider. Maybe later, maybe when you're fucking her flat on your bed; your cock up her tight ass or your palm coming down heavy on the supple roundness. You let her fantasize a minute, imagining it's the roughness she wants to receive; maybe the hot, slow grind of you still inside her or the whisper at her neck and her toes digging into the sheets. The offer has her breath stuttering in the mirror.

Irene tells you it's unfair.

"Sorry," you say, and don't mean a word.

Another breath in, the lungs expanding against your palm, ribs slipping. In and out, a reminder.

"Don't be," Irene manages, exhaling a laugh.

She offers you her lips, you know she doesn't mind - and she kisses you. You sink down to the bathroom floor and she sits so easily in your lap, your mouths meeting over and over again. She strokes your spent cock. Your hands squeeze her thighs and you take her chest in your mouth. Wiping your own smear of wetness off her tummy, bringing them to her face, letting her nose knock into your palm and lick at the tips.

"Can you taste how sweet your cunt is? Baby," and your mouth is on hers, kissing all traces off her tongue-

There's so many things you could do, it's enough to keep you sated for ages. Her back is pressed against your chest, and you gently draw another spill of cum leaking out from her pussy; she shoves your digits into her mouth, sucks until her jaw clenches, your thumb rolling around the roof, tongue pressed right between.

"If someone sees us," she whispers, licks her lips, your fingers, moans, tilts her hips and grinds down a bit. "We'd be so screwed."

"Don't worry, I'd say," and you can't help the tease in it; your voice low and all grit, the heat and your heart rushing through every vein. "It'd all be my fault."

It's filthy: her sitting in the puddle of your cum, making it soak the thin material of her dress; your heavy spill leaking from her cunt and soaking your slacks as the mess seeps further and further down your pants and her ass-

"We are such a disaster." She says it wistfully. "You and me, like this. A total fucking disaster."

(With your clothes torn open, hair a disaster, the imprints of your lips and fingertips all over her, she means. If it was anybody but the two of you: oh, how ridiculous it would seem. But the sheer audacity of the possibility has her looking at the cum glistening on her thighs. Then looking back to you, her dark-brown eyes, brighter than stars, searching the depth of the hold in yours, your arms wrapped around her.

Maybe she just wants to have this. For as long as you're giving it to her.)

You can feel yourself falling so deeply into her, the pull. The draw. It feels a lot like being lost. Like, there's something about loving her. The night's long and she's pressed so closely, fitting like something just perfect, and the way her hands find your ribs is the nicest, fondest ache. You only break out of the haze once the footfalls of her heels begin to echo behind you. The bass fades as you both make a run for the exit. It gets harder not to laugh - your giggling voices slipping between you. You have her nose pressed to the dip of your collarbone, kisses dropping in her hair, her lips curved into a smile every time your thumb does another circle - that place right below her hip, or right there behind her ear.

"Take me somewhere," she sighs. Her body pressed against yours, her cheek snuggling against you.

"Any suggestions?"

She shrugs, and the elevator chimes. "I wanna sit with you."

When she leans forward, just the faintest movement, her mouth upturning in the smallest smile. Her eyes flit away, and her brow wrinkles and lifts, like this: here. You could swear, to god, or the devil: there isn’t an ounce of light inside you that doesn't live at her mercy.

The clock is ticking down into the small hours. The night at its calmest, darkest, most wicked stillness. You ask her again, this time, just for clarity, a bit of guidance. "Somewhere we can go? If you have nowhere in mind, we could head back if-"

"No." Irene shakes her head. "Take me anywhere but home."

You're drunk. Irene's a little worse off. Her heel snaps. The usual grace, the poise, her ease, that’s all but vanished. It's just her: Irene. Hair windswept and the edge of her nose nipped by the chill, the moonlight.

She’s so fucking beautiful.

The night can hear her laughter in the air; you have her hands clasped around your middle, legs hoisted over your elbows. You’re carrying all fifty kilos of her across the pavement; the streets are quiet and the city's yours. Her dress bunches, and her voice is in your ear, a kiss peppered to the back of your hair. The both of you collapse and - ow, it's the crash onto concrete, a scrape and a bruise and a story to piece together tomorrow. Is this from the tumble? the sex? I don't know, Irene will say, sealing a band-aid over the red, the swell. Maybe this, maybe that. It all happened. The physical marks, the chemical thrill - the proof of life, a permanence, tethered.

"Let me, Irene," you're insisting, half-joking, pulling at the broken heel and tossing it a mile behind you. And like it's instinct, you just can't - can't help yourself. "Your legs are gorgeous, but, y'know. I’d hate to see you get hurt."

You run your palm down her calf and steal the other shoe. It gets tossed in the same direction, over her whine. "Babe."

Irene pouts, still too lovely, still too fucking sweet.

She doesn't laugh, or blush, or try to argue. Instead, she sweeps your hair back, curls her fist at the nape of your neck, and suddenly you're staring, eyes locked and wanting. Irene leans in, her weight settling against your forearms, and gives you a look; just long enough and tender and dreamy and calm enough to have the ache of your heart match its rhythm with her own.

"What the fuck," and her smile cracks open as the words struggle in her chest; her hand goes down your arm and strokes a featherlight finger to the edge of your jaw. "Please don't throw away a woman's shoes without permission."

She hiccups. Sways.

You kiss her. And kiss her, and kiss her. Irene smiles right against your mouth.

"Stay right here," she says. "Go get my fucking shoes, but stay right here with me."

Look, it feels so good, not worrying where she is at night.

"I thought," she's whispering as you cross into a twenty four-hour minimart, Irene on one arm and both her heels in the other - a pack of wet wipes in your hand - and then her pausing, stopping; this brief flutter of something - she says, "I used to think about how this would all eventually fall apart."

Irene leans forward and gives her weight onto you, hand playing around with the sleeves at your elbow.

"I used to wonder which one of us it would be," and the cashier is ringing up your purchases: a bottle of water, a cold compress, baby wipes and neosporin. The ice cream Irene's insisted you treat her for. She runs a hand up the back of your hair and smiles when you meet her eyes again, "which of us would drop the other, you know, first."

"The thought still come up?" you say, sliding a bill onto the counter and offering a quiet "keep the change."

"Yeah, sometimes. Or I mean I'd be watching you, sometimes, I guess." She smiles at your reaction, bumping your shoulder. "That’s the look."

You're walking out to the parking lot and you're pressing a soft kiss against her brow, waiting, patiently; because you always do, waiting. "Do I need to ask?"

Her grin, close-mouthed and gentle, a tinge of fondness, of humor: "you're going to ask either way."

"Hm," you say, popping the lid off the ice cream, breaking off the flimsy paper seal of the container. She's in the pocket of your blazer, Irene's fingers weaving in between yours, her hand reaching for a bite and grinning all the while.

It's four-thirty AM and the early hours will catch up to you, but. It's this: the yellow-orange streetlight above the two of you and her bare feet dangling off a concrete half-wall. In a white cocktail dress and sitting, you and her, atop a parking barrier. You're here, together, watching the skies lighten in the east - there, where the road will split to lead towards her place. Towards your own.

"There's no way," she says, wiping the corner of her lips with her pinky and then making a face. "For us to be together and not mess this up, eventually, somehow." She steals the carton and balances it between her knees. "There's no way to save this."

"Probably not."

Her mouth curls. There, and gone; there again.

"Doesn't that scare you?"

Your stomach is a riot of twists and nerves and the base of your throat is tight, like a swelling.

"It does." You lick your lips, can't think. "A bit, sometimes." You look at her - her profile, her silhouette, the messy, knotted ponytail, the wisping hairs beneath her temple. The press of her lips, how the gloss rubs off onto her knuckles, staining. "But then I see you - and I can't imagine how I'd even pull a 'it's not you, it's me,' convincingly."

Her throat clicks, and she leans her head against yours, and you're forgetting everything else.

You both stop. Sharing a bite. Sharing the silence.

There, and gone.

"Hey," she breathes out - and you can't explain her expression, how her brows knit together; she squeezes your hand, a tremor, and the corner of her lips pulls upwards, almost apologetic; sad, or thoughtful. "This ice cream is so fucking freezer-burnt."

"It’s not great."

You watch her nose twitch like she's holding back a sneeze, or a sniffle. She laughs instead and leans against the warmth of you; the smell of her, your bodies touching.

"I love it," you hear her say, and she doesn't give the container back.

Irene falls asleep in the backseat of a cab as the sun rises, your blazer draped over her chest; she murmurs your name and pulls closer, seeking warmth. The traffic thins as the roads lead to where she'll disappear, and you find yourself dreading it already.

In a day, maybe two. It’s funny. You could end up hating each other. You might have to force a pause, or take a break, or even step back from her entirely. That’s how it goes. It's the hardship, it’s living - it’s the knowing that she has a lease on life that will end, will expire, a loan where all her days are slowly counting down; a timer you recognize the injustice that it might someday read zero.

Not to get too far ahead of yourself, or to project some awful ending where one isn’t likely: but when Irene and you are like this, soft, sleepy, curled into each other; her hand at the small of your back, resting; this close, and closer. Your heart aches with an ambiguous type of feeling, indescribable-

Irene shivers a breath and presses her face into your shirt; and like a revelation: you fall further.

"Where do I take her, sir," the cab driver asks, and your eyes turn, watching her chest rise and fall, steady, easy; as her grip grows looser and her cheek presses onto the leather seats.

She's too gorgeous, too pretty in slumber, in sleep, the innocence the most dangerous thing; you fix these wispy tendrils of hair back behind her ear and press a hand to her temple, stroke the line of her jaw, the bow of her lip. How soft, she's always the sweetest sight - with her head resting, her mouth falling slack, eyelashes fanned out over the fullness of her cheeks, and all of her like this, all her darkness tucked away: you think about all those times you've traced her from across a room, across a city; if there was anyone else you'd rather wake up beside, in your bed and beside the pillow; someone who doesn't pick your fights and your silences and loves them in spite of, despite everything. Who lets the fights burn white hot until it leaves you both splayed raw and exhausted, in her, on you-

Someone who fits so, so perfectly with the grooves and the curves, who completes you.

"Just drive," you murmur, looking away, blinking away. "I'm not gonna remember."

You're thinking about a book you'd once read, an idea. The world of difference, the fact in its finer detail; all the myriad iterations of 'loving' and 'missing' and 'want': the imperceptible shifts between being the absence of something and feeling it, tasting it, taking it, drowning it and holding it in your palms, seeing it every time you turn, breathing, living: wanting to never let her go-

"You alright back there, bud?" the driver asks. The tone: the slow and steady understanding, his age, how he watches you, the soft shake in your voice, the gentleness with which you hold your gaze - he knows. A blind man could read what your heart’s written on your sleeve. "Late nights are a killer," he says, a chuckle, before shaking his head, muttering, "but mornings even more."

There are a few more hours left. Maybe more, maybe less, of not worrying, and not caring. The thing about loving Irene is this: her touch, the press and the tugging and pulling; her body and her heart; she can be anyone, the best friend, the boss, the mistress, the princess. The pet. And you would be remiss, she says, not to remember: you, too, can be just anybody. So long as it’s you, I always come running.

It's the last time you kiss her, and that's an okay thing; you pull off the side of the street to brush your hand up to her temple, and when Irene opens her eyes to you, her lashes fluttering against the swell of your cheeks; her hair in soft strands over her forehead and framing her face like this. This vision of her is for you, all yours, all the little things.

"I’ll see you soon," Irene says, sleepily, and you know that you will.

The nook she occupies in your head by now, is so well-established.

You can't remember when it began. Not like there was a sign, a hint, or a clue. Just, her. And her lips and her tongue and her touch, all this reckless abandon - like everything else, there had to be a leap.

Even with all the lights burning out and the moon hidden in clouds and the nights and days unraveling around you - in those early days, the press of her shoulders or the palms of her hands would always send the worst kind of butterflies through you, like everything else - just her, the sway and the tipsy, the turn and the look she'd have before she would touch the pad of her thumb to your cheek and drag her nail down the curve of your smile.

(It had felt - and you're no longer in it - but it had felt so frighteningly fast.

Weeks, she had told you once. I fell for you in weeks. Months? Years? Fuck, no time at all.)

"Hey," Irene says in the not-so-distant present. She's sitting across the kitchenette - knees under her, bare feet pointed to the window, and the steam rises from her tea.

"Mornin'," you mutter sleepily. Stretching, craning your neck and arching your shoulders and ignoring the pop in your lower back, the strain at your ankles. Irene tilts her chin up and blows through the steam. There's an air of self-sufficiency, a state of mind she seems to always have, as if, the ability to ignore her vulnerability is a muscle she could constantly flex, expand, train herself to avoid - and all you're noticing is how that small movement has her shifting and curling over the cup, trying to keep warm. Her hair is pulled high in a knot and held up by an elastic, her baggy sweats loose and rolled twice over, the camisole low, a thin strap sliding off her shoulder.

"When'd you-"

"Had to wake up earlier today." She blinks, her legs slipping open, bending.

"Any chance-"

"No." And Irene snorts. The teasing pull of her lips has your stomach twisting a little more: "you know me."

That you do; the lazy Sunday, the slight pull in the center of her lower lip as she purses it. Irene, with her hair messy-perfect and that stupid fucking smile, so careless, and the joke-flirt she's doing; she knows just what she's doing and, yeah, god. You still have a weak-spot for her and it's so big; the twist in the base of your throat. Your morning wood rising. You’re familiar with this: the deep ache.

"You know," you say instead, blinking through the heaviness of your lashes and scratching a thumb against the line of your jaw. "A girl could walk in and mistake this for an affair."

"Girls love me." She turns the cup around in her grip and grins again, makes sure that the image stays locked. "Or," and Irene holds up the fingers, counts on two. "I've had two affairs in my life. One is basically a distant memory-"

"The other?"

Her teeth press down on her lip again. "How am I doing so far?"

"Honesty and self-disclosure in the kitchen, at eight in the morning? Irene, you're really outdoing yourself."

She lifts a brow, then brings the mug to her mouth - like a second-rate cigarette and a scalding-hot burn. "If you did bring a girl here," she says after a while. And, smiling: "she'd see me sitting here, incriminatingly pretty. I mean, she'd probably cry. Screaming fits, a fist fight. Then the waterworks - oh, he was my first! I loved him! He took my flower - ow, don't touch me, I think I might faint-"

"I doubt it."

"Ooo," Irene sing-songs, turning and crossing the space to sit on the armrest beside you. The sway of her body's so obvious. You've got enough room to pull her onto your lap, but you keep your hands to yourself. She runs the tips of her nails over your shirt, just above the buttons and across the sleeves. "Hun, I bet she'd kill you. It'd be very bloody, but romantic. Sad, but inspiring in a mundane sort of way - something you've only heard in mystery novels. Riveting, sordid stuff. Could fill your entire inbox. I mean, as they say in Chicago: he had it coming."

"Nah," you decide, after a yawn. "Too dramatic."

"Not at all," she scoffs, peering at you over the tops of her glasses. "The man she loved was a heartless betrayer."

"Can I ask why my imaginary girlfriend always comes across like some cliché young ingénue? You seem to have a lot of opinions about this girl."

"What, the girl next door, a little smart, but neglects her intuition?" She flips the bun at the back of her hair. "All wide-eyes, a ribbon in her hair, a flower-child who's seen too many Wes Anderson movies." She sticks her tongue into her cheek. "Never once stops thinking about the bad boy."

"If you want to get technical, all my girlfriends have been older than me."

"Whoops," she says flatly, hand falling to her collarbone, "spoke too soon. Got you wrong. No need to panic. I'm sure you, a man, are not drawn to some young thing, easily swept up in a passion. Simply, if nothing else, for the sweet naivete. Those hushed little moans and then, the screams. She would tell you it hurts - and on the same note, she’d be begging you for more - the little slut. God, she'd still be so, so nice and soft and quiet. Ready to be anything for-"

"And if you're the girl?" You stand up and grab her wrist. "What then?"

She pauses, considering this new development.

"You do not treat me very well." Irene pushes the bridge of her glasses back up the curve of her nose. "No candle-lit dinners or grand, public gestures." She twists a curl of black hair around her finger. "Definitely not a confession on bended knee - oh, no, never, never - you'll not have to stoop to that. Because you are, in fact, quite terrible at it. I don't think I'd have a single opportunity to pine pathetically, waiting. And maybe you're a bad kisser, actually," she concludes.

You tsk, scandalized. "You are really not cut out to be the ingénue at all."

Irene laughs, softly, reaching out to tug gently at a tuft of your hair. She smiles up at you - and it's so easy for her, somehow. So graceful. "Shall I fix that for you?"

"Do not fall for me, sweetheart."

"I will try to resist the urge." She tilts her chin and presses a finger to her lips. "Kiss, first."

You lean forward, let your nose bump her temple, her hairline. "Glasses, first."

"Whiner," she murmurs. She yanks, gently. Tugs and pulls, and presses the pad of her finger at the sharp cut of your jaw - her gaze half-lidded and slow as she holds yours. Like she's reminding herself, something she can't forget - what it feels like, exactly. A reminder. You can only keep your eyes on the slide of her jaw. "Gonna keep you like this forever."

"Love," you find yourself whispering. Sometimes you wait just so you can relive that first kiss. Irene swallows. "What a beautiful temptation."

You imagine, again, if it had all really been by the book:

Three dates and a letter of recommendation. Making her pay for half, instead of making her feel guilty about paying at all, which for the life of you, you can't fucking figure out: how to treat a woman. Chivalry in modern times: a fucking travesty, truly. She'd lure you to her apartment, or you'd do the same to her - just after the first, you know, the obligatory. The getting to know her, except you'd end up skipping the post-dinner steps of being a gentleman, which would leave the night open-ended, and you wouldn't give it much thought until the kiss against her door is so fucking filthy it makes you reconsider everything and everyone, you know, the morality of fucking someone more than once in a day.

You'd have hit all the milestones, she'd have to lead you to bed, and you'd play all her favorite movies as she lays across your chest and shows you what she likes to do best: finger herself, or something. And you'd talk about it, afterward, you'd acknowledge it - because this should be what dating is, right? This should’ve been the next few months of your life. Running that same exact pattern, knowing each other so well you can tell what sex will be like before it even happens, anticipating exactly what kind of text you'll get the next day - the call the following night, the feel of her hands on you in all the right places. The lazy moans, her lipstick imprints on your skin, the smile at the corner of her mouth. Nothing like putting your own fucking hand in her pants and rubbing a few hasty circles until her slick gathers around her knees and she can't walk for a whole day.

Things fall into place, they fill gaps, the idea must be mutual at some point - mutual attraction, mutual enjoyment-

How it is Irene got to spending five, six nights a week at your place is beyond you. Not because you're worried about what people will say. You're not. It's just - weird, to not know what you've done to make this last so long.

Are there rules to loving someone? Is there a checklist, a script - what praxis will keep things in place: comfortable. Last you checked, you have no fucking idea how to treat someone like she deserves. To treasure and cherish, hold her tight but never cage - what qualifies, huh?

"Irene," you say, one day - as you're both brushing your teeth. Because really, what does.

She looks at you like she's bored.

"Forget it," you reply, laughing to yourself and leaning down to rinse your mouth. "Idiot."

"Wait, no," she says, stopping mid-brush, her toothbrush bouncing obscenely in her mouth. "What?"

"I said forget it," you tease, and of course, the glint in her eyes is a warning if you ever saw one - but who would you be, then, if you didn't lean in close and tell her, ever so gentle. The three words could be: not a clue, or, you're so petty, or, simply, I adore you and she’d let that one lay to rest.

You choose them a little differently, and Irene's face lights up like she hasn't known all this time.

A foamy spill of toothpaste leaks down her chin. "Th'a m'eh?" She's a mess, wide eyed and dripping and already reaching to swat you on the shoulder, disbelieving. "You can't just-" and her face scrunches, this exaggerated - ugh! - before she hides it in her hands.

Oh, you love her, and it feels so good, not pretending.

"Again. Say it again. I didn’t even hear you." She knocks her knee against yours, grinning behind her palms, wide and genuinely - happy. "Like, have some decorum."

Laughing - so hard you can't breathe - you shake your head and curl your fingers tenderly around her wrists, pull her hands from her face. "You are so greedy," you attempt between breaths, letting yourself press against the softness of her palms, her wrists, the pads of her fingertips - wanting to be a poet, she is a masterpiece - and tell her properly.

a/n: thanks for reading, it's always unbelievable to me anyone ever finishes these fics. This one's a very belated 'thank you' present for @yieldtotemptation. I'm like way late, but thanks for everything.

#irene smut #irene #red velvet irene smut #red velvet smut #red velvet irene #bae joohyun #kpop smut #kpop fanfic

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tacticaldiary · 8 months

Text

A Fighting Chance

Pairing: Simon 'Ghost' Riley x Reader

Genre: Hurt/Comfort

"When was the last time you kissed me and meant it?" Her voice drops into something akin to defeat.

And Simon...Simon feels like the rug's been pulled from under his feet.

Part 2, Masterlist,

"What're those?"

"Papers."

Ghost pauses halfway through opening the document, glancing up at the curtness of her voice. "Papers? She doesn't meet his eyes, gaze fixed on the table of the little booth they're sitting in.

The ice in her drink is long gone, watering down her coffee into something that tastes as bitter as her heart.

It had taken months for her to finally make this decision. Days of talking with her lawyer, crying alone at night and coming to the gruelling acceptance that this was for the best. It was best for both of them.

There's not many things that unsettle Simon. He's had blood stain his hands; his own, his comrades, and his enemies. Had almost any injury you could think of marring his skin, been prodded and ripped into, been the one on the opposite end of the knife.

But as he slides out the documents, turns them over, Simon's never felt more apprehensive.

He stills, reading the first few lines, clenching his jaw. "What is this?"

"I want a divorce."

And something in him crumbles at her defeated tone. Like she's already decided. Like he doesn't even have a chance to ask why or talk it through.

"No." He says tightly, putting them down and crossing his arms.

Her gaze shoots to his. "You can't just say that."

"I did. I won't sign them."

"I want this." She argues, and Simon swallows back the lump in his throat at how utterly tired she looks.

"I don't."

She's the light of his life, the one good, untouched piece of joy he gets to see. Something other than the bloodshed and violence he lives in.

"Simon," She says, shoulders sagging forward. "I can't do this anymore."

"This isn't the solution, love." He feels like his skin is crawling, the beginnings of unfamiliar panic clawing at his chest when she doesn't react to the pet name.

Doesn't smile, doesn't flush that beautiful red, doesn't squirm.

When she doesn't respond again, tight-lipped and clammed up and so determined to not look at him, he asks the question burning a hole through his tongue.

"Why?"

Deep down he knows. Knew this was coming but that part of him is buried under the thudding of his heart, and the rush of blood in his ears. Everything feels deathly still and moving too fast at the same time.

"Why?" She repeats, something in her stirring at the question. Her brow furrows and she switches from a cautious indifference to disbelief and frustration quicker than Simon can process. "Are you serious?" She huffs out an incredulous laugh. "You're away for months at a time and I'm supposed to what? Wait for you at our doorstep and wag my tail all happy when you finally come back to me?" Her grip tightens on her drink.

"Even when you are home, it's never about us. Never about me and you. You lock yourself in your study with your work, don't talk to me unless you come out for dinner or lunch. When was the last time we went out?" She demands. "When was the last time we went on a date? The last time we slept at the same time in the same bed?"

Simon clenches his jaw but says nothing, at a loss for words. It only encourages her to keep going, spewing thoughts that have been boiling over for the past few years.

"You barely look at me when we're home, I had to drag you out of the house to get here! You left halfway through our anniversary dinner last year because work called you in. Sometimes...sometimes I feel like you're only with me because it's easier than leaving and starting over, and that fucking hurts. It hurts when you can't bear to spend five minutes with me away from work. I've been telling you this for ages but you just...you don't listen to me." She leans forward, drink completely forgotten and hits the final nail in the coffin.

"When was the last time you kissed me and meant it?" Her voice drops into something akin to defeat.

And Simon...Simon feels like the rug's been pulled from under his feet.

"I never even know if you're coming home to me." Her voice cracks, and she hugs her middle, taking a deep breath to steady herself. "So yes, Simon, I want to separate. I'm not happy, not like I was when I met you." A sheen of tears she refuses to let fall.

"You can focus on work like you love to, and I can...I can move on."

It was so good when they started out. She found him endearing, dry humour and brooding and all. It was special, those first few years, and she'll always care about him but this...this waiting, this hurting, laying in bed at night alone and cold and crying...it wasn't right. It wasn't what she wanted and she wouldn't force Simon to want it when he clearly didn't want to.

"Fucking hell, I love you." Simon says quickly, stumbling over what to say. He reaches out for her hand on the table, but she pulls it away before he can grab it. It stings more than he can convey, makes the reality crashes down onto him.

He's about to lose her.

Because he couldn't fucking bear to pull himself out of being 'Ghost'.

It was always a rough couple of weeks during his leave. The adjustment to civilian life was a slow one for him, but that's not really an excuse at all.

"I don't think you do."

Simon blinks at her like she's slapped him. "You...you don't think so?" He repeats, running a hand through his hair. She nods, one nod, quick and so sure that it makes his chest ache.

Fuck. He's absolutely messed up.

"Everything's finalised on my end." She says. "You just need to sign them." Her voice is soft, almost like she's coaxing him.

If there's one thing he knows, it's that he's not touching those fucking papers. He's not losing someone he loves again.

"I'll take time off." He says, the intensity of his gaze makes a shiver run down her spine. "We can work through it, yeah? You can't spring this on me and not give me a chance to protest."

She shakes her head, "You're only taking time off because I'm upset." She tries to explain. "What do you think is going to happen? We spend a month together doing what we used to, and when everything's a little more stable you leave again. Distance yourself. Shut me out. Then we're back to square one."

"Won't happen." He says like he hasn't been doing it for the past few years already. "You...I can't lose you, darling." He leans forward. "Let me make it better. Give me a few months-"

"Simon-"

"A week."

"A week?" Her eyes widen. "A week to...what, prove that you'll change?"

"One week."

She worries her lip between her teeth, considering. One week wasn't a long time, but hope was dangerous in a situation like this.

"I'm not letting you go over something like this." Simon says. "I can't."

"This isn't about you." She crosses her arms. "You really think you can turn just...reverse the past few years in a week?" Maybe it's foolish of her to want him to say yes, to fight for her and realise that she's been hurting, but goddamn doesn't a small part of her scream at him to do it anyway.

"Not trying to reverse it." He folds his arms, and she can see the tense line of his shoulders as he takes in the situation, gears turning in his head as he plans how he's going to work his way out of a situation so precious and daunting as this.

Part of him didn't think it would ever come to this. Yes, he can be cold and aloof but Simon thought she knew that he loved her through it all. No matter what.

When was the last time you kissed me and meant it?

Fuck if that doesn't tear through his chest more painfully than any caliber bullet ever could.

He takes her in quietly for a moment.

The woman he fell in love with. The person that gave him a reason to keep going, a motive to feel anything other than the cold efficientness of loading a gun and firing. Soft touches and warm smiles, something so at odds with the rough life he's used to.

Sitting there in front of him, she looks more beautiful than he remembers, and it only proves to make his stomach sink like a stone at the notion of seeding any doubt about his feelings in her heart.

A right fucking bastard he was for it.

"I'm sorry." He breathes out, much softer than the gruff voice he's been using with her. "I'll do better. Just give me a chance, yeah?"

For one horrible moment, Simon thinks she'll decline. That she'll slide over the papers again and demand he sign them.

But she considers his words for a moment before nodding once.

And it's all he needs.

A fighting chance.

Reblog, Like and Comment!

Part 2

(11/10/2023)

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lxkeee · 4 months

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Hi, could I request a Lucifer morningstar x darkness demon overlord reader? She lurks in the shadows like a boogeyman, she acts like morticia adams from the adams family, how would he meet or act around the gothic queen👁👁✨

LUCIFER X OVERLORD! FEM! READER

Part two

Lucifer was just wandering around hell, unknowingly entering a territory of an overlord.

He doesn't know okay? It's just a forest of dead wilted trees with ominous aura.

His first instinct is to investigate.

This is his first time coming here, he only discovered this area after flying by to return to the palace.

Lucifer was walking around the dense forest, with his guard up.

The forest was quiet. A little too quiet.

He isn't afraid, unfortunately. He knows he can kill any demon who would try to mess with him.

Crack. A twig snapped

His head whipped to the direction of the noise, “Who goes there? Show yourself!” he threatens, wings in full display.

Shadows moving around him and finally stopping in front of him, morphing into a figure.

Lucifer expected a lot of things, but this.

A very tall and gorgeous woman, large deer antlers on her head. Sultry eyes and a smirk on her face.

Oh fuck, she's beautiful. Dangerous. He can sense the power she has.

“Good evening your highness, I didn't expect to see you here wandering around my home.” the woman says with a chuckle, making the man become a little flustered.

“Your home...?” he asked hesitantly and the woman nodded.

“Yes, this is my home or rather my territory. My home is somewhere around here. I just sensed a presence around these grounds and decided to check. I didn't expect to see the king of hell to be here.”

“M-my apologies, my lady. I simply didn't know.” he stammers a bit. Ah, calm yourself Lucifer. You're more powerful so you shouldn't be intimidated, he says to himself internally.

“It is alright, if you don't mind. Do you want to join me for a cup of tea? I just so happen to have finished brewing some.”

Lucifer is cautious around sinners, especially her. He doesn't know why his heart is palpitating this much. The best reason he got is fear loud incorrect buzzer noise

“I don't want to intrud—”

“Nonsense! You're not intruding.”

“But—”

“Do not fret, I am not going to hurt you. I should be the scared one as you are much more powerful than me. I am sure you can obliterate my existence with a flick of your finger.” the woman laughs softly, a kind of laugh that reminds him of the books he's read. The kind of laugh that draws you in.

“How about this, how about we get acquainted with each other? So that you'll be more comfortable?”

Lucifer's eyes narrowed, “Why are you so insistent?”

“Well, I just love making friends and you my dear seem to be an interesting character that I don't mind befriending.”

Lucifer rolls his eyes but eventually nodded, “Fine, My name is Lucifer Morningstar.”

“Wonderful, then... It's a pleasure to meet you Mr. Lucifer, my name is [y/n]” She says before gently holding his hand and placing a small kiss on his knuckles.

With a smirk on her face as her eyes looked at him as she did so.

Lucifer's cheeks reddened, quickly snatching his hand away from the demoness.

“So, about that tea?”

Lucifer is beginning to see a pattern.

A type even.

It's been a few months since he's met the deer demoness.

Surprisingly he managed to get along with her, despite her... Rather questionable actions.

He often visits her mansion at the middle of the forest where he met her or the other way around.

She often surprises him by popping out of the shadows with her presence concealed.

She's playful, mysterious, dangerous, beautiful.

And tall.

He likes his women tall okay?

And he likes them a little deranged.

Anyways.

She keeps teasing him.

Just like the other day, he came to visit at the wrong time and she forced him to help her get dressed.

It was inappropriate! She only asked him to zip the zipper of her dress.

Poor guy was blushing.

She didn't make fun of his obsession with rubber ducks.

She even made ducks out of shadows and made it swim around his room and of course, he made one too with his powers.

The shadows and gold dust ducks swimming around the room and in the air.

It was... Cute...

Lucifer has gotten to know the woman better too, he has gotten the chance to see many sides of her.

Lucifer isn't stupid, he can tell he's developing feelings for her.

He's afraid, he's afraid of getting hurt again or hurting her.

He has issues he needed to fix first.

Though, he is slightly a flustered mess around the woman.

Can you blame him? She calls him endearing nicknames! She calls him sweetheart and it just makes his heart flutter.

He is cautious around her not because he's afraid of her but because he fears his feelings for her would accidentally be known.

And she just appears out of nowhere!

It took awhile for him to sort his emotions and he thinks he is finally ready to confess.

But first, Lucifer needs to find hints if she feels the same way.

“Thanks for the coffee, [y/n]. It tastes amazing as always.” Lucifer says, admiring the duck shaped cream that is floating on his coffee.

“It is a pleasure, sweetheart. Drink to your heart's content. I know you've been stressed lately.” She says with a gentle voice.

“I have a question.” he started, already planning a discreet way to ask her.

“Hmm? Go ahead.”

“What if let's say... You have a close friend and you've only known him for a couple of months but they fell in love with you and now they're planning to confess to you? Would you date him?”

Don't mind him guys, he's trying his best.

[y/n] tilts her head slightly, confused before giggling.

She's not stupid but she kinda wants to tease him.

“Depending on who this friend is.”

“Just answer.” he deadpans.

“Yes, would you confess though?” she asked as she leans forward to reach him across the table, holding his chin. Lips just a few inches away from each other.

Lucifer.exe has stopped working.

“Y-yes...” he stammers, beginning to feel shy as his cheeks heat up.

“Do you want a kiss?” she asked teasingly.

“Please...?”

“Good boy.” she says before finally pressing her lips against his.

It was the most addicting kiss he ever experienced.

“I like you.”

“I like me too.”

“[y/n]!”

“I am just joking, I like you too.”

#lxkeee hazbin hotel masterlist #hazbin hotel #lucifer #lucifer hazbin hotel #lucifer morningstar x reader #lucifer magne #hazbin hotel x reader #lxkeee answers #lucifer morningstar

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lotus-n-l0ve · 7 months

Text

CRIMSON LOVE OF THE CURSED KING

— Ryomen Sukuna x Female Reader

She Is A Wild Flower In A Rose Field.

*⁠.⁠✧ SYNOPSIS : When the selfish merchant, F/N L/N, sacrifices his illegitimate daughter to the King of Curses for his own desires. Y/N starts to work for Sukuna. With every passing day they come closer, with every late night meetings, a feeling develops in their heart.

*⁠.⁠✧ WARNINGS & TAGS : True form!Ryomen Sukuna, historical au, husband!Sukuna, wife!reader, sacrificed!reader, master-servant au, cursing, offering au, use of y/n, kissing, blowjob, pet names, a lot of questions, misunderstanding, ooc!Sukuna, not proofread, 6.2k words.

*⁠.⁠✧ — NAVIGATION // JUJUTSU KAISEN MASTERLIST

➥ Heart Divider's by @cafekitsune

DO NOT PRESS [READ MORE] IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE. MINORS DNI, IF YOU DO THEN IT'S YOUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY.

Amusement is what Sukuna felt as he watched your adorable little figure sneak into the garden like a thief, looking left and right like a cautious cat who has stolen its favourite fish. Sukuna sat by the window on the second floor, blowing from the kiseru.

You still remained a mystery to the King of curses even after months of being here. Sukuna was known for wrecking havoc and destroying lands with a flip of his fingers. Kings and people from far away shiver in fear, when the monster will come for their neck next.

The kings and nobel heads offered him mountains of wealth and copious amounts of women. Sukuna never denied them but what he did with all that wealth or women was never known. To your misfortune or luck, your father, the infamous marchant, offered you, the illegitimate daughter, as the king's concubine. Then it was up to Ryomen Sukuna whether he would make you his queen or just another maid.

You were escorted to the estate in a carriage and then inside the shrine by none other than Uraume themselves. You didn't see nor hear from the king at the beginning of your stay here. Though you were made familiar with the other sacrificed maidens. Their fate was just like yours, sacrificed to the curse by their kings, fathers or even husbands, just to save their own life.

Every one of them was different from others. Some quivered when they even heard the name of their lord, while some were filled with rage for him. On the other hand some had developed the emotion called love for him. You waited everyday for him to decide your fate. It's not like you could run away from here. The estate was surrounded by dangerous curses who would kill you without a second thought.

Your days are spent like any other there. Waking up in the morning, then doing whatever work Uraume assigned you to. You were not still allowed to go outside yet so grocery shopping was not one of them. By the time the sun went down and the moon shone in the dark sky, most of you were permitted to go back to your own room. Only a few remain as per their schedule. You honestly like how your days were going but encountering Sukuna was inevitable.

It was three weeks after that you first came across the man, sitting by the inside pond. His back leaning on a round pillow. One hand held a book while the other had the wooden kiseru. The moonlight blessed down on him. Your feet stopped at the door. As he lifted his upper pair of eyes from the book, yours snapped down to your feet.

"I didn't know you would be here at this time, Master Sukuna. I'll take my leave." You bow down and turn to leave only to come to a halt when a deep voice sounded from behind.

"Stop right there." Sukuna watched as you paused before eventually turning around to face him. Sukuna beckoned you to come closer with two fingers, "Come here."

You walked up to him idly. Sukuna observed you from top to bottom. Just because it didn't seem like it doesn't mean that Sukuna doesn't know what goes on his property. He knew one and every person who worked for him. You were a new face he hadn't seen here before.

You stopped two hands length away from Sukuna, "You needed something, Master Sukuna?"

He hummed, pointing to the low table with his eyes, "Tidy up the table."

You tidied up the thin night kimono you hand on and sat down beside the table. You started with organising the books. Sukuna blew on the kiseru.

"You are new here." It was more of a statement than a question. His upper pair of eyes focused on the inked book but the stare lower pair weighted heavy on you.

You nodded your head, "Yes, Master Sukuna. I was brought here two weeks ago ………as an offering."

Offering huh? More like a sacrificed goat.

Sukuna scoffed inside. Of course this was not new. People of high status kept throwing slaves under Sukuna's feet like they meant nothing. More than half of his servants consisted of those offerings. Now Sukuna himself was not a gentleman, in fact he was far from being a gentleman but even he sometimes felt for their pathetic life. Sukuna would have rather died than being sacrificed for their selfish desires.

"Is that so? So, who were you offered by?"

You could hear the mocking tone lingering under his breath. If he tried to hide that, he did a terrible job but you doubt he was trying to hide it. You could not help but snort as you thought about the one who was behind all this.

"It was my father, Master Sukuna. He's a merchant from the West."

Sukuna saw no traces of sorrow in your expression as you talked about your father. As the matter of fact, your face was numb as if you don't care about him or your circumstances at all.

"You don't seem very upset with your situation." Sukuna carefully closed the book and dropped it in his lap, now just holding the kiseru. His all focus shifted on you and it made you feel a little jittery.

You stacked all the books away thinking to yourself, upset? You were far from that. Rather, you were liking your days here than you ever did at your father's house. Here, no one bore any hatred for you for your background. Your father wasn't here to remind you how much he despised you. Neither was his wife, who felt so jealous of her husband's affairs that she felt the need to torture you at every point of your life. Nor were your half siblings here who like their parents never hesitate to hurt you whether verbally or physically.

Others would call you crazy that you would rather work the vicious monster than your family but the uncountable faded marks littering on your body agreed with you.

You dared to raise your eyes to meet his', "I have no reason to be upset, Master Sukuna." With a small but content smile you put the brushes back in their place, "I am done. Now, may I go back to my chamber, Master Sukuna?"

"Hmm? Yes, you are dismissed." Sukuna waved you away.

You bow down one last time before leaving the room. Sukuna watched as you disappeared into the dark. Usually when people are brought here, they weep and sulk around. It takes them months to get over their pitiful state. And here you were, smiling as if nothing had happened in just two weeks. Nothing could be hidden from the King of curses but he could not figure out the void in your eyes. Too bad, Sukuna loved a worthy challenge.

After that night meeting Sukuna became weirdly frequent with you. When you were in the kitchen, Sukuna would drop by to order someone to bring him snacks. If you were cleaning the shrine, you would see him roaming the halls. If you were mending the garden, from the corner of your eyes, you could see him sitting by the window on the second floor, smoking kiseru or reading books.

But most frequently you met by the pond, where you met for the first time. At night when you could not sleep, your feets would always led you back there unconsciously. First few nights when you saw him, you tried to excuse yourself saying you didn't want to bother him but then he stopped you and let you sit there, just enjoying the view or sometimes reading a book. After some time it became a habit that you came to relish.

Who could have imagined that Ryomen Sukuna could be a comforting company? You two didn't talk but that did not bother either of you. Until one night.

Sukuna sat in his place, leaning on a round pillow, while you sat a little away from him by the table. The thin black kimono you had on did nothing to help you against the cold breeze of night that twirled with your open hair. Maybe, you should have worn something thicker. Your body shivered, goosebumps raising over your skin. As you wrap your arms around yourself, you feil to hear the rustling noise of clothes moving. No long after a black haori was held in front of you.

You followed the hand holding it and saw Sukuna deeply emerged in the book he had been reading from last night. He grumbled without looking up, "Take it. You have been quivering all night like a reed in the wind."

You could feel heat raising up your cheeks in embarrassment. Like a reed in the wind of everything? You muttered a quiet thank you under your breath which was loud enough in the silence of the night and took the warm haori from his hand. You wrap it around yourself and bask in the warmth of the fine fabric. You picked up the paint brush again, twirling it in the red liquid, you started placing strokes on the canvas.

"You are Y/N L/N, illegitimate daughter of F/N L/N." Sukuna commented.

Your hands stopped for a second before resuming to colour the canvas, "Yes, Master."

So he did a background search on you. Not like he needed to. Your father made sure to write a three page letter, singing praises of Sukuna that you handed to Uraume, hoping to find it disposed of in the garbage.

Sukuna chuckled, "Your father really believed that he could get me to be his puppet by giving me his illegitimate daughter?"

You were not sure who those scornful words were for. Your father for being so delusional or you for being a result of a wedlock. You would not put it past him though. He was after all the strongest of them all.

He didn't say anything for the rest of the night as neither did you. It was the dawn when he finally went back to his chember, leaving you for yourself. You waited for the footsteps to get fader before you also organised your things to take back to your room. Your room was on the first floor at the very end of the hallway. You didn't take much time to get ready for the day that was awaiting for you.

Night drawn upon, the moon dominated the night sky along with the millions of stars. You waited by the pond side for Sukuna but he didn't come. This was unusual, he was always here before you but today there was no sign of him. He was in the shrine that's for sure, you yourself delivered his dinner, though he was not in the room at that time.

Without his intense looming presence, you felt empty. Even his silence produced a comforting atmosphere for you which you missed dearly. You waited for him, one hour, two hours that turned into three hours but there was no sight of him. Sukuna was not entitled to work according to you after all you were just a mere peasant to him. But you could not help the disappointment heavy on your heart.

At last you got up with a sigh. Might as well get some sleep instead of dying of boredom. With a lamp in hand you started walking towards the library on the second floor to put the book at its place before going back to sleep. As you walked up the straits, out of nowhere a maiden ran past you, crying. You frowned your eyes wondering what on earth happened.

Standing at the top of the stairs, your eyes fell on the massive door of the master bedroom, where Sukuna resided. Many questions played in your mind. Did something happen to Sukuna? Or did Sukuna do something? You hated to admit but the first question worried you more than any other. Were you okay as long as Sukuna's fine even if it meant someone else's hurt?

You stopped in front of the shoji door, fidgeting with your fingers before you knocked on it twice, "Master Sukuna?"

No answer came from inside so knocked again, calling for him. Seconds later his deep voice answered, permitting you to go in. You took a deep breath before sliding the door open. Entering, you closed the door behind you.

Sukuna sat on the bed, the smoking pipe in his hand as usual. His chest on full display and red silken sheets hiding his lower half. Your eyes, unintentionally, cattled over the black tattoos that were inked on his body, from the smallest on his face to the strips on his chest. For being a monster, Sukuna seemed to be the favourite of God. Like God has centuries to create perfection, to you at least.

"What brought you here?" His lips curled into a smirk.

You quickly averted your eyes when you realised that he had caught you gawking at him like a shameless woman.

You clear your throat, "I-I saw someone running down stairs, crying."

Sukuna's face morphed into an irritated one, "So, you are here to see if I was the one that hurt her?"

"No, I wanted to check if you are okay." By the end of the sentence your voice reduced to mare whispers.

Now that you were saying it out loud, you noticed how ridiculous you sounded. Who on earth can dare or even think about hurting Sukuna. It was next to impossible. Well Sukuna noticed too because he was laughing like you have cracked the best joke of the century. You might have as well.

"Since you appear to be perfectly fine I'll take my leave. Good night, Master Sukuna." You were rushing out even before you could finish the sentence.

The door slammed shut behind you as Sukuna listened to footsteps running down the stairs, almost tripping on the last step. Sukuna wiped tears away from the corner of his eyes.

"O dear Y/N." Sukuna mumbled as he took a puff of kiseru, "You think that puny creature can land even a scratch on me?"

Though she knew how to piss him off real well. Sukuna thought back to the events that took place in his bedroom before you appeared. Sukuna wanted some good cunt to take out his frustration on. Like usual, Uraume made the arrangements.

Sukuna got up from the bathtub, water gliding down his muscular body. Quickly he wrapped a towel around his waist while he used another one to dry his hair. Sukuna was annoyed to say the least. Maybe he had gone quite soft nowadays because otherwise where do these peasants get the audacity to think that they can use Ryomen Sukuna?

Past days have been good for Sukuna. The reason? He has no idea. Or maybe it's those late night meetings with a curtain someone that kept his mood better. After all he anticipated the time when everyone would go to sleep and you would stumble upon the sitting area beside the indoor pond.

Your hair was always open, covering over your back. They always tempt him to just run his hands through them. He'd to clench his palms to not give in to his intrusive thoughts. Are you waiting for him tonight as well? How long will you wait for him? Are you thinking about him? Do you think about him like he does about you?

Sukuna walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed before finally addressing the girl who was kneeling on the ground a few metres away from. Her head was bent as ordered.

"Are you just going to sit like a useless doll?" Sukuna threw away the towel he was using to dry his hair, "Crawl on your knees here, pet."

Sukuna patted on his left thigh as two of his hands supported him as he leaned back a little. The kneeling girl got on all fours and started crawling towards him. Her back arched a little too much, putting her boobs and ass on show through the sheer kimono. She got between spreaded legs, sitting on the floor. She looked up at him with a cy smile as she slid her hands up his thighs.

She grabbed the hem of his towel and tied the knot, pulling it off. Cold air hit his two dicks making them twitch. The girl took one dick in her hand, giving him long strokes and giving kitty licks on the moist tip.

Sukuna grabbed a fistful of her hair, "What are you waiting for? Do what you came here to do."

Sukuna shoved his dick in her mouth, making her gag for life. She quickly calmed herself and started bobbing her head up and down. She hollowed the inside of her mouth, taking all in. Her small hands stroked the other one, giving them both the same amount of pleasure.

Sukuna threw his head back, groaning, as her tongue traced the throbbing vein wrapped around his cock. Images flashed in Sukuna's mind. Images of you kneeling between his legs instead of this no name girl. How good you would look taking his cocks like the good slut you were. Your mouth would puff up with his cook while your hands would work on his other one.

"F-fuck……. So good, you goddamn slut." His grip tightened as the thrusts became rougher and rougher. His red tips hitting the back of her throat. Tears swelled in her eyes in pain and pleasure.

"Y/N…… Y-Y/N, princess." His eyes rolled back as his hot cum shot in her mouth and chest. His hands released her hair, glancing down, disappointment filled inside him as he saw another girl instead of you.

"Master Sukuna, Who the hell is Y/N? I am Ayame." The girl cried out, "How could you call me by another girl's name?"

Her loud cries added to his annoyance. Before she could understand, Sukuna had grabbed her jaw in a tight grip, sneering at her, "Listen here you bitch, you are just a mare whore to satisfy me. Don't even try to cross your lines. You are nothing but a toy for me to play with, even that, you can't do right." He jerked her away, "Now scram."

She didn't need to be told twice. Her admiration for the king had clouded her mind, that she forgot his true nature. He was a notorious monster, not some prince charming. In a blink of an eye she was running for her room, completely ignoring the girl on the stairs.

Sukuna sighed, shaking his head. Too much drama in one day. At least your flustered face was worth it.

Water showered from the watering can on the flower plants in the garden. You carefully watered every plant. It was early morning, you wanted to finish before the sun hovered over the head and dried them dead. As you came to an end, you saw something rushed past from the corner of your eyes. It was so fast that you almost missed it.

You dropped the can on the ground and marched up to the bush that it hid behind. Parting the leaves, you came across possibly the most beautiful bunny you have ever seen with the most beautiful white fur.

"O my gosh! You baby." You gushed over it but that only seemed to scare it more as you saw it stepping back in fear. You saw the white fur on its left back leg wet with blood, "Don't worry you poor little thing, I won't hurt you."

You slowly brought your hand over it's head to pet but the second your hand was about to touch it, it sprinted off in the jungle behind the shrine.

"Come on, don't run away from me." You shouted as you ran behind the rabbit.

But it didn't stop, going farther into the forest and you ran behind it without any idea of direction. You don't know how long you ran for but soon your legs gave out and you found yourself slumping down under a tree, out of breath. Minutes passed before your racing heart came to a steady pace. You looked around and reality hit you hard. You had absolutely no idea where on earth you were.

You got up from the ground and started walking from the way you came from. It was half an hour when you finally accepted that you were lost. Panic bubbled in your heart. There was only high greenery wherever you looked. Not a single idea what way you came from.

Damn you bunny! And damn you stupid Y/N!

But you didn't stop. You walked and walked till the forest became dark and the moon came up. Everything around you had covered itself into black. Big shapes taking the forms of the terrific monsters. Goosebumps arised all over your body, in cold and fear. Ironic. You feel comfortable with the King of Curses but here you are, getting scared of silhouette. Your steps got wobbly and slow.

À rustling noise came from a bush and that injured rabbit hopped out of it. You shriek in fear, stepping back without seeing and before you know you are falling down the slope. Your body rolled down on the ground, twigs scratching and digging in your skin and all you could do was cry in pain. At the bottom you slammed on to a tree. You felt like all the air had left your lungs.

Tears burned your eyes and sobs erupted from you uncontrollably. With the help of hands, you brought yourself up to rest your back on the tree. Blood ran down from the cut on your forehead. Your body was aching for some rest, fighting for its life to stay away. You felt utterly hopeless.

Will anyone even notice that you've disappeared from the shrine? Will Sukuna notice that you didn't go to the usual meeting spot tonight? It's as if you had gone back to those days in your father's house. Where no one loved you but everyone loved to take their anger out on. At the crack of dawn when you went back to your little room, your body would feel like hell with all the new marks added on your skin.

When your father disclosed the news that you would be offered to Sukuna as a peace offering, you didn't feel an ounce of surprise. You had already accepted your misery. Maybe it was the result of your previous life's sin that you would meet your end by Ryomen Sukuna. But what shocked you was that your life with the cursed king was thousand times better than you had back home. Though you aren't sure if you could call that home.

Sukuna may be known for his cruelty but you would not think twice if you were told to worship him, consider him your god. He was your god. You could live your whole life being his loyal priestess. But what does he think about you? Are you as important to him as he is to you? Or are you just a toy for his entertainment? Well play toys are replaceable. Like the girl from the previous night, he's got many.

Your eyelids became heavy and the dizziness hovered in your mind. Much to your resistance, the world around you disappeared and your body slumped against the tree, unconscious.

Back in the shrine heavy footsteps thud on the wooden floor, Sukuna's huge body moved down the dimmy hallway, eyes glaring into nothing. Behind him, Uraume followed with a poker face but a storm was going inside their head. Sukuna stopped at the end of the hallway and threw the door open that slammed against the hall. Few panicked screams came from other rooms but Sukuna paid no mind to it.

His jaw clenched as he found the room empty, no sign of you being there. His eyes flared in anger and hidden disappointment. So, you finally resorted to running away? Was your life that bad here? Or did you just hate him that much? Sukuna doesn't remember doing anything that will lead to taking this kind of step.

"Uraume." His voice roared in the hallway, "Since when is she missing?"

"We noticed her absence this afternoon, Master Sukuna."

Sukuna threw them a glare, "And why was I not informed?"

"You ordered us to let her do anything she wants so we didn't pay much attention there." Uraume looked down, ashamed, "I'm sorry, Master."

"If I don't find her, you'll be more than sorry." Sukuna grunted before walking past them.

Soon there was a crowd of curses in the manor. Sukuna ordered every one of them to find you before sunrise and inform him. Sukuna sat on the throne, waiting for any news of you as he reminisced over the moments you two spent together. When he first saw you standing on the doorway, moonlight made you glow. You reminded him of that myth, moon princess.

Or those times where you showed no fear, hatred or disgust for him. When you saved the best looking fruit to serve him yourself every night. When you coloured the blank canvas with his palette. Those nights when you dominated his dreams, from the filthiest to the fluffiest. When you looked at him with nothing but pure affection that made his heart flutter. Then why? Just why did you run away?

The door opened and Uraume hurried inside, "Master Sukuna, they have found Ms. Y/N."

In an instant Sukuna was out of the door and into the woods led by Uraume. Questions played in his mind. What state were you in? Were you okay? Were you hurt? Did any stupid curse spirit attack you? Uneasiness filled him from inside the more he went deeper into the woods. How far have you gone?

At last he caught the gimpels of your slumped body. Sukuna crouched down in front of you, sliding off the strands stuck to your sweaty forehead only to realise that you've fainted. His eyes ran over your wounded body, at that moment he wanted to punish you for putting yourself in this position more than anything.

Silently, Sukuna slid one hand under your knees and one underneath your back and picked you up. Sukuna went back to the shrine with you in his arms.

When your eyes opened, an unfamiliar ceiling came to your view, too fancy to be your room. You frowned your eyebrows. What were you doing here? Then everything hit you from the previous day. You were not in the forest. That meant that someone had found you and brought you back here. Who was it?

You sat up on the soft bed, letting the blanket rest around your waist. Looking around, your eyes fell on the man sitting on the tatami mat with his back turned to you. His huge build and pink hair, hard to not notice. So he's the one who saved you? Again?

Your heart swelled up in happiness. Was he worried about you? Has he personally gone out to look for you? Did he miss you?

"Master Sukuna?" You called before you could understand. His back visibly stiffened but he remained still. Did he not hear you? You call him again but this time he roughly stood up and left the room. Confused is what you were with his actions. You wondered if you did something wrong. Seconds after he left, Uraume entered with a tray in hand.

They placed the tray on your lap, "Ms. Y/N, please drink some warm soup. You'll feel better."

Uraume said and took a seat beside the futon, on the tatami mat. Just as you were about to refuse, your belly rumbled embarrassingly loud. In the embarrassed silence, you picked up a little bit of steaming soup in the spoon, blowing on it and then drinking it.

You noticed that you were not feeling any kind of pain and there were no cuts or bruises on your body. After that fall you were sure that you would have at least one broken bone.

Uraume saw you inspecting your arms and they answered your unasked question, "Master Sukuna healed you."

You muttered a soft 'hmm' and silence engulfed you again. It was awkward, especially because the all put together Uraume was fidgeting with their sleeves.

You kept the tray aside with the empty soup bowl, "What is it, Uraume-san? You look anxious."

Uraume dropped their head on the floor, "Have we done something wrong that you had to take this kind of step? If so, please punish us."

Their sudden action sent you into panic mode, "Wait wait wait, What do you mean?"

"Master Sukuna is deeply hurt by your attempt to run away. Please don't punish him for our mistakes." Uraume answered.

Run away?

You threw off the blanket and grabbed them by their shoulders, bringing them up, "Uraume-san, I am confused. When did I try to run away?"

The next words that came out of Uraume's mouth sent you in a spiral. How they misunderstood you going missing. They also mentioned how hurt and angry Sukuna was. That explains his attitude just now.

You palmed your mouth, "O my lord! That's… um.... it's not, where is Master Sukuna? I've to clear this misunderstanding."

You ran out of the room, ignoring Uraume's shouting to not strain yourself. The first place you looked for him was the library where he spent most of his day, drowning himself in the poetic world of other's imagination. Unfortunately it was empty but there was a pile of books left on the table as if someone had tried so hard to read but just couldn't concentrate.

Next was the throne room but it also devoid any sign of him. Where could he be? What place would he go to? Then it clicked. That place. Where you first met him. Where you enjoyed the serene silence of the night. Where you slowly but surely fell for him. The indoor pond.

As you neared the place, muffled voices became clear. Deep raspy voice of you King and a higher pitched feminine voice.

"............. Please Master, I've surrendered myself to you. Why can't you see my love?" Tears streamed down Ayame's porcelain cheeks as she stared at Sukuna's back. Even while sitting down he almost towered over her petite figure.

Sukuna grunted, feeling irritated but otherwise decided to ignore her existence. If it was any other time, she already would have been sliced into million pieces. But at the moment, neither he had any wish nor any energy to put someone in their place.

The whole night Sukuna spent staying by your side and healing your wounds. In the process he discovered all the fading marks on your body when the maid changed you out of that dirty attire and onto a more comfortable blue one. Sukuna had a faint idea who might be the cause of those bruises. Of course who else other than that greedy bastard of your father.

It took every fibre in his body to not go on rampage and find that fucker. Sukuna wanted to give him the slowest and the most dreadful death anyone could even think of. But patience is the key to a satisfying result.

"Master Sukuna, that girl doesn't even love you. She didn't think twice before pulling that stunt."

Sukuna groaned in annoyance. Can't this girl just shut up for once. Ayame knew that she was crossing the line or may have crossed it long ago, it might cost her her life but today was her chance. If she could show him just how much she loved him and deserved his love, she might get to be with him for eternity. She could turn into a damn cannibalistic curse for him.

She gulped down the fear and approached him, "I love you, Master Sukuna, way more than that ungrateful girl could ever—"

Just as she was about to place her hand on his shoulder, a pair of hands grabbed her wrist in a painful fist. The huge one belonged to Sukuna while the one underneath his was much more skinny to be his. Both Sukuna and her eyes followed it and they saw you standing there but you were only looking at Sukuna. He instantly withdrew his hand back and got up, standing at the edge of the pond.

You jerked her hand off, "I do not appreciate anyone talking bad about me behind my back."

"You've got some nerves to say that after the atrocious stunt that you have pulled the night before." Ayame gritted words out between her teeth.

"Don't act so over smart. You don't even know what actually happened. I would never……" Your voice softened, "I can never do that."

Ayame scoffed, "You think anyone will believe your bullshit? If you really didn't try to run away then what were you doing that deep into the forest?"

"I don't owe you any explanation, whoever you may be."

"I'm Ayame—"

"I don't want to know." You ignored her fuming face and walked up to Sukuna instead, "Master Sukuna—"

"Ayame." Her face lit up with hope as Sukuna called her name but that soon turned into disappointment with his next words, "Get out."

Ayame took her leave with an already broken heart. Sukuna went back to being silent again, giving you a chance to explain yourself. You wait for the door to close and give you the much needed privacy but that never happened. You ignored that too.

"Master Sukuna, I didn't try to run away, it's a big misunderstanding." You explained everything, each and every small detail but you were not sure if he even believed you.

His back still faced you, Sukuna remained silent for some time before finally saying something to you, "Why should I believe you? For all I know all this might just be an excuse from you so that I don't kill you."

Sukuna's mouth worked without any thoughts, "Maybe you really intended to get as far away from me as possible. All this time that you spent with me was to make me let my guard down. I was shocked when you said that you aren't scared of me, that might have been a lie too right?......."

It hurt you to see him doubt you and your unspoken relationship. As you tried to interrupt him, his bombarding voice stopped you. Even you were starting to feel frustrated with the situation. At last you let frustration take over you.

In just three steps you were standing in front of the king of curses. You wrapped your arms around his thick neck and got on tiptoes, then your lips crushed on his rough ones. Sukuna didn't react instantly but then his stiff body relaxed. He reciprocated the kiss with much more passion. A hand tangled with your open hair while another rested on the middle of your back. Two hands wrapped around your waist and rested on you ass.

His tongue explored every corner of your mouth. Your hand sneaked up on the nape of his neck and twisted in his pink hair. Sukuna moved, taking you along with him and you followed blindly. Then you felt yourself falling and hitting the cold water of the pond.

You yelped in surprise, "Master Sukuna!"

Your fingers dug on the fabric over his shoulder in death grip. Sukuna kept a firm hold around your waist as he removed the hair on your face that was blocking his view. Water clung to him, making him appear more appealing than ever.

"You cannot live without me?" Sukuna said as his lips curled up in a smirk, using your earlier said words to tease you.

However the smirk was wiped off his face the next second when instead of shying away, you pulled him close till your breast was squeezed against his chest, "I, the loyal servant of the King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna, can not live or even think of living without my King."

"You are getting bolder these days." Sukuna whispered under his breath and you reciprocated it with, "The effect of you, my King."

Sukuna wasted no time devouring your lips in his. Both soaking wet from the water, you let yourself be lost in each other, exploring each other's body. Clothes shredded, bodies entangled, and two cursed souls became one. Ayame stood outside, her back leaning against the wall as tears streamed down her cheeks and neck. Maybe she truly didn't deserve him.

Thus began the crimson love of the cursed king, Ryomen Sukuna.

"Come here baby, I brought you your favourite fruit, peaches." Sukuna watched as your kneeling form gushed over the white rabbit who hopped out from behind the tree, taking the peach and feasting on it without any care, "Eat fast before anyone sees you here."

It was the same injured one that had caused chaos in your life months ago. You found it wandering in the garden after that passionate night when you gave yourself completely to Sukuna. Sukuna sometimes wonders whether he should let you know that he already knows about him. But seeing you hop around, scared of him finding out is too entertaining.

"Y/N!" Sukuna called from the second floor.

"Bye bye baby." You shoo-ed the bunny away in fear. Sukuna could barely suppress the laugh as you sprinted inside the shrine, "Yes, Master Sukuna, I'm coming."

Yeah, he definitely should not.

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vavandeveresfan · 4 months

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Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

#detransitioners #detransition #gender critical #New York Times #gays #lesbians #trans #trans insanity #long post #article #detrans #transgender #post trans #desisted

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mozart-the-meerkitten · 10 months

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So I rewatched The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe today and I gotta say it's weird to me that people misunderstand Edmund and rag on him about getting taken in by the White Witch because it could have happened to any of the siblings.

In fact, Lucy does the exact same thing Edmund does when she first comes to Narnia. She trusts the first person she meets, goes to his house, eats his food and is put under a spell. Literally the only difference is that Tumnus regretted his actions because he wasn't evil. The White Witch had no regrets about how she manipulated Edmund, but the fact remains that she and Tumnus do the same things.

If Lucy had encountered the Witch the first time she was in Narnia, it would have been incredibly easy for the Witch to trick her, probably without even using enchanted food. Lucy was very willing to trust Tumnus until he actually told her he was kidnapping her. If the Witch had been charming with her and asked her to bring her siblings to Narnia Lucy would have tried, just like Edmund.

Susan wouldn't have been much harder, but she would definitely have required some sort of spell since she's so skeptical. But we know that, presented with the actual evidence that Narnia exists, Susan does accept it. From there it'd be fairly easy for the Witch to manipulate her by playing off how Susan's siblings don't like to listen to her logic even when she's right or has better ideas. I think Susan would also like the idea of being a queen and making her siblings listen to her.

Peter is a little harder, just because he's older and more cautious, but I think that it could be done. He has, honestly, the same vice as Edmund at the beginning. He's frustrated at the defiance his little brother is giving him and overwhelmed by the situation he's in. If the Witch could convince him that, when she made him king, his siblings would finally obey him, I think that he, like Edmund, would fall for it (especially if magic was involved in tricking him).

So, yeah, Edmund is just the kid who happens to get taken in by the Witch, but it could have been ANY of the siblings who betrayed the others. And that's the point. Edmund could be any of us- and at the same time, he is all of us. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." That is the point that Lewis is making with Edmund. It is so easy to let ourselves be deceived when we hear what we want to hear, because that road seems so much easier. But in the end it traps us and enslaves us, like Edmund was to the Witch, and there is only one who can pay the price for our betrayal.

#Narnia #the chronicles of Narnia #the lion the witch and the wardrobe #edmund pevensie #susan pevensie #lucy pevensie #peter pevensie #the white witch #aslan #Narnia gives me deep thoughts

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rosemaze-reveries · 2 months

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During an interview, the manor guests suddenly get a question about you.

this is def an experimental format!! i got this idea while reading the character letters. in the POV of an unknown interviewer (not reader). reader uses they/them.

🔗⚰️📰🔮❤️‍🩹💉🌪️✂️🍀🩰🔫🪡🤹🧲🦋🐍

Q. Could you describe your relationship with (Y/N)?

🔗 Ada - "Yes, that's my lover. I would say our relationship falls within the typical scope of that sort of thing. Of course, I believe we share something special, but everyone does when they're in love, don't they?" She covers all her bases in one decisive breath, leaving little room for me to comment.

⚰️ Aesop sits perfectly upright, fingers threaded at his knees. His eyes drift to the side and he seems to begin speaking mid-thought. "I had... cautioned myself not to upset their perception of me," he explains. "But they pried, and stayed, regardless of what they found... For that, I'm grateful."

📰 Alice has kept a sharp eye on me the entire time, but it's at this question that she drops the formalities. "I wasn't aware you would be prying into my personal affairs. Where did you learn that name?" Her frankness pins me in place. For some reason, I end up apologizing.

🔮 Eli can't help a sheepish smile from blooming across his face. "Well, truthfully... I don't use this term lightly, but they might be the love of my life." He has been consistently grounded with his responses, so I'm surprised to catch him flustered, however subtle it is. Personally, I'm touched.

❤️‍🩹 Emil considers for a moment. He doesn't meet me in the eye, instead pinning his gaze on nowhere in particular. A faint smile ghosts his lips. After a while, he answers, simply, "Safe."

💉 Emily's hands are folded neatly on her lap. At the mention of that name, her shoulders tense, but she otherwise maintains her composure. "Someone I trust." Her answer is vague and cautious, but acceptable. I'll try to uncover a deeper meaning behind that 'trust'.

🌪️ Ithaqua - "Mine." He is curt and to the point. Yours? I echo, hoping he'll elaborate. His head tilts to the side, and while I can't see the face behind his mask, a sense of dread suddenly overcomes me. I decide not to press further.

✂️ Jack stretches out his hand of blades, flexing each finger in front of him. I can't deny the cold sweat that drips down my spine just by being in his presence. "May I respond with a question of my own?" he says to me. "Suppose a butterfly loses its way, and winds up caught in a spider's web. Wouldn't you agree that the more it writhes and struggles, the more exhilarated the spider becomes?" I don't have the courage to hear out the rest of this analogy.

🍀 Lucky - "I've always been known as a pretty lucky guy, but the luckiest day of my life was when I met them! I remember it was the—" He drags me down a long-winded story about their life together. I get the idea. Eventually I'm forced to cut him off.

🩰 Margaretha twirls a curl of hair, a meek blush dusting her cheeks. "Have you ever been in love before? You're never prepared for the magic of it all. I feel a new rush with them everyday. I know, realistically, all good things come to an end, so I tried to remind myself to expect the worst, but they've proven over and over that... I'll never feel safer than in their arms." After rambling for some time, a look of surprise flashes across her face. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go off like that. Oh, but I've just never met someone who feels so much like true love before."

🔫 Martha doesn't miss a beat. "Sorry, I don't know anyone by that name." I look down to double-check the name written in her file. Her watchful gaze follows my line of sight. Are you sure? I try. "Must've been some confusion somewhere," she insists. The next day, I realize all my files on her and (Y/N) have gone missing.

🪡 Matthias - "Wh-What?" he starts, but keeps going before I can repeat the question. "Oh, uh, an ally, I guess." Well, I gathered that much. When I press for more details, his head sinks low, fingers grasping at the armrest. "I don't know what they saw in me. Was it out of pity?"

🤹 Mike's eyes light up and he blinds me with a contagious smile. "(Y/N)'s a sneaky one, and I mean it—they've got me under the trickiest spell of all. Guess what happens every time I think about them?" Egged on by his grin, I take the bait. You get lovesick? I guess. Suddenly, he tosses a handful of butterfly glitter in my face. "I get butterflies!" Very funny, I sigh, exasperated with these carnies. Why did he have that on hand in the first place?

🧲 Norton leans back in his chair, scowling. "What's that got to do with anything?" He snaps a couple times in my face, urging me to "stay on topic." It's hard to say if this question struck a nerve, as he's been uncooperative for most of this interview, but my suspicions point me to prod further. After all, it'd have been much easier if he just said he didn't know them.

🦋 Vera's face contorts into a leery, hostile glower. "Why do you ask that?" Before I can say anything to mitigate the rising tension, she catches herself, and her expression softens slightly. "I'm sorry. That's... someone quite dear to me, so your question took me by surprise."

🐍 Yidhra's follower goes pale, clearly unnerved. "She won't answer that," she tells me through shallow breaths. "Th-This isn't my place to say, but I'd advise you not to involve yourself with that person." As if on cue, I get a sensation I can only describe as a hand slowly wrapping around my neck. It disappears when I move to scratch it. Must've been my imagination.

Part 2

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targaryenluvs · 6 months

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ooh what about coryo x a plinth!reader, like sejanus’s younger sister who’s friendly but cautious. and though she accepts coryo into the family (since he was her brother’s “friend”) the way he just took his place begins to unsettle her until she finds out what happened but by then it’s too late and she can’t get rid of him

RUNAWAY

pairings: dark!coriolanus snow x fem!plinth!reader

summary: you’d always considered coriolanus to be a friend of yours. family even. but after sejanus’s death you find him to be off. he’s keeping something from your family and you’ve run out of time to get as far away as you can.

warnings: mentioned murder/hanging, nc kissing, secrets, manipulation, lying, possessive, blackmail, forced marriage, implied sex

a/n: thank u for the requestsss!! i’ve had no inspo lately so thank y’all

he looked so different.

well not so, but to anyone else it was just a change of clothes and a hairstyle. but he truly had changed, in personality and looks. his face rarely smiled anymore, it being reserved for a small group.

what you didn’t know was that the group was just you.

your family has been quick to welcome him, sejanus’s loyal best friend. the one who’d been by his side, when it happened and before it. who helped him in the academy and as peacekeepers. you liked coriolanus a lot back then, he was always nice to you. bringing you a rose or a treat he’d managed to charm a naive baker into passing his way free of charge. you’d always seen him as a brother, his presents being an affectionate way of showing his liking of you. sejanus’s little sister. you were happy for sejanus, as most of the kids weren’t exactly welcoming. having an acquaintance, friend even, was good for him.

but if you’d known he had other intentions in mind for these years you would have ran for the hills.

coriolanus was on the fast track for success.

with the plinth fortune at his back he was for once providing what he wanted to for his family. presidency in the horizon, respect by his side and lucy gray in the past.

but there was something he wanted from the plinth family, even if he’d already taken their fortune and son. their daughter. before now, he was meek. he may have held himself high, fooled some and scared others with his smart self he’d never managed to get the one thing he wanted, you. but there was no way you could deny him now, right?

you didn’t know how it had happened but you weren’t miserable. you knew you’d have to marry one day so why not coriolanus? you thought to yourself as you fixed your wedding dress, you’d asked for time alone before you walked since- well you didn’t know why. you just wanted a second to breathe before the entire capitol came down on you with a million questions, pokes and prods.

you were in corio and yourselfs room. as you surveyed the room one last time as an unmarried woman you noticed something peeking out from his bed. you knew coriolanus liked to write, but you assumed it was all business related. god you wish your curiosity had kept itself in check.

your dress was wet in places. the tears were non-stop and you couldn’t breathe. just when you thought the tears and heavy breathing would die down you felt coriolanus’s hand on your bare shoulder, “you should have not read it.” his voice was stern, unwavering. you wanted nothing more than to kill him. “don’t be hysterical. get up. he’s gone and there is nothing you can do about it. i won’t allow you to ruin my image, get up.” you continued crying as he lifted you up, manoeuvring you like a doll. moulded for him.

he wiped away your tears as you buried your face in his neck and your nails in his biceps. you were holding on to him for dear life, you feared if he wasn’t there to ground you the floor would eat you.

“settle down, we have a wedding to finish.” you choked on god knows what, “do you honestly believe i’d marry you now? no! i’m telling everyone. and they’ll see what a disgusting monster you are. how dare you come to our family for reprieve and safety! use our money! stay in our home and smile at us knowing what you did?” you screamed as you ran towards the door, being met with a guard. he was large, burly and did not look like he cared about you. the tears down your face and he held no sympathy. “i pay him handsomely. he won’t help you, no one here will.” coriolanus walked over to the door and shut it as you walked backwards.

you had no clue what he would do to you, if he could have sejanus hung and then face his family everyday. charm you, love you, sleep with you and now marry?

“would you like to tell your mother? that someone she considers to be a son took her child from her? would she even believe you? or would she die of heartbreak before you could explain? what happens when i prove your lying? no one knows besides you and me. your word vs mine. a powerful business man, game maker of the hunger games, from old money and wealth. coriolanus snow, soon to be president and his dear wife. y/n plinth, a daughter of the plinths, new money with no history in the capitol and whom made money of off the war whilst others suffered. even if they did believe you, who would stop me from making sure they see their son again?”

checkmate.

you had no where to run to and your family on the line, so when coriolanus walked to you, fixed your hair and dress, you let him.

when your father walked you down the isle to the monster who destroyed your family, you let him.

when your mother cried tears of happiness for her daughters marriage, you let her.

when coriolanus kissed you passionately, hand dropping quite low as the crowd cheered for your love. you let them.

and when he carried you to your new bedroom, ripped your dress off and made his way down, you let him.

because you knew there was no way you’d allow him to touch your parents, hurt them. maybe they could get away from his poisoned thorns that dug so deeply. by the end of the night you’d been taken in so many ways you couldn’t move without irritating a bruise. and with coriolanus’s arm trapping you in his chest only one thought blared through your mind.

RUNAWAY!

#coriolanus snow x fem!reader #coriolanus snow x reader #dark!coriolanus snow x reader #coriolanus x reader #coriolanus snow #hunger games x reader #coriolanus snow x plinth!reader

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talesofadragon · 10 months

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𝐁𝐮𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐥𝐲 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞

Summary: Despite witnessing the death of his mother and being forced to grow under the watch of his Death Eater father, Theodore Nott is living proof that love and care bloom even in the most barren conditions. Maybe, they flourish even more.

Warnings: Allusions to sex

Pairing: Theodore Nott x Pregnant!Reader

Genre: Tooth-rotting fluff

Word count: 4.2K

All Masterlists | Theodore Nott Masterlist

𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 he had over his twenty-four years of existence.

His first dream was at the tender age of three after his mother surprised him with a trip to Diagon Alley. When nightfall came, the Sandman put him to sleep, drawing images of the alley's bustling stores and magical people behind his eyelids.

His second dream was at seven years of age. It had been a few years since the loss of his mother, and he had come to terms with the painful reality that her ghost did not linger within the desolate corridors of Nott Manor. But her soul and her memories seemed to still echo in his head.

The third dream was the catalyst that set off a chain reaction, unleashing a plethora of heavenly promises and alternate realities. It marked the beginning of one of the best stories he had ever read and one in which he had serendipitously played a role in curating. It happened when he was fourteen.

Hogwarts was abuzz with excitement as it hosted the renowned Triwizard Tournament. Though he wasn't particularly enthralled by his school and its whimsical attractions, let alone the two other visiting schools participating in the tournament, he had no idea how profoundly this event would impact his life. Everything changed when the girls from Beauxbatons Academy gracefully entered the scene, and amidst them was a certain witch with the most mesmerizing, iridescent eyes that instantly captured his attention.

Y/N Y/L/N—that had been the name of the witch who occupied his dreams for years on end. Though today she was known as Y/N Nott, his remarkably beautiful and majestic wife.

Tonight, just like every other night, Theodore sat on his bed. He would lovingly observe the gentle rise and fall of Y/N's chest as she peacefully slept beside him. In recent times, she often kept one hand tenderly clasping his while the other lovingly cradled her pregnant belly, an undeniable symbol of the beautiful life they were bringing into the world.

And like a magnet calling for the metal, Theodore’s hands would always wander to the life they had created, astounded by the little flutters he felt both against his palms and in his heart.

Y/N truly was his dream. And she was entirely his.

“Why are you not sleeping?” she murmured without prior notice, prompting Theodore to look at her. Her eyes were barely open, tiredness dominating her every feature.

Theodore was cautious not to engage in conversation with her, not wanting to risk waking her from her peaceful slumber. Instead, he propped himself up on one elbow, using his free hand to gently play with her hair. He lovingly brushed away the stray locks that caressed her face and used his index finger to twirl some of the strands. A playful smirk adorned his lips, knowing that the action almost always lulled Y/N into an undisturbed sleep—and he could already see her eyes fluttering shut.

But then, she abruptly shook her head, forcing her eyes to open.

“Y/N,” Theodore chastised, giving her a pointed look.

“Theo,” she replied, drawing out the last vowel.

Theodore snorted at her antics, and for some reason, he recalled the lazy days he spent with her in his bed at Hogwarts in the years following her transfer to the school.

She shifted closer to Theodore’s side—maybe she thought that moving around might sober her up. She cupped his face, angling it closer to hers. “Why are you awake?”

“I’m just thinking, butterfly.” He shook his head with a subtle laugh, his hands caressing her lips and pulling her bottom lip down. He only released it when he was sure her pout would mold into a relaxed smile.

“About?”

“Us three.”

Theodore observed the puzzled expression taking over his wife's features. She blinked owlishly while languidly processing his words. As his thumb gently brushed against her pregnant belly, her gaze shifted downward, and a melodious giggle escaped her lips.

“What about us three?”

“Nothing in specific,” he replied, grinning like a Cheshire cat. He already swooned whenever Y/N used the word “us.” But to hear it accompanied by a number that reflected a product of their ardent devotion? It filled his heart with love.

“I’m sleepy, Theo. Be specific, please.”

Merlin, Theo smiled. If this is a dream, I hope it lasts forever.

“I’m just really happy, Y/N,” Theodore elaborated.

Y/N mirrored the winsome smile that he radiated. She leaned in closer, positioning herself between his legs with her knees firmly planted on the mattress. Tilting her head to the right, Theodore's attention wandered between the still-visible hickeys on her neck, which had yet to fade away since two nights prior, and her lovely little belly.

“I want to straddle you,” she said after putting both her hands on his broad shoulders. “But I’m too big, and I can’t figure out a comfortable position that doesn’t involve me squishing you.”

Theodore’s uproarious laughter flooded the entire room. He found it both amusing and ludicrous that Y/N would think that. Wordlessly, he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her toward him until his chest cushioned her back, and his hands wrapped nicely and securely around her middle.

“This is my favorite position.”

Y/N raised an eyebrow at her husband’s remark. “Huh. Since when did Cowgirl stop being your favorite?”

“Y/N.” Theodore rolled his eyes. He buried his head in her neck, teasingly biting her. She giggled, trying to push him away. “No straddling, riding, or exerting yourself while pregnant.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Theodore deadpanned. “Go back to sleep, butterfly. Not getting enough sleep is bad for the baby.”

“But how can I sleep when my baby is awake?”

“Is he now?” One of Theodore’s hands combed through Y/N’s hair while the other rubbed soothing circles on her belly.

The placid movements made her eyes flutter, but she blinked away the exhaustion at once. “Not my little prince,” she whispered. Her eyes landed on Theodore. “My little king.”

Pink dusted Theodore's cheeks in response to the comment. He had never realized how much he yearned for even the tiniest and most tender displays of affection until Y/N entered his life.

He basked in her warm words, bumping his nose gently with hers. “I love you. But I will love you even more if you get some rest.”

Y/N pouted. And Merlin, it was physically impossible for Theodore to do anything but smile at her reaction. “Not before you do.” She glared at him, and he held her gaze. A moment passed, then two, and then three. An errant yawn escaped Y/N's mouth, and she unintentionally blinked. She inwardly reprimanded herself at the realization. “Let me read you a story then.”

“A story?” Theodore asked amusedly.

“Hmm. It’s good practice for when the baby comes.”

“No, Y/N.” Theodore shook his head. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

“I’m not trying to do anything,” Y/N shrugged innocently.

“Lying little witch.”

“Overprotective big oaf.”

“Oaf, you say?” Theodore raised an eyebrow while Y/N laughed. “Alright, you’ve done it.”

Instantly, Theodore flipped her over, making her back softly land on the mattress. He tickled her ever so gently, planting kisses all over her neck, cheeks, and body, eliciting delightful giggles from her until she let out that long, familiar sigh of contentment. Within minutes, she had drifted into a peaceful slumber, leaving him to gaze affectionately at her and the beautiful life they had created together.

As soon as Y/N’s eyes opened, Theodore's absence from the bed struck her, followed by the unnaturally quiet atmosphere around her room. She planted her elbow on the mattress, and with great effort, though she would never admit it, propped herself up and gazed at her surroundings.

The magical clock on the wall marked eight-thirty in the morning, and Y/N found it odd that Theodore was nowhere in sight. He rarely left her alone, especially since she became pregnant, hardly giving her a minute by herself.

Deciding not to think much of it, she slipped her slippers on and, unceremoniously, made her way out of bed. She was about to call for her husband when the smell of eggs and grilled cheese permeated the air. Her hurried steps echoed through the house as she dashed toward the kitchen.

“You’re making breakfast?”

“Y/N!” Theodore whipped his head in surprise, flying pans and floating juice surrounding him. “I told you to call me if you need anything. Especially if you want to walk down the stairs!”

Y/N completely brushed off his comment, eyes lighting up as one of the spatulas scrambled the eggs. “I’ll set the table.”

“Woah, woah, woah. You’re not doing that.”

“It’s no trouble, really,” she replied, looking down at the arm that blocked her way.

“Y/N—”

"Setting up the table will not break my back, Theo! I can do things even though I’m pregnant."

"I know, Y/N. I know." At this point, it was evident that Y/N's mounting frustration was reaching a tipping point. Theodore had to tread carefully with his words to avoid making her cry or, worse, giving her a reason to ignore him. "It's just that I wanted to surprise you with breakfast in bed. And, you kind of ruined it."

Y/N's big doe eyes locked onto her husband, a hint of calculation shimmering in her irises, revealed by the tilt of her head. As she placed both hands on her belly, Theodore's composed demeanor couldn't hide his concern and attentiveness.

He never enjoyed seeing Y/N upset, especially when she was pregnant. The mere thought of an upset Y/N during her pregnancy made him uncomfortable.

However, her giggle dispelled all his doubts, and a wave of relief washed over him. Still, his heart felt like it was dunked in the frozen waters of the Black Lake when he saw her skipping ahead, confidently navigating the stairs.

"I can fix it!"

"Y/N! What did I say about the stairs?"

"That I can't walk down the stairs by myself," she cheekily replied, holding onto the railing tightly. His heart clenched just as tightly as he watched her.

"Stay where you are, I'm coming,” Theodore announced.

“Uh-uh-uh. I’m climbing those steps myself, and if you even think about helping me, you won’t be coming until a year after this baby’s born.”

Theodore scoffed, “Don’t threaten me with sex, Y/N. It’s not going to work.”

“I said you won’t be coming, Theo darling," she pointed out matter-of-factly with a wicked grin. Sometimes, it didn't take much to remember that she was sorted into the House of Snakes. "I never mentioned sex.”

Theodore glared at his wife, his tongue poking his cheek. She won. And she knew it.

“One step at a time.”

With a quick wink, she resumed her way up the staircase, calling over her shoulders, “The baby wants strawberries, and I want grapes. Can you fix something, my love?”

“Get in bed safely first, and then I’ll see if you can get your fruits.”

Y/N waved at him from the threshold of their open bedroom door. Once he was sure she was inside, he cursed under his breath. Though, his smile never wavered and only turned into the biggest grin when he started chopping grapes and strawberries.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help?”

Theodore stood proudly, attempting to hide his uncertainty behind a facade of confidence. He wore an expression that asserted, “I am perfectly capable of baking a cake for my wife.”

The chaotic ambiance in the kitchen begged to differ.

The room seemed to be the battlefield from the Third Wizarding War with flour scattered everywhere, eggshells haphazardly discarded on a plate, and cake batter splattered on once-pristine beige walls.

Perched on the bar stool, Y/N attempted to mask her chortle behind the book in her hands. It was a good thing that Theodore was too busy opening and closing cabinets to notice her amusement.

“Theo, my love. I know pureblood Slytherins struggle to admit defeat, but maybe it’s time you retire that apron you’re wearing and let me take care of this cake.”

“Absolutely not,” Theodore refuted with a little too much vigor. The spatula in his hand swayed to the right, causing a generous amount of batter to land on the side of Y/N’s face. “Oh, Merlin! Y/N, I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Did I hurt you? I swear I didn’t mean it!”

Y/N’s nose scrunched in disgust when Theodore approached her side. He cupped her cheeks, but she briskly swatted his hands away. His heart broke, and he stepped back with dimmed hazel eyes.

“You utter nincompoop, Theodore Nott!” With a horrified expression, Theodore watched Y/N rush to the sink and splash her face with water. A goblet of cold water came flying to her hands after she snapped her fingers, and she gulped it down at once. “That smelled foul! I don’t want to imagine how it tastes. Throw that bowl away. Right now.”

He did so immediately. He looked down at the gooey mixture, stifling a scowl. “Maybe it’s better if I buy a cake.”

“Or, hear me out. I should make one.”

“You’re not exerting yourself.”

“Theodore, darling. Baking a cake is a breeze. It’s you who struggles to even boil water.”

“I don’t struggle to boil water,” Theodore grimaced. One look from Y/N, and he was left evaluating his response. His eyes wandered to the slight mess he had created in the kitchen and then to his pouting wife, who looked absolutely ethereal with her round belly. He was starting to cave. Damn, that witch. “No! Don’t look at me like that. I’m getting you a cake. One you’re not making.”

“But—”

“No buts. In fact, I’m going right now,” Theodore said in a rushed tone. He knew that if he even looked at her for one second longer, he couldn’t remember what letters formed the word “no.” He immediately summoned his keys, placing them in his pockets. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t touch anything, don’t worry about anything. Just… breathe. Yeah, butterfly?”

Y/N blinked, gazing at her husband. “You too?” she replied unsurely.

Theodore gave her a quick, though impassioned, kiss that almost made her forget where she was and what they were talking about. His hand went to rub the curve of her belly, and she cursed those stupid hormones that made her whimper.

Dazed, she watched as Theodore fetched his coat. He sent her a languid smile, and then, he dashed out of the house and apparated promptly. As soon as she heard the apparition crack, it was like the “Nott Enchantment” was lifted off her, and she could see everything around her much more clearly.

She turned on her heels, carefully studying her kitchen. With a devious grin, she rushed to grab her wand and immediately pointed it at the counter. “Wingardium Leviosa.” The utensils simultaneously launched into the air, followed by the eggshells and the other ingredients on the counter.

Y/N cleared the surface quite easily, directing whatever needed washing to the sink, which was already filling with soap and water, and disposing of the trash. Scourgify was at the tip of her tongue, but deciding that she wanted to revel in her rebellion a little more, she tucked away her wand and pulled the cleaning supplies from the storage.

Immediately, she put on the pink rubber gloves, which Theodore never quite fancied, flexing her fingers in the air and picturing the look of sheer terror on her husband’s face. She poured the surface cleaner on a cloth and began disinfecting the kitchen.

Slowly, but surely, the abysmal smell—courtesy of Theodore’s extraterrestrial baking skills—was replaced with the fresh scent of pine and vanilla. Y/N inhaled these scents, labeling them as one of freedom. Even her baby seemed happier, vehemently kicking her belly and bouncing around.

It didn’t take long before everything was clean. Satisfied, Y/N placed the cleaning supplies under the sink and started putting back the clean utensils. Though, her peace was disturbed by a loud pop.

She shrieked, placing one hand atop her mouth and the other on her belly when it dawned on her that there was now a little less light inside her home than there was a second before.

Looking up, she exhaled a sharp breath when she realized that one of the ceiling’s light bulbs was out.

“It’s a good thing your father isn’t here, my little prince,” Y/N whispered, gently caressing her belly. “He probably would’ve apparated us to the moon, thinking it was a Death Eater or something.”

Once more, she felt her stomach fluttering as her baby’s little kick brought a smile to her face. She couldn’t help but feel grateful that her little boy seemed to be inheriting her sense of humor, and she silently thanked the stars that he might just be a lot less uptight than Theodore.

Merlin seemed to be on her side too, egging her on and encouraging her little streak of rebellion. Without giving it much thought, Y/N rushed to the electrical panel by the kitchen’s wall and spotted the room’s switch.

When they had first moved, Theodore was particularly concerned about muggle electricity, swearing that it was an anti-wizard mechanism that would electrocute them if they came near it. Y/N didn’t believe him. But because she loved him too much to see him losing his precious hair over this trivial matter, she did indulge in his absurdity and kept herself away from the panel.

After her curiosity got the best of her, she decided to ask Fleur, a friend from Beauxbatons and Bill Weasley's wife, about electricity. Knowing that Mr. Weasley, Fleur's father-in-law, had a fascination with muggle devices and technologies, she figured Fleur might have some insights. Additionally, Hermione, Fleur's sister-in-law, being a muggleborn, likely knew a thing or two about it as well.

To her relief, Fleur reassured her that electricity wasn't half as bad as Theodore had made it out to be. With the kitchen switch turned off, Y/N could easily change the light bulb without any risks.

She grabbed her wand, pointed it up, and carefully removed the old bulb. Just as she was almost done placing the new one, she felt a hand snatch away her wand and another grab her waist.

Y/N gasped, feeling herself being pushed against the wall. Her breath was knocked out of her lungs, her eyes peering up in horror until they landed on familiar hazel irises that looked anything but warm.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?!”

Her annoyed voice mixed with Theodore’s sharp one. She pushed him away from her just as he threw her wand across the room. It clattered on the floor, the noise accompanying Theodore’s labored breath.

“I told you not to do anything!”

“Well, I wasn’t doing anything!”

“You were playing with that muggle death trap, Y/N! All while being pregnant!”

“Oh, get off your rocker, Nott! I turned the electrical switch off before changing the lightbulb,” Y/N argued, gesturing toward the electrical panel.

It was obviously a mistake given how Theodore's face turned as white as snow, and the trembling in his fingers signaled the storm of emotions building within him, about to erupt. “You touched Frank Benjamin’s apparatus of doom?!”

“What?” Y/N made a face after a moment of silence and confusion.

“Did you touch that thing?” Theodore asked, pointing at the panel.

“Yes.”

“Are you mental?”

“I’m starting to think I am after two years of being married to you!”

“Don’t change the subject!”

“Who the bloody hell is Frank Benjamin even?”

“I told you not to change the subject!” Theodore warned.

Y/N was this close to slapping her husband’s obnoxiously handsome face. “You are being awfully dramatic, Theo. Just because Draco told you and Blaise that electricity is a torture device developed by muggles doesn’t mean it’s true!”

“Oh, yeah.” Theodore crossed his arms. Surprisingly, now that Y/N could see the pink and purple paper bag from her favorite bakery in his arms, her husband looked a lot more cute than intimidating. “How’d you know that?”

“I asked Fleur,” she deadpanned. “Oh, and would you look at that? I’m still alive! Looks like Frank Benjamin did a lousy job.”

“We do not say his name in this household, Y/N!” Theodore insisted while stepping closer. He seemingly noticed the bag he was yet to discard in his hands. He placed it on the counter and turned to his wife before he froze in his place. “You cleaned the house?!”

Y/N flung her arms in the air at her husband’s callousness. “Yes! And with those pink gloves you hate so much!”

“I told you not to do anything. I left you for ten minutes!”

“I wish you left me for more. Maybe then I would’ve been able to do the one thing I need more than anything.”

“Which is?” Theodore scoffed.

“Breathe!”

Following her outburst, Y/N’s hand came to rest on her hip while the other landed on her heart. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let the oxygen flow inside her lungs.

When her eyes fluttered open, the tension that inundated the air slipped. And meeting her on the other side was her Theodore with warm hazel irises and outstretched hands.

“Come here.” He gestured with arms wide open. Y/N dove into his embrace. She had gotten quite better at accommodating her large belly in Theodore’s bear hugs. “I’m sorry if I've been frustrating lately. I just… I just want you to be safe and happy, Y/N. Both of you.”

“We are, Theo. With you, we always are,” Y/N assured him. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, and she buried her face deeper into her husband’s clothes. His scent invaded her senses, and she had to admit defeat against her hormones.

“Hey. Look at me, butterfly.”

Y/N lifted her tear-stained face. She wanted to let Theodore know it was just her hormones and that there was nothing to worry about, but any modicum of common sense evaporated as soon as Theodore started kissing away the tears.

She exhaled in delight, relishing in the feel of her husband’s lips against her skin. His touch was delicate and ephemeral, yet it left a trail of anticipation and ardor in its way.

“Theo,” Y/N murmured. She cupped his face, her thumb gliding gently over his stubbled jaw. “I love you.”

“You can never love me more than I love you, Y/N Nott," he admitted, caressing her neck, specifically her pulse point. "And maybe, it’s because my affection knows no bounds that I’ve crossed the line from being protective to becoming overbearing. And for that, I truly am sorry.”

Y/N’s heart swelled with affection at his heartfelt words, leaving her momentarily speechless. “I forgive you,” she replied, planting a soft kiss on his neck. Theodore's lashes fluttered in response to her touch. “And thank you for admitting this out loud. I know it must’ve been hard.”

“Oh, it’s not the only thing that’s hard right now.”

“Theo!” Y/N guffawed loudly. She playfully slapped his chest, but he quickly caught her wrists and nuzzled his face in her neck, nipping her sensitive skin. “Stop being promiscuous. I’d like to peacefully eat my cake, please!”

“Why have a cake, Y/N? When I can make you the most fantastic cream pie. It’s going to leave you craving for more,” Theodore whispered huskily in her ear, going as far as licking her earlobe and sucking it gently.

Y/N gnawed at her lower lip, already feeling herself surrendering to Theodore. Curse those stupid hormones and all the times she teased him with sex. Must he retaliate, too? How did they even get to this point?

“After the cake, Theo. Our baby is hungry.”

Theodore stopped then, pressing a soft kiss to Y/N’s temple. He grasped her hand, beaming when she interlaced their fingers together. He watched her as she giddily reached for the strawberry cheesecake he had gotten her, plating two slices, and taking the biggest one for herself.

“This is really good.”

“Better than my cream pie?” Theodore wiggled his eyebrows. He laughed and ducked out of the way of a flying strawberry, effortlessly catching it before it hit the ground. “You missed, my love.”

“Don’t you ‘love’ me, Theodore Nott!” Y/N pointedly addressed him. It was hard to take her seriously with the crumbs on the side of her mouth. "One more sexual innuendo and I'm naming our child Frank Benjamin."

"Absolutely not!" Theodore scowled. He took a bite from his own cake, looking back thoughtfully at his wife. "Though if you do indulge in my cream pie, I'll let you tell Draco and Blaise that we are considering naming our child Frank Benjamin."

Y/N's eyes lit up like a thousand stars twinkling in the night sky, and Theodore couldn't help but feel a euphoric swarm of butterflies dancing in his soul, bringing an overwhelming sense of happiness and warmth to his heart. Her radiant joy illuminated the room, and at that moment, he knew that her happiness was all he ever needed in this world.

Thank you to the lovely nonny who suggested this prompt💚 I hope I did it justice. I always knew that I will be writing for Theo Nott sooner or later, and I'm glad to have started with this piece.

Thank you to everyone who sent me requests; there are loads of Theo fics I'm working on, and I hope to release them as this year progresses.

#theodore nott x reader #theodore nott x y/n #theo nott x reader #theodore nott #theo nott x y/n #theodore nott x pregnant reader #dad!theo nott #dad!theodore nott #overprotective theodore nott #harry potter fanfiction #theo nott #theo nott imagine #theo nott x you

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