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reiding-writing · 5 months

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macarons and misunderstandings [ s.r ]

Summary:

You coax Spencer into joining you in a bakery café that your friend recommended you to visit whilst on a case in NYC, and although it starts as two friends getting lunch together, it doesn’t end that way.

WARNINGS: minor swearing, wholesome miscommunication

pairing: spencer reid x gn!reader

genre: fluff, just the most sickeningly sweet wholesome fluff

wc: 3.4k

masterlist!!

a/n: rest assured, i will be returning to my comfort zone of hurt/comfort for my next fic bc i cannot write wholesome stuff for the life of me 😭

“Alright, take a break everyone, we’ll pick this back up after everyone’s had the chance to eat,” Hotch’s voice rings across the NYPD conference room alongside the closing of the file he was reading from, and he tucks the manilla folder under his arm as he stands. “I want you all back here by 1:30,”

There’s a small chain of nods and ‘yes sir’s before the team is rising from the table and grabbing their belongings to vacate the police station to go and get some lunch, and you manage to catch Spencer right before he leaves. “Hey Spence-”

“Hm? Yeah?” He does a full U-turn with his body, almost walking straight into you in the process if not for his hand still holding the door open to give him a point of balance, and you have to stifle a small smile that tries to break its way onto your face.

“You got any plans for lunch or can I effectively kidnap you for an hour?”

Spencer gives you slightly furrowed expression although doesn’t seem opposed to the idea. “I’m not sure that was the best way to word that but no I haven’t,”

“Yeah probably not-“ You let out a small breath that could almost constitute as a laugh. "Anyway, apparently there’s a really good french bakery like two blocks away from here, we should go check it out before Hotch changes his mind and decides we’re confined to the station,”

“Right… yeah uh-.” Spencer laughed softly, encouraging you out of the door ahead of him before following behind you. “A bakery sounds really nice actually,”

"My friend told me about it when she was down here for fashion week, she said it has some of the best pastries she’s ever tried," You emphasise the word ‘best’ with your hands, and Spencer’s eyes followed them as he got caught up in your enthusiasm.

One of your favourite things about your oddly-developed friendship with Spencer was that you could do things like take a trip to a bakery together without a single hint of awkwardness.

Long since had the silences between you held any unfamiliar tension or apprehension when it came to getting to know each other those five years ago.

It was comfortable. Secure. And you weren’t entirely sure it was just a ‘friendship’.

“Did she happen to mention what type of pastries they have?” Spencer asked you, his eyebrows raised with genuine curiosity.

"She specifically mentioned the almond croissants, although i’m also eager to try their lemon crêpes because they sound absolutely amazing," You continue to exaggerate what you’re saying with your hands as you push open the door of the Police Station, exiting into the cool autumnal breeze of the New York City streets.

Spencer followed closely behind you, nodding along to what you were saying as he placed his hands the pockets of his tattered trench coat. Although, he wasn’t entirely listening to the words leaving your mouth, too focused on how the autumn breeze blew your hair softly and how the partially concealed rays of sun made your eyes look like they they held all of the stars in the milky way.

"Ooh, and macarons-" You turn towards Spencer as your excitement about what pastries to get overtakes any lingering thoughts of the case you’re working on, gripping onto his sleeve with your left hand.

You were excited about the pastries; He was excited about the warmth of your hand through his sleeve.

“Macarons do sound good. You know what would go really well with them?” Spencer looked at you as he spoke, smiling like you’d ripped the sun from the sky and given it to him as a present. “Hot chocolate.”

"Oh you are so right-" You give an immediate sharp nod at Spencer’s suggestion, sliding down his arm to rest on the inside of his elbow, fingers pressed gently into the slight curve created from where his hands rested inside his pockets.

To the unassuming eye, the two of you most probably looked like a couple out on a date, your arms linked and Spencer looking at you like you were the only person in existence.

Spencer was very aware that the way you touched him made it look like you were in a relationship.

And it made him feel a little giddy.

He had to force himself back to reality. He wasn’t in a relationship with you. All he was doing was going out with you as a friend to grab some pastries for lunch. That’s it.

"Okay so we have definite yeses to macarons and hot chocolate, I feel like we’ve gotta get at least one almond croissant considering how much my friend was raving about them, anything else?"

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a crêpe before. Maybe we should try one of those?”

Spencer had a sudden urge to kiss you, and he didn’t really know why. Maybe it was gentle heat of your fingers against his arm. Maybe it was the light pink flush on your cheeks from the cold breeze. Maybe it was the fact that he’d been subconsciously pining after you for years to the point where he could barely think of anything else.

"Yes. Definitely. 100%." You give the inside of his elbow a small squeeze at the prospect of introducing him to the delicacy that is french crêpes. "I cannot let you live a life without crêpes in it."

Spencer nodded along arbitrarily, not listening to a single word that you just said as he internally imagined how it would feel to have your hands in his hair and your lips on his skin.

Why wasn’t he in a relationship with you? You were just… perfect, and he was really into you.

He felt like there had to be a reason why you weren’t together, but that train of thought made Spencer fluster to the point he was afraid you’d be able to see it if he thought about it any longer.

"Aha," You make an exclamation of victory as the bakery comes into view, pushing the door open with a soft bell chime and tugging Spencer inside with you with a gentle but excited insistence.

The bakery looked amazing, although much closer to a café. It had a small quaint European feel to it despite it being on a main Street in New York City, and surprisingly, it wasn’t that busy either. It was the exact type of bakery that Spencer had hoped it would be.

You scour the chalkboard menu for a second to make sure they actually had everything you wanted before going up to order, and Spencer noticed as your hand slid downwards to the inside of his wrist so that you could lean forward to see the chalk whilst still keeping yourself anchored to him.

He was definitely blushing now, his heart taunting him as it pounded against his chest.

Spencer wanted to ask you to kiss him, or at least hold his hand, but the thought of bringing attention to the unspoken connection the two of you had may ruin it stopped him from saying anything, not wanting to risk losing what he currently had in the very minor instance of gaining something more.

"You’re alright with sharing a croissant and a crêpe right? I figure it might be too much otherwise-"

Spencer nodded with a smile. “I don’t mind sharing a croissant and a crêpe with you.”

You give him a beamed smile and a nod as you leave his side to go and order, shutting down his offer to pay before he could even suggest it.

He subconsciously ran his fingers over his wrist as he waited for you, trying to compensate from the loss of your touch and the gentle warmth that accompanied it as he watched you engage in polite small talk with the cashier.

You looked so sweet. So perfect.

"let’s sit outside yeah? it’s a nice day," You retreat back towards him with a tray balanced in your hands, two mugs of hot chocolate joined with four coloured macarons and a single croissant and crêpe, carefully distributed to balance the weight as you carry it.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Spencer nods at you softly, a wistful expression still on his face as he takes you by the elbow in order to help you carry the tray safely.

The reinstating of your previous contact brought a small flush back over his cheeks, and even through his hands were only brushing against the fabric of your shirt, it still felt oddly intimate.

The two of you walk over to a vacant table, set under a large parasol that casted the table in a comfortable shade.

Spencer took a seat across from you as you both sat down, separated by a small table in between the two of you.

Funny how a little table could do that.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

"Oh my god we are definitely coming back here next time we have a case down here-" You give a satisfied sigh as you wipe your fingers on a serviette, placing it inside your empty mug and pulling out your phone to check the time.

1:17.

You should get back to the station.

The thought of having to go back dampened your mood a little, and not just because it meant you now had to spend the rest of the day bent over a desk to curate a profile.

You really enjoyed spending time with Spencer like this, whether it be accompanying him to a new museum exhibit or driving him to buy his groceries so he wouldn’t have to sit behind the wheel.

It was a small highlight of your time not spent working, and you always found yourself disheartened when it was time to leave.

“We should definitely come back.” Spencer looked at you as he spoke, catching the mild change in your expression. “Are you okay?”

“Hm? Yeah- yeah i’m good,” You give him a nod and a reassuring smile as you stand from you seat with him following not long after you. “Just not exactly looking forward to going back to work,”

“Yeah I understand what you mean,” Spencer gives a small laugh, stuffing his hands back into his pockets again.

"We should do this more often you know,” You tilt your head slightly at him, the words leaving your mouth without any thought behind them. "I uh- enjoy spending time with you like this,"

“I enjoy spending time with you too,” Spencer smiled gently.

He looked at you, feeling a slight bit of courage at your confession of enjoying spending time with him one on one.

Come on Spencer, just ask them out already.

"I’m glad," You give Spencer a half-laugh, turning away from him slightly to hide the flushed nature of your cheeks from your embarrassment.

Spencer’s eyes studied you, and he felt like now might be the time. You two were still technically off work, you loved spending time together, and you’d just spent the last half an hour listening to him rant about the new book he was reading whilst the two of you drank hot chocolate and shared french pastries with each other.

You weren’t just friends. You were more than that.

At least he hoped so.

“Can I take you out… on a date?” Spencer’s voice was soft, but it carried confidence.

"A- date?" You stop walking in the middle of the street, your body re-directing any cognitive functioning to focus on computing Spencer’s question.

Spencer stopped as you did, eyes entirely trained on your expression. He couldn’t help but look at how beautiful you were right now. Your face painted with a blush and a mild look of confusion characterised through the slight furrow in your eyebrows.

“Y- yeah… do you want to go on a date with me?”

Of course it was okay if you didn’t. It wouldn’t hurt Spencer. He’d handle the rejection. Right?

"I- Yeah-" You nod quickly, a little too enthusiastically if you were to think about it logically. “Yes,”

"I’d love to go on a date with you-" You’re words are rushed and slightly muddled together as you hastily agree to his proposition, but they get the point across.

Spencer’s face lit up with a blush as you said yes.

That’s wonderful news.

A small grin spread across his face. “I’m glad…” The words slipped out without Spencer realising it, joined by a notable fluster.

He was glad.

He was absolutely thrilled about the fact you want to go on a date with him.

Spencer was so incredibly grateful that you said yes.

“Wouldn’t- I mean- We just like went out together and got food and talked and stuff- was that… a date?-“ You gesture your hand back to the bakery café the two of you had just left.

You weren’t exactly wrong, and he understood your confusion.

“I suppose it follows the motions of a date,” Spencer looked at you, overtaken by how perfectly ethereal you looked with the breeze fluttering against your shirt and a blush covering your cheeks.

“But an actual date would be much more romantic.” His words were confident, even if he was embarrassed that he was admitting to you just how much of a romantic he was underneath his façade of being uninterested in finding someone.

"So it wasn’t a date?” You raise an eyebrow slightly, fiddling with your sleeves. “Because I want to kiss you but if it wasn’t a date then I can’t because you can’t kiss someone without going on a date with them first because it breaks date etiquette-”

Spencer’s eyes widened as he listened to you ramble without taking a single breath. You wanted to kiss him?

You wanted to kiss him.

Spencer was trying to keep his emotions in check as he stared at you. Your words made him tingle with excitement. “Um… you can- still kiss me if you want…?”

You shake your head with determination. “You can’t kiss someone before you’ve been on a date with them,”

Spencer looked so utterly confused.

So, you didn’t want to kiss him?

He wanted to kiss you.

“Why not? Your logic makes no sense. Why can’t kiss me?” Spencer was so utterly confused, his eyebrows knitted in a way that made you want to plant your lips between them as he tried to understand what your issue was.

"My logic makes complete sense-" You cross your arms over your chest as you gesture for the two of you to keep walking with a nod of your head.

"Everybody knows that you never kiss somebody until the end of the first date, it curses your whole future relationship otherwise,"

Spencer couldn’t help but stare at you blankly.

What he heard you say was wrong. Really wrong.

You should kiss someone whenever you want to kiss someone. Especially if they’re your crush.

But you were adamant you couldn’t kiss Spencer because of this stupid arbitrary rule.

"Well, if you’d have agreed to my judgement that our bakery stop was a date then you’d be getting a kiss," You shrug your shoulders nonchalantly, lips pressed into a straight line. "But you don’t, therefore I can’t kiss you,"

Spencer stared at you in disbelief as you spoke, before his eyes widened.

He knew what you wanted to hear, and so he gave in.

It was the only way he’d get a kiss.

“Okay okay- It was a date at the bakery I was wrong-”

He hated how desperate he sounded, but you were so beautiful, you were stunning, you were the most gorgeous person he ever met.

Spencer wanted to be with you. And you were giving him an in to finally press his lips against your perfect face.

"Are you sure?" You furrow your eyebrows at him in mock accusation, agains stopping in your tracks to stand in front of him with your eyes fixed on his face.

Spencer sighed. “I… yes. It was a date. I was just being silly…” Spencer took your hand for a moment as he spoke to you, interlacing his fingers in yours and feeling the warmth of your hands against his frigidly cold ones.

He wanted you to know that he felt a lot differently towards you compared to how he’d felt about anyone else.

You were special.

And he wanted you.

"Right you are pretty boy," You give his hand a small squeeze as you use your other to cup his face, pulling it towards you with a gentle insistence so that you could press a chaste kiss to those perfect pink lips that had just been begging you to silence them. "You were being silly,"

Spencer’s face lit up with another blush as you called him pretty boy.

Of course you thought Spencer was pretty. Not handsome or beautiful.

Pretty.

He let himself be pulled in closer as you spoke to him teasingly, telling him that he was being silly.

And then… your lips. Pressed against his with a soft pressure that he gladly returned.

That was all it took for Spencer to feel like the luckiest man on earth.

"Here’s to a successful first date," You chuckle softly as your lips part, your noses brushing as you lean back to admire the rosy tint to his cheeks and the beaming smile that accompanied it.

Spencer felt so happy. So overwhelmingly, sickeningly happy.

And so, he did a thing that he never thought he had the courage to do. He pulled you into his arms, leaning in to kiss you with so much fervour that you were relying on the strength of his hands on your waist for stability.

Spencer didn’t know when he’d get the opportunity to do this again. So he was 100% going to make the most of it.

You can’t help the smile that erupts on your face as he pulls you in again, your hands cradling his cheeks and your head tilted ever so slightly to the left as you rested your weight into his hands.

If you’d recorded this moment and told him it was a scene from a cheesy romance movie he would’ve believed you.

As the two of you reluctantly pull away due to the unfortunate human necessity of breathing, you catch a glance at the watch face on the inside of your wrist.

1:29.

“Shit- We really need to get back to the station.” Your hands fall from his face to grab one of his own, pulling him down the streets as you hurry back to the police station, mildly out of breath and still completely flustered.

“So-“ Spencer pulled a small resistance against your hands as the two of you stopped outside of the door.

“We’re going on a second date once we get home right?”

#criminal minds #spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #mgg #criminal minds x reader #spencer reid fluff #criminal minds fluff

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familyabolisher · 10 months

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hi if u don’t mind me asking, could u please elaborate on your thoughts on the critique of contemporary anti-intellectualism (specifically on social media)? i’m legitimately curious and enjoy a lot of ur analysis and commentary i mean this in good faith :)

Broadly speaking, the philosophical concept of anti-intellectualism tends to critically describe the ideological + rhetorical relegation of intellectual production to an elitist practice fundamentally at odds with the interests of the layman; and, crucially, the treatment of these categories as fixities. I disagree with the propositions of that philosophical discourse as well, but that’s not always the form that the discourse takes on this website. On here, ‘anti-intellectualism’ is more of a vague catch-all used to describe anything from people who express frustration with the literary canon & mainstream schooling in ways that don’t coddle the sensibilities of people with literature degrees to people who come out with outright fascistic views on provocative art; it attempts to corral what are in fact very disparate positions and perspectives under the umbrella of insufficient ‘intellect,’ often shorthanded to ‘reading comprehension’ or ‘media literacy’ (or ‘[in]curiosity,’ a new favourite) without any materialist investigation into what we mean when we talk about intellect and literacy and a lack thereof or whether this is a politically expedient description of the dynamic[s] in question.

When I say materialism, I mean it in the Marxist sense, ie. as a counter to idealism—because what’s being described here is a fundamentally idealist (and therefore useless) position. The discourse of anti-intellectualism as it exists on this website relies on idealist propositions—people lack curiosity, they lack interest, they are ‘lazy,’ they are ‘illiterate’ where ‘illiterate’ is not a value-neutral statement about one’s relationship to a socially constituted ‘literacy’ but communicating a moral indictment, at its worst they are ‘stupid,’ ‘idiots’—these descriptors rely on an assumption of immutable internal properties rather than providing a materialist description for why things are the way that they are. These aren’t actionable descriptors; at best they’re evasive because they circumvent serious interrogation of the conditions they’re describing, at worst they’re harbingers of an inclination towards eugenicist rhetoric. The discourse casts those who are ‘illiterate’—which in this capacity means those who fail to perform conventional literacy, who lack a traditional education, who don’t demonstrate sufficient interest in classic literature—or the more unkind ‘stupid’ (which, frankly, is what people want to say when they say ‘illiterate’ or ‘incurious’ anyway, lmao) as socially disposable and places the onus of changing one’s behaviour (so as to not be cast as illiterate/incurious/stupid) on them rather than asking what conditions have produced XYZ discourse of social disposability and responding with compassion and ethical diligence; I hope I don’t have to explain why this is eugenicist.

The discourse also lacks an ability to coherently describe what is meant by the ‘intellectualism’ in question—after all, merely appealing to ‘intellectualism’ is a similarly idealist rhetorical move if you don’t have the material grounding to back it up—and indeed tends to dismiss legitimate critiques of intellectual + cultural production as ‘anti-intellectual.’ People love to talk about ‘literacy,’ but don’t like expounding on what they’re actually describing when they do so—the selection of traits and actions that come together to constitute a correct demonstration of ‘literacy’ are built on the bedrock of eg. an ability to thrive within the school system (a mechanism of social control and stratification), fluently speak the dominant language by which this ‘literacy’ is being assessed (in online spaces like Tumblr this is usually English), and engage with the ‘right’ texts in the ‘right’ ways where ‘right’ means ‘invested with legitimacy and authority by the governing body of the academy.’ Literacy is used as a metric of assimilation into hegemonic society by which immigrant and working-class children are made rhetorically disposable unless they demonstrate their ability to integrate into the hegemonic culture (linked post talks about immigrant families being rendered ‘illiterate’ as a tactic of racism in France, but the same applies to the US, UK, etc); similarly, disabled people who for whatever reason will never achieve the level of ‘literacy’ required to not have Tumblr users doing vagueposts about how you deserve a eugenicist death for watching a kids’ show are by this discourse rendered socially disposable, affirming the paradigms which already make up their experience under a social system which reifies ableism in order to sustain itself. (This includes, by the way, the genre of posts making fun of the idea that someone with ADHD could ever struggle with reading theory.) ‘Literacy’ as the ability to understand and respond to a text is difficult and dispersed according to disparate levels of social access, and a lack of what we call literacy is incredibly shameful; any movement towards liberation (and specifically liberatory pedagogy) worth its salt needs to challenge the stigma against illiteracy, but this website’s iteration of ‘anti-intellectualism’ discourse seems to only want to reaffirm it.

Similarly, the discourse dismisses out of hand efforts to give a materialist critique of the academy and the body of texts that make up the ‘canon’—I’m thinking of a post I saw literally this morning positing a hypothetical individual’s disinterest in reading canonical (“classic”) literature as an “anti-intellectual” practice which marked them as an “idiot.” (Obviously, cf. above comments re. ‘stupidity,’ ‘idiocy’ as eugenicist constructions.) People who will outright call themselves Marxists seem to get incredibly uncomfortable at the suggestion that there are individuals for whom the literary canon is not even slightly interesting and who will never in their lives engage with it or desire to engage with it, and this fact does not delegitimise their place in revolutionary thinking and organising (frankly, in many areas, it strengthens it); they seem determined to continue to defer to the canon as a signifier of authority and therefore value, rather than acknowledging its role as a marker of class and classed affects and a rubric by which civility (cf. linked post above) could be enforced. (I believe the introduction to Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism touches on this dimension of literary studies as a civilising mission of sorts, as well as expounding on the ways in which ‘literary studies’ as we presently understand it is a nineteenth-century phenomenon responding to the predictable nineteenth-century crises and contradictions.) People will defer to, for example, Dumas, Baldwin, Morrison, to contravene the idea that the literary canon is made up of ‘straight white men,’ without appreciating that this is a hugely condescending way to talk about their work, that this collapses three very different writers into the singular category of ‘Black canonical writer’ and thus stymies engagement with their work at any level other than that of 'Black canonical literature' (why else put Dumas and Morrison in the same sentence, unless as a cheap rhetorical ‘gotcha’? I like both but they’re completely different writers lmfao), and that this excises from the sphere of legitimacy those Black writers who don’t make it into the authorising space of the canon; and, of course, reaffirms the canon’s authenticity and dismisses out of hand the critique of loyalty to hegemony that the ‘straight white men’ aphorism rightly imposes.

The discourse operates on a unilateral scale by which the more ‘literacy’ (ie. ability to speak the language of the literati) one has, the greater their moral worth, and a lack of said ‘literacy’ indicates the inverse. This overlooks the ways in which the practice of literary criticism wholly in line with what these people would call ‘intellectualism’ has historically been wielded as a tactic of reactionary conservatism; one only has to look at the academic output of Harold Bloom for examples of this. People will often pay lipservice to the hegemony of the academy and the practices by which only certain individuals are allowed access to intellectual production (stratified along classed + racialised lines, of course), but fail to really internalise this idea in understanding that the critical practices they afford a significant degree of legitimacy are inextricable from the academy from which they emerged, and that we can and should be imagining alternative forms of pedagogy and criticism taking place away from sites which restrict access based on allegiance to capital. Part of my communism means believing in the abolition of the university; this is not an ‘anti-intellectual’ position but a straightforwardly materialist one.

A final core problem with the 'anti-intellectualism' discourse is that it's obscurantist. As I explained above, it posits the problem with eg. poor engagement with theoretical concepts, challenging art, etc., to be one of 'intellect' and 'curiosity,' idealist rather than materialist states. In practice, the reasons behind what gets cast as 'anti-intellectualism' are very disparate. Sometimes, we're talking about a situation wherein (as I explained above) someone lacks 'literacy'; sometimes we're talking about the reason for someone's refusal to engage with and interpret art with care and deference being one of bigotry (eg. racist dismissals of non-white artists' work, misogynistic devaluing of women's work, etc.); sometimes we're talking about a reactive discomfort with marginalised people communicating difficult concepts online as a 'know-your-place' response (eg. backlash against 'jargon' on here is almost always attacking posts from/about marginalised people talking about their oppression, with the attacks coming from people who have failed to properly understand that oppression; I've been called a jargonistic elitist for talking about antisemitism, I've seen similar things happen to mutuals who talk about racism and transmisogyny). All of these are incredibly different situations that require incredibly different responses; the person who doesn't care to engage with a text in a way that an English undergrad might because doing so doesn't interest them or they lack the requisite skill level is not comparable to the person who doesn't care to engage with a text because they don't respect the work of a person of colour enough to do so. Collapsing these things under the aegis of 'anti-intellectualism' lacks explanatory power and fails to provide a sufficient actionable response.

Ultimately, the discourse is made up of a lot of people who are very high on their own capabilities when it comes to literary analysis (which, as others have pointed out, seems to be the only arena where all this ever takes place, despite the conventional understanding of ‘media literacy’ referring as much to a discerning eye for propaganda and misinformation as an ability to churn out a cute little essay on Don Quixote) and have managed to find an acceptable outlet for their dislike of anyone who lacks the same, and have provided retroactive justification in the form of the claim that not only is [a specific form of] literary analysis [legible through deference to the authority of the literary canon & the scholarship of the nineteenth century and onward surrounding it] possible for everyone, it is in fact necessary in order to access the full breadth of one’s humanity such that an absence thereof reveals an individual as subhuman and thus socially disposable. A failure to be sufficiently literate is only ever a choice and a personal failing, which is how this discourse escapes accountability for the obviously bigoted presumptions upon which it rests. In this, all materialism is done away with; compassion is done away with, as it becomes possible to describe the multiplicity of reasons why someone cannot or does not demonstrate ‘literacy’ in X, Y or Z ways in the sum total of a couple of adjectives; nothing productive comes of this discourse but a reassertion of the conditions of hegemony in intellectual practice and the bolstering of the smugness of a few people at the expense of alienating everyone else.

As I’ve said countless times before, the way to counteract what we might perceive as ‘incuriosity’ or disinterest in challenging texts is to talk about these challenging texts and our approaches to them as often as we can, to make the pedagogical practices that are usually kept behind the walls of the academy as widely accessible as possible (and to adjust our pedagogy beyond the confines of ideological hegemony that the academy imposes), and to encourage a culture by which people feel empowered to share their thoughts, discuss, ask questions, and explore without being made to feel ashamed for not understanding something. The people who cry ‘anti-intellectualism’ because they saw someone on Tiktok express a disinterest in reading Jane Eyre are accomplishing none of this.

#ask

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juyeonszn · 10 months

Text

SACRIFICE (EAT ME UP)

PAIRING lee hyunjae x f!reader

WORD COUNT 9.17k

GENRES horror ﹒ smut ﹒ angst ﹒ fluff ig?

WARNINGS 18+ MINORS DO NOT INTERACT, mature language, mentions of murder, descriptions of crime scenes, mentions of blood, mentions of knifes, graphic description of stab wounds, mentions of potential mental illness, THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THAT CONSTITUTE WARNINGS BUT ?!1?1 I DONT WANT TO SPOIL !1!2!2, Lots of Kissing, mutual masturbation (f! receiving fingering & m! receiving hand job), pillow talk ig, big dick hyunjae 😈, um unprotected sex lol be safe u silly geese, car sex, cowgirl position yeehaw, creampie, this entire fic is just a whole fucking roller coaster i stg it’s gonna haunt me forever

SUMMARY with a serial killer running rampant on campus, everyone around you seems to be dropping like flies. but, hey, at least you have hyunjae to protect you.

MORE omg.. my first written work for tbz 🙀 extra super fun fact; this was originally an idea i had for hyunjin from skz on my other blog that i actually started writing the week before halloween last year (the reason it’s a horror fic), but i never finished and sort of felt like there was no point in continuing it after a while— that is until i stumbled upon the draft a few weeks ago and decided to revamp, edit, and complete it 😋 i kept going back and rereading and then blanking when i wanted to add to it until last night when i said fuck it and drank two cups of coffee to power through the end 🙌 anyways.. here u all go, my baby that i never thought would see the light of day and my first time writing a genuine horror piece <3 also special shoutout to rina my soulmate @tsukidou for beta reading 🫶

PLAYLIST sacrifice (eat me up) — enhypen, awake — the boyz, roar — the boyz, fever — enhypen, fate — enhypen, taste — stray kids, wake up — ateez, white noise — pvris, heaven — pvris

“Alright, that’s all for today’s lecture. If this was your last of the day, make sure to find someone to go home with and remember the curfew rules!” Your English professor says, concluding the class.

The students around you rush to pack up their things and get off of campus as soon as possible. You don’t seem to be in a hurry, though, taking your time to put away your notebook and laptop. Your roommates were still in their music production class, so you didn’t want to go home alone, deciding to wait until they were done.

“Y/N, don’t you wanna get home?” Professor Park asks, her voice echoing in the now empty lecture hall. She throws the strap of her bag over her shoulder and pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“I do, but I have to wait for my roommates. They’re in a class right now and I’d rather not go by myself.” You let out an awkward laugh. She nods at your reasoning, giving you a small smile for comfort.

“Okay, you be careful! I’ll see you on Thursday.”

You raise your hand in a silent salutation, watching as she exits the room, leaving you completely alone. Though a public space, in a public building, the fact that there’s no one else nearby leaves you utterly unsettled. Your stomach churns with a twinge of fear and you start to feel a bit claustrophobic despite being in such a spacious area, so you choose this point to hurriedly collect your belongings and get the hell out of there.

The past couple of months have been in this weird state of limbo. You don’t recall exactly when the killings started, but once the police noticed a pattern, everyone knew sooner or later that the presence of a serial murderer would be announced on the local news. Your town enforced a citywide curfew to protect its citizens, but mostly the students at your university.

Every single one of the killer’s victims were university students. You were friends with a bunch of guys and while it was nice having big strong men surrounding you, you knew that could hardly do anything to quell the lingering anxiety you’ve felt ever since the spree began.

The police seemed to be having trouble coming up with any possible suspects, or even gaining any leads, thanks to the killer’s unusual victimology and the cool down time between murders always varying. If the people in charge of protecting you couldn’t do that, how were you supposed to feel safe?

In an attempt to get to the building where Jacob, Kevin, and Eric were as fast as you could, you speed walk out of the lecture hall, accidentally bumping into someone. You bow at a nearly ninety-degree angle and hurl out apology after apology following the collision, not trying to make any enemies in this day and time.

“Watch where you’re going, idiot.” The stranger spits, waiting for you to glance up at him to give you a nasty glare. He looks like the kind of guy who thought he was all that, despite peaking in high school. You feel your bottom lip quiver and you avoid eye contact.

“I—”

“Woah, dude, chill the fuck out. It was an accident, I’m sure she didn’t— wait, N/N, is that you? Hey it’s okay, don’t worry about it.”

There’s a familiar voice in your ears and a hand under your chin, forcing you to stand upright. Whoever you bumped into walks away with a scoff. You meet eyes with Lee Hyunjae, one of your dearest friends. He recognizes that hint of panic in your features and he frowns.

“I’m so sorry, Jae, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going—” Your breath is caught in your throat and you fumble over your words.

“Hey, hey, slow down,” he keeps a hold on your biceps. “It’s alright, I promise. He’s gone. What’s wrong?”

You shut your eyes tightly, feeling pathetic for causing such a scene for no apparent reason. Hyunjae guides you through your breathing, his focus trained on you the whole time. He always made you feel so comfortable.

“With everything that’s been going on, I’m just so paranoid and afraid of being alone. I wanted to go to the music department building and wait for the boys.” You finally explain once you’ve calmed down and the rise of your chest is even.

“How about this? I’ll take you home so you don’t have to stay on campus any longer.” He suggests, bringing up a hand to tuck some hair behind your ear. You nod slowly, gathering your bearings.

Hyunjae leads you to his car that’s parked in the lot closest to the building you were just in and the two of you make your way to your apartment. You’d been friends with your roommates for years now, meeting in eighth grade. You had just moved schools and happened to be put into a class with Eric Sohn, the most rambunctious boy you’d ever met. He thought you seemed really sweet upon first impression and decided to befriend you, introducing you to all of his friends in turn.

Aside from Eric, there was Sangyeon, Jacob, Younghoon, Hyunjae, Juyeon, Kevin, Changmin, Chanhee, Haknyeon, and Sunwoo. While it was a little overwhelming, it was nice going from zero friends to eleven in the span of just a couple days. You were pretty close to all of them, but you and Hyunjae initially hit it off the best. You understood each other on a different level than everyone else and to this day, you still don't know the exact reason why.

Towards the end of high school, your friendship with Hyunjae transformed into something that wasn’t purely platonic. You weren’t entirely sure when it started to change, but your feelings for him grew exponentially. You tried to keep them to yourself, hidden from the world to preserve your fragile teenage heart. Though you’d already been friends with them a few years at that point, you still had that inkling of dread in the pit of your stomach that one day they’d choose to stop talking to you. You especially didn’t want a silly crush to be the cause of that.

After a while, however, the lines began to blur together anyway and everyone could tell you felt for him romantically. Once, Eric had made a comment about it being so painfully obvious that Hyunjae was just as into you and it nearly shook your whole world.

When college time rolled around, you all knew you’d be attending the same university, so picking roommates was a bit of a tricky situation. You chose yours solely based on the fact that you were majoring in similar things, so it’d be easy to fit schedules together. (You also couldn’t handle being roommates with Hyunjae; it’d be too much for your heart.) Hyunjae lived with Juyeon, Changmin, and Sunwoo, while Sangyeon, Younghoon, Chanhee, and Haknyeon lived together.

Hyunjae parks in a spot near the stairs that lead to your unit. The car is still running when you unbuckle your seatbelt and you stare at the steps blankly. Though the close proximity with him has your pulse racing, you want nothing more than some company until your roommates get home. You turn to him shyly, balling up a fistful of your sweater.

“Jae, do you— do you think you could stay with me for a bit before the boys come back? I don’t— I really don’t wanna be alone right now.”

The look he gives you is full of adoration, like you personally put the stars in the sky. He smiles softly and nods, reaching across the center console to place a comforting hand on top of yours. The two of you keep them intertwined as you go inside your apartment, locking all the locks carefully before sitting on your couch.

You don’t make a comment about him not letting go despite already being in the safety of your home. You don’t say anything about him pulling you into his side either, mostly because you want him to.

With all that’s been happening recently, you’ve felt so hollow. There was this indescribable emptiness expanding in you and even though you so desperately wanted to chalk it up to something else, you knew it was due to the fact that there was growing anxiety that you could be next, that any of your friends could be next. You were starting to move like you were in a simulation, doing everything in your daily routine without a single emotion. Sure, you’d laugh when Eric made a stupid joke but that’s about the most anyone could get from you aside from the occasional panic attack.

Hyunjae being here and holding you is exactly what you needed to feel some semblance of warmth again.

There’s a soft knock on your bedroom door around eight that same night, waking you from your slumber. You don’t remember falling asleep or being moved to your bed, so you’re not too sure when Hyunjae left. You rub the sleep from your eyes as you get up to open your door.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to wake you, but we got some takeout if you’re hungry.” Jacob says with an apologetic smile, leaning on the door frame.

You give him a bleary look as you nod, following him into the dining room where your other two roommates were sitting at the table. Eric greets you through a full mouth. A small laugh escapes you when you sit across from him, Kevin adjacent to your seat. The sound of the TV in the living room plays as background noise as the four of you eat.

“So when’d you get home? I thought you were gonna wait for us.” Kevin asks.

“I was, but then I ran into Hyunjae when I was on my way to your building and he offered to bring me home,” you shrug, taking some tteokbokki with your chopsticks. “It was a whole thing, please don’t ask.”

Eric hums to himself, a mischievous grin on his face as he takes a sip of his cola. “Interesting. And you say he’s not into you…”

Heat blooms over your cheeks and you accidentally drop your chopsticks on your plate, their clacking against the ceramic garnering your roommates’ attention. Eric Sohn was now number one on your hit list. Kevin elbows him in the side and tells him to be quiet, despite the tiny upwards curve of his lips.

“If he cares about you as much as he seems like he does, he wouldn’t have left you here alone after you fell asleep,” Jacob mutters, looking at you from his peripherals. “What was the point of escorting you home if—”

“Jacob shut the fuck up,” Eric suddenly blurts, the three of you stare at him as he clambers over to the living room, turning up the volume on the TV. “Look!”

You turn in your chair, your stomach churning at the news report unfolding before you.

“We’re live just outside SNU, where another victim has been found. The body hasn’t been identified yet, but from what we do know, he was a student that attended the school,” the female reporter says into the microphone she’s holding, a glazed over expression in her eyes. “Crime Scene Investigators believe he was murdered at around six this evening, and was assumed to have been making his way home from campus. Updates are expected to come later tonight once we have more information.”

You know that far away, checked out gaze she had all too well. She’s reported on the killings for a while now, no doubt numb to the way things were at this point.

Your appetite spoils immediately and you excuse yourself from the table, making your way back to your room. You sit on your bed and bring your knees to your chest, taking a deep breath in, then covering your mouth when you breathe out to muffle the sob that follows. It was becoming too overwhelming for you and there was nothing you could do about it besides sit back and watch.

It was understandable for anyone in your situation to feel hopeless, how could they not? With someone terrorizing the city in an unpredictable manner, there was no sense of normalcy in anyone’s life. You shudder when you finally bring yourself to stop crying, digging your nails into the fat of your calves.

Through the walls, you can hear the boys talking, voices solemn.

“Why’d you have to put the TV louder, dumbass?”

“Sorry, I just like being up to date on the case, you know? I want to be prepared. What if I need to learn clone jutsu to take out the guy?”

“Eric, you’re such a clown, oh my god.”

“I get that you’re interested and all, but you have to be mindful of Y/N. You know how much this has affected her both emotionally and physically, she doesn’t need the constant reminder that it’s happening. And I’d appreciate if you apologized for telling me to ‘shut the fuck up’.”

There’s a snort in between.

“My bad, I didn’t mean to be rude about it. But while we’re on the topic, I think we both need to admit our mistakes. What you said about Hyunjae to her wasn’t cool either. I know we’re all friends, but it just came across too—”

“It was really snappy, Jacob. And a bit petty.”

“Yeah! What Kevin said.”

“I— you’re right. I just don’t want her getting hurt, in more ways than one.”

You don’t hear much else from the trio and sigh heavily, dragging your hands down your face and wiping your eyes with the heels of your palms. You grab your phone from your nightstand and hesitantly search for Hyunjae’s contact, the line ringing a couple times before he answers.

“Y/N? Is everything okay? Did something happen?”

“N-no, I’m fine. I was just— I wanted to check on you and make sure you were okay,” you mess with your bottom lip. “I heard there was another victim and I didn’t know when you left the apartment, so I just— uh— I just needed to know that you were safe. I called to see if you’d answer.”

You squeeze your eyes shut out of embarrassment, even if he can’t exactly see you. The stuttering was enough to make you go into hiding for the rest of your life if this serial killer didn’t.

“Oh,” you can hear the slight chuckle in his response from the way his breath hits the speaker. “It means a lot that you’d do that, N/N. Really, I appreciate you so much.”

Your lip finds itself between your teeth and your heart is pounding unbearably fast, you think you might be having a heart attack. You bring a hand up to clutch at your chest as a fuzzy feeling courses through your whole being.

Now you were scared for an entirely different reason.

(The main one occupies your mind again later that night when you scroll through your Twitter feed, only to find out the most recent victim was the guy you accidentally bumped into. You feel like some sick version of a guardian angel was looking after you. It makes it hard to fall asleep after that.)

A couple days passed and you found yourself thinking about Lee Hyunjae more than usual.

Not to say that you didn’t already think about him at least once a day, but now it was worse. When you woke up, you wondered if he was still asleep. While you drank your morning coffee, you wondered if it’d taste sweeter had he made it for you. When you had lunch, you wondered if he’d like the spam musubi you made yourself. When you attended your other classes, you wondered which courses he was struggling with this semester.

As you were walking out of your English class, you recalled running into him. Had he not been there, you might’ve driven yourself insane trying to rush over to the music building while diffusing the issue with that stranger.

When you first began to harbor feelings for him, you assumed it would become nothing more than a silly schoolgirl crush. He was attractive and kind to you, but that was just the bare minimum— you thought you’d grow out of it. However, as time went on, what you thought was just puppy love had blossomed into something stronger. It was a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, all of that had been tossed on the back burner with everything that’s going on. Recently you’ve been too afraid for your own safety and well-being to over analyze your interactions with Hyunjae, but now you’re back to square one.

All because he’d done something nice for you.

God, the bar was so low. Was it really too much to ask for someone who was decent? Someone who wasn’t a serial killer?

You were on your way to the music building to wait for Jacob, Kevin, and Eric once again, when you see Hyunjae coming down the hall. He’s on his phone, not paying any mind to his surroundings. You’re about to call out to him when someone stops you, tugging on the sleeve of your sweater gently.

“Hey, Y/N right?” The tall boy asks, a charming smile on his face.

“Uh— yeah,” you nod, tucking some hair behind your ear. “Y-you are?”

“Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I must seem like a total weirdo,” he laughs, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “I’m Mingyu! We have English together.”

“Oh, you’re Mingyu? Professor Park told me about you before class today,” you give him a small comforting smile. “I don’t mind helping you!”

“Ah, that’s great to hear. I was a bit worried you’d be more annoyed about having to tutor someone so late in the semester.” Though he’s much taller than you and approached you first, Mingyu comes across as a little shy in nature. It puts you at ease in a way.

“No, not at all! English isn’t always the easiest, I get that. I wanna help as much as I can before finals. Look,” you pause, pulling your backpack off one shoulder to rip out a sheet of paper. “I’ll give you my number so we can arrange meet up dates! I’d prefer if we met at the library if that’s okay with you?”

Mingyu grins and sports a thumbs up in agreement. “That sounds perfect. Thank you so much, Y/N!”

You scribble your phone number onto the paper and hand it to him before parting ways. With the off guard conversation, you nearly forgot about Hyunjae, who was nowhere to be seen now. You feel your lips droop into a frown, since you were hoping you could talk with him for a second.

As you’re walking across the quad to the music building, a wind chill blows past you, making you wrap your arms around yourself. It was mid November and for some stupid reason, you were only wearing a small cardigan.

When you squint up at the sky, you also realize it’s more overcast than anything. There’s an angry grey cloud right above you and you curse yourself for not having an umbrella or a raincoat. You should've been more prepared, especially because of the inconsistent weather this time of year.

Suddenly, the sky is blocked from your view and you furrow your brows, spinning around. Hyunjae stares back at you with a smile ten times warmer than the frigid air surrounding you and a thicker jacket in one hand. The other holds up an umbrella just as tiny droplets begin to fall from above.

His timing couldn’t have been better.

“Heading to the music building?” He asks, skillfully placing the coat on your shoulders.

“Mhm… was gonna wait for the boys.” You respond, a little awestruck by how gorgeous he was. Especially up close. Your eyes fixate on the freckle on his nose rather than his own. He hums, keeping an arm around your shoulders as he leads you in a different direction.

“I can take you home again,” he glances down at you. “I don’t mind one bit.”

“O-okay!”

During the car ride to your apartment, you send a quick text to your roommates about not waiting up. You were happy that your relationship with Hyunjae was evolving. The past couple semesters had been rough, and you hadn’t seen him or any of the other guys nearly as much as Jacob, Kevin, and Eric. (And that was only because you lived with them.)

You toss your keys on to the mini table beside the front door, taking off your shoes with a small groan. The boots were cute, but not very comfortable. Hyunjae follows suit, his sock clad feet shuffling against the floor to sit on the couch.

After switching on the TV, you find a random Hallmark Christmas movie to play in the background, knowing full well that his presence beside you was too distracting. The brunette turns to face you, placing a hand on your thigh gently to get your attention.

“So, who was the dude you were talking to earlier?”

You blink at his question. So he saw you after all. Was he perhaps jealous? The idea shouldn’t make you giddy, but it does. “My professor asked me to tutor him ‘cause he’s struggling with English. Why?”

“Just curious. He seemed a little touchy.” Hyunjae plays with the hem of your sweater.

“O-oh. It’s fine, he wasn’t a random perv, if that’s what you were wondering.”

He scoots a little closer to you, tucking some hair behind your ear. You feel your face flush impossibly hotter. Your heart is racing and your breath is caught in your throat. His body heat radiates off of him with the new proximity.

“Good. It drives me crazy seeing other guys put their hands on you.” He admits bluntly, his hand resting at the junction where your neck meets your shoulder.

You know you look insane, your chest heaving up and down and your eyes widened a little. Like a baby deer caught by a predator. Who knew sweet sweet Hyunjae had a rather risqué side to him? You swallow thickly, not daring to move an inch. His thumb caresses your skin gently, goosebumps littering in its wake.

“Hyunjae…” You breathe, lips parting as you finally make eye contact with him.

“You’re so pretty, Y/N.”

You want to scream into the cushion behind you, your hands clamming up. Hyunjae looks like he could swallow you whole if he wanted to, his bottom lip between his teeth as he leans in a bit more. This moment was something straight out of one of your darkest fantasies. You never thought this would ever happen, that either of you would ever actually make a move on the other.

The sound of the front door unlocking catches both of your attention. Hyunjae pulls away from you faster than your brain can comprehend what exactly just occurred. Jacob is the first to walk in, laughing at something Eric said. The three males pause when they see you’re not alone.

The greetings are quick, Hyunjae dapping up the boys as if nothing. He’s also quick to say goodbye, ensuring them that he’ll make sure you’re safe when they’re not around. He gives you that smile of his, the one where his eyes form crescents, and then he’s gone.

You don’t know how much more of this you could take.

“So, Y/N…” Eric starts in the middle of dinner, side eyeing you as he shovels rice into his mouth. “You and Hyunjae have been together an awful lot lately.”

Kevin snorts, kicking the blonde under the table. You suppose it was going to come up eventually. This ‘Will They, Won’t They’ back and forth shit was starting to tire you out. You weren’t getting any younger. Time was passing you up the longer you waited to just say something. And with all that’s been going on, it was silly to be afraid of admitting your feelings.

“He’s being a good friend, Eric,” Jacob sighs, reaching across to flick him on the forehead. “It’s actually really nice that he watches over Y/N when we’re gone.”

Eric grimaces, rubbing the spot that Jacob assaulted. You frown a bit when you realize that he had a point. Hyunjae was treating you like a child that had to be tended to, babysitting you like you weren’t capable of holding your own. Granted, both times he’s come over, you asked him to. So you couldn’t really blame him for assuming you wanted him around to protect you.

“Do y’all think Hyunjae actually likes me? In a non-platonic way?”

Kevin’s spoon clatters onto the floor and they all pause their banter to look at you. Every time your feelings for Hyunjae were brought up, you chose to ignore them and switch the subject. You can’t keep running away.

“Uh— yeah. Duh. Of course he does. I don’t know anyone else who would go out of their way to stay with someone they saw as just a friend multiple times a week so she felt safe.” Kevin finally answers after a moment.

“Okay.” You settle on, taking a sip of your water.

“What do you mean ‘okay’?” He raises an eyebrow at you, but you just shrug.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

As you’re washing the dishes after dinner, you hear the news broadcast over the faucet. Another victim had just been found behind the campus library. The camera shows the scene behind the reporter, something that would’ve made you queasy a couple days ago, but now you feel nothing— just a dull ache in your chest. It’s messy, almost like the killer was in a hurry to get it over with.

The body is covered with a black tarp, paramedics wheeling it away in the corner of the screen. The reporter still wears that dissociated expression on her face as she goes over the details of this victim. She explains that because the murder was done so haphazardly, they were able to identify the body easily.

Twenty three year old Kim Mingyu, Sports Med Major.

The rest of the news report sounds like static in your ears as you scrub away at the dishes mindlessly. Your fingers have pruned and the water was burning the backs of your hands, but you don’t feel it, too checked out to care. It seemed like the killings were getting closer and closer to you. Part of you thought you’d be next every single time.

You had to tell Hyunjae how you felt. It was now or never.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s waiting outside of your apartment complex, leaning against his car. You take careful steps down the stairs, nearly fainting at the sight of him in a hoodie and grey sweatpants. He runs around the car to open the passenger door for you, only shutting it when you’re all buckled up. It’s not long after that he revs the engine and drives off to nowhere in particular, just like you requested. (Curfew ignored.)

It’s silent at first, save for the low hum of his music, R&B that resonates somewhere within your soul. You can’t help but steal a glance from your peripheral, fisting your sweatshirt when you see how concentrated he looks while driving. He has his right hand resting on the gear shift, the other gripping the wheel. You could’ve had this view all to yourself so long ago had you just spoken up.

“Hyunjae,” your voice is wobbly, but you steel yourself to continue. “I have something to tell you.”

“What is it?” He asks, keeping his eyes on the road.

“Do you think— uh— do you think you could pull over?” If you were going to confess, you wanted him to look at you. Besides, the drive was starting to make you jittery.

He nods and goes a bit further, before pulling into an empty lot. He shifts into park, unbuckling his seatbelt so he could turn his body towards you, giving you his undivided attention. You mirror him, tightening your hold on your sweater when he wets his lips, smiling at you. “Is this what you called me for?”

“Yeah, actually,” you force yourself to keep eye contact, pushing the lump back down your throat. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for years now, if I’m being honest with both of us.”

He chuckles, much like he did the other night over the phone. It drives you just a little crazy. “I’m listening.”

“I— I don’t know how to word this properly…” You wipe your palms on your legs. Come on, Y/N, spit it out already. “Fuck, okay, I like you Hyunjae. Like, really like you. In the way that I sometimes wish you would kiss me until I can’t breathe. I’ve been so afraid of admitting that to myself, but I’ve realized that life is way too short to dwell over the fear of rejection. But please, tell me you feel the same.”

He stares at you with an indecipherable look in his eyes. You feel like throwing up now, you stomach twisting and churning at the thought that you just ruined everything between you. There was no going back after this. He knew.

It’s as if months have passed by in utter silence with Hyunjae just sitting there, no words coming out of his mouth, until finally, he just leans across the center console, cupping your cheek with one of his hands. His vision is trained on your lips, his face close enough that his lashes flutter against your skin. God, he was even more gorgeous from this distance.

Instead of saying anything, he presses his lips to yours, a sweet but desperate kiss that melts away all the worries tucked into your head. They feel so soft on your own, molding together in near perfect timing. It’s like you’d been living for a year without rain and this kiss was the shower that saved you from a drought. It’s all you’ve ever wanted and needed and more.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do that,” he breathes when he pulls away slightly. “The real thing is so much better than I imagined it would be.”

For once, time slows down in this moment, almost like the world stopped spinning on its axis. Everything slips from your mind and it’s just you and Hyunjae, here in his car in the middle of an empty parking lot. Nothing else matters. You smile at his confession, a genuine smile that was spurred on by contentment rather than force. You felt light and airy, no longer weighed down by such a trivial problem.

“I think I have an idea,” you giggle, reaching up to brush a stray hair from his face. “I’m not too sure, though, I could be wrong. Could you do that again to help jog my memory?”

Hyunjae laughs, (it’s the most melodic sound you’ve ever heard) but doesn’t hesitate to kiss you. You reciprocate his passion, tangling your fingers in his dark hair. He sighs into the kiss, pulling you on top of him. Your legs straddle his lap as best as they can and he reaches down to recline his seat, scooting it as far as it can go from the wheel. The thin material of your fleece shorts hardly hide the feeling of him under you, a low moan pushing into his mouth.

He nips at your bottom lip, tugging at it with his teeth gently before peppering kisses along your jaw and neck, sucking along the exposed skin from your sweatshirt. You whine, throwing your head back as his tongue soothes over the bruising area. His hands slide under your top, rubbing up and down your sides before moving them down to your thighs, repeating the action.

“You’re so gorgeous on top of me like this, Y/N.” Hyunjae says, just above a whisper like someone else might hear this intimate conversation. He grips your hips and bucks upwards to grind into your clothed core. Your eyes widen and you involuntarily moan at the sensation. This wasn’t what you were expecting when you planned to confess, but you didn’t hate the outcome. He grins at your response, reconnecting your mouths sloppily.

If you were given the choice, you were wholeheartedly satisfied with just this. You would’ve been plenty okay with just making out. Had you been asked years ago that you’d even get this far, you would’ve snorted in your own face, so why should you be greedy and want more than what you had? (That’s not to say that you didn’t.)

“H-Hyunjae,” you stutter, your brain foggy from all of the kissing you just did. “Do you…?”

You trail off, not sure how to word your question. You didn’t want to come off like a sex crazed maniac, but you didn’t want to come off like an amateur virgin either. Truth of the matter is, you were neither, but it had been a while since you indulged yourself in something of this sort. And this time it would be with Hyunjae, the one person you never thought you’d do this with. You were nervous.

All you wanted was to be entwined with him in more ways than one. You wanted all of him— the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the sick, the healthy. He could do no wrong on your eyes and you wanted to show him that.

“Do I…?” Hyunjae trails off, waiting for you to continue.

“Do you want to make love… with me?” This had to be the single most mortifying moment of your life. You cover your face in humiliation, shying away from him when he sits up on his elbows.

“What kind of question is that?” He asks with a chuckle, prying your hands from your face so he could look you in the eyes. “If I could make love to you every hour of the day, for seven days a week, I would. I want you all the time, Y/N. Earlier today, before we got interrupted, I wanted to do unimaginable things to you.”

You hide yourself in the crook of his neck, your skin flushing hotter. Weren't you wearing too many layers? The car was starting to feel stuffy. Hyunjae’s chest rumbles with laughter beneath you, pressing his lips to the shell of your ear. This is probably the gentlest he’d be with you all night, because from what you could infer, he was a manhandler.

“Take care of me,” you breathe, mouth brushing against his pulse point. “Please.”

Hyunjae stops holding himself back. He’d do whatever you asked of him, only hoping you’d be tied to him in every lifetime, just like this one. He kisses you again with an unrivaled fervor, slipping his hands inside your sweatshirt and touching you everywhere physically possible. They’re warm on your skin, palming your breasts over the flimsy fabric of your bralette.

He helps you get rid of your top and shorts, leaving you in just undergarments. The sight of you barely clothed sends him into a frenzy, especially knowing it’s for his eyes only. You aid Hyunjae in pulling off his hoodie and yanking his sweatpants down his long legs. The minute most of your restrictions are gone, Hyunjae brings you closer to him. He hisses at the contact, the warmth of your cunt through your panties putting him under a spell.

You whimper when his touch travels down your front, sneaking into the waistband of your underwear. The pads of his middle and ring fingers apply the lightest amount of pressure onto your clit the second he finds it, circling the sensitive bundle of nerves. Your nails on one hand dig into his shoulder while the other trails down his abdomen, rubbing up and down his length through his boxer briefs.

Hyunjae groans into your kiss and you gasp for air as you tear from him, resting your forehead on his to watch as you get each other off through your clothes. If earlier was something taken from one of your wet dreams, what did this constitute as? You clench around nothing when he pushes up into you, your wrists clashing. Knowing he was just as down bad for you as you were for him just made this all that much more real.

“I need to feel you around me,” he mumbles in your ear, dipping his fingers in and out of you languidly as if to explain what he meant. “Let me stretch you out.”

You nod in response, fumbling with his briefs. Hyunjae lifts his hips enough for you to help him out of them. You groan when he reveals his impressive size, wondering how exactly he expected you to take him. He pushes your panties to the side, mimicking the sound you just made when he sees your bare pussy drooling for him. You eventually get frustrated and line him up with your hole, sinking down in one fluid motion. A voluminous moan escapes from the back of your throat, his dick throbbing achingly inside of you. At first you stay still like that, your pelvises touching as you adjust to his length and girth.

“H-holy shit— you’re s-so deep, Jae,” you cry, resting your forehead against his yet again. He pecks your lips, holding onto your hips to help you bounce on his cock, practically impaling you every single time.

“Fuck, you’re taking me so well. Such a good fucking girl,” Hyunjae grunts, the warmth of your walls drawing him in even further. “So tight, too.”

Your thighs begin to burn and your movements become slower, which he takes note of instantaneously. He bends his knees and forces your upper half impossibly closer to him, thrusting up into you. This new angle allows him to find that one spongy spot that has you seeing stars, fogging up your brain and even your vision.

You cast a downward glance at the minimal space between where the two of you are connected. Your moans and whines grow louder with the view of every thrust of his hips into yours. Hyunjae sneaks his hand in the middle of you, his fingers expertly toying with your clit. Any more stimulation and the band in your stomach is snapping.

You’ve had sex before. You’ve slept with a handful of other guys in the past, but nothing could ever compare to this moment. Your cunt had already memorized his size and every vein, effectively ruining the chances of any other man doing this with you. Lee Hyunjae had you in a chokehold whether he realized it or not. He had you wrapped around his finger without really trying, but you could never complain.

Your walls squeeze his cock and he knows he won’t last much longer, shutting his eyes tightly. “C’mon baby, you gonna cum for me?”

“Mhm,” you whimper, your skin flush on his own. “Wanna cum so bad for you, Hyunjae.”

“Yeah? Me too, sweetheart,” he pants, the thumb on your hip pressing against the bone. “Where do you want me?”

“Inside,” you babble. “Please, please. I want you to cum inside me, Hyunjae.”

He kisses you softly just then, swallowing your pretty moans with something completely opposite of what he’s already given you, and that’s what sends you spiraling, fluttering around him. He groans, spilling into you and letting you milk him dry of everything he has to offer, painting your insides just like you asked him to.

You lay like that for a while, Hyunjae’s dick still buried in you to the hilt. Both of you attempt to catch your breaths and bring yourselves down from the well-anticipated euphoric state you just visited. You giggle at the condensation coating the windows of his car, extending your arm to draw a heart and a smiley face with your finger. He slowly pulls himself out, hissing at the sensitivity, but doesn’t make a move to get you off of his chest.

Where do you go from here? A line had just been crossed and you weren’t entirely sure you knew what he wanted from you. It’s one thing to imagine kissing and fucking someone extensively. But it was another to actually want a tangible, romantic relationship from them, to actually capacitate feelings for them.

“I love you,”

You jolt up and stare at him with widened eyes. Did those words really just come out of his mouth? As if he can read your mind, he nods. There’s a dragged out sigh, followed by him sitting up slightly with you perched on his lap.

“I really do, Y/N. I’ve felt this way for years and I’m willing to do anything for you.” He admits, tucking some of your hair behind your ear. You kiss him gently, the pad of your thumb swiping across his cheekbone.

“I love you, too.”

The Saturday after your night in Hyunjae’s car brought everything into perspective for you.

You hadn’t spoken to him since he dropped you off at your apartment and it was beginning to worry you. Even though you made sure he reciprocated your emotions, there still could’ve been a misunderstanding. Had you been too forward? Did you scare him away? Did something happen to him? Whatever the explanation was, you didn’t like the eerie feeling it started brewing in your stomach— it was foreboding.

In spite of not talking to them at all in what seemed to be a month or so, you tried calling each of your mutual friends to see if you could get some answers. Not even his roommates picked up their phones and this made you much more uneasy. You pace back and forth in your living room, nicking at your bottom lip with your nails. Why did he choose now of all times to ghost you? What went wrong?

Kevin comes out of his bedroom a couple minutes later, expecting to grab his morning coffee as usual. When he finds you nearly on the brink of insanity instead, he decides to intervene. He supposed his caffeine could wait until his best friend was calmed down. You jump in surprise, holding a fist to your chest. He raises his hands in mock surrender.

“Didn’t mean to startle you, my bad. What’s up? Why do you look like you’re going through a quarter life crisis?” Kevin asks you, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Is everything okay?”

“I—“ you pause and take a deep breath. “I don’t know…”

His eyebrows furrow and he guides you to the sofa so you could sit down. “What do you mean ‘you don’t know’?”

“Hyunjae hasn’t talked to me since Thursday night, after he brought me back here,” your voice is hoarser than you’d like it to be. “I-I texted and called him a bunch but he hasn’t replied. I even— I even tried Juyo, Sunwoo, and Changmin. No luck with them either. I’m concerned, Kev.”

Kevin combs through his hair, pursing his lips in thought. “Yeah, okay, I would be too. It's a little weird that none of them are responding. Have you thought of just showing up at his place to check in on him?”

You shake your head. “No, I didn’t want him to think I’m clingy and annoying in case he was there. What if he just wants to get me off of his back and he’s telling them to ignore me?”

“I don’t think that’s the case at all, Y/N,” your friend sighs, putting his glasses on top of his head and running a hand down his face. “Hyunjae has never been that kind of person in all the years we’ve known him. I highly doubt he’d switch up now. Plus, he’s literally crazy about you. I’m pretty sure the guy would move heaven and earth for you if he could. I think there’s a very real and genuine possibility that something is seriously wrong. It’s like— it’s just a gut feeling, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” If Kevin felt this way, too, that would only mean one thing, right? You had to get to the bottom of this. There was a chance that lives depended on it. A quick roll of your neck and you’re standing. “I’m gonna go over there. I can’t leave things unanswered. I can’t wait for a fucking news report.”

The ravenette pats the top of your head. “Be careful, N/N. Please.”

You give him a nod before you’re slipping into your shoes and grabbing his car keys. You’re not exactly dressed for a confrontation if there is one— clad in a pair of sweatpants, an oversized sweatshirt with your university’s crest on it, and socks with sandals— but you were too preoccupied to care.

The drive itself was mentally taxing, your brain dissociating most of the ride. You’re not sure how many of the lights you passed were actually green. The closer you got to Hyunjae’s apartment, the more that trepidation settling in your lower abdomen grew. Throughout your life, you’d never been the type of person who acted on instinct or had a nagging voice in the rear of your head warning you about situations you got into. You usually went with the flow and if you made a mistake, you allowed yourself to learn from it.

However, that was prior to being thrown into a period of uncertainty like this one. Now, all you could do was act on instinct. All you could do was listen to the stupid nagging voice in the rear of your head yelling at you. All you could do was follow the blaring alarms and caution signs in your field of vision. And this time they were almost deafening.

Kevin’s car rolls to a stop outside of Hyunjae’s building, occupying an empty spot three away from the front of the stairs. Your pulse races when you step out of the vehicle and immediately recognize the cars in the spaces beside yours. Hyunjae’s, Juyeon’s, and Changmin’s. You notice a thin layer of dirt caking Juyeon and Changmin’s, as if they’d remained unmoved for a long time. Perturbed wasn’t a big enough word to describe what was going through your mind.

Half of you was terrified to take a step towards the stairs, let alone ascend them to Hyunjae’s floor. What would go down when you reached his apartment? What would happen the moment that door opened?

You ball your hands into fists, the edges of your nails jabbing the skin of your palms. The pain steels you enough to move forward, walking up the stairs slowly. There’s a chill tiptoeing along your spine the whole trip up, like your body knew what you were getting yourself into before you did. Maybe you were stupid. Only an idiot would lead themselves blindly into a scenario without knowing the outcome.

It’s been minutes of you staring at the slightly rusted numbers on Hyunjae’s door before you register that you’re standing in front of it. If you're being honest, you have no idea what you’re doing. You were acting on autopilot— progressing without a thought of what’s coming next. A shuddered breath leaves your lips and you raise your knuckles to the door.

The first knock is too soft to hear if the inhabitants were in their bedrooms, so you apply more force the second time. The sound reverberates through the hall, a wince appearing on your features. If someone was inside, surely they had to have heard that one. You wait a little longer for the door to swing open and reveal one of your friends looking perfectly fine. For Juyeon to showcase that grin of his that reaches his eyes and ask what you were doing here. For Changmin to give you that sweet smile that puffed up his cheeks and ask what you needed. For Sunwoo to blow a raspberry before he laughed at how silly you were for stressing over them. For Hyunjae to reassure you that it was all going to be okay, that he loved you. You were praying for that.

But no one showed up on the other end of that doorway and you were stuck glaring at that same painted board of wood.

That’s what sends your instincts into overdrive. Your hand grabs the knob, twisting it just in case. It makes a full rotation, pushing open the door the tiniest bit. You peek inside carefully and find all the lights in the living room and kitchen off. Your teeth bite down on your lip as you enter the apartment. One of the things you hated about it, was the annoying buzz of the fluorescent lights in their bathroom. And for some reason, that was all that infiltrated your ears.

The door for said bathroom was cracked just a tad at the end of the hallway, but what caught your attention was the room closest to you— also cracked the most miniscule amount. You see light filtering through, an almost orange glow like that of a desk lamp. Your stupidity would be your downfall, you conclude, your feet gravitating to the room. It’s Hyunjae’s you recall when you’re outside of it. They always say curiosity killed the cat, and you couldn’t help but revert to a feline and nudge it open with your foot.

You really wished that saying was just that— a saying.

Eric sits ahead of you, tied to a chair in the middle of the room. There’s a piece of fabric gagging his mouth and his clothes are tattered, blood staining nearly every inch. A long gash runs along his left bicep and a myriad of smaller cuts litter his face and arms. What your focus lands on first are the several deep stab wounds on his thighs.

A hand comes up to cup your mouth to keep yourself from screaming at the sight of your best friend in this position. He struggles against his restraints, muffled cries for your assistance shattering your heart into a thousand pieces like broken shards of glass. Tear streaks mixed with dried blood cover the apples of his cheeks.

“Oh my god, Eric,” your voice wobbles as you scramble to free him. “Oh my god…”

You pull down the fabric in his mouth first and he gasps for air. His eyes widen at something behind you and he warns, “Y/N—!” before he’s interrupted by your yelp. The person pressed into your back has their arm around your neck with a hold tight enough that you can’t escape, but loose enough that you can breathe, the blunt edge of a knife grazing the column of your throat.

“Tsk tsk, Youngjae. You should know that making so much noise when your killer’s not in the room just alerts them of suspicious activity. That’s survival 101, my friend. Isn’t that right, sweet sweet Y/N?”

No.

No. No. No. No. No.

This wasn’t happening.

This couldn’t be happening.

“Please, let her go, Hyunjae.” Eric begs. Hyunjae hums, nuzzling his nose in your hair. He rolls his eyes and scoffs after inhaling your scent, resting his chin on your shoulder.

“God, you’re a mouthy one. Not even Juyeon and Sunwoo were this chatty when I slit their throats— then again, it's not like they could talk much anyway.” He snorts.

You felt sick. You were lightheaded now, just at the thought of your friends gone. “W-why are you doing this?”

Hyunjae grumbles, pouting his lips. “Time for me to unravel my evil villain monologue, huh?” He slips a hand under your sweatshirt and pinches the side of your waist. “Well here it is; what you’re dying to know. The first incident was by complete accident, we were simply having a discussion about why he shouldn’t have been staring at your ass while his girlfriend was next to him at Jeong Jaehyun’s end of summer bonfire. The dude got pissed off that I called him out and tried to start a fight, but I shoved him so hard, he fell and hit his head on a rock. I just couldn’t find it in myself to feel bad about it so I left him there like nothing. From then on, anyone who came between us or remotely hurt you in any way wound up on the receiving end of this knife. Funny isn’t it? How you’re the one beneath it this time?”

It all began to fall into place once he laid the cards out on the table for you to read. The guy you ran into Tuesday after class. Poor Kim Mingyu, who just wanted to pass his English final. Your friends not picking up their phones. And supposedly it was all in the name of love.

“Y-you did that for me?”

“Of course, baby,” Hyunjae mutters into the shell of your ear. “I said I’d protect you didn’t I? I just want you all to myself.”

“What the fuck does that possessive bullshit have to do with me? What did it have to do with Juyo or Changmin or Sunwoo?” Eric cries. “Oh god, what about—?”

“Sangyeon, Hoon, Chanhee, Hak? Yeah, those four were taken care of way before my own roommates. You, obviously, were the chosen one this go around. Then it would be Kevin and lastly, Jacob. I planned on stopping after you three unless absolutely necessary.”

“How is any of this fucking necessary? You’re psychotic,” the blonde exclaims, still wriggling in his restraints. “Why would Y/N want you after all of this? Did you really believe she’d never find out about what you’ve done?”

Hyunjae glides the smooth edge of the blade against your skin and releases you from his grip, but takes a hold of your wrist, placing the handle in your grasp. He urges you forward, closer to Eric. “If she was scared of me, don’t you think she would’ve tried harder to escape me? Didn’t even blink when I held the knife to her neck.”

The brunette kisses your temple and you watch the fear in Eric’s eyes morph into defeat. “After everything we’ve been through? I’ve known you since eighth grade, Y/N. Eighth fucking grade. And this is how it ends?”

“H-he loves me,” you stutter, glancing at Hyunjae. “Don’t you?”

“You don’t kill your best friends out of love, Y/N! He’s insane! Please, don’t let him get into your head. You’re not that kind of person.” Eric attempts to reason.

Maybe you weren’t. Maybe you were. Who knows? That didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that Hyunjae loved you. He loved you so much that he’d kill for you. Over and over and over again.

It was kind of comical that you loved him all the same. You, too, would kill for him. Over and over and over again.

#the boyz #the boyz x reader #the boyz smut #the boyz hyunjae #tbz #tbz x reader #tbz smut #tbz hyunjae #lee hyunjae #lee hyunjae x reader #lee hyunjae smut #hyunjae #hyunjae x reader #hyunjae smut #juyeonszn

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arminsumi · 5 months

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could you write anything about jealous aki? drabble/hc/ fic i'll take any thoughts you have on him

sending all the love to this beautiful blog of yours 💖💖💖

A Bit of A Situation

AKI アキ

Note : my moongem!! 😣💗 good to see u again!! thank u for bringing love n aki to me hehe. hope u enjoy!!

Aki; stood tall and stoic in an immaculately neat suit and tie.

His posture stiffens and throat constricts when he watches a sleazy co-worker chatting you up during a mission.

Aki's just cleaned his katana of blood with a smooth swipe of a cloth. He clicks it shut into its saya.

The co-worker isn't bad-looking, but Aki thinks you can do better. He clenches his jaw a bit when you laugh in response to his loud, obnoxious flirting.

Aki stares.

When he feels this prickling feeling in his chest, he's reminded of something someone asked him once;

"Aki, do you think you're the jealous type?"

"No, jealousy is immature."

And Aki has considered himself mature until he sees that sleazy co-worker chatting you up.

Why does it bother him? It just does. Aki heads over to you two, and uses his superiority to his advantage.

"Hey, idiots. Focus on the task at hand unless you want me putting your flirting session into my report to Makima, yeah?" he threatens with a stony face.

A stony face, a cold voice; but you smile when Aki speaks to you even if it's just to reprimand you. You just like him.

The co-worker disappears, leaning into his car to get his weapons and supplies.

"I wasn't flirting." you say to Aki, and he looks at you with slightly raised brows like he doesn't care.

"Okay." he responds, "I saw the exchange and saw you laughing with him. I think that constitutes as flirting."

"I was laughing at his attempt of flirting." you told him to clear up the misunderstanding.

Aki doesn't have a response; he feels a bit silly about his misjudgment.

He stiffens his shoulders.

You give him a smack on his shoulders.

"Lighten up. Your shoulders are so stiff sometimes I wonder if they're made of wood."

"I'm not usually this stiff, I swear." he replies awkwardly, like a teenager trying to prove to his crush that he's not a dork. It's funny to see small shifts in his demeanor when it's just you and him.

"What do you mean? You're always stiff. I think I should take you out for a spa day; you look like you could use a break."

Your name is called by another co-worker, detracting your attention from Aki. He feels a small pang of annoyance when the moment is interrupted.

"Ayyy, we need you. There's a bit of a situation in the lobby; we found someone's head."

You reply with one of your weird little jokes that Aki loves so much, "Oh no. Someone lost their head? That's not good, we should get it back on their shoulders. Okay, see you Aki."

"Don't call me Aki; I'm your senior."

"Mhm. My jealous senior." you tease flirtatiously.

Aki's back stiffens even more. He purses his lips and avoids your gaze, looking at the sky, the parking lot cars, the apartment windows, anything except you.

His eyes follow your back as you walk off to the apartment where the "situation" is commencing. Then he cringes at himself; crinkles the corners of his eyes and tightens his face like he just sucked on a lemon.

I do not permit the copying/reposting/translation/plagiarism of my works. Do not steal what I've worked hard to create.

This is fictional work.

#fluff #aki #aki hayakawa #aki fluff #aki x reader #aki hayakawa x reader #aki csm #csm aki #chainsaw man fluff #csm fluff #csm x reader #aki chainsaw man

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allthingslinguistic · 1 year

Text

But by the end of my five years [as a copy editor], I felt intellectually and psychologically worn down by the labor I logged on my biweekly timesheets. Whatever roller-rink of neurons helped me spot aberrations from convention had grown practiced and strong, and it was difficult to read any unconventional sentence without reflexively rearranging it into a more conventional form.

Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]

I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.

It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.

Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.

But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.

A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.

In another article I pair it with, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”

It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all. [...]

Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]

There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.

I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.

I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. [...]

It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules. [...]

Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

--- Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections? Helen Betya Rubinstein on Having Power Over More Than Just Commas

#linguistics #literature #copyediting #copyeditor #prescriptivism #grammar snobbery #editing #writing #publishing

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69dias · 1 year

Text

rockstar!jk mini series: [1/?] paris

a/n: it is here, and it has not been proofread. i am so sorry for the lack of content on my part but i promise i will make it up to you guys. next one’s in new yawkkkkk

warnings: mean!jk makes his return, unprotected sex (if u do this i will end it all), fucking within the first hour of knowing somebody, degradation, a bitttt of dacryphilia, FINALLY WROTE OC SUCKING JK OFF, riding... dirty talk, i think that’s it. oh and an obscene amount of petnames.

wc: 4.6k

the first time you meet jungkook is in paris.

it happens after the show, one that you’re sure you won’t be ever have the capacity to forget, one that affirms every piece of media ever romanticizing this city because fuck, do amazing things happen here.

you don’t get to think about the performance too much, just barely processing the way the lead singer had stared you down during the set, the glide of his fingers over the strings of his guitar, the sweat on his arms and the way the stage lights beat down on the ink covering his skin; just barely processing how stunning he looked, and how you’re barely even drunk but would still do anything to get him to look at you like that again.

when you make your way to the bar, comically slow and still a bit dazed from all the eye-fucking and the performance that was practically sex personified, there’s a security guard right there who almost seems to be judging your every move, eyes flitting down the expanse of your body as though he’s inspecting you for something. there’s a leather jacket draped over his uniform-clad arm, complete with patches similar to something an 80s actor would wear, complete with a cigarette hanging from their lips. it sure as hell doesn’t belong to you, and you open your mouth to tell him that, but he beats you to it.

“ma’am, this is for you.”

you don’t hear him clearly at first, and when you do, it’s hard to make the conclusion that he is indeed speaking to you. you whip your head around to see who else this man could possibly be asking to take this jacket, but he doesn’t let you dwell on it for too long —

“no, ma’am, you.” when you point to yourself, his sigh of agitation makes your eyes narrow at the sheer audacity he has to get irritated with you when he’s asking someone random out of the hundreds of people to accept this patched jacket. “yes, you. jeon jungkook would like to give you this. he tells you to check the pocket.”

the slight accent he has makes it hard for you to decipher the name, but this time, it isn’t hard for you to connect the dots.

jeon jungkook. the lead singer, who’d introduced himself as JK just a mere five minutes before he’d sluttily bitten his lips and done a once-over of your entire form like he was willing to devour you whole just like that.

jeon jungkook wanted to give you his jacket. there’s something in his pocket for you. this reminds you awfully of a wattpad story you’d written about harry styles back when you were a fledgling, and you figure it’s god’s way of repaying you for all the flack you’ve gotten for it over the years.

“are you sure he said it was for me?”

“yes, ma’am.”

it’s the last thing he says before extending his arm towards you, tilting his head expectantly. your fingers shake, still not fully able to process this when you pluck the jacket out of his hold. the man doesn’t stay for longer, and you think he clearly does not get paid enough for this, but whatever pitiful feelings you have towards this security guard dissipate as you reach into the pocket of the jacket.

it’s a piece of paper, perfectly out of the cliches you’d curate for yourself back in 2010, and it’s been written on in hasty ink.

the peninsula. meet me at 00:30 in the lobby. -JK.

this shouldn’t be a surprise, not in the slightest. you knew what you were getting into when you entered a cab headed to The Peninsula, you knew the risks of going to meet a rockstar after one shared look during his performance, and you knew meeting at midnight wouldn’t constitute anything other than this.

this, being sex, of course.

of course, though, life has a way of catching you off guard, but you don’t think it’s a bad thing, not when jungkook is fucking you the way he is.

you expected roughness, clothes ripped off each others bodies, pressed against the walls of his room, calloused hands running down the expanse of your unmarked skin, desperate and hot and messy; you expected to be bent over, cheek pressed into the softness of his bad — you expected jungkook to live up to the stereotype, although often misconstrued, that he would be rough in the typical, rockstar one-night-stand sort of way.

and jungkook does almost the exact opposite.

to set the scene, imagine a hotel room.

it’s a suite, floor to ceiling windows, and a bed far too big for the one person staying in the room, on top of which you’re bent over in half.

jungkook looms over you, thigh caught in one large palm as he uses the other to trail over your cheek, inked fingers dancing over the curve of your jaw until they rest gently over your neck. he doesn’t apply any pressure, eyes trailing over your face to gauge your reaction before he proceeds, zooming in on the way your lips fall open in a mixture of surprise and what he can only assume is lust.

he has you in your beyond skimpy lingerie that barely offers any dignity, the fabric being so light that it almost seems like you predicted the outcome of the night, but there’s no way you could’ve guessed any of this would happen. aside from the underwear, though, he insisted you wear the jacket that got you caught up in this to begin with, and the look in his eyes as he scans your body is something you wish you could save forever. the very obvious salaciousness directed towards you does nothing to save you from the ripple of embarrassment that washes over your body until it settles deep in your stomach when you realize that he’s fully clothed, and hellbent on staying that way for a good while.

when your eyes flit away from his face, avoiding him almost desperately, he tsks, index finger lifting from the goosebump-riddled skin of your neck to prod at your chin until you’re forced to look at him again.

“c’mon now, baby. look right at me. that’s what got you here, now, isn’t it?”

the question doesn’t require an answer, but you shake your head no, and it makes him laugh; loudly and unabashedly like he’s outright mocking you, and it doesn’t do anything to help how humiliating this is.

“no? no?” he tightens his grip on your neck once, twice, holding it there until you outstretch your head in a clear struggle to breath. the nonchalant way in which he stares down at your face, practically painted with desperation, pleading him to let you breath, sends waves of arousal down your form. you can practically feel the lace of your panties sticking to your pussy, and it makes you grind up into him for any semblance of friction to relieve yourself. “you don’t agree that you got yourself here?”

when he loosens his grip, you can’t help but relax into the sheets, panting in a quick effort to regain your breath so you can answer him. it’s not like his insistence that this situation began with you bothers you, but you’re not entirely to blame, which is something you affirm as soon as you recover.

“you were staring at me, too, though.” the words roll of your tongue almost too fluently, which is something that both surprises you and fills you with profound regret when he narrows his eyes down at you.

jungkook pulls his hand off your neck, placing it onto the soft skin of your other thigh, separates your legs so your feet land on either sides of his waist. he pulls himself closer to you, enough so you could feel how hard he is if he were to shift his hips up just a bit. the denim of his ripped jeans is a little too close to your pussy, and it makes you want to speed this entire thing up so he would just fuck you, but his next moves make the thought disappear altogether.

he brings his fingers to your face again, this time grabbing your jaw in an unforgiving hold, smushing your cheeks together until you feel tears gather in your eyes. he leans down, licking a fat stripe up the side of your neck, pulling away to blow on it softly until the sensation sends chills rippling over your skin.

“say that again, baby. think about you got yourself into a car and then showed off your pretty little body, think about how you’re grinding your slutty cunt on my jeans right now, and say it again. is this my doing?”

his grip doesn’t loosen on your cheeks, and hot tears run down your cheeks when he shakes your head no with his own hand.

“you’re all pretty like this just for me?”

he makes you nod yes, not of your own volition at all, and then let’s go. there’s a smarting ache blooming over your face, one that leaves you squeezing your eyes shut until his disapproving tsk has them snapping open to stare at him.

you don’t think you’ve ever been this turned on, cunt clenching around nothing as jungkook looks you up and down, eyebrows perked at the way your breath catches in your throat when he settles his hands along your waist.

it’s short-lived, the warmth of his palms leaving your body to rip his shirt off of his own in record time. he’s truly a sight to see, expanse of his right shoulder covered in ink that trails down to the fingers that had just been wrapped around your jaw, dim light of the hotel glinting off the two barbells on his nipples. his skin is like honey, smooth and golden, the chisel of his abs and definition of his adonis’ belt disappearing into the tight jeans that wrap around his thighs almost sinfully. it takes a second for you to recuperate, finding yourself doing exactly what you had done just a couple of hours ago at the show, shamelessly running your eyes across the expanse of his body.

the grin that spreads across his face when he sees your reaction is almost childlike, and it makes a rush of affection wash over your body when he leans down to place a kiss next to your lips. that feeling fades into the same one of unadulterated desire, though, as he turns the chaste kiss into one that’s anything but; catching your bottom lips between his teeth, slipping his tongue into your mouth so your own is open, letting him lick his way into you, filthy like he would shove it down your throat if he could.

your hands fly to his nape, playing with the smooth skin before scratching your fingers down the taut muscles of his back. he pulls away when you run your nails over his waist and reach the buckle of his belt; his own hands join yours then, pulling at the leather and tossing it so it lands next to your head. his jeans are next, unbuttoning them and pushing them until his knees, too desperate to remove them completely.

when he pulls his boxers off, it’s almost comical how your head snaps downwards to take a lewd look at his dick, and it truly would make you seem silly if it wasn’t so fucking pretty. it’s a peculiar way to describe a dick, but it’s long and thick, a bulging vein trailing along the underside leading up to his pink mushroom tip, a sharp contrast to the white beads of precum that spill over the side, testament to how turned on he is even when you’ve barely touched him.

“taking a pretty good look, baby. what’s up, not good enough for you?”

his tone is teasing, and you decipher the mocking lilt immediately, but just in case he’s being serious, you affirm him.

“no, no. it’s… it’s really pretty…” when you trail off, lost in the thought of how he’s going to feel inside of you, he clicks his tongue, chuckling softly.

“want it inside you, hm?”

your nod is soft, and you’re not even sure if he sees it, but you use all the strength you can muster to push him off of you. he lets out a small oof when he lands on the mattress, and you can see his eyebrows rise inquisitively as he watches for your next move.

completely taken over by a desire to just get his dick in your mouth, it doesn’t take you more than a few seconds to adjust yourself, pushing his legs up so his feet rest on the bed, and situating yourself between his thighs.

jungkook laughs, running a hand through your hair, grip tightening ever so lightly when you run a finger over his tip, collecting his precum and popping it in your mouth. when you look up at him, you see that his cheeks have developed a soft blush, eyes hooded when they look down at you in a daze, waiting for you to continue.

you’d hate to deny him further, revving up your throat to sloppily spit on the tip of his cock, relishing on the soft hiss he lets out at the contact. you do the same to your palm, rubbing it over his length until his hips twitch, breath getting heavier.

jungkook has a gorgeous voice, you know this, and thousands of people other than you do as well, but the moan he lets out when you finally get your mouth on him is nothing short of pornographic. you meet his eyes as you sink further down his length, tongue rolling around the base as you take him until his tip hits the back of your throat. you’ve been blessed with a gag reflex that’s practically non-existent, though, and it’s clear that he enjoys the feeling of your warm throat when you take his dick all the way down until your nose meets the hair at his base.

he uses his grip on your head to fuck your mouth slowly, soft ruts into his hips into you as you stare up at him, entirely helpless. the softness lasts for a couple of seconds, though, before he’s gathering your hair into a makeshift ponytail to really give it to you, broken groans and heavy pants echoing into the air. it’s all a mere buzz in your ears, though, as you try not to grind your own hips into the bed below you; it’s ridiculous how you feel so turned on when he’s using you like a toy to get off, and your cheeks dust over in embarrassment when you trail a hand down to press softly over your clit.

the reprieve you get has you moaning onto his dick, and it’s clear that he enjoys the vibration, voice getting pitchier as he continues to thrust into your mouth. he’s big, though, and the strain in your jaw paired with the lack of oxygen has you tearing up, the view of his contorted face getting blurry as you try to breathe through your nose.

jungkook’s head lolls back, hips getting sloppier as he gets closer. your free hand goes to tap the skin of his thigh as a signal to let you take a break, and you almost think that he won’t let you have it, too strung up in his own pleasure, until he pulls you off. there’s a filthy string of spit connecting your lips to his dick, tears rolling down your face, mouth parted and cheeks flushed in the wake of the mess he’s made of you.

“jesus, fuck, baby… who taught you that?”

you laugh, not fully processing the question until he sits up, heavy red cock slapping against his abdomen when he leans down to press a kiss to your forehead. jungkook’s smiling too, though, and you let him wipe the spit off your bottom lip, watching intently as he situates himself against the headboard.

when he pats his lap, using two of his fingers to call you towards him in a come hither motion, you genuinely feel irritated at how attractive he is. it is entirely unfair, and the pit of desire in your stomach entirely consumes you as you crawl your way up towards him. jungkook’s hands are warm on your waist when you get close enough for him to pull you up and over your lap, heat placed directly over his cock until his tip is just lightly kissing your clit. you’re so sensitive, so besides yourself in want that you grab his base to finally get him inside of you —

“Hold it, sweet girl. Gotta get you ready,” he practically lifts you up with one hand alone, and the way your pussy clenches at the display of strength is genuinely humiliating, but he doesn’t seem to notice when his inked fingers make their way to your clit.

He traces up your pussy, gathering your wetness before using the pad of his thumb to rub at your clit ever so softly. the action makes you keen, head falling forward to rest in the crook of his neck as he changes his pace from the rough demeanor he exhibited until just a few seconds ago. he presses a soft kiss to your temple, picking up his pace as he rubs your clit in soft circles, paying close attention to the changes in your breath and the way your soft whimpers get louder when he speeds up.

when he deems you wet enough, jungkook dips his index finger into you, letting you take him inch by inch, slowly until he reaches the soft spongy spot a couple of inches in, free hand coming to rest at the side of your hip when you buck forward, sucking a sharp breath through your teeth —

“f-fuck, jungkook, please just — please fuck me,”

his chuckle is light, kissing the side of your head again as he slowly prods his middle finger into you.

“I’m going to, honey, just breathe out for me, okay? gotta get your sweet cunt open for me, hm?”

your nods are fervent, letting out a slow breath of air and allowing his two fingers into you fully. the stretch is welcome, but the sting is ever present, and you claw down the skin of his biceps until you get used to it. he fucks his fingers into you expertly, bringing you closer and closer to the precipice of pleasure until his name rolls of your tongue like a prayer, letting yourself succumb to the pleasure. you kiss down the column of his neck, sloppier and wetter as you warn him that you’re about to cum —

jungkook pulls his fingers out of you, a disappointed whimper of yours that gets pitcher at the tail-end colors the air as he pushes the blunt head of his cock into your entrance instead.

it’s a lot girthier than just his two fingers, but you assume he didn’t want you to get too comfortable and the pain is entirely welcome, especially when you can feel every ridge of his cock, clenching uncontrollably as he slides further into your cunt, nearly kissing your cervix from this angle when he bottoms out.

the two of you let out a moan, curses coalescing as they break the silence that has consumed the two of you. this feels natural, like you’re made to take him and he’s made to fill you, and when jungkook nudges your jaw to focus your eyes on his, you feel compelled to just never look away; his cock nestled within you, arm wrapped around the curve of your waist, as he leans forward to press his lips against yours in a sloppy kiss to keep you distracted as he begins to inch out slowly.

you feel a blossom of warmth in the tresses of your stomach when he ruts back into show, soft movements of his hips until your head rolls back, baring your neck so he can lick down it lazily. he presses a palm to your lower abdomen, telling you to breathe out, baby, applying just the slightest amount of pressure so you can feel him all the way in your stomach when he bottoms in again.

the groans he’s letting out are nothing short of filthy, th soft murmurs of your name as you brace your hands on the definition of his thighs doing nothing but incentivizing you to give your hips an experimental roll until you see his eyes shut and tighten.

“fuck, sweetheart. ride me, yeah —“

you’re good at listening to instructions, which turns out to be great for him, audibly moaning when you start to sink into the rhythm in fucking yourself on him. he lets you work yourself up, stares at you through dark eyes, voice scratchy as he guides you through it —

“aren’t you the prettiest girl in the world, hm?” jungkook knows just what to do, too, words fuzzy in your ears but the feeling of his warm palm on your abdomen doing nothing but spurring you on. “there we go, that’s it.”

his hand strokes the skin it sits upon, pressing down when you stop moving to catch your breath, the stinging pain rippling through your thighs as the strenuosity of pushing yourself over the edge gets a bit too much. you’re sure you look like a mess, hair messy and mouth dropped open in a silent moan as jungkook thrusts upwards into you, eyes fixated on where he can feel the bulge of his cock in your stomach.

you make a mental note to thank the security guard if you ever find him, because holy fuck.

jungkook doesn't let you start up again, planting his feet on the sheets as he uses his free hand to grip your hips, using it as leverage to really fuck up into you. he finds the spot comically easily, something you’d tried to do yourself with the seemingly pathetic hip rolls, nothing compared to the way jungkook is taking you right now.

you don’t mind giving it up, either, because it’s been a while since you’ve felt like this. it’s been a while since someone’s had you relinquishing all control, had your eyes rolling to the back of your head, tits bouncing about obscenely as he never lets up on how rough he’s fucking you, his own breath coming in pants and choked out affirmations of how good he feels — “fuck yeah, that’s a good girl”, “taking me so fucking well” — as he makes it abundantly clear just how close he is.

it should take longer, it's always taken longer, but jungkook uses the hand on your stomach to reach down, rubbing tight circles on your clit until your upper body loses the strength to keep you up, ripples of pleasure sending chills all over your skin until you fall forward into the crook of his neck. you muffle your moans into his skin, embarrassed by the obscenities that just roll off your lips, but every half circle he rubs on your clit tightens the string at the tresses of your stomach until you can’t help your head from lolling back.

“jesus — jungkook, fuck —“ the way your hips move on their own accord, sloppy in their goal to somehow meet his thrusts halfway is completely out of your control. it’s insane how close you are, and you only affirm this over and over until he has to physically hold you down to keep you from slumping over from the strength of his own hips. “I’m so, so close, please —“

“come on, baby, almost there, hm?”

he uses a free hand to tilt your chin down to look him in the eyes and it feels like you’re on fire. the angle of his dick splitting you in half, the way he’s staring at you, the thumb on your clit — it’s all too much and it has the coil that’s tightened in your stomach snapping, high washing over you in soft ripples and then a sharp wave that has your upper body tightening and loosening all in one go. it’s lighter than you expected, but you can feel the flutter of your cunt around his cock, moans breaking as you take in the way his face contorts in the wake of your orgasm.

jungkook’s thrusts stop, and you’re thankful because overstimulation is not your favorite, but he doesn’t stop chasing his own high; hips now moving up in shallow ruts as his grip on you loosens, head tilting up and giving you access to the column of his throat. you lean forward, licking a fat stripe up his skin until a shiver wracks his body. he presses a hand against your nape, grip weak in an attempt to push your foreheads together.

he stares you right in the eyes, using his other hand to pull his cock out of you, smiling lazily when you let out a hiss at the emptiness.

jungkook is stupidly close, if the borderline angry red of his cock is anything to go off of, and he doesn’t stop going after his orgasm when an inked hand encircles his base, never breaking eye contact with you as he gets himself off. there’s a filthy shlick shlick that is nothing but a buzz in your head as you’re still coming down from your high, but nothing fazes you, not when he looks so damn pretty.

eyes blown out, skin of his chest red from the exertion, breath raspy and voice breaking as he pushes himself over the precipice, you can’t bring yourself to look away from jungkook right now, almost paralleling the performance that got you into this debacle to begin with.

when he cums, it’s with a soft sigh and a deep groan of your name, spurts of white a stark contrast against the red of his cock. he lets you collect the cum on two of your fingers, a low chuckle ripping from his throat when you pop them into your mouth and then out.

jungkook doesn’t stop you when you slip yourself off his lap, instead just trading soft circles over your thighs from where you lay next to him. he’s a lot gentler now that the room is no longer charged sexually, but you don’t exactly pick up on the change in atmosphere — not when you’re this tired.

“jungkook?”

“mm, yeah baby?”

the pet name seems to slip out of his mouth, and you’re taken aback at first, enough to snap your head up towards him. he doesn’t look back, instead shuffling off the bed entirely, presumably to go clean himself up.

“don’t kick me out, ‘kay?”

“okay, baby. stay as long as you need.”

when you wake up, it’s to a bag of McDonald’s next to you, and yet another note.

you’re not surprised, though. it was clear that whatever you had with jungkook would be a one and done thing, and you’re grateful that he at least let you stay the night.

he seems to have packed up, and your memory may be failing you but it’s likely that he’s gone to fly off to get to another one of his shows somewhere in new york. or any other big city. you decide to look it up later, the dull pounding in your head not letting you wrack your brain further.

the note, however, seems to do the ‘looking up’ for you.

xxx-xxx-xxx

text me, i’ll fly you out to new york.

p.s. check-out’s at 3, sleepy head.

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