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#raw dogging my way through school

asahicore · 5 months

Text

bad news first - sjy (m)

this work contains smut - minors please do not interact pairing. jake x fem!reader synopsis. From the moment you'd met at eight to the day he moved to South Korea at fourteen, you and Jake were inseparable. But after years of being apart, you've come to terms with the fact that at twenty, you and Jake just aren't what you used to be. That is until you get a text from him, and all of a sudden, he's back by your side, doing his year abroad at the university you study at, and all your feelings for him float back up to the surface. genre. college au, childhood friends to ???? to lovers, painful mutual pining, one bed trope..... a sprinkle of angst (my hand slipped) but mostly fluff i promise and smut (mdni!!!), also i made sunghoon really weird in this and idkw, this is set in scotland.. edinburgh uni rep!! word count. 23k author's note. everybody say happy belated birthday to @zreamy.. happy belated birthday zo!!! being 22 years and 6 days old is cooler than just 22 years old anyway.. hope you like it bestie... if you dont... well theres a building on campus thats 17 stories high sooo.. enjoy! i hope everyone else enjoys too, since this is a bday fic for zo she couldnt beta read so i had to raw dog this so if its terrible.. not my fault! lmk what u think!! i also made a playlist for this, do listen along!!

“Alright kids, good news or bad news first?”

You looked at your teacher, then at the boy next to you, then back at your teacher. “Bad news first,” you said in unison.

You were only eight, but you were both wise enough to know that hearing good news second would assuage the blow of whatever these bad news were. Miss Dawson sighed as she crouched in front of you. “The bad news is your bus driver is on strike and won’t be coming. The good news is that your parents have been informed and are coming to pick you up soon.”

Following her instructions, you headed to the gymnasium and sat there silently among the other kids. Not many kids in your class rode the bus home, and the ones who did seemed to have drivers not on strike, so it was just the two of you. You were used to that, though - over January and February, you had made a sort of silent pact to stand and wait for the bus together. You sometimes shared snacks, but you never spoke. For some reason, you felt at ease with this boy, even though you didn’t know much about him. You had heard he had moved to Brisbane just at the start of this year, all the way from South Korea. You were pretty sure his name was Jake.

You handed him one of your Twix bars. Then he spoke. “I thought a strike was when you did really well in bowling.”

“Same,” you replied, mouth full of chocolate and caramel. “I’m not sure why that would keep the bus driver from picking us up.”

Jake looked at you with wide eyes, distress clear in them. “Do you think he went bowling instead of picking us up?”

This made you frown. “That’d be really rude.”

“It would. I always make sure to go bowling on the weekends, ‘cause if I missed school that’d be rude to Miss Dawson.”

You nodded your head in fervent agreement. “For sure.”

That weekend, his mum called your mum to ask if you wanted to go to the bowling alley with them. From then on, for the next six years, you were stuck together by glue.

Twelve years later, Jake’s name appearing on your phone screen has become such a rare sight, you don’t believe it right away. It takes you a few seconds of intense squinting at the letters to actually realise your eyes aren’t deceiving you.

jake.sim15 hey y/n!! you go to edinburgh uni right?

You type and delete three different responses before settling for a simple yeah, I am! what’s up?, hoping you sounded nonchalant even though you very much felt chalant. You thought that whatever you sent wouldn’t be as weird as taking forever to answer such a straightforward question.

As you wait for Jake’s reply, you scroll through your previous shared messages, noting with sadness that for three years in a row, the only instances you’d texted were to wish each other a happy birthday or when he reacted with a fire emoji to Stories of your dog, Milo. Before that, your last conversation was to congratulate each other about getting into your top choice universities and to discuss plans for your respective futures.

Futures that used to include each other, you think. His reply appears at the bottom of your screen before melancholy can fill your heart.

jake.sim15 i applied to go there for my year abroad next year annnnd i got in !! heh

You shoot up straight from your seat on the lounge chaise you’d been sunbathing on, a loud “Oh my God!” involuntarily escaping your mouth.

“What? What happened? Is everything okay?” Chaewon asks frantically, rushing over to your side. “Oh,” she says when she sees your phone. “It’s a text… from a boy?”

This makes Yunjin, previously unbothered by your panic, rise from her seat and take off her sunglasses. “A boy? Show me,” she demands, snatching your phone from your hands before you can protest. Upon seeing the texts on your screen, she lets out a loud gasp. “It’s not just any boy! It’s the one and only Jake Sim himself.”

“Give that back!” you plead, hand reaching for your phone, but Yunjin is already walking away.

“And he’s coming to Edi this September, apparently. He says he’s sorry for not saying anything earlier, but he was waiting for an answer up until now.” She scoffs. “Leave it to our uni to tell someone they’re in less than two months before term starts. Oh, you’re the first person he’s told, Y/N! After his parents. How cute,” she coos, protesting when you snatch your phone back from her. “Hey! I was reading that.”

“Those are my texts, Yunjin. I’m the one who’s meant to read them.”

She shrugs. “You would’ve told us anyway.”

“What are you going to reply?” Chaewon asks. With the both of them hovering over your shoulders and watching as you type a response, a sort of stage fright comes over you, making you send what might be the most unoriginal reply known to man.

“Awesome? Seriously, Y/N?” Yunjin reads, disproportionately disgusted with you.

“That’s a lot of exclamation marks. It almost makes it look like you don’t mean it,” Chaewon says.

“I do mean it!”

“Well, he seems to like it. A smiling-with-teeth emoji is a good sign, right?” she asks in an attempt to make you feel better.

“He has automatic caps off. That man is run-through,” Yunjin says, shaking her head as she walks back to her sunbed.

“You were excited about him texting me just a second ago,” you reproach.

“Yeah, before I found out he was a whore.”

“Yunjin, you know we don't slut-shame here!” Chaewon exclaims. Before Yunjin can say anything even worse in response, your phone starts ringing, and Jake’s name appears on your screen. “He’s calling you?” Chaewon gasps, making Yunjin sit up with a start for the second time in less than five minutes.

“This man is insane,” she remarks with all the seriousness in the world.

You run away from your friends, finding refuge in the outside kitchen area out of earshot. They don’t need to hear your conversation with Jake. You love them, but they can be weirdly unsupportive in moments like these.

“Hey, Jake,” you greet, hoping he doesn’t notice the breathlessness in your voice. It was because you had just ran, of course - you didn’t want him to think you were so nervous about talking to him after such a long time, you could barely breathe. Because you weren’t. At all.

“Hey, Y/N!” he replies, and the excitement in his voice makes your heart melt. “I hope it’s not weird that I called, I just thought it’d be nicer than texting, is that okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine, it’s nice to hear your voice,” you say before you can really think about it, and cringe at your own words. Years without talking and the world’s worst line is the first thing you say to Jake. Thankfully, before you start excruciating yourself, a chuckle pours out of Jake’s throat and blesses your ears.

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too. What are you up to?”

“Oh, I’m on vacation with my friends. One of them has a rich aunt who owns a villa in southern Italy, so we’re just chilling by the pool right now.”

“You always wanted to go to Italy! That sounds so nice,” he says. Your breath catches gently in your throat - he remembers, you note.

“Yeah, it really is. What about you, how are you spending the summer?”

Jake tells you about the local bookstore owned by a grandpa that’s always had a soft spot for him and that gave him a part-time job for the summer. “I’m trying to save up as much money as I can before I leave. If I treat you to a meal, will you show me around the city?” he asks, and you can hear the grin in his voice. It makes you realise how much you’ve actually missed him.

“You don’t need to treat me to a meal, I’ll show you around anyway.”

Still, he insists, and you find yourself giving in quickly - because it’s Jake or because free food is on the table, you’re not sure. Probably both.

You and Jake get to talking, but fitting years and years of catching up into one conversation is an impossible task, and before you know it, when you check your phone, you’ve been talking for over an hour. Yunjin is angrily waving at you, pointing at her stomach to indicate hunger like a caveman who’s just learned how to communicate. You apologise to Jake, telling him you have to go, and plan to meet during fresher’s week before you hang up.

A few hours later, you get a text from him saying it was nice talking to you and jokingly asking whether Yunjin was satisfied with lunch. It’s innocuous, but it opens a gate for more texting, which leads to long, rambling voice messages, which leads to late-night phone calls that remind you of when you were fifteen and still kept in touch. When August fades into September, you feel like you’ve got your best friend back.

You remember why you were so in love with him at fourteen.

You see Jake before he sees you.

Among the throngs of people, you manage to spot the dark, messy flop of hair on his head weighed down by a nice pair of wireless headphones. After a thirteen-hour flight from Seoul, a four-hour layover in Frankfurt and a final, two-hour flight to Edinburgh, he looks rightfully exhausted, using what looks like the last of his energy to spot the exit and the airport bus stop. Even wearing a simple denim jacket, white tee and grey sweatpants, he’s so gorgeous you forget what you came here for, until he almost walks right past you without seeing you. You put yourself in his path and hold your hand-written banner up, making yourself as obvious as you can as you call out his name.

When he sees you, he stops dead in his tracks for a second, someone almost running into him before he remembers the crowd behind him. His tired features break out into a bright smile that has your heartbeat speeding up so much, you think it might run out of your chest.

He had told you not to come, that it would be late for you and he didn’t want to bother you, but you had managed to get the information of his arrival before he forbade you from picking him up so you did it anyway, wanting to surprise him. After years of being apart, rather than waiting another day, you wanted to see him as soon as possible.

Jake briskly makes his way to you, dropping his bags next to him on the floor as he engulfs you in a hug, warm and tight as if he’s trying to make up for all those years. You hug him back as if someone would appear out of thin air and take him away from you again.

“This was the longest day of my life, I’m so happy to see you,” he says when he pulls away, and you’re so happy you can’t even say anything back, resorting to giggling and lightly swatting non-existent dust off of his shoulders.

As you wait for the bus, he tells you about every trivial thing that happened to him on his trip, from how expensive a sandwich is at the airport to the German kid sitting in front of him that kept turning around to stare at him on his second flight.

“How did you know he was German?” you ask, amused.

Jake pauses. “Just vibes.”

Conversation on the bus is slightly disjointed as you jump from topic to topic with random pauses here and there before one of you finds something to talk about - but it’s okay, you hadn’t expected for the two of you to be as easy as before. It’s more awe at seeing each other after such a long time than awkwardness. Even though you’d caught up over summer, there was a world of difference between speaking on the phone and actually sitting next to him. You notice things like the shine of his hair, the creases that form on the sides of his lips when he smiles, or, unfortunately for you, the veins that run along his forearms and hands - things you hadn’t noticed previously thanks to the sometimes questionable quality of the front camera of his phone. Once in a while, your thigh brushes against his, and it reminds you that he’s really here. Even that he’s real, at all.

In a tragic turn of events, Jake lives in the student accommodation you used to live in in first year, and coming back to it two years later is slightly traumatising. His three-person flat is in a different building as your old one, and you marvel at how it somehow still smells the same - like dusty, decade-old carpeting and the permanent stench of students’ dubitable cooking. He’s the first one to move in, which makes the place slightly eerie, but it means that you’re not bothering anyone by unpacking Jake’s stuff and cooking Shin Ramyun the previous tenants had left behind at 11pm.

Your late dinner was meant for you to take a small break, watch a couple episodes of Friends which Jake had been shocked to learn you’d never watched, and you had been shocked to learn he was a die-hard fan of (since one year ago), then get back to unpacking. But the ramen sends an already exhausted Jake into a food coma so intense, he falls asleep on your shoulder five minutes into the second episode.

You let him sleep as long as he needs, turning the volume down on his laptop and stifling your chuckles as much as you can. You feel like a cat has fallen asleep in your lap - you are now obliged by law to stay still until Jake wakes up. It’s not until an hour later that Jake’s uncomfortable sleeping position forces him awake, lifting his head off of your shoulder with a grunt. He looks around himself, at his room that’s not quite familiar to him yet, then at you, eyes still scrunched with sleepiness as a grin blooms onto his lips.

“Sorry,” clearing his throat of its grogginess. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost one a.m,” you reply, and his eyes go wide.

“You should’ve woken me up! Does your shoulder hurt?” he asks, much more alarmed than he should be, and it makes you laugh.

“It’s all good. But now that you’re awake, I should probably head home.”

“I’ll get you an Uber,” he says, already pulling out his phone.

“It’s fine, Jake, my place is a ten-minute walk from here. I live just up the road.”

Jake’s fingers on his phone pause as he looks up at you. “Then I’ll walk you home.” He lifts a finger in warning when he sees you start to protest. “And don’t fight me on this. You did so much today, it’s the least I can do.”

As much as you love the idea of spending more time with Jake, even if it’s just ten minutes, you still don’t want to bother him when you know how tired he is. “It’s really safe around here. I can just text you when I’m home, if you’re worried about me getting kidnapped or something,” you say, taking his jacket from his hands and placing it back on his desk chair.

He grabs it back, putting it on before you can take it from him again, and rummages through one of his suitcases for a black, woolly scarf. Neither of you speaks as he wraps it tight around your neck, even though the early September weather isn’t cold enough to warrant it. His hands stop briefly on the scarf and a small smile spreads on his lips. You hope he doesn’t hear your sharp intake of breath when your eyes meet. “It’s not about that,” he says simply, voice low and unlike you’ve ever heard it before. You don’t think his voice had quite finished cracking when he’d moved away back then.

Suddenly, he steps away, grabs his keys, and heads for the door. “Let’s go!” he says, voice back to its usual cheery tone. You don’t find it in you to question him, so you just follow him out, welcoming the night breeze that cools down your burning cheeks with open arms.

The walk to your place is mostly done in comfortable silence, but it still goes by too quickly for your liking. You keep your hands in your pockets to prevent yourself from doing something stupid, like reaching out for Jake’s hand that swishes back-and-forth as he walks. Instead, you bury your nose in his scarf and relish in the unfamiliar but comforting smell that his cologne has left behind on the fabric. You hug goodbye when you reach your flat, and you have to remind yourself to let go. He insists on you keeping the scarf. “My mum packed me, like, three, so you can have that one.”

“Your mum still pack your things for you, does she?” you ask, tone playful.

“No-” he says, voice slightly whiny, before he realises you’re just teasing him. “Whatever,” he chuckles, ruffling your hair. You hope the streetlights aren’t bright enough for him to notice the flustered look on your face. The both of you stand there awkwardly for a second, before he lets out another chuckle. “Right. See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” you beam.

“Okay,” he says, but still doesn’t make a move to leave. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll be off then.” He gives you one last smile then turns around, burying his hands in his pockets, and you watch as he walks away.

“Get home safe,” you call out after a few seconds.

He pivots on his heels, and, with a wave of his hand, says, “I will! Go inside.”

“Good night!”

“Night, Y/N!”

When you walk into your living room, Yunjin is sitting on the couch, arms crossed over her chest, gaze trained on the wall opposite her, one lamp lighting the otherwise completely dark room. She looks like a detective in one of those bad cop shows.

“Gosh, what’s all this for?”

“You’re back awfully late,” she says, neither looking at you nor answering your question.

“Yeah, I was with Jake,” you shrug, heading into the kitchen for a glass of water. She abruptly gets up from her seat, following you into the other room and staying close behind you.

“And?” she demands, mouth way too close to your ear and making you start.

“And what?” you ask.

“What do you mean and what?!” she says, clearly agitated. “I want to know everything!”

“There’s nothing to say, really. He seemed happy I picked him up from the airport, then I helped him unpack. He lives in Riego, by the way.”

“Ew.”

“I know, it was awful going back there.”

The two of you stare at each other as you drink your water. “Well?” she asks.

“What?”

“Is that it?”

You fill your glass again to take it into your bedroom. “I don’t know, we just ate and watched Friends.”

“You hate shows with laughing tracks,” she states like it’s an accusation.

“It wasn’t actually that bad,” you reply, shrugging.

She tuts. “Love will do ugly, ugly things to a person.”

“You’ve been in a loving relationship for the past two years.”

“This isn’t about me. Can we talk about how you’re still in love with the same loser from when you were ten?”

“I was fourteen, and don’t call Jake a loser when you haven’t even met him.” You ignore the roll of her eyes. “And I’m not. Not anymore. I’m just happy to have my friend back.” Yunjin gives you a look. “Okay, maybe I’m still a little bit in love with him. But it’s so little, it’s barely there.” Her expression is unchangingly unimpressed and you can’t help but throw in the towel. “Alright, fine. I still love him, what about it?”

“You’re pathetic.”

“I know that, no need to remind me.”

“Are you gonna do something about it?”

“My patheticness? I’ve tried, didn’t really work.”

“No, idiot, about Jake. You should go and get him! It’d be so sexy if you got together as 20-somethings after knowing each other since you were babies.”

“We were eight when we met. And I don’t know if sexy is the word I’d use here.”

“Anything is sexy if you try hard enough,” she says, and you have to laugh. “Anyways, you should confess your undying love and tell him you’ve felt that way since you met.”

“I wasn’t-”

“Guys might not show it, but they probably get all hot for stuff like that. Boosts their ego and shit.”

“Yunjin, I just got my friend back, I’m not gonna risk it. Plus, who knows, I might not actually be in love with him. It might just be my emotions acting up, like, seeing someone I used to like after a while. We’ve both changed so much, once I get to know him more now, I might not even feel the way I used to.”

“Notice how you’ve used the word might twice in ten seconds? You’re just trying to find excuses.”

You groan. “This is why I hate English Lit people.”

“You do English Lit.”

“I know, and I’m the only nice person that does it.” In your head, you add and Jake, but saying it out loud would only make this conversation worse for you.

“What’s that scarf, by the way? Did he give you that?”

You look down at the scarf like it’s a piece of incriminating evidence. “Can you stop grilling me, please? It’s late.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

You sighed deeply. “Fine. Yes, he gave me-”

“It’s not even that cold outside!” she exclaimed in an outrage. “Don’t tell me he also walked you home?”

You pause. “He did.”

She gasped. “He walked you home because he’s in love with you.”

“He walked me home because he’s a good friend that looks after me.”

“He walked you home because he realised how hot you’ve gotten and he wants some of that.”

All you can do is sigh. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.”

“If you weren’t such a coward, you wouldn’t be going to bed alone.”

“Whatever!” you say, shutting the door behind you, shaking that preposterous conversation out of your head. When you get into bed, it takes you at least half-an-hour before you can settle down, but you know your constant tossing and turning isn’t due to your inability to find a comfortable enough position to sleep in. Between your evening with Jake and Yunjin’s pestering, thoughts run wild and incoherent through your head.

You want to tell her every little thing that happened with Jake tonight, but you’re afraid it might do you more harm than good. She is most definitely the type of friend who will take the smallest action a guy did for you or the most meaningless thing he might have said and turn it into a sign that he has the hots for you, which usually does wonders for your confidence, but right now, you don’t need that kind of delusion. Did seeing your childhood best friend you used to secretly harbour feelings for make you feel some type of way? Of course, but that doesn’t mean you still love him after all this time, after six years of being apart, the majority of those years spent with no contact. It wasn’t like you parted ways with resentment, or anything of that sort, far from it; rather, you drifted apart naturally, as two teenagers with over 7000 kilometres between them would. At first, you’d call frequently and even write each other letters - but as you became more preoccupied with school, friends, and extracurriculars, your phones gradually rang less and your mailboxes became gradually emptier. You don’t even remember who sent the last, unanswered letter.

Tonight isn’t the first time you replay the moment Jake announced that he would go away, but it’s the first time it’s a bittersweet memory. It used to only be bitter - but now that you’ve reconnected, you can look back at it with fondness, wishing you could tell fourteen-year-old you the hurt would only last so long.

It hadn’t started unusually.

“So, bad news first, right?”

In your six years of friendship with Jake, this had been the first time you’d really been wary of what he would say next. The look on his face told you that this bad news wouldn’t be as easy to shake off as usual. Your definition of bad news was things like I got grounded so I can’t hang out, I forgot we had a test tomorrow so I can’t hang out, my allergies are acting up again so I can’t hang out.

“I’m moving to Korea next month.”

I’m on another continent, so I can’t hang out.

You remember the words not quite making sense at the time. “Oh? How long are you staying there?” you said, taking a bite of your strawberry ice cream which Jake had insisted on paying for, even though you knew he didn’t get much allowance.

“Forever.”

You stopped chewing, and the ice cream melted uncomfortably in your mouth. You don’t know how long you stayed there, frozen as you stared at your best friend in disbelief. It wasn’t until he lightly shoved your shoulder, only meeting your eyes for a split second, that you remembered to swallow and to say something.

“Forever as in… You won’t live here anymore? At all?”

Jake shook his head. He kept his eyes trained on the vanilla-chocolate ice cream sandwich he’d left in its wrapper. In the blazing hot Brisbane summer, it had probably fully melted two minutes ago. “At all.”

“Oh,” was all you found yourself able to say. For some reason, you hoped that continuing to eat your ice cream would stop you from crying, but to no avail. Hot, salty tears quickly started raining down your cheeks, mixing with the sweetness of your ice cream when they reached your lips.

“It’s my dad’s work. Same reason why I moved here when we were kids in the first place. They wanted him here then, they want him back there now. We just have to follow,” Jake explained, sounding just as upset as you felt.

“Right.”

“Are you mad at me?” Jake asked, worry clear in his voice, and finally turned to face you. At the sight of you crying, he let out a small oh, tears of his own pooling in his eyes.

You frowned. “Of course not. I’m never mad at you, you know that. I just… You’re my best friend, Jakey. It’s gonna be so lame around here without you.”

“It’ll be lame there without you, too.”

You attempted a smile. “Well, of course. But at least you’ll get to make new friends, see new places. You’ll be in a whole other country, I’m sure you’ll have fun there. I’m gonna be stuck in boring old Brisbane for the foreseeable future.”

“Do you know how offended our friends would be if they heard you speaking right now?” he asked, nudging your shoulder with his.

You sniffled and let out a chuckle. “They’re all great, but… I don’t like them nearly as much as I like you,” you said, staring down at your hands, hoping he wouldn’t realise exactly what you meant by that statement.

A weight was lifted off of your shoulders when Jake answered. “I like you the most too, Y/N.” You tried not to think too much about whether he’d meant it platonically or romantically - none of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was the feeling of his arms around you, his warmth enveloping your whole body, his familiar scent that you already missed.

You felt him take a deep breath against you before he pulled away. He sniffled and did his best to put on a smile. “Right, enough of that. I’m not leaving until next month, so don’t think you’re rid of me just yet,” he joked, and it helped alleviate the weight on your heart, even if just a little. “You said you had something to tell me? Good news after bad news, and all that.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot about that.”

You thought for a second. Today was the day you had planned to confess your feelings to Jake - you’d only told him you had good news to share. But what was the point now that he was leaving? If he felt the same way, it would only make his departure that much harder, and if he didn’t, it would ruin your last moments together. It just wasn’t worth it.

Jake tilted his head, waiting for you to speak. In a split second, you made yourself forget your disappointment over having built the courage to tell him how you felt only for it all to fall through, and resolved to make the most of Jake’s last month here. You wiped your tears and mirrored his small smile as best you could. “Um, it wasn’t anything much. My mum made those cowboy cookies you like.”

Jake’s head fell back as he groaned in anticipation. “If she wasn’t happily married with three kids, I’d marry your mum. Let’s go right now.”

You laughed. “There’d be a bit of an age gap there.”

“We’d make it work,” Jake joked, throwing his arm around your shoulders as you walked towards your house. He beamed down at you, his bright, boyish smile that you loved to bits, and you beamed up at him as you grabbed the hand that hung off your shoulder in your own.

You walked as happily as you could. “Do you even speak Korean?” you suddenly asked.

Jake halted abruptly in his steps, a gravely offended look on his face. When you looked back at him in confusion, he rolled his eyes and started walking again, pulling you with him. “It’s literally my mother tongue, Y/N. I speak it every day at home.”

“Oh, right.”

At the time, you thought nothing could come between you and Jake. Not anyone, not anything, neither distance nor time. But they did. A week after he’d left, a boy from your class you’d talked to maybe once or twice asked you out on a date. You weren’t sure why, but you said yes. Then you said yes to being his girlfriend, even though you didn’t like him all that much, and you even said yes to reducing your texting with Jake because it made him jealous. When you’d broken up with him and wanted to catch up with Jake and apologise for your absence, you’d found that his new school in Seoul was a lot more demanding than yours in Brisbane, and he had to spend most of his evenings in academies if he wanted to get into a nice university. It’s when you learned that he’d be staying in South Korea for college that you decided to leave Australia too. Brisbane was a lot less fun without him there - why bother staying? You couldn’t go to him because of the language barrier and the cost of university there. If you were to essentially uproot your life, might as well go somewhere you could get a scholarship and understand the people around you.

It seemed insane that someone you had thought would be by your side for the rest of your life, someone that was part of your most cherished memories, had been reduced to someone you casually texted once in a while. It seems even more insane that now that you’re finally done essentially grieving your friendship with Jake, he stands in front of you again, six inches taller but still donning those puppy-like eyes and smile of his.

For your sake, you just hoped you wouldn’t be as in love with him at twenty as you were at fourteen.

The next day, you show Jake around campus, which wouldn’t normally take more than ten minutes, but takes double that time because of the sheer amount of people there. Between the Societies Fair taking up most of the square, the tour guides leading freshers, walking slowly and taking in their new campus, and the pizza and drinks stands, freshers’ week always turns campus into what feels like the busiest place on Earth. You try not to let it hit a nerve for Jake’s sake, who’s clearly ecstatic at all the activity, but you like this place a lot more when it’s quieter. You walk through the Fair, laughing as Jake marvels at all the different clubs and societies at the Uni.

“Gardening Society? Dungeons & Dragons Society? Wine society?” he exclaims, astonishment growing with every passing stand.

“And this is only the first day. They also have a Taylor Swift Society.” He grabs a flyer from about every society, even though you know he’ll join between two to zero of them.

When you walk out, there’s a girl handing out samples of shampoo and conditioner, and you let her give you one, more out of politeness than anything.

“These are so useless,” you start, and Jake chuckles, unaware of the incoming rant. “I had that job of distributing them last year, and we would get a tip if we gave them all out. So naturally I put a bunch in my bag, but then I had to use them for like two weeks.” You sigh. “First of all, my hair did not like it. And second, the ratio is so off. There’s way more conditioner than shampoo when it should be the other way around, so you have to condition your hair even though it’s not properly clean. So stupid.”

“Sounds terrible,” Jake says, laughing. “Is that why you’re not doing it this year?”

“Oh… Not really. I dated the guy that takes care of this promo stuff, so it would’ve been kinda awkward…” you trail, immediately wishing you could backtrack on conversation. Talking about your ex with Jake wasn’t on your to-do list for today. Or ever.

“You dated your boss?”

“The manager, yeah, I guess. He was only 24, though, don’t worry.”

“I’m more worried about the power imbalance than the age gap there.”

You shrug, looking down at your shoes. “It’s not like he was that high up.”

“So, what happened? Why did you break up?”

“Well, he acted like our four-year age difference meant he could treat me like a little kid. It was nice being taken care of at first but then I realised how condescending he was and dumped him.”

“How long were you together?”

You pause. “Two weeks,” you admit abashedly, making Jake chuckle. “At least he didn’t waste my time and showed his red flags early on.”

“Any boyfriends since?” he asks, and you wonder whether you’re making up the unsure tone of his voice. As if he’s curious, but doesn’t want to show it too much. You hope you’re not making it up.

“A few, but they never last very long with me,” you say, a meek smile on your lips. “Furthest I got was three months.”

“And why didn’t it work out with three-months-guy?”

“He started comparing me to his mum a bit too often.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, I ran out of there without looking back.”

“Well, it’s nice to see you’ve got high standards. I would hate to see you date just any loser.”

You want to say, High standards or issues?, but you don’t want to make it weird, so you play it cool instead. “I would never. I have a mental checklist with everything a guy needs to have for me to date him.”

“A checklist? I have to hear about this.”

You sigh, debating whether you should tell him about it. Would he notice it’s based on him? Would he notice the only person that could tick practically every box was none other than him? Jake gently elbows your side, goading you on. When you look at him, he’s got a shit-eating grin playing on his lips, and you give in. You look off into the distance as you start listing your requirements. “Well, there’s all your basics like funny, taller than me but not too much, ‘cause I don’t want neck cramps, smart, takes uni seriously, has plans for his future, easy to talk to, not emotionally stunted and can actually have a vulnerable conversation. It’s also a bonus if he has a nice face.”

“How much of a bonus?”

You think for a second. “It’s more a dealbreaker than a bonus, actually. Nice smile is a must, definitely.”

“Okay. Got any more specifics?”

“I do have some particular ones. It’s nice if he’s a reader, but it’s terrible if it makes him think he’s better than everyone or if he tries to sound smarter than me. I like it if he has experience, I don’t want to have to teach him everything. But obviously I don’t want him to still be in love with his ex. Guys and their first loves, I swear… I also don’t really like picky eaters.” You look over at Jake and take a double-take. He’s typing away on his phone, but because of his privacy screen protector, you can’t see anything. You huff. “I also don’t like it if he has those protective screens on his phone. What’s on there that’s so important that I can’t take a peek? What are you even doing?”

The sweet sound of Jake’s giggles erases any trace of annoyance that you felt seconds ago. He turns his screen towards you, showing the list of mostly ticked boxes that he’s written up. “See? I check most of these,” he says with a proud smile. “Guess your standards aren’t that high.” You don’t tell him that your standards are high, he’s just that amazing.

You do your best to look only amused at this even though inside, you’re all but freaking out. “Which are you missing?”

“Well, I clearly own a privacy screen. And I don’t have much experience. Not nearly as much as you, by the sounds of it,” he admits, somewhat sheepish. “But other than that, I’m practically the perfect man for you.” He looks down at you with a smile so bright, it makes you wish you had brought sunglasses. It takes everything in you not to scream right then and there. Yes, Jake, you are the perfect man for me, but I wish you wouldn’t say it like it was a joke.

You let out a stiff chuckle, and, rather than saying something stupid and possibly damaging, shift the conversation to him. “What do you mean by not much experience? Have you not dated anyone?”

Jake sighs. “Nope, not anyone. I went on a few dates, you know, went through a few talking stages and all that, but it never went much further. There was always something…” He glances at you then. “Missing.”

“I know that feeling,” you say with a chuckle, and he laughs too, a breathy sound.

“I don’t have a checklist to pinpoint what it is, though.”

You smile. “You should try, it might help.”

“I just… I guess I’m like you in that I also have high standards. But it made me not even want to give anyone a chance, especially since I knew it wouldn’t end up anywhere.”

“Don’t tell me no one has ever managed to reach the great Jake Sim’s standards?” you ask, trying to keep your tone light.

Jake smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Of course someone has. She’s the whole reason I have standards in the first place. It’s not my standards I compare people to, it’s her.”

Jealousy has never made you feel as sad as it is right now. “And… it didn’t work out between you?”

Jake looks at you, eyes searching for something in yours but seemingly not finding it, and so he turns his gaze away. You don’t know why you feel so disappointed. “Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’. “She didn’t feel the same way.”

Whoever this girl is, you can’t believe how stupid she is for passing up the opportunity to have Jake Sim. “That’s… It sucks, I’m sorry,” you say. You don’t think spitting on this girl would make him feel any better, so you keep those thoughts to yourself.

“It’s okay,” he says with a small smile. “It was a while ago already.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re quite over it, though,” you say, and you’re surprised but glad to see his smile widen.

“That’s true.” His eyes meet yours again. “I don’t think I’ll be over her anytime soon, either.” You have to look away to shield the pain that flashes through your eyes from him.

Pretending you don’t have feelings for your best friend and that you’re okay with him being in love with someone else is like riding a bike: even after years of not doing it, it only takes a few minutes for you to be able to do it perfectly again. Muscle memory, if you will. So you sigh dramatically and throw your arm around Jake’s shoulder, slightly pulling him down to your level. “Don’t worry. We’re going to have so much fun this year, you’ll completely forget about her. Promise. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Yeah?”

He smiles down at you. You want nothing more but that glint of melancholy in his eyes to be gone. “Yeah.”

Jake is only half-glad to see you haven’t changed much from your childhood and early teenage years. You’re still just as pretty, just as warm; it’s still as comfortable to be around you. You’re also still as dense.

Then and now, he did everything he could to make his feelings for you very, very obvious. Either you’re completely oblivious, or the idea of dating him is so horrifying to you, you understand but pretend you don’t. He really hopes it’s the former.

He arrived in Edinburgh just a bit over a week ago, and you’ve seen each other almost every day. Out of those times, there isn’t a single one where he hasn’t tried to send something your way - something that says, hey, what if we stopped being friends and dated instead? Wouldn’t that be cool? Can’t you see how desperately I love you?, but you never latch on. The ball’s in your court, and he wants you to throw it back, but it’s been feeling more like a boomerang that always hits him right in the face when it circles back than a game of catch.

But he’s reminding himself not to be too greedy. Even if it’s just as friends, at least he has you back, so he’s satisfied with that. For now.

His first class of the year is on the following Tuesday morning, a ninety-minute seminar specifically made for exchange students called Discover Scotland. (He has Mondays free, resulting in a three-day weekend, which you and your 9am Monday tutorial are very envious of.) As interesting as the English Lit courses he’s taking seem, it’s this one he’s most looking forward to - except for the one class he shares with you, of course. Not even because of the seminars themselves, which will be about all sorts of topics on Scottish culture and history, but because of the coursework, as crazy as that sounds. It consists of a singular project, not due until the very last day of the semester, in which he has to travel to at least three different places in the country, research its background and provide a detailed account of his experience there. It can take any form: a written report, an in-class presentation, a podcast, anything. He could even film a TikTok if he wanted. Jake knew that being part of the Arts & Crafts club for two years in a row back in Seoul wasn’t for nothing - his scrapbooking skills would finally have their time to shine.

That afternoon, he practically snatches you as you come out of your lecture, giving you little time to say bye to your friends, and makes you take him to the biggest stationary store you know in the city. If he wants to ace this project, he will need supplies. Many, many supplies. And it’s more fun shopping if you’re with him. You seem happy following him around the store, and when he asks you if you want to come on his trips with him, he can pretend it’s because you seem so excited about his project and not because he had thought of you accompanying him as soon as he heard about it.

As you stand in line at the till, you tell him that if he wants to start his project now, you could go to the beach together. You raise your eyebrows at him when he snaps your head towards you. “There’s a beach here?!”

“Did you not look at a map before coming here?” you ask, amused.

“I guess I didn’t…” he says, distraught at the new information. It only lasts a second, though. “Okay, let’s go now.”

“Now?” you echo, and he nods. “But-” you start, but are interrupted by your thoughts. “I guess there’s no reason not to. The weather’s nice and it’s not like I have any uni work yet. Let’s go,” you agree, looking up at him with a smile. You’re so pretty he almost forgets to look away, until the employee calls Next in a bored drawl.

An hour later, you’re at the beach, barefoot on the sand and ice cream in hand. Strawberry for you and vanilla for him, he notes with a smile. Really not much has changed, he thinks. From the sand, to the water, to the promenade along the beach, Portobello is worlds away from the beaches back home in Australia, or those of Jeju Island. But it’s still nice, and because you’re with him, it’s even better. You’ve been walking around for an hour, splashing each other with water and mercilessly ruining sandcastles left behind before he realises you technically came here for his project. He writes down things he doesn’t want to forget on his phone and snaps a few pictures, sneaking a few of you when you’re not looking. He wants to tell you how beautiful you are with your hair blowing in the wind and the way the chill bites at your cheeks, but he keeps it a secret between him and his Notes app.

Even though he lives two stops further down, he gets off from the bus with you, containing his excitement as best he can when you invite him up for a cup of tea. “Depends. What tea do you have?” he asks, trying and failing to play it cool. He’s just grateful he doesn’t have to come up with an excuse to spend more time with you.

You roll your eyes playfully as you unlock the front door to your building. “I can make you hot chocolate, Mister Tea-Is-For-Old-People.”

He chuckles. “Actually, I’ll have you know I started drinking tea at uni.” When you turn around to look at him, a surprised look on your face, he nods proudly. “Mh-hm. I got addicted to caffeine very quickly into first year so I started drinking black tea for the sake of my heart,” he explains.

“God,” you say breathily, sounding mildly horrified. “A caffeine addiction sounds intense.”

“It was, yeah,” he says, laughing as he follows you into your flat.

Yunjin and Chaewon are sitting at the living room table, watching an episode of what he thinks is Gossip Girl, and they greet him as normally as these two can, but he wonders what the knowing look they exchange is all about. He’d met them the previous weekend when you had all gone for drinks together, along with Jay, Yunjin’s boyfriend, and they had all but grilled him on his relationship with you. He hadn’t thought much of it, chalking it up to your friends feeling protective of you, and truthfully, he was just happy to get to talk about you. But now, he was wondering if you had told them anything about him that made them so curious about him. If you did, he hoped it was something positive.

He stands awkwardly in the kitchen, chatting with you as you boil the water and get cups out, but he can feel their gazes burning the back of his head. Clearly, whatever conversation he’s having with you, he’s also having it with them. “How do you take your tea?” you ask.

“Um, three sugars and lots of milk, please,” he says, smiling innocently when you slowly turn to look at him, a mix of disapproval, disgust, and offence on your face.

You sigh deeply. “I mean, I’ll do it, but I’m not sure that’s even tea anymore.”

“You’re one to talk, Miss Caramel Frappuccino,” he says, recycling your bad joke from earlier.

“At least I don’t claim to be drinking coffee when I order a frap,” you argue. “And this is how you battled your coffee addiction? You’ll be getting another kind of heart problem, Jakey.” He doesn’t know if you even notice your use of his old nickname - the first time you’ve used it since he’s been here - but you don’t make a big deal of it, so he doesn’t either. Not outwardly, at least. Mentally, he’s running laps around your small kitchen.

Jake laughs it off. “I thought I came here for tea, not a health check-up,” he says, smile growing wider at the sight of yours.

“Right, sorry,” you say, giggling. “I’ll make your tea just how you like it,” you add in a sweet voice. Jake knows you’re just doing it as a joke, but it still manages to make butterflies erupt in his stomach.

His tea tastes even sweeter that day.

A few days after your impromptu trip to the beach, you’re waiting for Jake outside of his class. He heard of this donut shop he “absolutely needs to visit” and is dragging you along with him - well, “dragging” is a big word considering you’d follow him anywhere. You got here a few minutes early, not needing much of a reason to leave the library, so you scroll through your feed until Jake calls out your name. You’re only mildly surprised to see Jay leaving the classroom behind him.

“Y/N! Can you believe that Jay and I are in the same class?” he says excitedly as the two boys walk toward you. You feel like a dog owner being greeted by their over-enthusiastic dog after a long day (about three hours) of being apart.

“I can believe it, actually. You two do the same degree.”

You exchange quick greetings with Jay before the three of you start heading out. As you walk, Jake throws his arm around your shoulders so casually, it almost throws you off balance. Physical contact always came easy to him, but there’s something about him doing it next to someone else that catches you off guard. It reminds you of walking somewhere with Jay and Yunjin as they discretely held hands. It makes you feel like it’s not the three of you, but Jay with the two of you. Like you and Jake come as a pair rather than as two individuals.

All of that from a simple arm around your shoulders.

Jake asking you in a very unsubtle whisper whether Jay can come with brings you out of your head and back into the conversation. “Yeah, of course,” you say, smiling. It’s not a bad idea to have Jay along: hanging out with someone else might snap you out of your delusion.

Most of the walk to the shop is done in laughter as Jake and Jay realise how much random stuff they have in common, from their peanut allergies to the embarrassing Harry Potter phase they had as fifteen-year-olds. Grassmarket is really busy on Friday afternoons, and there’s a bit of a queue of other donut-enjoyers in front of the boutique, but you don’t mind. The sun is shining down gently on the square and it gives you time to choose your donut out of the ten or so flavours available. In the end, you go for white chocolate and raspberry, while Jake chooses Biscoff and Jay, tiramisu.

“My friend Sunghoon would love this,” he says after taking a hearty bite. “He goes crazy over tiramisu. Like a cat with catnip.”

Jake chuckles, mouth full of Biscoff. “That’s funny, I also have a friend named Sunghoon who loves tiramisu back in Seoul.”

Jay punches Jake’s shoulder, eyes wide in amusement and shock. “Bro, that’s crazy. You have to be lying at this point,” he says, but Jake shakes his head fervently.

“I promise I’m not. I’ve even saved his number with the tiramisu emoji.”

“There’s a tiramisu emoji?” Jay asks, already over questioning the existence of Jake’s Sunghoon.

The conversation circles back to the courses you’re all taking this semester, and Jake tells Jay about Discover Scotland and the trips he’s planned so far. “Well, if you really want to discover Scotland as a student, you need to go on a night out in Glasgow,” Jay says. Going by the look on Jake’s face, Jay’s idea seems to have struck a chord in him.

“Y/N?”

You nod, finishing your mouthful of donut before speaking. “Yeah, Glasgow’s really fun. We should go,” you say, laughing when the two boys high-five in victory. Between the train, the drinks and the club entry, going out isn’t a cheap ordeal, and getting to and fro also takes a while - even so, the smile on Jake’s face makes it worth it.

He wipes some raspberry jam from the corner of your mouth, shooting you a wink, and you want to disintegrate right then and there, become one with the bench you’re sitting on and never have to face him again. The conversation resumes as Jay tells Jake about all the best places to go out in Glasgow, but you don’t hear a word - the feeling of Jake’s thumb so close to your lips takes away your ability for coherent thought.

“It’s decided, then. We’re going out tomorrow night,” Jay loudly announces. “Let me gather the troops.”

That’s how you find yourself in line for the club the next day, already tipsy from pre-drinking on the train and at the pub. It’s still warm enough for you and the girls to wear as little clothing as you want, but Jake insisted on giving you his flannel jacket anyway. If not for the warmth it brings, you’re glad to have his scent enveloping you.

The five of you work exceptionally well together. You, Chaewon and Yunjin have been a given since you met in first year, and Jay and Yunjin went so well together that he was but a natural addition to your little group. Jake’s only been here for over a week, but it’s like he’s always been around, and you couldn’t be happier about it. Him and Jay hit it off immediately, and although the girls needed some time to warm up to him (it’s not everyday that you meet your friend’s ex-best-friend she’s practically always been in love with; you understand why they might’ve been wary at first), they now tease him just as relentlessly as they do Jay. He takes it like a champ.

For a little while, you watch your friends speaking over each other, bickering over nothing, a smile on your face. Two pints of cider and some of Jay’s fancy vodka have made you more grateful than ever for them - if you drink too much in the club, you’ll be hugging them and crying about how much you love them. You’re not sure what that might look like around Jake, so you decide to keep yourself in check for the night.

It takes about thirty minutes before you manage to get into the club. It’s not coat check season yet, so you head straight to the bar. “Sunghoon said he’d meet us here,” Jay says, lifting his head to spot his friend in the sea of drunk students. “Oh yeah, there he is! Hoon, hey!”

You hear a loud “Jongseong!” being shouted from somewhere in the crowd, but you’re not sure who Jay is waving at until a boy whose face is mostly eyebrows is standing - well, standing as best as he can, with the copious amount of alcohol he’s obviously already consumed - in front of you. He gives Jay a hug and the three of you a nod of his head, a lopsided smile on his face. When he turns to Jake, his eyebrows lift first, then his face breaks into a wide grin.

“Jake, my man!” he shouts, taking a stunned Jake’s hand and bringing him into a hug.

“Sunghoon? What the hell are you doing here?” he asks, chuckling and frowning in confusion.

“I’m just partying, man! Same as you!”

“No, I mean here in Scotland, you dumbass!”

“You two know each other?” Jay asks, looking back and forth between his two friends.

“Jake’s my man!” Sunghoon exclaims, unhelpful and stumbling as he throws an arm around his man’s shoulders. Jake shoots you a distressed look but you just laugh at him.

“This is Tiramisu Sunghoon I told you about,” Jake says, helping Sunghoon stand up straight.

“God, what I would do for a tiramisu right now,” Sunghoon says, looking at Yunjin like she might relate. She chuckles awkwardly.

“I have no idea what he’s doing in Scotland, though. Hoon, I thought you were going to NYU for your exchange?”

Sunghoon pauses to think for a second, looking like he’s never heard of NYU in his life. “Oh, that! Yeah, I did an online orientation thing and… it did not go well. Let’s just say there’s someone in New York City who wants me dead,” he says conspiratorially. You all stare at him but he gives no further explanation. On your right, you hear Yunjin whisper what the fuck under her breath. “So I transferred here instead!”

“I didn’t know you were an exchange student,” Jay says, still looking just as confused.

“Yeah, man! But anyways, let’s not talk about uni right now. I’m on a bender, day three, baby! Do not talk to me tomorrow,” he says, chuckling until the smile suddenly drops from his face. “I mean that.” You look around yourself, glad to find everyone is just as baffled as you. “Let’s party!” Sunghoon cheers, intoxicated grin back on his lips. Jake and Jay follow, but you and the girls stay back for a second, taking in everything that has just happened.

“That. Is the most beautiful man I have ever seen,” Chaewon blurts, staring blankly at the spot Sunghoon stood in a second ago.

“Yeah, he also seems to be a raging alcoholic. And he’s what, twenty-one?” Yunjin says, a scowl on her face.

“I could fix him.”

“Okay, let’s go,” you say, grabbing your friends by their wrists before either of them can say something worse.

Feeling generous, Sunghoon buys shots for all six of you, and you quickly down them before heading to the dancefloor. On your way there, a group of sober-looking girls hand Chaewon a giant, still almost full jug of red liquid, something that costs at least twelve pounds here. They say they’re leaving and don’t need it anymore, smiling as you profusely and astonishedly thank them. You look at your friends, mentally weighing the risk and drugging possibility this might present, but shrug and pass the jug around after taking hearty sips anyway. It tastes so much like fizzy cherries that you wonder if it even contains any alcohol, but sure enough, twenty minutes later, the three of you are spinning around on the dancefloor, screaming the lyrics to your favourite pop songs at the top of your lungs. Jake at a club is a completely foreign sight to you, and you can’t stop laughing at all the silly moves he pulls.

You’re shaking your whole body to a Nicki song from the early 2010s when you suddenly feel a hand on your hip. Before you can turn around and slap whoever this random man is that thinks he can touch you, a familiar voice whispers it’s just me in your ear, and you simultaneously relax and tense up knowing that Jake is standing right behind you. “There’s a creep staring at you,” he explains, lips and breath gently tickling your ear as he speaks. You look around the room and quickly notice a man standing in a corner, drink in one hand and the other in his pocket, unmoving as he eyes you with a smirk so slimy it makes your stomach turn. To avoid his gaze, you turn around, but you’re not sure the sight you’re met with is much better for you.

Jake peers down at you, eyes slightly glossed over and cheeks flushed from the alcohol, jaw locked in annoyance. He glances at the guy in the corner, who you assume is still staring when you feel Jake’s hands brush along your sides until they reach your waist. His gaze returns to your face as he brings you a step closer to him. Reflexively, you wrap your arms around his neck.

“Is this okay?” he mouths. All you can do is meekly nod. You watch as his eyes deliberately scan your face, going down and down. Time stills when they reach your lips and stay there. It’s like someone has put the booming music of the club on mute, and the only thing you can hear is your heart loudly beating in your ears. You suddenly feel very sober.

You swear Jake’s face is slowly inching its way towards yours when you’re abruptly taken away. Yunjin has grabbed you by the forearm, leading you and Chaewon to the bathroom as she chants “Bathroom break! Bathroom break!”, clearly unaware of the moment she’s just interrupted.

Because of the queue for the girls’ bathroom and Chaewon’s decision to console this random girl who was in the middle of a breakdown, it’s not until half-an-hour later that you emerge back into the crowd. You spot the boys at a table, two empty shots each in front of them and all three with a beer in hand. They will not be happy checking their bank accounts tomorrow morning.

“Y/N! You’re back!” Jake calls out happily when he spots you, and you can tell right away that he’s much drunker than when you left him. His whole face is flush, his eyes don’t open quite all the way, and a lopsided smile won’t leave his lips - even like this, he’s so pretty that you want to grab his hand and take him somewhere it’s just the two of you.

Chaewon gets drinks for the three of you and then you’re dancing again. It’s already one am at this point, and the remaining two hours until the club closes, fueled with alcohol and good music, go by in a flash. Before you know it, the DJ is playing All of Me by John Legend and the lights have been turned on, clear signs that you’re overstaying your welcome. The few people that have made it to closing time stumble out of the club and into the street, heading for either the nearest subway stop or the next party of the night. Since there are no trains at this time, your group walks to the close-by bus station, listening to Jake and Sunghoon grumble about how the clubs in Seoul don’t close until at least five or six and how trains run all night there.

The bus is already at the station when you get there, and the driver doesn’t seem too pleased about having six mildly drunk kids get on his bus, but he’s probably used to questionable people taking public transport at this time of the day anyway. Physically, Sunghoon is sitting across from you, but mentally, he’s off somewhere far, far from this bus. With his head against the window and mouth wide open, saliva pooling at the corner of his lips, he looks like he’s any second away from obnoxiously snoring. Jay and Yunjin are sitting somewhere you can’t see them, probably eating each other’s faces; she once told you they had their “most mind-blowing sex” when both a little drunk, and much to your dismay, you haven’t been able to get that piece of information out of your head since. Chaewon is on the phone to her long-distance bestie Sakura, for whom it’s a nice eleven in the morning right now.

This means that you and Jake are left alone, both of you still tipsy and not tired enough to fall asleep. You drop your head on Jake’s shoulder, and not only does he let you, he also takes your hand in his, interlacing your fingers and placing them atop his thigh. Clumsily, because he now has to use his left hand, Jake slips his phone out of his back pocket and shows you the photos he took all evening. As the night progresses, they get blurrier and blurrier, so much so that towards the end, you can’t tell what he was even trying to capture, and you laugh at how inappropriate some of these would be to submit in a university project.

When he softly says your name, you don’t raise your head, simply humming to let him know you’re listening. You close your eyes, cherishing the way your name sounds on his lips. It’s his tone, tentative and vulnerable as he tells you there’s something he’s been wanting to ask you, that makes you look up at him. He, however, won’t meet your eyes, and settles his gaze on the window, even though it’s so dark outside you can’t make out a thing.

“How come you never replied to my letter? I know it’s been ages, but… I still find myself wondering about it.” The question is softly asked and you know he by no means wants to hurt you, but it still feels like a punch to the throat. You hadn’t remembered who it was that had sent the last letter, while he’d been wondering all these years why his words had been left unanswered.

He seems set on not looking at you, so you rest your head back on his shoulder. Your hand is still in his. “I’m not sure, Jakey. I’m sorry,” you say, aware it’s not a satisfying answer. You’ve thought about why you and Jake had stopped talking for hours on end; you’ve discussed it with your friends and your mum, looked at it from all sorts of angles, tried to come up with real reasons other than time pulling you apart. But now that Jake himself is asking you about it, the words don’t come easy. You’ve theorised that you were afraid putting effort into sustaining your friendship would only hurt you in the end, because it was just that - a friendship. You could fool yourself into thinking you were okay only being friends with him when he was with you, that putting your feelings aside was worth it since you could at least spend time with him. But now that he was away, you didn’t have that anymore - it just hurt. So what was the point? And how could you phrase all this without betraying your feelings for him?

“Our letters were so sparse anyway back then, even our texts and calls were getting less and less frequent… And whenever I had a new boyfriend, I’d get into the same argument about being too close to you over and over again, even though you were literally on another continent.”

“You know, I always felt sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“Those boyfriends of yours. I felt like you waited for me to leave before you started dating-”

“It wasn’t like that!” you exclaim, lifting your head again. Finally, he meets your eyes, gaze softening upon seeing your affronted expression. “It wasn’t like that,” you repeat, relaxing your tone. “If anything, they were the ones that waited for you to be gone. I'm sorry I let their jealousy get to me.”

Jake smiles, the tenderness in his gaze making your whole body turn to jelly. He squeezes your hands. “It’s okay. I just… I felt like I was always in the way of your relationships, even after I left.”

“You don’t have to feel sorry about that. They should’ve had more trust in me.”

He pauses, gaze dropping down to your intertwined hands. “I would’ve been jealous.” When his eyes find yours again, there’s something in them that you quite can’t place. It creates a ball of nerves that pull at your stomach. “If I were dating you, and you had a guy friend you were as close with as we were back then, I’d be jealous. You know, I’d assume he had feelings for you. And that you might have feelings for him, too.”

Because I did, you think. I did, and I still do. You try to communicate that thought to Jake, but telepathy works especially bad when one has as much alcohol coursing through their veins as you do right now. So instead, you say the opposite of what you’re thinking, turning away from Jake to avoid his gaze. You watch the dribble of saliva trickle from Sunghoon’s lips. “That’s not a great view of male-female friendship.”

Jake’s retort comes immediately. “But we were different, right?”

His words echo through your head until they make even less sense than they did initially. Different from what? From who? You’re not sure - but you like the idea of you and Jake being different, special. You especially like the idea of Jake thinking so. So you look at him and smile. “Right.”

Slowly, his grin fades and turns into a worried expression. “Y/N?”

“Mm?”

“We’re still different now, aren’t we?”

You want to wrap him in your arms so tightly neither of you can breathe. You settle for running a hand through his hair and pinching his cheek. “Course we are.” Your whole being relaxes when his face breaks into a smile again.

The next morning, you wake up to Yunjin plopping down on your bed unceremoniously, shaking you awake, and asking you if you want anything from Snax Café. On one hand, you’re grateful that she thought of you and that in thirty minutes’ time, you’ll have the greasiest sausage wrap and hash browns known to man in your hand; on the other, you’d like to think that she knows you well enough to know to order your regular from there without asking. But that’s probably the hangover talking.

You stumble out of bed, thanking last night’s you for having remembered to take headache medicine before crashing. Even if your stomach is very upset with the copious amount of alcohol it needs to rid your body of, and your throat is begging for water, at least your head doesn’t feel like it’s been split into two. As Yunjin barges into Chaewon’s room just as she had done yours, you head for the kitchen to get yourself a tall glass of revitalising tap water. You’re only mildly surprised to find Sunghoon passed out on your living room couch - it takes you a few seconds to remember that the three of you took pity on him when you learned he lived over an hour’s walk from the station, so you let him spend the night on your uncomfortable, cold leather sofa. While you down your glass in three gulps, you hear Yunjin shaking Sunghoon awake and asking him loudly if he wanted something from Snax.

“Fuck, I’d kill for a Snax right now,” he groggily says before he’s even opened his eyes. When he does, they dart around the room until they land on Yunjin, who's crouching in front of him. He looks like he thought her question was asked in a dream and not in real life. He also looks like he's not quite sure where he is, or who Yunjin is. It isn’t until Jay comes wobbling out of Yunjin’s bed to the couch opposite Sunghoon that the memories seem to piece back together in his head. The three of you watch him like he’s an unstable mental patient and you’re his doctors.

“No need for that, I’m ordering it on Deliveroo.” He nods his head and goes back to sleep for the time being.

Just as you’re about to text Jake, your phone rings with a call from him. His raspy morning voice as he asks you whether you slept well makes you want to put your head in an oven heated at 200 degrees Celsius. However, you resist the urge, and answer him with a smile, then ask him the same question.

“I slept pretty well too. I’d have slept in longer but one of my flatmates decided to have a Sunday fucking brunch and his friends are so loud. Can I come over?”

You’re very aware of the other people in the room, especially of Chaewon who has just walked in and is eyeing you suspiciously as if to say, Why are you smiling so hard at ten in the morning? You know the girls would jump at any opportunity to tease you about Jake, and with the added presence of Sunghoon in the room, you can’t have that. So you stifle the giggles bubbling in your throat and answer as nonchalantly as you can. It also gives you the chance to reflect on why Jake Sim asking you whether he can come over makes you want to giggle like a giddy schoolgirl so much.

(Maybe it’s because when it comes to him, you’re still the giddy schoolgirl you used to be.)

“Yeah, of course. I was going to ask you if you wanted anything from Snax, actually.”

“Snax? What’s that?”

“Oh my God, Jake, am I about to introduce you to Snax right now?”

Twenty minutes later, the six of you are sitting around your small living room table, all varying amounts of tired, dehydrated and famished as you dig into your breakfast. Given your current levels of energy, it’s fairly quiet; plus, the food hits such a spot that it’s hard to talk and eat at the same time. Jake eats like he’s never had a breakfast wrap and hash brown in his life. It’s an endearing sight if you’ve ever seen one.

You spend the afternoon together, watching movies curled up in your bed, and you try desperately not to think about the implications of that - except that’s hard to do when Jake is right next to you, legs and arms ever-so-slightly brushing against yours, his warmth so close yet so out of reach. You purposefully let him pick movies you’ve already seen so that you don’t have to focus on anything but your own thoughts and the faint but dizzying scent of his body wash. The both of you had an innumerable amount of sleepovers as kids, so this shouldn’t feel weird, but it decidedly does, probably because you’re much more aware of him now in a way you weren’t before.

As hard as you try to figure out what exactly he meant by “different,” you draw a blank. The only way you’ll understand is if you ask him, and you’re far too scared to do that. You don’t want to seem so hung upon a singular word he used when he was tipsy. It might be slightly dramatic, but you felt like some sort of balance had been restored since Jake was back in your life - the problem was it made you scared to do anything that might threaten this newfound equilibrium. It at least seems like different means a good thing to him, and that’s enough for you.

You look over to him when the second movie comes to an end. He’s sleeping peacefully, lashes caressing the skin under his eyes and cheeks looking rounder than usual. It’d be so easy to reach a finger out and trace the line descending from the top of his forehead to his chin, gliding along the bump of his nose and feeling the plumpness of his rosy lips, but you settle for drawing that line with your eyes instead.

You don’t think you’ll be able to fall asleep with him next to you and your heart beating so loudly in your ears, but you find yourself waking up a few hours later, the sun already starting to set. Jake is already awake, scrolling on his phone, one arm casually behind his head as if being in your bed is as comfortable to him as being in his own. When he sees you’ve woken up, his honey-coated smile washes warmly over you, and he makes a joke about how he keeps on falling asleep when he’s with you. “I feel that at ease, I guess,” he says, and you hope you’re not making up the small blush that spreads over his cheeks.

Semesters are always a short and intense affair, but this one passes by even quicker with Jake by your side. Before you know it, it’s midterms already, and you and Jake have travelled enough for him to complete his project and make another one just for the hell of it. He had scoured the internet for the cheapest train tickets and most noteworthy sites, planning trips that lasted anywhere between three hours and a day for the two of you. All you needed to do was follow and trust him, which was the easiest thing anyone could’ve asked of you.

You’ve gone back to Glasgow, during the day, this time, as well as St. Andrews and Aberdeen. You’ve practically visited every loch and castle in a one-hour train ride radius of Edinburgh, and Jake has more lined up for the second part of the semester. He’s even said that your trips should continue being a thing next term, and you couldn’t have agreed faster. With every new destination, every train ride spent looking out a window or laughing about everything and anything, any odd Scottish food you try for the first time, you somehow fall for him a bit deeper. You didn’t know your love for him could bloom any more than it already had - but Jake is the gift that keeps on giving, and, unwillingly or not, he always finds new ways to make your heart speed that much faster.

Attentionate, affectionate, sweet Jake who always makes sure you’re comfortable wherever you go, always gives you his jacket or tucks your hair behind your ear to prevent it from falling in your face. Who, as time passed, grew more touchy, would hold your hand, ruffle your hair, pinch your cheek, which was simultaneously devastating and elating. Who, you could tell, started to linger more, both in his touch and in his gaze. Questions of does he love me back or am I seeing what I want to see? nearly drove you mad.

“I feel like at this point the only way she’ll understand that I like her is if I kill myself and write in my suicide note that it’s her fault for not loving me back.”

Jake has been pacing back and forth in Jay’s living room for approximately twenty minutes, with no end in sight. At least he’ll have gotten most of his ten thousand steps of the day in.

Jay sighs heavily. “Okay, I really don’t think you need to go that far.”

“Sounds romantic to me,” Sunghoon says, mouth full of salted caramel popcorn.

“I hope you never get a girlfriend,” Jay retorts, looking at his deranged friend with a scowl. He turns back to his (slightly more) normal friend and gives him a sympathetic smile.

“I mean, I told her we were different. Different. That we weren’t like regular friends. I tell her she’s pretty every chance I get. I give her my jacket all the time, even though this country is fucking cold. I’ve even given her a t-shirt of mine, sprayed with my perfume and everything. And don’t get me wrong, I do it ‘cause I love doing that for her-”

“Simp,” Sunghoon snickers.

“But what the hell else can I do? Like, she has to be ignoring it on purpose at this point.”

“You could always, you know… tell her?”

Jake scoffs, fixing his friend with a derisive look. “Wow. What a great idea, Jay, I never thought of that one before!”

A popcorn lands right on Jay’s cheek. “You’re so clueless, man,” Sunghoon says, a shit-eating smirk on his lips. As if he knows any better.

Jay looks back-and-forth between his friends, an expression on his face like he’s been disparaged. “Sorry, I didn’t know being straightforward and honest was such a bad thing. It would just make things a lot clearer for the both of you.”

“But… I’m scared,” Jake says.

“Man up!” Sunghoon suddenly yells, punching the sofa next to him, making his friends jump. “How can she ever figure it out if you don’t tell her?”

“You were on my side just a second ago, man, what are you doing?” Jake asks, confusion written all over his face. Sunghoon’s eyes dart back and forth between the two boys, retreating into silence as he stuffs his mouth with another handful of popcorn.

“Just ignore him,” Jay says. “But for once, he did say something that makes a modicum of sense. You think you’re being really obvious, but you might not actually be. Which could be a good sign, you know. I heard girls were super aware of a guy liking them if they weren’t into him, but being totally oblivious if they did like him.”

“Where did you hear that?” Jake asks, an eyebrow raised in suspicion.

“...Instagram Reels,” Jay reluctantly admits, frowning at Sunghoon who bursts into laughter.

Jake holds the bridge of his nose between two fingers like his head aches. “You’re both so useless, I’m never coming to you with my problems ever again.”

“I’ll pretend I’m not offended by that.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, anyway,” Sunghoon says. He’s smiling but Jake genuinely can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

“But seriously, if you think you’ve done everything, then just do one last thing that’s so obvious she can’t misinterpret it,” Jay says.

“Like what?”

“Like kissing her, or some-”

“Kissing her?!” Jake echoes.

“That’s wild, man,” Sunghoon uselessly butts in.

“It’s just an example, calm yourselves,” Jay says. “Or, again, just straight up tell her how you feel. It’s what I did with Yunjin, and it worked.”

“You and Yunjin are dating?” Sunghoon asks, bewildered.

Jay shakes his head at him. “Where the hell have you been, bro? We were literally cuddling on the couch the other day.”

“I just thought you were really good friends, or something.”

Jake groans, holding his head in his hands. Sunghoon was of no help whatsoever, and Jay was so on point that it annoyed him. Confessing was the only solution - but Jake was so afraid of being rejected and losing your friendship that he had barely entertained the thought. But he had found the courage to do it once, and even though his planned confession had fallen through back then, he could get himself together and do it again.

It was the day he had told you he was moving to Korea, which he himself had learned that morning. Originally, he’d texted you because he had news to share - good news. Or at least, he hoped they were good. He hoped the soft, lingering looks you gave him weren’t a figment of his imagination but rather the confirmation he needed that you liked him back. He hoped that like him, you cared too much about your friendship to make the first move into something else; that by confessing first, you’d be relieved of that responsibility; that his wish to hold your hand and kiss your forehead wasn’t one-sided.

He decided not to prepare anything - just a couple sentences that he’d rehearsed over and over in his head. Declarations of love, bouquets of flowers, chocolate and couple keychains, all that could wait until after you’d said yes to being his girlfriend. He didn’t want to win you over just once, he wanted to show you every day how much he loved you. Fourteen-year-old Jake was absolutely head over heels for you; so imagine his disappointment when, as he was getting ready to meet with you, his parents called him downstairs, a tone to their voice Jake wasn’t familiar with, but that couldn’t mean anything good.

“Your dad’s job is sending us back to Seoul next month,” his mom announced, not beating around the bush. He felt everything quite literally crumbling down around him. His friends in Brisbane, his school, his hobbies, but above all, you. He’d lose it all. And what was the point now in telling you how he felt? If you felt the same way, it would only make his departure that much harder, and if you didn’t, it would ruin your last moments together. It just wasn’t worth it.

What he had planned to be good news turned into the most awful ones. The thought of it happening all over again makes twenty-year-old Jake shudder. But he wouldn’t let himself be trapped by time again - sure, in seven months, the academic year would be over, and he would go back to Korea. But that didn’t mean that those seven months should be spent in agony, or the following ones either, for that matter. You would make it work. What was long-distance to someone who loved someone else as much as Jake loved you?

But he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. He has to start by really resolving to do this, and in the off-chance that it actually goes in his favour, he’d start worrying about long distance then.

First, he has a trip to plan.

You should’ve known that a trip to the Scottish Highlands in the middle of November was a risky choice in terms of weather. The day started off nicely enough - no sign of rain when you woke up or as you watched the sunrise through the train window. Clouds turned the sky a bright white at first, then increasingly greyer and greyer. You feel the first drops of rain after lunch as you walk around a small village. By four pm, it’s pitch black and storming like you’ve rarely seen before. You head into a pub to grab a drink as you wait for the rain to subside, but subside it does not. You end up ordering fish and chips, one each, although one serving is enough to feed three. Even after taking your time eating, the bad weather does not let up. The last train, which is meant to be at eight pm, has been cancelled. Luckily, there’s an inn right across the road from the pub; you have no choice but to spend the night.

The inn receptionist is sitting so low on her chair, you can barely see her over the desk until you’re standing right over it. Her face is hidden by a book and it’s only when you say hiya that she seems to realise you’re there. You had never heard of the book or of its author, but you recognized the cover design as that of those romance novels with repetitive plots and weirdly misogynistic love interests your mum and every other middle-aged woman was obsessed with.

Her smile widens as she looks between you and Jake. “Hi there. One room for the lovely couple?”

“Oh, we’re not-”

“Yes, please,” Jake interrupts, smiling down at her, then at you. “It’ll be cheaper if we share a room.”

“Our only room with two single beds is already taken, I’m afraid. One double bed okay for you two?”

You feel like you’re about to faint, so you’re glad Jake is there to answer. “Yeah, of course.” How the idea of sharing one bed with you is so okay to him, you’re not sure - granted, you’ve done it before, but this feels different. For all intents and purposes, this is a hotel room you’re staying in. And you’re staying in it with Jake.

You try to calm your breathing as the receptionist guides you to your room, chatting casually with Jake on the way there. As she unlocks the door for you, she informs you that check-out must be done before eleven in the morning tomorrow, then bids you good night and leaves you to it, still wearing that smile you swear has mischievousness to it. The door clicks shut behind you, and it’s just Jake and you again, together in this small room until tomorrow morning. Your chances of survival are very, very low.

Your room is a humble one, consisting of a desk, a cupboard, two armchairs, a small, separate bathroom and the infamous bed. Every surface seems to be covered with wood, from the ceiling, to the walls, to the old-fashioned furniture. Only the floor is a soft, beige carpet. Especially with the darkness outside, it makes for a gloomy room until you turn on the lamp by the entrance; it casts a warm, golden light in the room, one that would make you feel at ease if it wasn’t for Jake’s presence next to you. The implications of being essentially trapped in a barely-lit room with him are heavy on your mind, especially when he looks this gorgeous with his hair still damp from the rain and the soft lights playing on his face.

His voice brings you out of your thoughts. “Right. Do you, um, do you wanna shower first?” he asks, setting his bag on one of the armchairs.

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” There has never been such an awkward tension between the two of you, but you know you’re not doing anything to ease it. You hope a shower will help you get out of your head and make you relax.

You feel the tension leave your muscles under the hot water, but your stomach is still in knots. You’ve never been this nervous around Jake before; back when you were fourteen and again in these past few months, you’d gotten so used to dealing with your unspoken feelings for him that you could almost forget about them when you were with him. They’d come back to you when you were alone and dwelling on the moments you’d spent together, on his words and actions you desperately tried not to read too much into but always ended up doing anyway. But right now, they’ve floated to the surface, becoming as obvious to you as a stain on your skin you can’t rub away. You’re scared Jake will notice it, and, in the worst case scenario you often thought about, would run away and never speak to you again.

At least the raging storm outside would make that a bit harder.

When you step out of the shower, you curse yourself for not having worn more comfortable clothes on this trip. You definitely can’t wear these jeans and button-up sweater to lounge around. Thankfully, the inn provides two long bathrobes that you could wear over underwear and your tank top, but you wonder where on the scale of inappropriate this would be to wear with Jake in the room. He’s seen you in short pyjama shorts before, but this, like everything else that would usually be normal between the two of you, feels weird today.

You wrap the bathrobe around yourself, tying it in place around your waist, and decide that it’d only be weird if you made it weird. And if Jake found the sight of your bare legs weird, then he was the weird one.

The scene you’re met with as you walk into the room makes you want to retreat into the bathroom immediately. Jake is lying on the bed with his upper half against the headboard, one leg extended and the other one bent, resting his head against one palm, using his free hand to scroll through his phone. His t-shirt has ridden up slightly, putting the waistband of his Calvin Kleins into view. Worst of all, when he sees you, his face breaks into a grin.

Your stomach twists when he gives you a once-over, letting his gaze linger on your legs. “Did you bring a bathrobe with you or was it included?” he asks with an annoyingly handsome smirk.

You roll your eyes. “Yes, I bring a bathrobe with me wherever I go,” you say sarcastically. “Now shut up and go shower, you stink.” Reverting to insults is always the solution when you’re internally freaking out.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He takes so long in the shower that by the time he comes out, you’ve dozed off in bed. As if you were a child, he wakes you up with a boop to the nose, crouching next to the bed and smiling at you. His wet hair falls on his head like that of a movie star in a shower scene, which you find extremely unfair, and his cheeks are red from the warmth of the water.

“It’s still early. Do you wanna go grab another drink?”

“In our bathrobes?” you say, laughing. “Nah, I don’t really feel like drinking anyway.” Read: I’m not sure what I’ll do with alcohol in me.

“Okay, no worries. Um, I think I saw they had board games in the lobby?”

Your ears perk up at this. “Ooh, what kind of board games?”

Putting jeans on underneath his bathrobe, Jake slips away for a minute and comes back with Monopoly, Uno, and a deck of cards. “They didn’t have much for two players,” he says, dumping everything on the bed.

You already knew that anything would become fun if you did it with Jake, but you definitely didn’t expect to spend almost five hours just playing Monopoly and card games with him. Neither of you stays put for very long, always switching from sitting criss-cross to laying on your stomach, making fun of the other’s bathrobe even though you’re wearing the exact same thing. You make each other laugh as you make up your own nonsense rules and disregard the laws of your games, attacking the other ruthlessly for a couple extra points or coins. Jake even makes you go get snacks from a corner store that’s miraculously still open because you lose the first round of Uno.

After some time, Jake lets out a loud yawn, which in turn makes you yawn too. He checks his phone to find that it’s close to midnight already. “Time for bed?” he asks, and your nervousness that had finally dissipated as you played came rushing back.

You nod. “Yeah, sounds good.”

The two of you clean up before brushing your teeth. Even that, with Jake by your side, becomes a silly affair as he pulls faces in the mirror and nudges your hip with his. You stay behind to use the toilet, and when you come back out, Jake’s already in bed, bathrobe tossed on one of the armchairs. This means that Jake is just casually in a t-shirt and boxers, waiting for you to join him in bed. Luckily, his back is turned to you, so you quickly take off your own bathrobe and slide under the sheets, careful to keep your distance from him. The sheets are cold underneath you, and you know it’ll take a while before your body heat warms them up - although you feel very hot and bothered because of the man lying next to you.

“Gosh, I’m really sleepy all of a sudden,” he says, words distorted by a yawn. You only hum in response, and he reaches for the lamp to turn it off. Just like that, you’re in complete darkness, and Jake’s body is mere inches from your own.

It’s eerily quiet for a while, and when you’ve managed to slow your heartbeat and regularise your breathing, you start trying to fall asleep. You toss and turn, unable to find a comfortable position until Jake’s low, sleepy voice breaks the silence. “Can’t sleep?” he asks, and you freeze.

You sigh. “No. I’m sorry for keeping you up,” you say guiltily.

“It’s okay. I can’t really sleep either. It’s a bit cold in here.”

You pause. “Right. Yeah, it is,” you say, even though you feel like you’re sweating buckets.

The room plunges into silence again, long enough for you to think Jake has fallen asleep. You feel something cold against your foot, only realising as it slides up your calf that it’s his foot. “Jake!” you whisper-yell, withdrawing your leg as he bursts into giggles that warm your heart. “Your feet are so cold,” you say in-between chuckles.

“I’m cold all over,” he whines. “Have they not turned the heating on yet? It’s already mid-November.”

“People are used to the cold here.”

“Well I’m not. Can we cuddle?” he suddenly asks, and he must somehow feel the way you freeze in place because he stammers out a justification straight away. “For, I mean, just for warmth, you know. I don’t think I’ll sleep otherwise.”

His foot finds yours again and you can’t help but laugh. “Sure, fine,” you say with a sigh as if you were doing only half-heartedly for his sake. As if this was some big sacrifice you were making, and not something you’d daydreamed about one too many times before.

Your heart is beating a thousand miles a second when you scooch closer to Jake, his hands finding your waist as easily as if they’d been there a hundred times before. He pulls you in much closer than you had expected, holding you tightly against his chest, one arm for you to use as a pillow and one hand resting on your lower back. You try to calm your respiration so that he can’t hear how short of breath you are, but based on his own breathing, he seems to be out in five minutes. It takes you longer to fall asleep, every shift of his body sending shivers down your spine, but you manage to relax after some time, letting his warmth envelop you as you drift off to sleep.

The feeling of waking up with you in his arms is so unreal, Jake thinks he might still be dreaming.

He looks down at your peaceful sleeping face and can’t stop the smile that spreads on his lips. Jake always thinks you’re pretty, but this is a sight he particularly wants to commit to memory. He watches fondly as the bright sun rays of the early morning hit your face, making you scrunch your eyebrows and bury your face deeper against him. You grunt softly, and when he feels you shifting and stretching your legs, he pretends to fall asleep so you don’t catch him staring. It seems like you’ve raised your head, chin tilted towards him - if he’s lucky, you’re watching him “sleep” just like he did seconds ago.

He contains a smile at the joke that forms itself in his brain before shooting his eyes open, catching you off guard during what you thought was a private, secret moment.

“Shit!” you yelp, practically jumping off of him and rolling onto the other side of the bed. He bursts into laughter, proud that his little prank was effective. Before you can scold him, he makes his way to you, wrapping an arm around your waist and bringing your back against his chest. He thinks he feels your body tense; but then you bring your hand over his, swiping your thumb back and forth against his skin, and you relax in his hold. “You’re so annoying,” you complain, but your voice is tender, almost weak.

He buries his face in your hair, trying not to be too loud when he inhales there. “Sorry,” he says, the smile evident in his voice. “The opportunity was right there. Caught you staring, huh?”

“You’re such an idiot.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” It’s quiet for a few minutes, and Jake is more than happy to enjoy this moment in silence, but there’s something burning the tip of his tongue. It’s been there for a while now, but he thinks he’s finally found the right moment. “Y/N?”

“Mm?”

“There’s something I couldn’t tell you last night, but I feel oddly okay saying it right now. Are you listening?”

“I am, yeah,” you say gently, voice so soft it caresses his skin and draws goosebumps from it.

His chest expands and falls with a deep, shaky breath. With your back right against it, he’s scared you’ll hear that his heart is beating faster than it should. “Bad news first?” he says with a nervous chuckle.

“Uh-oh.”

“There’s no roundabout way to say this, so here goes, I guess.” He takes another breath. “I’m in love with you, Y/N.” You tense in his embrace, and he waits for you to say something, anything before he continues.

“Oh,” is all you say. He hopes it’s a good oh - even if it isn’t, he doesn’t let it deter him.

“Yeah. I really debated telling you this… I know you might not feel the same way. But I also know that if I don’t say anything and make the same mistake twice, I’ll beat myself up over it for the rest of my life.”

“The same mistake?” you ask, looking at him over your shoulder.

He gazes down at you tenderly, pushing hair away from your face with a gentle hand. “I already felt that way back when we lived in Australia. I was about to tell you but when I learned that I was moving, I didn’t wanna risk ruining the little time we had left together.”

The look on your face both breaks his heart and patches it up again. “Jakey…” you say, voice just a whisper. You turn around to face him and bury your face in the crook of his neck. The fact that you’re not saying much is making his stomach twist in agonising stress, but he takes it as a good sign that you’re still holding him tight and not running away.

“I think I’d be the luckiest guy on Earth if you felt the same way,” he says, hopefulness clear in his voice.

And then he finally hears the words he’s been dying to hear all these years. “Of course, I feel the same way, Jake,” you say, eyes meeting his. “This isn’t bad news at all, it’s like, the best possible news ever.”

It takes him a few seconds, but when your words sink in, a bright smile graces his features. He feels tears coming up - tears of relief that you feel the same way, of sadness that it took the both of you so long to get here, of happiness that something new might start - he’s not sure. Perhaps everything at once.

“Of course?” he echoes, smiling wildly. “It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“Oh, gosh,” you murmur, burying yourself into him once more. “I can’t believe this is actually happening.”

He tightened his hold around you, bringing you to him as close as physically possible. “Me neither.”

The feeling of you tangling your bare legs with his and bunching up the fabric of his t-shirt in your fist awakens something in him - he had been in his head, thanking the heavens that you loved him back, reeling from his belated confession, but he was now very aware of his body. And of yours. He was reminded of Jay telling him to kiss you - although he hadn’t needed to go there to reveal his feelings to you, it was still a possibility. It was even more so now that he knew you felt the same way.

He tries to be subtle as he brushes a hand up your back to the nape of your neck, gently grazing his fingernails against the skin there. He has to suppress a self-satisfied smirk when he feels you squirm under his touch, lifting your head to fix him with a scolding look. Your stern expression fades as soon as his eyes fall on your lips, however, and you quickly mirror his gaze. His lips part, and he feels his whole body shake as he takes a deep breath in. Who knew that you’d share your first kiss on a random Sunday morning in the fuckass middle of nowhere in Scotland?

Maybe you take pity on him, or you recognise the effort put into being the one to make the first move, or, as he’d like to think, you just really want to kiss him - either way, you’re the one who closes the gap and presses your lips to his.

Your lips. So soft, so delicate against his, absolutely perfect. It’s a simple, tentative touch, but he’s craved it for so long that it makes his head spin. He frowns, despite himself instantly needing more than this feather-like feeling of your lips brushing against each other. His mind tells him to calm down and take it slow, but his body takes over, urging him to grab the nape of your neck a little harder, to hold you a little closer to him, to kiss you a little stronger. Thankfully, you let him do all of this and more, hands finding purchase in his hair and returning his intensity tenfold.

He doesn’t know what’s better - the fact that you’re kissing him or the kiss itself. The way your lips move against his is intoxicating; it wraps itself around its mind and leaves no room for thoughts that aren’t of you. You seem to want him as desperately as he wants you, to have waited for him as long as he did for you, and this is what drives him crazy. You press your body against his and he sees stars; you let out a moan against his lips and he kisses you deeper, ready to do anything to hear that melody again.

Unfortunately, the only melody he gets to hear is that of his phone alarm, informing you that it’s quarter to eleven and that you have fifteen minutes to leave. Check-out at eleven am had sounded nice yesterday; now, he would stay in this dingy inn his whole life if it meant he got to keep kissing you.

The both of you reluctantly break apart, bursting into giddy laughter when your eyes meet. As said before, Jake always thinks you’re pretty, but with your pupils blown and your lips plump from kissing, this might just be the prettiest he’s ever seen you.

“You know, I like you a lot, but I’d like you even more if you could stop time,” you say.

He looks down at you with a smile, pushing away the strands of hair that had fallen on your face. “Sure, I’ll learn how to control time for you.”

“Thanks, Jakey.” You peck his lips, lingering, and he closes his eyes to savour your sweetness.

“Anything for you, baby.” His eyes widen at the nickname slip, but you erupt into giggles.

“Baby?”

“Would you look at the time, we really got to go,” he says, detangling his limbs from yours. He pauses for a second. “Baby,” he repeats, pressing a quick kiss to your forehead before bouncing from the bed.

You get ready together, and the mundane tasks of stripping sheets from a bed and packing bags become the funnest things he’s ever done. You’re all over each other, attacking the other with kisses and hugs; Jake doesn’t think he’s ever felt quite this happy.

And this is only the beginning.

There’s a glint in the receptionist’s eyes when you check out of your room, as if she knew something you and Jake had been oblivious to all along. It’s the only one in town, so you go back to the little pub for a full breakfast with eggs, hash browns, haggis, and sausages. You get coffee so strong you think you might not sleep for the next four days, while Jake drinks tea that is equal parts sugar, milk, and actual tea.

From the moment you leave the pub to the moment you arrive at your doorstep, Jake’s hands barely leave yours. When they have to, like when you’re searching for the perfect seat on the train or when the controller checks your tickets, they’re back together within a minute, like two magnets that can’t stay apart for too long. The rain has long subsided, leaving place to a bright blue sky and wet blades of grass that shine in the sun.

Now that your mutual feelings don’t need to be kept secret, you tell each other about everything you had to go through, like you pretending your good news was your mum having baked the cookies Jake liked and him seeing your new boyfriends every two months on your close friends story. He tells you about all the hints he’s dropped, causing you to facepalm over and over again. It feels like two friends catching each other to speed on all the latest gossip, except the topic of that gossip is you.

The juxtaposition of your familiarity with Jake with the novelty of behaving like a couple, of not having to hold back with your touches or gazes or words, is nothing if not jarring. But you have a feeling you’ll get used to it in no time.

As you unlock the front door to your building, you don’t ask him if he’s coming up - to you, it’s a given that you’ll be spending the rest of today and every day after that together. So when he doesn’t follow you, staying still on the threshold, you turn around with a questioning look on your face.

“There’s something I need to do this afternoon,” he says, taking both of your hands in his.

“Can’t I come with?” you say. Jake wavers for a second, but sadly, he stays firm in his decision.

“Sorry, baby, it’s a surprise. I’ll be back at seven with takeout?”

You can’t possibly be mad at him when he calls you baby and offers food in the same breath. “Only if you bring takeout.”

“You only love me because I feed you, don’t you?” he asks, a smile on his face.

“Yup,” you reply. You’re standing on a step, so you bend down to kiss him - you intend for it to be a peck, but when your lips touch, you’re unable to pull away. You let yourself get lost in the feeling of his lips on yours, in the warmth that takes over your body and makes your brain all fuzzy.

A loud, affronted gasp from behind you makes you jump from Jake, and when you turn around, Chaewon and Yunjin are standing in the stairwell, staring at you with wide eyes and gaping mouths.

“So this was a sexcapade?” is, much to your horror, the first thing Yunjin says.

Thanks to Chaewon, neither you nor Jake have the time to dwell on this sentence as she comes running down the stairs and pounces on you. You don’t know how a woman so small can have such force, but her hug is so tight you can barely breathe, let alone hug her back properly. “I knew you could do it!” she exclaims. When she pulls away, she seems so moved, it looks like she’s about to cry. “You finally popped your Jake cherry,” she whispers, but it’s loud enough for Jake to hear. A bark of laughter escapes his throat.

“Okay, thanks, guys,” you say, escaping this awkward situation and going up the stairs. “I’ll see you later, Jake!” you yell over your shoulder. The girls seem to be on their way out, and you’re more than happy leaving him to deal with them on his own. God knows you’ll get the worst of it when they come back.

As soon as you get to your flat, you make a beeline for your bedroom, plopping on the bed. You’re the same person, and this is the same room. But something within you feels entirely different, like a scar that you had been carrying around had, without you even noticing, healed so well you could barely see it anymore. You lifted your hands in the air, looked at the back of them, then at your palms. They were the same old hands that had been with you your whole life, and you were almost shocked that there wasn’t something utterly different about them after having held Jake’s hand for so long. Just to be sure, you sniffed your right hand, but it didn’t smell any different, either. But you still felt Jake’s hand on yours, like headphones you’d been wearing for hours and still felt on your ears after taking them off.

Yunjin and Chaewon are back from their shopping half-an-hour later; they got you a chocolate fudge cake from Tesco to congratulate you. “You guys are acting like this is my birthday…” you say, eyeing the cake greedily as Chaewon cuts it into three equal parts (even though it says serves eight on the packaging).

“This is more important than your birthday, Y/N,” Yunjin states as she pours oat milk into three cups of Earl Grey tea. “This is, like, the moment of a lifetime.”

“Are you saying a girl’s importance depends on her having a boyfriend?”

“Yes, Y/N, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Especially when said boyfriend is the guy she’s been pining after for all of her teenage and adult life.”

You sigh. “Well, he hasn’t exactly popped the boyfriend and girlfriend question yet.” They both turn to look at you, an annoyed look on their faces. You stand up straight, uncomfortable under their gazes. “What?”

“Usually, I’m all for clarity on this issue,” Chaewon starts. “But isn’t it pretty obvious here?”

“You’re still gonna have to tell us everything in minute detail, but Jake’s already told us what happened. He had no qualms referring to you as his girlfriend, so I really don’t think this is something you need to worry about. What you should worry about is when and where you’re going to hop on that dick.”

Chaewon bursts into laughter, and you can’t help but follow suit. “Gosh, Yunjin, you really do have a way with words.”

“I know. This is what having a Jane Austen hyperfixation at fifteen will do to you.”

Following Yunjin’s orders, you tell them about the events of the previous day and this morning over tea and cake. They ooh and ah and gasp in all the right places, ask you very specific questions and even make you draw a picture of the room you stayed in. You’ve talked to them about Jake so many times that there’s only so much to say now - but still, you talk for hours on end, deviating off-topic so often you end up talking about something else entirely.

You’re in bed reading for your Middle English Literature class when the doorbell rings. It’s seven on the dot, so it can be no one else other than Jake. It’s been mere hours, but you’ve missed him enough to last you for weeks.

He brought takeaway from the Indian place you’d raved about a hundred times but hadn’t brought him to yet. Somehow, your heart grows even fonder as you watch his reaction to the food, the raise of his eyebrows, the widening of his eyes, the excited shimmy of his shoulders. When you ask him about his afternoon, a wide smile breaks out onto his face, like a lightbulb illuminating a room. Without a word, he scurries to your room, bringing back some sort of book with him. He hands it to you with a shy smile and curious eyes, eagerly anticipating your reaction. The cover reads Y/N and Jake in his clumsy but endearing handwriting, with the date of his arrival in Edinburgh and an em-dash scribbled underneath. “I haven’t booked my flight home yet, so I’ll add the second date later,” he explains.

When you flick through it, you’re met with photographs of you and Jake on all of the trips you’ve done so far, as well as the various adventures you got up to in the city. There’s even one of you sleeping in the library at two am during midterms when you had forgotten about one of your essays, due at midday. Jake had come with coffee and words of encouragement, and now he could brag that the high mark you got was thanks to him. It’s not only photos - it’s also ticket stubs, receipts, stickers, and even a dried flower you had found pretty on your trip to St. Andrews. He’s also written quite a lot, from diary-like entries about what you got up to that day or songs that reminded him of you.

“You misspelt right here,” you say, pointing to a sentence that reads This is the café write next to the hotel where the last Harry Potter book is said to have been written!!! under a photo of you drinking a massive cup of hot chocolate. The more you look at the typo, the more it makes you laugh, until you have tears brimming in your eyes.

Thanks to Yunjin’s messiness, pens and pencils are strewn over your coffee table. Jake, flushed red in embarrassment at the small mistake, snatches a pencil and aggressively erases write, spelling it correctly the second time around. “This is the level of today’s English Lit undergrads,” he murmurs under his breath. His frown disappears when he looks at you and he laughs along.

You continue looking through the album until you land on a page titled Why I love Y/N. From top to bottom, left to right, it’s filled with Jake’s tiny handwriting. You can tell he put effort into making it neat. There’s a singular photograph of you, one that dates from the first days after Jake’s arrival when you were walking around in the Meadows, the park right next to campus. The sun shone down on you and you smiled brightly at Jake behind the camera.

You’re not a quarter through reading when tears swell in your eyes, rendering your vision blurry. You wipe them away before they can fall and stain the page. Jake has detailed every last thing he loves about you. It can hardly get cornier than this, but the fact that he wrote this about you makes your heart so full, you’re afraid it might explode in your chest. It ranges from basic things like the way she makes me laugh or her pretty face when she falls asleep in the train (or anywhere, for that matter) to more you-specific things like the strict pastel colour-coding she uses for her notes and her perseverance when eating spicy food even though she can’t take it. He mentions things about you that you didn’t even know, and that feeling of being known in-and-out, of being really seen by someone else only brings more tears to your eyes. Your favourite line comes at the end - the way she makes any place feel like home. A proper sob pushes past your lips at this, and Jake, who had been watching you with an anxious smile, rests a palm on your knee and inches closer to you.

“Why are you crying, is- Did I write something bad?”

You shake your head fervently. “No, no, Jakey, this is… It’s perfect. I’m just…” you trail, letting out a half-sob, half-chuckle. You look at him with a smile before pulling him into a tight hug. “I love it so much. I love you so much.”

You can feel Jake relax against you. “I love you too, baby. I’m glad you like it.”

You pull away after a small while, and turn the next page over. It’s a picture of you over breakfast this morning, with words WE’RE DATING!!!! written underneath it, and those simple words make you so happy, your cheeks ache from smiling. But every page after that is empty. Jake scratches the back of his neck. “I, um, I thought we could fill the rest out together. I debated just doing it myself and giving it to you at the end of the year, but I thought it’d be more fun doing it together.”

“It would. This is such an amazing idea,” you say, flicking back through the pages.

“I thought of it because of that project I had. When I started working on it, all the photos I wanted to include were of you, but I wasn’t sure how much my professor would appreciate that… So I decided to make one more personal. One for us,” he says shyly, shrugging like it’s no big deal.

“Thank you so much, Jakey.”

He smiles. “It’s no worries.”

“Did you do it all this afternoon?”

“I had started it before, but I added it most of today, yeah. Which, by the way, awful timing. I wanted nothing more than to spend today with you.”

Your heart leaps. You’re not sure you’ll ever get used to hearing such words from Jake’s mouth.

Sometime later, you’re laying in bed with Jake between your legs, watching the most recent animated Spiderman movie. With the tips of your fingers, you draw random patterns on his forearm, and if it wasn’t for his occasional chuckles, you’d think he had fallen asleep. You chat for a bit after the movie, but you find that after such an emotionally-packed day, you’re ready to call it a night fairly early. But when the lights are off and it’s just you lying against Jake’s chest, his fingernails grazing your scalp and his familiar, comforting scent clouding your judgement, all thoughts of an early night are thrown out of the window.

You shouldn’t feel so nervous - you had fallen asleep in his arms last night, and it had gone well. Really well.

“This is different from yesterday, isn’t it?” Jake suddenly says, breaking the heavy silence with a low voice. It’s like he read your mind.

“Yeah,” you whisper against his skin.

No other words are needed. You brush the tip of your nose along his neck until you reach his jawline, pressing soft kisses there and delighting in the increasing shakiness of his breath. The feeling of your lips meeting is so intense, so all-encompassing, that you don’t know if you’ll be able to handle anything more.

This is still new territory, but you’re both so eager to discover it that it makes for a messy kiss, lips moving against each other ravenously, tongues beckoning moans from the other. It’s a kiss that somehow leaves you breathless and breathes oxygen back into your lungs at once.

In a matter of seconds, Jake has flipped you on your back and is hovering over you, one hand holding him up and one hand free to roam your body. He slips it underneath your t-shirt, brushes it along the side of your waist, his touch leaving behind a trail of fire blazing on your skin. It’s so distracting, you can’t even kiss him back properly anymore. Jake doesn’t seem to mind. At first, when he starts pressing hot kisses to your jawline and your neck, you think he’s giving you a respite - but when he gently sinks his teeth into the skin there, leaving marks that will later remind you tonight wasn’t a dream, chuckling as you squirm and whine under him, you understand that this is anything but a respite.

You curse your earlier decision of not wearing a bra, because it gives you no preparation whatsoever to the sensation of Jake brushing his thumb against one of your nipples. With a loud gasp, your back arches off of the bed, which only aids Jake in raising your t-shirt up over your breasts.

He takes a minute to admire the sight of you panting and half-naked underneath him. It makes you feel shy, and you want to do something so that he stops looking and starts doing, but his gaze holds you in place. His pupils are blown with lust, eyes raking over your body and taking everything in. You have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact that it’s you he’s looking at with those eyes.

His soft lips attach themselves to your nipple while his fingers continue their work on the other one. You’ve never felt this sensitive, never felt this on edge, like you might fall apart at any second even with so little simulation. Your core throbs, impatiently waiting to be tended to, but you’re already trembling so hard from Jake’s attention to your breasts that you don’t know what will happen to you once he actually touches you down there.

“You doing okay, baby?” he asks, the rasp in his voice making you want him impossibly more. You grip his hair and he looks up at you, a tender smile on his lips. You nod your head yes and he laughs. “Yeah? You want more?” You pause at his question. You do want more, but is it worth your sanity?

It takes you a second to decide that it’s worth that and more. You nod again.

Jake seems to have sensed your hesitation. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I am. It’s just a lot.”

His expression of worry softens into a smile. “I’ll take it slow for you, love. It’s a lot for me, too.” He leans in to press soft kisses to your cheek, and some of the tension in your body diffuses. Whatever happens, Jake will be there to take care of you. “But it feels good, right?” he asks, lips moving against your ear, sending shivers down your spine.

“So good, Jakey,” you reply shakily.

“Good.”

You can tell that Jake really does want to take it slow - his movements are more deliberate, gentler. But eagerness, both yours and his, soon takes over, and a minute later, he’s trailing kisses down your body until he reaches your lower stomach. Your breath quickens as he hooks fingers underneath your leggings and underwear, sliding both garments down your legs and leaving you bare to him. You think the feeling of his lips on the fleshy parts of your inner thighs is what might actually do you in, make you lose your sense of reality forever - but then his tongue darts out against your clit, a barely-there touch, and your whole body flatlines.

Your reaction eggs Jake on, who, more confident now, takes the sensitive bud in his lips and alternates between sucking and licking motions. A knot ties itself embarrassingly quickly in your stomach, a knot that tightens and tightens as Jake flattens his tongue against you, licking up your juices from your entrance to your clit; a knot that threatens to come loose when he slides a long finger inside of you. You can’t take more than thirty seconds of this.

“Jakey,” you say, voice practically a moan. Your brain is fuzzy and it takes a distressing amount of time to form a simple sentence. “Can you come here?”

“Is something wrong, baby?” he asks breathily, sliding his finger out of you and coming back up so that his face is right above yours.

“No, just… I want you.”

Any trace of worry on Jake’s features dissipates as he cocks an eyebrow, one corner of his lips tugging up into a smirk. “Is that so?”

This kind of boldness would usually have you rolling your eyes, but here, it only makes your core throb more violently. It’s almost humiliating how much you want this man. It’s definitely humiliating, how easy it is to swallow your pride and play into his game. “Yes, please,” you say, eyes pleading with him.

He smiles almost giddily before burying his face against the side of yours. “My baby’s so polite,” he says, pressing a kiss to your cheek. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“Take this off, then,” you say, grabbing the bottom hem of his t-shirt.

“So she says please and gives orders,” he jokes, quickly obliging anyway.

Not once in your time apart had Jake posted any sort of beach trip or pool photos, so this was the first time you saw his bare chest. God, was it one for the history books. You trace the defined lines of his muscles with a finger and wonder how he had managed to get even more perfect. He lets you marvel at him for it, clearly proud that you’re gawking so shamelessly, but your mind drifts back to more urgent matters when he presses himself into you, his clothed cock, hard and hot, brushing against your folds. “Fuck,” you sigh, bucking your hips into his to feel him over and over again.

It’s so much, but it’s not enough; Jake instantly gets your message when you hook your fingers under the waistband of his boxers, pulling him to you and kissing him feverishly. Your lips don’t part as he slides his boxers off, and you drink up the nectar that are his moans as you take him in your hand, pumping him a few times.

“Condom?” he asks, but you shake your head.

“I’m on the pill. And even so… I usually always use a condom, but I don’t want to now. Not with you.”

Jake closes his eyes as he takes a deep, stabilising breath. “I feel totally normal about that. Not crazy at all.”

You giggle, and he opens his eyes, a wide smile gracing his lips before he bends down to kiss you. “You ready for the night of your life?” he asks against your lips. “It’s gonna last five minutes, tops,” he says, making you laugh again. “I’m sorry, baby, I can’t do anything about it. I think I could’ve cum just from eating you out.”

“That would’ve been hot.”

“Really? We’ll make it a challenge for next time, then.”

When Jake plunges into you, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever felt before. He fills you up, slow inch by slow inch, until he’s buried to the hilt inside you. You both need some time getting used to the feeling - Jake drops his head in the crook of your neck and lets out a sound between a grunt and a moan, something you’ve never heard from him before. You grab onto his shoulders, fingernails digging into his skin as you try to tether yourself to him. You hold him so tight that he has no choice but to let his body rest on top of yours, his arms coming to circle your waist and bring you even closer.

His movements start out halting, the pleasure so overwhelming that it makes it hard for him to move steadily. In time, he falls into a torturously slow rhythm, but it’s the perfect kind of torture, the kind that has tears brimming in your eyes. It’s so hard to take, and yet you want more. You’re brought closer to the edge with every thrust of his dick into you, especially as he picks up the pace and lifts your hips to meet his. The new angle has his tip brushing against that spot deep inside you that makes it hard to breathe.

You can tell he’s just as close as you when he loses that steady rhythm he had found, his motions growing more desperate, harsher, quicker. Conscious of your roommates, you slap a hand over your mouth to muffle your moans as your orgasm washes over you, your whole body on fire, so sensitive that the few more seconds Jake needs to come undone himself drive both your body and your mind into overstimulation. Even the feeling of him pulling out, drops of hot liquid dripping out of your entrance, is too much and makes you let out a small, tired whine.

Jake peppers your face with kisses as he holds your waist tightly, brushing his thumb back-and-forth on your warm skin, sticky with sweat. “You did so well, baby. So good for me.” You think you might be ready for a second round if he keeps talking to you like that. “I love you so much.”

You sigh deeply, as if you were just told disconcerting news. “Okay.”

“Okay?!” he echoes, looking up at you with an outraged expression on his face.

“I’m sorry, I love you too, I just- I’m not used to this yet! You can’t just tell me you love and expect me to be normal. You have to warn me first.”

“Can I just warn you now that I’m going to tell you I love you every time I get the chance?”

You sigh. “I guess.”

“Can I tell you now?” he asks, and you hum. “I love you.”

“I love you more.”

Jake tuts. “I highly doubt it, but whatever makes you happy.”

You hold Jake close to you, one arm around his shoulders and the other hand playing with his hair as you come down from your high. You think he might’ve fallen asleep, and you’re close to drifting off yourself when he speaks. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this. Not just the sex, although that has been on my mind for a while now,” he says, making you laugh, “but all of this. Being together, getting to be in your arms like this, kissing you whenever I want. Calling you my girlfriend.”

“Me too, Jakey. I waited so long I didn’t think it would ever happen.”

Jake chuckles. “How stupid were we not to have noticed we felt the same way?”

“Very stupid. I think we felt so sorry for ourselves that we were stuck in one-sided love, that we didn’t even realise the other was going through the exact same thing. But at least we’re now.”

“At least we’re here now.” You and Jake yawn at the exact same time, making you burst into giggles, giddy with sleep and love.

“Let’s sleep, baby,” you say.

Jake hums, burying himself deeper against your body. “Sleep well, my love. I’ll be here.”

After years of pining after each other, you and Jake find it a bit hard to keep your relationship to yourselves, or your hands off of each other.

At the beginning, all of your friends had been happy for you, but that quickly went away when your and Jake’s honeymoon phase never died down and the PDA just kept on going. If the glue you were stuck with previously was metaphorical, this one was pretty close to being real. Superglue kept you together, your moments together rarely spent without some sort of physical touch. Yunjin fake-gagged so often, you were afraid she might actually vomit one of these days. It took Sunghoon two weeks longer than everyone else to clock you and Jake had started dating.

This meant that in private, there was truly no holding back. Jake back-hugged you any chance he got, to the point you started to think he was more koala than human - although that’d imply he saw you as a tree. Make-out sessions were a particular favourite of yours - how could they not be when your boyfriend’s lips seemed to have been carved by God himself, soft and plump to the heavens, like they were made to be kissed. Really, you were just honouring God’s will when you kissed Jake.

The goodbye that comes at the end of the year is not an easy one, and the month spent at home before you fly to Korea seems to never end. But you get there eventually, and as nice as it is to catch up with Jake’s parents after so long, you feign sleepiness after lunch as an excuse to get some time alone with your boyfriend. Ironically, this “time alone” is spent so intensely that you do end up falling asleep afterwards.

You have to admit, you really did a number on your boyfriend this time - what can a girl do when she missed her boyfriend this much? Jake is still passed out when you wake up from your nap, so you slip out as discreetly as you can from his embrace and get out of bed. You head for the closet first and swipe the comfiest looking sweater of his that you find there so you can stay warm as you look around his room. A pang of melancholia hits your chest - most of the pictures and objects on his walls and shelves are parts of his life you weren’t around to witness. Friends you don’t recognize, places you’ve never heard of, phases you’d never known he’d gone through. But then you see the frame on his desk, a faded photo of the two of you at ten years of age, eating ice cream on the bench outside of your house. Milo is sitting at your feet. Jake’s family hadn’t adopted Layla yet. You realise that even if there’s whole parts of your life you didn’t get to share with each other, nothing could touch your memories, or your future.

You want to go back in time and tell fourteen-year-old you that no matter how painful it might seem at the moment, it will all be worth it for the sight of Jake Sim slowly drifting into wakefulness, patting the bed next to him, and noticing you’re missing with furrowed eyebrows. When he opens his eyes and they settle on you, a sleepy smile will grace his dazzling features, and he’ll say, “Come back to bed.”

You’ll be even more in love at twenty than at fourteen.

permanent taglist: @zreamy @sunghoonmybeloved @lalalalawon @sd211 @w3bqrl @raikea10 @wntrnghts @moonlighthoon @4imhry @rikisly @loves0ft @iamliacamila @theboingsuckerasseater9000 @chaechae-23 @baekhyuns-lipchain @hyuckslvr @vernonburger @amorbonbon @fluerz (ask to be removed/added!)

#enhypen smut #jake smut #enhypen x reader #jake sim x reader #sim jaeyun smut #sim jaeyun x reader #enhypen oneshots #jake sim oneshots #enhypen imagines #jake sim imagines #enhypen fluff #jake fluff

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emmyrosee · 1 year

Text

It’s not common to see Atsumu fuming.

Genuine anger, not the petty shit he throws at you when he decides he wants to be an obnoxious turd to yourself or his brother.

You can tell the difference, too, because a petulant pout and attitude is plastered on that pretty face of his, but when he’s genuinely mad, there’s no attitude; it’s just raw emotion and lips pulled in a straight line, his chest giving irregular, short breaths because he can’t breathe. It’s almost scary, but it happens so little that you’ve learned to manage it when it does happen.

This is one of those rare occasions you have no clue which he’s feeling.

The car door outside slams shut, sending a nervous chill up your spine, but it’s immediately squashed when you hear Hisako’s innocent laughter. You smile and turn towards the now opening door, and you give atsumu a fake, sympathetic look when his thick brows are furrowed in frustration. On his leg, Hisako’s tiny arms are wrapped around him, her legs locked around his ankle and her smile that’s missing a tooth is beaming up at him.

“You,” he scolds, looking down at his menace of a six year old. “Go upstairs. And don’t come out until you’re seventy-eight.”

“Can I hug mommy first?”

“If you must,” he growls. With that, Hisako quickly bounds over to you and reaches her arms up for a hug, and while you give her one, you watch as Atsumu paces the floor, cards his hair, chews on his cuticles, anything to make him calm down.

“Daddy’s mad,” she whispers in your ear.

You offer her a snort, “I know.” With a kiss to her head you plant her back to her feet and nudge her to go into her room, waiting until to door closes before you turn back to your husband.

“Atsumu-“

“I’m not ready for this,” he growls. “The little traitor, I can’t believe she’d do this to me- my own flesh and blood.”

“Don’t word it like that, you make it sound like she committed arson or something.”

He softens and pouts like a dog; clearly, whatever it is, it’s taking a toll, and you sigh before you walk over and plant a kiss to his forehead. “Whatever it was, I know it wasn’t on purpose; what happened?”

“She’s just not ready, okay, she just doesn’t know-“

“Sweetheart, you need to let me in here-“

“He was holding her hand!” He whines, scrubbing his face with his hands. “They-They-They were holding hands! I thought I had a few more years to prepare for this shit! Wanted to wait before I put the fear back into these damn boys! I can’t fight a six year old!”

You pause. You retract your hand and give him an absolute smirk.

“You’re kidding me?”

“Sure ain’t!” He barks, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s so mad his forehead vein makes itself known with a sheen of sweat. “Tomorrow, I’m going to that damned school, and I’m moving her classes!”

“Honey,” you say sweetly, gently grabbing his arm to ground him. “It’s okay; I’m the one who told her to be nice to this boy.”

Instantly, his head whips in betrayal. His eyes are blown wide, muscles tense and despite how angry he looks, he can’t find the words to convey it.

“YOU WHAT?”

You shake your head, “she asked me why she feels butterflies in her tummy when she sees him.” To try and soothe him, you hook your head over his shoulder and bat your eyes innocently, “and I told her that it’s the same feeling I get when I see you-“

“Don’t try to be sweet, I’m mad at you,” he snarls, but there’s a softness in his eye that makes you think he’s not as serious as he thinks he comes across. A massive hand cards through his hair and he looks up to the sky as if to ask for patience. “I can’t believe this. My two babies, the loves of my life, betraying me in such juvenile ways.”

“Atsumu, spell juvenile,” you challenge.

“Spell ‘no’,” he grumbles. You sigh and gently grab his arm to pull him to the couch, and for a few seconds he puts up a small fight, but does end up giving into you in the end.

“Sweetie, listen to me,” you soothe. “Hisako is six. She’s going to start having little crushes soon enough-“

“Fuck, stop reminding me,” he whines.

You shake your head and rub a soothing hand on his back. “And all we can do is let her express those feelings in healthy ways; it’s what we’ve always done.”

“What if he hurts her?”

“He’s six.”

“What if he breaks her heart?”

“I’m sure she’ll cope.”

“What if he-“

“Atsumu.” Your hands squish his cheeks. “Calm down; she’s going to be okay.” You smile and kiss his pouted lips, “you remember what it was like having a crush at school-“

“Excuse you,” he grumbles from his squished cheeks, shaking his head from your grip. “I’ve only ever been in love with you.”

“You’ve told me about your relationship with Rintaro, trust me, that was a crush.”

“Was not!”

“Was too.”

“Was not!”

“It absolutely was.” You smile warmly, “and that’s fine. But now, you need to let her experience the same thing. She’s a big girl. Besides,” you nudge your nose with his, “you’ll always be her favorite man.”

“That’s actually Osamu, but I appreciate it.” Your words do seem to calm him down however, and he wraps a big arm around you to settle into the couch, “I just love her, baby… just want her to be safe.”

“I know; and she will be.”

The silence you get comfortable in gets interrupted by the door to your home getting flung open, and while you jump in the air in shock, next to you, Atsumu chuckles.

“Speaking of the devil.”

“What did you-“

Before you can say anything, Miya Osamu suddenly stands in the middle of your living room, the hat on his head tampered with and his apron turn on his hip, his head lined with sweat as if he ran here. Your jaw slacks in surprise, “Osamu, you did not leave work to come here-“

“WHAT STUPID LITTLE SNOT WAS HOLDING HER HAND?”

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awarmcupofmilk · 10 months

Text

Gojo x reader "Broken Mirror"

afab!reader

summary: you knew gojo was the one. gojo wasn't so sure.

content warnings: breakup/sad, angst, deviations from gojo’s past arc

word count: 1,226

note: hi lovelies, I'm back! I'm thinking of turning this into a series, thoughts?

please don’t repost, edit, translate, use, or copy my works on any platforms (if you’d really like to please reach out – reblogs are welcome)

You’d known for a while Satoru was the one.

When he’d thoroughly humiliated the elders through cheeky comebacks and downright threats because Gakuganji made a remark about your way of dress off-duty.

When he called off classes for the day to host a hot dog eating contest, just because you were having a hard time with your sister getting engaged---fresh out of high school.

When he literally saved your life on that mission.

But what sealed the deal was this adorably clueless look on his face, set so vividly apart from his usual smirks and sneers, when he got daifuku on his cheek.

You were in love. And in it bad.

At first, you knew you were alone in your convictions. Satoru hadn’t ever prioritized love and you didn’t think you’d convince him otherwise. You told yourself it was fine, that you’d date for a few months, maybe a year and then move on for the better.

But you don’t move on from the strongest.

You couldn’t taste anything else once you’d had him. Nothing else held appeal.

You kept telling yourself it was fine. You were still young, you still had time to date without a future. But the smell of his aftershave, the way his hair curled behind his ear, his distaste for alcohol. It all drew you in, too deeply, and you wanted it too badly.

Satoru would stiffen when you brought up the future.

He was happy to make plans for Friday date night, but anything about revisiting the clan or moving in or god forbid, marriage had him giving non-answers and changing the subject at the first opportunity.

It was a stabbing pain, seeing the look on his face, and a few times after a particularly sobering conversation you’d almost considered ending it. But he was so sweet. By all other accounts he was a wonderful boyfriend. Chivalrous---opening the door for you, insisting on paying the bill, unfolding the napkin at restaurants to cover your lap. He genuinely listened. And yes, he had a slight habit of being a little too friendly with no doubt interested women, but he’d always own up and do better when you called him out. And you just clicked. So effortlessly, so seamlessly. So, you told yourself it was fine.

You had your whole life ahead of you at twenty-three. And you knew, any third party would tell you that you were being unreasonable. But you loved him. You were sure about him. Surer than you were about most things. Maybe anything. You used to be so cynical about marriage. You didn’t buy anything about soulmates or true love or the one. But Satoru was it for you. You just knew.

But the more you wanted him, the more anxious you were to hold on, to not lose him. You found yourself asking, “Are you going to break up with me?” As a joke from the outside but in truth a deep fear, seeking opposition or confirmation, you didn’t know.

And Satoru would always respond easily, with that trademark suaveness, “Not planning on it.”

You asked more and more often, and whether or not Satoru noticed, more and more anxiously.

And each “I don’t see that happening,” each “No” followed by a soft kiss sold it to you more. You stopped telling yourself it was fine. You’d be together forever. You were sure of it.

Things weren’t perfect. You two had your rough patches and fair share of fights. But you wanted each other enough to make it through anything. If the you from a few years ago could hear yourself, this madness probably would have been put to an end. But you loved him. You loved him in that cliché, film way that looks manufactured in hindsight. But it felt so raw, so pure, so real. You’d be together forever.

Soon, despite yourself, you began hinting. Rings. Nice houses. And even, though you were now appalled at the memory, babies. Not to be had then, of course, just for the far-off future. You could be patient if commitment was promised.

And for whatever reason, Satoru played along. He started engaging in talks about the future, even though he used to say he didn’t want to make these promises, didn’t want to plan so far. You had reminded yourself of what he used to say, that look on his face when you brought up plans. But for some reason hidden to him and you, he bought into it too. He started fantasizing with you. Of course, to you it didn’t feel like fantasizing. But he seemed to want it, almost as badly. You thought his face lit up picturing your lives together in the next few years. You thought he smiled a little wider, laughed a little louder.

He wants this too. You told yourself. We’ll be together forever. You said.

You told this to yourself like a mantra, and soon it became indisputable truth.

✧

“Hey,” you started, leaning on Satoru’s shoulder. You snuggled closer to him on the couch and pulled the blanket over your shoulder. “Does it ever bother you that I ask about the future?” You said.

Satoru stiffened, and your heart dropped.

“What do you mean?” He asked.

“You know, like do you not like talking about plans long-term?”

You were fishing for an easy answer, some artificial reassurance, a “No, I like it fine.”

But he paused. You couldn’t breathe.

“I thought I told you I didn’t want to make promises.”

“Oh,” was all you could say. It sounded like you had let out a breath. A small cough.

“I mean, it’s kind of fun to fantasize,” he said.

You hadn’t realized how much the word “fantasize” bothered you. How seriously you took your “plans”.

“But I mean, I can’t promise what will happen in a few years,” Gojo continued.

You felt dizzy. “You don’t see us together in a few years?” You asked. It sounded like a whimper and you hated yourself for it.

“I just mean I don’t know what my life looks like in a few years.”

“Oh,” you said again.

There was silence. You’d stopped resting on his shoulder and you didn’t know what to do with yourself. You pulled the blanket off and fidgeted, eyes glued to your lap.

“…where do you see this going?” You finally asked. Quietly.

He let out a breath. “Look, I’m going to be honest, I’m twenty-four, I can’t make any commitments right now.”

“Oh.”

You felt oddly calm. “Um, thanks for being honest with me,” (finally, you thought).

“Sure,” Gojo said.

“So we have an expiration date, huh?” You asked.

Gojo frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this is going to end at some point.”

“I mean, I’m not making a decision right now about the future,” Gojo said, you thought he shrugged. “I still want to be with you now,”

But he didn’t understand. That was the point. You’d decided on forever without a second thought, and he just let you. But sooner or later, when he decided it was time to experience life without you, he’d leave you behind. You didn’t want now if you couldn’t have the future.

You didn’t meet his eye. “Gojo, I think we should end things.”

It’s funny how the things you love the most can shatter in an instant.

✧ Masterlist ✧

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chunnies · 1 year

Text

was listenin’ to ‘Scotty doesn’t know’ and got an idea

Pairing: Hobie x AFAB! Reader

Warnings: Smut, cheating . Unprotected sex(pls use a condom)

The sound of skin slapping together and the smell of sex in the air. Your phone started to ring.

“Oh, hey, baby.” You said, trying your best to hold in your moans, but Hobie wasn’t stopping. He just kept thrusting in and out. Watching as his cock disappeared in and out of your went cunt.

“Yeah, i’ve got to. Uhm. I’ve got to go baby.” you said over the phone before hanging up.

“Fuck, Your so fuckin’ wet for me” His slurred voice said while sending in a few final thrusts before he coated your walls white.

All you could do was moan in response. You soon got dressed and hopped out of his van and going home. Waiting until tomorrow for your next meet.

You never thought you would cheat on your boyfriend. He trusted you and you trusted him. Then Hobie showed up. He was beautiful. He send butterflies through your whole body just by looking in your direction. It wasn’t love. You had a boyfriend. He loved you and you loved him. So why were you aching for Hobies touch?

“Oye, peng teng?” His voiced echoed through your mind

“Oh, my bad. Do you need something?”

“No, but you keep starin’ at me, so i thought you needed somethin’.”

How embarrassing. He caught you staring at him, now he was asking you why. You can just tell him that you were aching for him to touch you, you wanted him to trail his lips from yours all the way down to your core. You needed his touch. You needed him.

“No, sorry. Zoned out i guess!”

“You zone out like tha’ everyday? Might wanna get that checked out.”

Shit.

“Yeah, sorry..”

“Stop ‘pologizing , is alright. Swee’heart” He winked at you before walking out of the classroom. He winked. At you. You. That just send you over the edge. You needed him. And before you knew what you were doing you put on your backpack and chased him down the hall. Grabbing into his arm when you finally caught up.

“Wait,” You said breathless. “I do need something.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

You didn’t think this far ahead. You looked around and didn’t see anyone. So, you grabbed both sides of his face and kissed him. And that’s how you got to your current situation.

Currently you were riding him. Your hands on his chest as you bounced up and down. Letting out moans everytime his length was fully in you.

“It’s so cool when you’re on top.”

“W..Wha?” You slurred out. You couldn’t comprehend anything going on except that you were reaching your edge.

He laughed. He laughed at how pathetic you looked. Sweaty and moaning for him. When your boyfriend was right outside. Who’s idea was it to fuck in-front of his house? Doesn’t matter. He came . Yet again. At this point you were gonna get pregnant. Well, if you came off the pill at-least. You knew he liked to raw dog it, so, you started taking the pill.

Your life was pretty good. Except for the fact you were in a relationship you didn’t care for. You just didn’t know how to break up with him. You only wanted hobie. Only needed him. He was everything to you. Anyways, Hobie told him. Hobie told your fucking boyfriend that you and him were fuckin every other day. And that you both loved it. Later that day when Hobie walked past you in the hall with an even bigger smirk than usual you knew he had done something wrong. So, you texted your boyfriend and told him to meet you at your house after school. So, when he made it there you just had to end things.

“I just can’t do this anymore, being stuck in a relationship i don’t want to be in sucks.”

“You soon this so you can keep fucking that punk Hobie?”

“What?”

“He fuckin told me. I just. I cant look at you right now..” He said before leaving. You just stood there. Shocked and happy? Why were you happy?

Taglist: @localbeidousimp @wisteriaflowersss @melda0me

#Spotify #hobie x reader #hobie brown #atsv hobie #hobie my beloved #hobie brown x reader #smut

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heartfullofleeches · 2 years

Text

Masochist Yan bully with a sadistic student council reader

Tw: smoking, cigarette burns, masochism, slightly suggestive themes

Erin watches the cafeteria door as he wastes for you to come outside. He was standing behind a building in the recreational area of the school, tucked away from human eye less they rounded the corner. He flicks on his lighter as you finally make your way outside for your routinely inspect of the school grounds.

He puts the cigarette to his lips. The other week, you caught another school smoking in this same spot and gave them an earful. You forced everyone to leave, but there were rumors you made them smoke the entire rest of the pack after-school. Erin still got tingles when he remembered how the student cries from your verbal assault.

Erin lights the cigarette, taking in a puff as the nicotine burns. He gags. It's not his first time, but in his excitement he ended up inhaling more than intended. He stands close to the end of the corner; tossing his pack onto the ground as your footsteps approach.

He steps out and picks from up, cancer stick hanging from his teeth as he waves. "Hey, Y/n. What's up?"

Your expression is neutral. "What are you doing, Mr. Hart?"

"Nothin." He takes the cigarette from his mouth and blows into the air. "Just enjoying my break like everyone else."

Without another word you walk over. You grab him by the wrist, pulling him around the corner as you then shove him against the wall.

"Give it to me."

Erin's face heats up. He feels your breath against his face. He shakily hands you the cigarette.

You grimace. "How disgusting. Tainting our school grounds with this stench. It's fitting for someone like you, but that doesn't mean you can do it."

His heart beat excellerates. "What are you gonna do about it?"

"Well I let the last pest off with a warning, but I'll make an example out of you. You're tougher to crack than them anyways." You step back. "Kneel."

Erin's not as tough of an egg as you think as he immediately falls to his kneels. He was a little over a foot taller than you standing, now at stomach level. It was a good imbalance. One he'd like to see more often. He gets as close as possible, chest pressed against your leg. You stare down at him; him returning the look with one that reminded you of a dog in heat.

"Stick out your tongue."

Erin again does as told. That smart ass confidence of his had been withered down to an obedient pet. You had yet to fully tame that spirit of his - but you would. You yank him forward by the jaw; flicking some of the cigarette's ash onto his tongue. He trembles in anticipation. You finally press it into the flesh of the muscle; keeping an iron grip on his jaw.

"Gah.. Hah..." Erin moans in pain as the bud chars his tongue. He grabs your thighs, nailing hooking onto the fabric of your pants. It fucking hurt. He could feel the tastebuds in that area melting away, but he wanted more. So much more. The pain was as enriching as the sweet embrace of a lover. It believed with his sick obsession for you that left him in a puddle of pure ecstasy.

Saliva pours over his lips and onto your fingers. He tries so hard not to bite down; jaws clenching, but unable to close around the cigarette. It eventually goes out from the combine weight of his saliva and being forced into a surface. You twist the extinguished bud for added measure before flicking it onto his lap.

You force his head back; another moan erupted from his throat as you yank his hair. Your fingers enter his mouth as you except the extent of the damage. A circle red is burnt into his tongue; the flesh raw. He nearly finishes on the spot as you tug on it. Deeming he's learned his lesson, you let him go.

"I think that's enough punishment for today. Don't do it again or..." Your voice trails off. As you spoke your eyes wandered his body; falling on an unflattering sight between his legs. "Are you- Did you get-"

Erin doesn't respond. Too caught up in the pleasure running through his body to speak. You nearly retch.

"How repulsive... Clean yourself up and go home for the day."

You walk away as the alarm rings for the next period. Erin slumps against the wall as he shoves his fingers in his mouth, trying to reach that same high he felt when yours were in their place. It's not enough to settle his heart back into his chest, but enough to finish what needed to be done.

#this is nasty #yandere #yandere x reader #yandere male #male yandere #Yandere bully #Yandere scenarios #yandere headcanons #yandere imagines #yandere x you #yandere oc x reader #yandere x darling #yandere oc imagine #yandere drabble #yandere blurb #suggestive

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vnynv · 9 months

Text

Selection page & introduction mockup of my Fear and Hunger 2: Termina OC! They're the animal handler and just so happen to go to Prehevil motivated by an internal problem, as they just so happen to be a marriage of Sylvain. Also a (non-canon) scene with Daan and a doodle page, including their moonscorched form, Janus.

They're really shy and uncomfortable around people (especially new ones and crowds), but with the mask, it just results in them seeming aloof and scary. At least it's something they and Marcoh can bond over at the start! They also slowly come out of their shell with Olivia's interest in plant biology and theirs in animal biology.

On day one, they'll be around the train and riverbank; on day two they'll be in and around the moldy apartments, and day three they'll be in the Virgin Maiden Forest, where they'll eventually moonscorch.

Skip Character History?

(⤵ Under the 'read more' is a very lengthy post! 2.5k words. You've been warned ^^;)

CHOOSE CHARACTER

CLASS/ Animal handler (Kirkas)

AGE/ 29

INFO/ Experienced with the toughest of animals, the animal handler knows their way around nature and the dangers that hide within. They aren’t afraid to stick their head in the mouth of a lion.

Incomplete soul

— Intro

The soothing sound of the railtracks... You are not used to such peaceful and tranquil atmosphere.

You can't help but let your mind wander. You reminisce what has lead you to this point in life…

You grew up in a remote city that Voroniya claimed as its own, though you would never see much support in the aging administrative buildings and cracked concrete. The town itself was big, very big, but only one trainline cut through the fields and forests that surround it. When you played at the playgrounds, far away from the other kids, your hands would come back raw from the chipped paint.

It wasn’t as if the other children excluded you specifically, not at the start, but they could never find a connection with you. Or maybe the other way around.

It didn’t seem that you belonged with them, or anyone else for the matter. Even around your own family, you started to clam up and not find the strength to push the words out. This alienation got so bad at one point you tried to leave this world. You failed.

You still craved a connection, but every other half didn’t fit with yours, like a missing puzzle piece. So instead, you searched for solace elsewhere.

>Isolate yourself at home

You closed yourself off to the world, though even your parents had trouble connecting with you once more. They tried to be understanding, then mad once you were adamant about hiding in your room for ages. You wouldn’t leave for class, you’d get left behind, and your muscles would atrophy. You had to fake going outside just for some peace and quiet, but you would in actuality hide in the closets and under the beds. You grew familiar with the mice that would scratch under the walls and the birds that would land on your windowsill. You learnt the skill Mastery over vermin.

>Run off into the woods

You run off one night, suffocated by the row of houses and families who can all talk but you. For the next two weeks, you find yourself in the ever sprawling forest, surviving cold nights by sleeping in the moss and sucking on rocksides to hydrate yourself. You had to learn which plants were safe by experience. Your uncle found you with hives and a deeper face than usual, but you can’t say you were ever scared in the woods. You never learnt the distinct cues of bird chirps or had the same gait as a burrowing fox, but your affinity with Vinushka rose & you learnt the skill Undergrowth awareness.

>Get close with the stray dogs outside

They were whimpery things, ribs poking out and gums gnashing, but you soon were able to get close to them after stealing pastries from the dinner table. After school was out, they wouldn’t run away from your beckoning hand, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t learn when they got too overwhelmed and ready to lunge. You were lucky for any bites to not get infected, but it was a lesson for you to maintain yourself. You got close enough to take naps with them hidden in rubble. Eventually, some adults noticed your interactions and tried to help by sending the dogs to kennels and be adopted. Perhaps the hounds had gotten a better life with a family, or they were culled for attacking a child. You never found out. You learnt the skill Unleash the hounds.

Your parents had you on a tighter leash once you came back. No running off for you anymore, and the remainder of your childhood years were once more silent and lonely.

It gave you ample time to throw yourself into studies, however, with no other kids inviting you out for outings once your class got older. Not surprisingly, you aimed for animal care studies. You then slowly worked your way up from a local animal shelter, to bigger things. Learning to talk to other humans, like a human, was the greatest survival tactic you had to overcome, however.

Impassive and skilled, you found yourself leaving your big, desolate city, to work for an organization that helps with wildlife clean up. Years ago, before the second Great War, you had heard of Voroniya experimenting with chemical power. Of course, it ended up as an irradiated disaster, but the media coverage was much easier to clean up than the actual station in the wilderness. The codename for the location was ‘Hell.’

(Gain DOMA gas mask.)

You were good at what you did, and many a times were specifically called upon to do field work with these… mutated animals. It felt emotionally filling, you think, but you still came to an empty home. Many a time did you think of getting a cat, but even then, you worked random and long hours. It’d smell the other animals on you, anyway.

The more you worked at the cleanup, the more you learnt of the branches of the organization. Or rather, it being a branch. It has ties to the Eastern Union military, and the goals weren’t to just observe and take care of the mutations, but to militarize them for its own use.

The most surprising thing, however… was that you met someone. Someone you could hold a conversation with.

A soldier, technically, but this person was a pencil-pusher and focused on archives and annotations, and DOMA’s project now fell under this associate’s jurisdiction. The two of you were grouped together, among others, and they took an interest in you as much as you did them.

The task was to move some specifically aggressive animals into containment, at least for a higher branch to study them. You partially wished to be one of those scientists, but by now, your gas mask has become a second skin.

The animals were contained in cages and kept in the basement while your team waited for pick-up to arrive, though you hoped that the tranquilizers worked well enough so they slept through the ride and discomfort.

Just as you watched your teammate note things down, the two of you heard noises from one of the cages. It was one of the dog-beasts, who had half-scales forming over its body by the time spent in Hell, and a rough personality that made for its lost years. It took the whole active half of the team to get it down. At any moment now, it was going to burst from its metal imprisonment and enact revenge.

Your friend was much closer to the exit, but you knew you had only one second to figure out what to do, being much closer to the cages.

>Subdue the beast yourself

As it lunges out, you think fast and fall back on adrenaline and skill to handle it. You have faith in your dear friend and colleague getting out the tranq gun, so all you need to do is be the muscle and pin the animal—no, beast down. Easier said than done. With its gaping and jagged maw, it gets you on the arm and shreds it. Past the pain, you realize you can’t move it anymore. It must have bit into your nerves. No matter, your vision is sharp and focused as you’re able to wrestle it down with your remaining strong arm. You have to pin the neck with your knee just as the tranquilizer is shot. Your arm is left bloody, but you learnt the skill One-handed.

>Brace for impact

Just as the lock breaks, you put one hand in your pocket and take out a syringe. Your remaining arm is held up to guard your throat as your feet get into a strong stance. This is as most prepared as you’ll get, it seems. The beast is but a blur as it jumps on you, and even in your uniform and split-second preparation, absolutely bites through your arm. You’re dragged down with it, and fumble with the tranquilizer in your other hand as you yell through the pain. It is muffled by your mask. For a moment, you’re afraid that you can’t penetrate the scales of the dog, but it soon goes limp in your hold. It ended as fast as it started, but you were left worse for wear, clutching your injured arm. You learnt the skill Perfect Guard.

Once more safe, the adrenaline leaves your body and you find yourself lightheaded from the blood loss. Just as your conscience slips away, you feel two hands support you before you drop to the tile floor.

The next time you wake, it is in a hospital. You have a cast on your arm, and even find a leg bandaged. You didn’t know at the time, but you ended up twisting a knee. Your partner-in-crime is sitting on a chair, and they turn out to be delighted in you waking up.

After the nurses made sure your blood levels were normal, you were discharged. You also found your gas mask to be cracked from the scuffle after you passed out, as your friend succinctly put. Oh, well. The organization told you to take an extended leave, so it wasn’t like you would need it in the near future anyway.

You had to learn to do things one-handedly back in your apartment, and it was more of a struggle to make yourself breakfast than it was to traverse the irradiated Hell. Days later of you rotting on your couch, you would slowly limp to the front door and find your only friend waiting. Turns out, they asked for time off as well to take care of you.

After that, the two of you got much, much closer, even after you regained most control of your arm. While you were resting and couchbound, your beau told you many stories of their hobbies to fill the time. Turns out, their archiving habit spanned their work and into their interests, namely of the Old Gods.

The place you grew up in was quite secular. Sure, grandmothers told kids stories about spirits, but there was no construction for any God like other cities, towns, and villages have. At most, you just had the faintest connection to the deceased Vinushka’s traces, but your beloved’s interest was not devotional (and not for only one God), but rather of appreciation. You learnt of Alll-Mer’s ascension and what most people don’t know of just as you learnt of how Gro-goroth and Sylvain’s amore.

There wasn’t a specific day that the two of you crossed from ‘friends’ to ‘lovers.’ It felt so natural that you could’ve blinked and missed it. You really couldn’t believe there could be a person like this, who’s caring, understanding, and talking to them feels like second nature to you. So, when your partner brings up experiencing a marriage of flesh for Sylvain, you see no downsides.

Everything truly was perfect. You had heard of horror stories of failed ‘marriages’, but the two of you coming to one was as if fate had always intended for this to happen. You had Sylvain’s blessing.

The month off from work after you two became one was the most beautiful month in your lives. You never knew you could appreciate each brick that made your apartment until you left the house the next day.

This euphoria didn’t last for long. Everything had been prim and fair at the start, with while you both were fused in conscience, inner conversation felt like a giddy secret you were in on. It was almost time to go back to the workforce, but the 50/50 train of thought didn’t remain much for long. It started to become more of ‘you’ and less of ‘them’, until you couldn’t feel their presence any longer. The day you couldn’t hear a single thought from them, as if they were locked away in full.

They were still here, you still felt the twitch of a finger, or a tic only they grew up with, but there was a barrier put between the two of you. There was no body to mourn, but with you wearing half their face, there was equally no other head to caress, mouth to kiss, and to ask if they’re alright. You’re not sure if it would be better if they could hear your thoughts, freaking out at the loss of theirs, or not.

Just days before you’d go back to work, when you decided to buy a ticket out of your region. As they had told you the tales of all the Old Gods, a memory came to the front of your head of one conversation. The ascension of Alll-Mer, a special man who ascended once an Old God died for his spot. It wasn’t just the birth of Alll-Mer, that day, but the Sulfur God as well. One was locked far, far away, and most people know it to be the latter that was chained up and banished…

But if what some people say it to be as Gro-goroth took the skin of man and walked as one of their own… This memory of yours had been so strong, it was as if your lover was still guiding you along. A way to figure out to cut the chains, that’s what you need.

You don’t think you could ever reverse the process of Sylvain’s marriage, or if you even wanted to, but to at least hear your beloved’s voice again… That’s enough.

If by the desire of a Sulfur Priest to cause ruin and destruction, or by the desire of an Alll-Mer Follower to do good unto this world, you could reunite with them, you’d do anything in your power to achieve it. Your ticket is for a land reasonably far away, far enough that they start worshiping these Old Gods, but close enough that it falls under the Eastern Union’s current domain.

How do you prepare for your travels?

>Stock up on medical goods (Gain x2 Blue vials and Cloth fragment)

>Stock up on protection (Gain x2 Bear trap and Leather armor)

>Stock up on food (Gain x2 Dried meat and Moldy bread)

A lifetime ago, you would’ve hated talking to people, but to help get your partner back… Talking to a priest and a cashier should be similar enough, right?

— Extra

Incomplete soul skills:

Unleash the hounds: Be able to recruit the headless hounds, along with extra scenes with Moonless and August. -40 Mind if a recruited hound dies.

One-handed: Be able to use two-handed weapons with one hand and have 25% chance to not use up ammo.

So incomplete I haven’t thought of at least two more. Lol.

Other introduction trivia:

With Mastery over vermin, get extra mini-quest and scenes with the vermin.

With Vinushka’s affinity, get extra scene with Iki Turso about Vinushka being dead.

It is not confirmed which of the two sides is the original, and which was the partner.

DOMA: Дикие Обслуживание & Милитаризация Ада (Wild Observation & Militarization of Hell)

#vny again with a long ass post with a fan oc #fear and hunger #fear and hunger termina #fear and hunger fanart #termina #digital art #daan #pavel yudin #levi #headless hound #fear and hunger original character #f&h oc #kirkas | animal handler #moonscorched #long post #🚐 art #blood #gore #nudity

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haunting-venus · 4 months

Text

who ever said three's a crowd ? ↳ neteyam x fem!omatikaya!reader ( + male oc...)

content warnings | smut ( minors dni ), characters are aged up !, extensive dirty talk ( about a threesome ), talk of mlm/anal sex, slight intoxication, handjob, fingering, p in v

word count: 3108

notes | this is for day three of romancing pandora and i am actually so pleased with how this turns out, let my boy neteyam be bi omg ! this might be cheating a little bit since there is no actual threesome (yet) but there is explicit dirty talk/fantasization about one ! don’t worry you dirty dogs, i am in the process of writing the sequel to this once i am not drowning in school assignments

please feel free to picture zaelnu however you like but this is personally how i see him

na'vi dictionary | sayrìp — handsome ; yawnetu — loved one, beloved person

You were dancing on air as you trailed through the reaches of High Camp, fingers tangled in Neteyam’s as you giggled through the night. You were riding the line between sober and drunk, your extremities pleasantly tingling and feeling a little bolder than usual.

Neteyam wasn’t usually one for public affection beyond linked fingers and fleeting forehead kisses, so you count yourself lucky you’d been able to get your hands on him so much tonight. It felt like forever since the two of you had had any time alone. Neteyam’s duties as future Olo’eyktan became more intense every day, especially with the increasing amount of RDA raids and counterattacks that seemed to grace your home much too often.

It made you proud, knowing your mate was important and competent and helping your clan at all waking hours. It also meant he was gone for long stretches at a time, trudging home tired and dirty. You missed him like hell.

The many lonesome nights and the buzz of fermented juice had made your usually fleeting public touches heavy and lingering. Your fingers traced over the nape of Neteyam’s neck, nails scraping against the roots of his hair, thigh pressed solidly into his side as your lips ghosted over his broad shoulder.

Your probably inappropriate demeanor for two prominent members of the clan was hardly noticeable among the drinking and dancing bodies—families and mated pairs chattered all around, singing and conversing over shared leaves of meat and fruit. To anyone sparing a passing glance, the two of you probably just seemed a little cozier than normal. The warriors had returned from the raid with plenty of wares and no casualties, a feat rare enough that it warranted a little celebration in the midst of war and chaos.

Neteyam was limber and relaxed next to you the entire time, the most relaxed he’d been in ages. His cheeks were tinged dark with the effect of the liquor and the trace of your fingers, his hand dancing dangerously high on your leg and eyes glinting playfully with the light of the fire. You felt heat pool within you at the little challenge in his gaze, your breaths becoming heavier as you let your hand trail down his chest, ghosting along the fabric of his loincloth as you leaned over him to grab another piece of fruit.

The shudder Neteyam let out would be imperceivable if you weren’t pressed so solidly against him, breathing hard through his nose as his fingers tightened on the inside of your thigh. He was just as wanting as you were. It gave you a sense of comfort knowing he had missed your touch as much as you missed his.

You turned a bit on your way back up, hoping to catch the heated look in Neteyam’s amber eyes and instead caught the startled gaze of a young warrior, Zaelnu, across the fire. You felt a hint of shame run through you, ready to run away and hide, before you noted the raw desire staining the archer’s face, eyes near black with what you were sure was want.

You held the man’s gaze for a moment, brow bone raising a bit in playful question before he turned away flushing, immediately busying himself with the roaring conversation between young warriors next to him. It could’ve been an accident, wandering eyes that happened to catch you at the wrong time. Except, now you couldn’t help but clock the stolen glances Zaelnu kept shooting your way, lips wet and swollen as he bit on them, eyes trailing over the clench of Neteyam’s abs and the delicate curve of your waist over the flickering flames.

You pushed Neteyam down onto your bed mats with heated pants, planting yourself into his lap with a desperate pull of your mouths to one another. You couldn’t help the images that flooded your brain as your mate’s hands gripped your hips, his ears pinned back to his head as he gasped into your mouth. Another set of hands roamed across Neteyam’s chest, tracing under his pecs and down his slim hips, a second pair of lips finding the sensitive spot beneath his ear to make him groan between the two of you.

It piqued your memory of something you and Neteyam had discussed long ago, under the light of eclipse with intimate whispers when Neteyam was first coming to terms with liking both men and women. There were many mated Na’vi that brought in a third party into their relationships, either for sexual or child-rearing needs. It wasn’t at all unusual, but he assured you there was no one else better for him than you, that he was completely content as things were. That didn’t mean the idea had been completely abandoned, reemerging at times in dirty fantasies whispered under heated breaths as you worked him in your hands.

You let out a little whine as Neteyam pulled you more firmly into his lap, the bulge of his cock seating between your swollen cunt with a delicious friction. Your lips left him with a wet sound, ducking your head to run your tongue up along his long neck, letting your teeth graze across the muscle there.

“Fuck, love, missed this so much,” Neteyam’s voice with breathy with want, head leaning back against the wall of your shared home as he rubbed his thumbs along the dip of your hips. “You’re lucky no one saw us, with your hands all over me like that.”

A teasing smile edged on your lips, canines glinting as you pressed your forehead to his with a heated stare. “Actually, I think your little archer friend got an eyeful.”

“What—stop joking.” Neteyam goes still under you, eyes a bit wide.

Zaelnu was a talented marksman, tall and lean with kind eyes and dark dreads knotted with chains and feathers. He was a bit sarcastic, but still sensitive, with a remarkable respect for nature and the creatures he hunted. It was clear he admired Neteyam, often seeking his advice before anyone else, but he always stayed respectfully distant.

Neteyam was subtle about his attraction to the younger hunter, keeping up the cool facade of dutiful friend and stoic leader. He had played the role of the respectable eldest son his entire life, always putting others' needs and feelings before his own even if it was to his detriment. It was too bad that you could see through him like a glass window, reading each flick of his tail and flush of his cheeks when he was around Zaelnu for what they really were—desire.

“I’m serious. He looked like he wanted to eat you right up. Don’t you think he’d look pretty, with his head between your legs?”

You can feel Neteyam’s heart quicken under your hand, cock twitching even as he frowns up at you. “Stop it, we talked about this. I love you, yawnetu, I want you. You will always be enough for me.”

“I love you too, Neteyam, always.” You press a swift kiss to his flushed cheek, running a soothing hand down his shoulders. He nervously worried his lip between his teeth, fingers twitching up your leg. “But I know that there are parts of yourself you cannot explore with me, and I want that for you. It would please me to give that to you.”

He grunts as you roll your hips slowly against him, feeling the weight of him against you as you hold his gaze. “My love-”

“Besides, you know I think it’s hot, and I know you’d like it.” You let your hands wander down the ripple of Neteyam’s stomach, feeling him shiver under your light touch. “Come on, sayrìp, tell me.”

You pepper kisses down his neck, hips moving steadily against the bulge of his cock, relishing in the way the swollen head nudges against your clit. You can feel yourself becoming wetter against him, the whining noises coming from his chest and the fantasy spilling from the depths of your mind making fire run through your core.

“I-I’d want him on top of me, stretching me,-hah-just like that, yawnetu, shit.” His canines worry his lower lip, cheeks flushed high as you move to slip his cock from its restraining fabric. He looks borderline wrecked under you, eyes hot and pleading as you run your fingers firmly against the tender spot under his cockhead.

“You’d want him to fuck you?” That hadn’t been quite what you had in mind but it made your thighs clench, imagining Neteyam panting and flushed as he so often had you, sucking marks into your neck as he clenched around the fingers inside him. “He does seem pretty good with his hands. Fuck, would you let me watch? Let me stroke you just like this as his fingers open you up?”

Neteyam makes a desperate sound, ears pinned against his skull as he bares his teeth to your neck. He briefly moves his hands off your waist to the ties of your loincloth, fingers tugging at the knots until the fabric falls free against your legs. He makes quick work of running his thumb through the slickness there, gliding it up and over your clit, making you pant into his shoulder.

“What if I sat on your face, letting you taste just how hot you make me while he fucks you. I bet you’d be trying so hard to stay focused, making me cum on top of you, but it would feel so good you’d lose it.”

You were trembling on top of Neteyam now, pushing your hips into every slide of his fingers against your throbbing clit. Your words felt like they were spilling from the deepest parts of your brain into the air between you, unchecked and raw as you gasped them wetly into your lover’s skin. Every fleeting thought and shameful fantasy was making itself known, pulling itself from you with every desperate movement of Neteyam against you.

“You think he’d know just how you want to be fucked, or would he ask your advice like he does everything else? Maybe you could use me as an example, your perfect little display of how to properly fuck someone until they’re begging.”

Neteyam groans from deep in his chest, the sound rumbling through you. His slick fingers abandon your clit, just barely teasing the rim of your pussy before stroking deep inside. Your thighs shake around him as you grind wantonly against his hand, nudging his fingers against the spot you crave the most.

“Fuck, oh, yawnetu, would want you on me, your pretty lips on my cock before you get up and kiss him while he fucks me under you. Want him to taste me on you-”

Neteyam’s fingers keep bumping into that soft spot that makes your eyes roll back, pulling desperate mewls and pants from you. His neck is scattered with marks now, little indents of your teeth and blossoming purple spots that he’ll no doubt get teased for tomorrow. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered but the solid feel of him underneath you and the dizzying heat building between you.

An idea piques your mind through the pleasure, crawling its way to the forefront as you feel Neteyam’s fingers desperately pushing you to release. Your fingers trail down his shaft, tracing the throbbing veins with firm touches before rolling his balls into your palm. You can feel liquid courage racing through you, spurred on by the throb between your thighs and Neteyam’s twitching hips. You let your fingers trail behind his balls, the edge of your knuckle rub firm circles into the patch of skin there, stimulating his prostate.

Neteyam’s eyes widen, dark and wanting as he lets out an honest to mother whine as he stares up at you. His cock twitches against you, wetting the spot under your navel with precum as he shifts between pushing closer and pulling away from your touch. You give an awed giggle, heat pulsing through you as you give another gentle rub behind his balls before he’s nudging your hand away from the sensitive spot.

The world shifts as Neteyam pushes you back onto the mats, gripping both your wrists above your head with clenched fingers. The soft fibers stick against your sweaty back as he pressed his weight down into you. You let you a whine as his precum slicked cock slid between your folds, slotting into the seam of you with a steady grind. He was able to get so much more leverage this way, pulling one of your legs high up on his hip to press his cockhead firmly on your clit.

“Fuck, ‘Teyam-”

“Isn’t this what you wanted, yawnetu? Get me all worked up, tease me with your pretty words?” His words were thin and panting even as he tried to gain control over himself, eyes wild as he kissed his way between your breasts and up your neck with tongue and teeth igniting every nerve along your body.

“Just, please, fuck me, I-I need it-want it so bad.”

Neteyam can feel himself losing his grip on himself between the smell of your sex and the dirty video of your fantasies making his mind fuzzy with desire. He releases your hands from above your head, stroking down your body and across your firm nipples. You’re so pretty under him, absolutely soaking and pushing your hips frenzied up into his touch, moaning softly with each flick of his fingers across your breast..

“Shit, yeah, pretty girl, I-I’ll give it to you, just let me-”

He pulls back briefly to adjust himself at your hole, fingers tight under your thigh as he lifts your leg to push deeply inside you. You hadn’t felt this desperate in a long time, sensitive and mewling under Neteyam as he screws his eyes shut above you, in an effort not to cum. The air between you was charged, the pressure inside you overwhelming and, fuck, he was so far inside you, pressing right into the spot that made you see stars at this angle.

“Fuck, you drive me insane, sound so pretty like this-hah”

He moves his hips steadily into you, long and deep, moving his fingers down to roll your soft and swollen clit. You can’t help but keen at the touch, fisting your hand into his braids to pull a groan from deep in your lover’s chest.

“Keep touching me like that, p-please love.” You can hear the pleading in your voice, each word sounding more like a moan than a sentence as heat builds up steadily in your core, singing through your clit and up your spine.

You felt a little frantic, gasping huge gulps of air that were pushed out of you in little ah, ah, ah’s everytime Neteyam rolled his hips back into you. He didn’t seem to be faring any better. His gasps are raw and desperate, muscles straining as he holds himself above you, thighs flexing and forearm taut with exertion.

“Fuck, you’re doing so good, love, take me so well, so deep inside.”

Neteyam is breathless above you, eyes fixed on the sight of your cunt stretching so prettily around him, swollen and wet. His lip is between his teeth, chest heaving with each breath, and it’s so easy to imagine him on his knees just like this, pressed between you and another man, fucking you mindlessly to the same rhythm that Zaelnu is driving his long fingers into his prostate.

“Fuck, I’d w-want you to be in the middle, f-fucking me like this while he fucks you, please ‘Teyam.”

It takes a moment for Neteyam to process what you said, head fuzzy with the impending tightness of his orgasm and the sweet gasping sounds you make each time he pushes into you. When it manifests, the image does him in—being pressed between your legs in the sweet heat of you while Zaelnu stretches him wide, having to fight between pushing back into the tight pull of your cunt or pressing onto the cock splitting him open.

The shock of his orgasm runs like lightning down his spine, hips jutting unevenly and hard into you as heat floods his body and pleasure crests up through his abdomen. Neteyam’s face is lax and panting into your shoulder as he cums, fingers gripping the meat of your ass bruisingly tight as he spends himself inside of you.

You feel a swell of pride in you as Neteyam shakes above you, cock jerking inside of you with each pulse of his racing heart as he fills you. He prides himself on always making you cum first, it feels nice to turn the tables every once in a while.

His fingers move frantically against your clit, wet and sloppy as he urges you to chase the high together, and you can feel yourself cresting the edge. You feel yourself clenching around his softening cock, pulling overstimulated gasps from Neteyam that he muffles with his teeth in your shoulder.

“Oh my, fuck, yes.” The sting of his canines pushes you to the edge, back arching into the pads of Neteyam’s fingers as he rubs your clit in sweet circles as you fall apart under him.

Your head tips back, digging your blunt nails into the muscle of his shoulder, panting through the twitching of your muscles as Neteyam slowly pulls himself out of you. The air is hot and sticky between you, slowly cooling with the light breeze coming from the opening at the top of your home.

“Damn, you were really into that, huh?” There’s a teasing edge to your tone, soft and breathless as you hook your leg over Neteyam’s thigh. He pushes his face into your shoulder, feathering light kisses across the curve of your neck.

“Shut up.”

“Oh, come on, you’re so hot when you get desperate like that. I’m just glad my intuition about your little crush was right.” You chuckle sweetly.

He groans and throws his head back, lips curling in a bashful smile as he lets the afterglow of his orgasm wash over him. His fingers trailed down through your hair, rubbing against the back of your neck comfortingly. “I will never live this down, will I? It’s not like I was the only one worked up. Those were some pretty detailed fantasies, yawnetu.”

“I might’ve thought about it more than I’ve let on. It’s hard not to, with how you stare at him like you’re going into heat.” Your cheeks flush a bit, teeth playing with your bottom lip as you giggle at the shocked part of his lips.

“I do not stare.”

“Uh huh, okay, sayrìp.” You press a kiss to Neteyam’s cheek, trailing your fingers across his arm that’s slung over your waist. “Just saying, he stares at you too.”

tags | @tallulah477 @neteyamsoare @eywaite @torukmaktoskxawng

#venus writes #neteyam x reader #neteyam te suli tsyeyk'itan #avatar the way of water #avatar #avatar 2009 #neteyam sully #neteyam x you #romancingpandora2024 #smut #neteyam smut

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dadbodbuck · 10 days

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some sentences saturday

from my untitled cat dad eddie fic!

“Hey, kiddo,” Eddie says as Chris pulls himself into the truck.

Chris eyes him warily. “What did you do?”

“Am I really that obvious?” Eddie laughs, pulling out of the school pickup line.

“You look like a dog with something in its mouth,” Chris observes.

Eddie chews on the inside of his cheek to buy himself time. “Yeah. I—uh—may have made an impulse purchase. Frank told me to volunteer at an animal shelter, so I went, and there was this cat, and—”

“Dad,” Chris gasps, “Did we get a cat?”

“Sort of,” Eddie winces, “She might not… she might not be friendly like your friends’ cats. People really hurt her, before.”

Chris frowns. “Oh.”

“She’s really scared,” Eddie explains, “She thinks someone like you or me or Buck will hurt her.”

“I wouldn’t hurt her!” Chris defends, “Neither would you or Buck.”

“She doesn’t know that,” Eddie says softly, “She’s a cat, so the only way to help her understand that is to show her. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Chris nods. “Is that why you got hurt?”

Eddie glances down at his bandaged hand. “Yeah. She bit me.”

“What did you do?” Chris says, with a protective bite that, honestly, makes Eddie a little proud.

“She’s been declawed,” Eddie says, “She can’t scratch people to let them know when to stop any more, so she bites more often. I had to give her some food, and got too close to her personal space. Hopefully with more work I can get closer to her or feed her from a bowl, but she’s been staying in her carrier.”

“Okay,” Chris accepts, “Can I see her?”

“I think that would be a good idea,” Eddie says, “She’s in my room—we’ll do your homework in there, and then we can work on slow blinking. I’m talking to a behaviorist from the shelter, and she says that’s how cats say I feel safe.”

Chris, with a look of raw determination (the only good thing Eddie ever gave him), nods. They make it home in one piece, and soon Chris is speeding in through the front door and towards Eddie’s room.

“Mijo, wait!” Eddie winces. Chris does actually stop (thank God), pausing with his hand on Eddie’s doorknob and a plaintive look back.

“Let me lead this, okay?” Eddie says, and he always hates taking agency away from his son, but this is… this is something he can’t afford to mess up. He doesn’t like the churning feeling in his gut when he thinks about what’ll happen if Magnolia bites Chris.

With a downcast look, Chris nods.

“Hey, I’m not saying I don’t think you’ll respect her space, or that I think you’ll do anything wrong,” Eddie assures him, “I just want to make sure she sees a familiar face first, okay?”

“Okay,” Chris says, relaxing. Eddie opens the door and steps in.

When they get in, she’s still in her crate. Eddie bites back a sigh of disappointment, one that quickly becomes unnecessary when he realizes she’s eaten her food.

“Alright, bud, let’s get cracking,” Eddie says, sitting cross-legged on his own bed. Chris joins him, and it’s almost like they’re having a sleepover, whispering because they’re up too late, and not because there’s a really freaked out cat six feet away.

#911 fic #fic tag: magnolia #my wips

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dateamonster · 7 months

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webcomics*! webcomics baby!!! i grew up reading these bad boys like they were the sunday funnies. im serious i would get up early in so i could check my daily roster of webcomic updates before leaving for school.

webcomics sort of feel to me like my generations version of zines. not that both those things arent still around, i just mean that, in the same way that there was this big boom of super creative zine self-publishing in the 70s through the 90s thanks to the increasing access to copy machines, and later home printing, the early 00s-10s was sort of the moment people seemed to collectively realize they could kind of just upload whatever they wanted to the internet and people would actually see it, leading naturally to another boom in indie art and storytelling.

a lot of the comics that popped up around this time were sort of... rough. raw. weird. there were no rules about what a webcomic had to be other than 1) a comic and 2) on the web, so there was some freedom to be as messy or as precise as the author wanted. this led to some real bangers, and some absolute flops. but regardless of how it turned out i think theres something to be admired about the sheer amount of creativity going into these projects that, for the most part, were purely passion-driven without any guarantee of greater recognition or success.

obviously webcomics are still around, but the culture surrounding them has shifted quite a bit. most people who are willing to put in the work of a longform serialized comic In This Economy are also doing so with the hope of being able to profit or at least sustain themselves financially on their work. theres no shame in that! but it has made the webcomic scene more competitive, more polished, less experimental. capitalism at work, you know.

people arent really as incentivized to try new things and dare i say get a little weird with it when innovation doesnt pay the pills. however that doesnt mean that there arent still artists out there who are challenging that.

i got the idea a while ago that i wanted to put together a list of webcomics that have been really influential to me and my own creative efforts, but i realized that list would be a mile long and wouldnt really give me the breathing room to talk about why those works resonate with me. so i decided instead to make a list specifically of my (currently) most beloved, most influential webcomics that i feel like are doing something unique that sort of pushes the boundaries of what is considered a "normal" comic.

presented in no particular order, with all attempts made to be spoiler-free, below:

nasty red dogs and feast for a king by kosmicdream (18+)

delicious, dark, meaty comics. ffak in particular is like this massive sprawling scifi stream of consciousness thick with blood and viscera and. a lot of highly transsexual erotic cannibalism tbqh.

personally i find nasty red dogs a lot more like easy to get into story-wise, but both are just chockablock full of this beautiful grotesque unapologetic and downright indulgent physicality. its pages dripping with every fluid you can think of and some you cant, and its also compelling surprisingly empathetic characters set against a backdrop of otherworldly rituals, cosmic pre-apocolypses, and worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. body horror heaven lives here.

mr boop and crimehot by alec robbins (very 18+)

if youre at all into weird webcomics youre probably already well familiar with mr boop, and if you arent theres really nothing i can say other than Please give it a shot, but if you havent been keeping up with alecs work since then you might not be as familiar with his current project crimehot. and thats a damn shame because it is all the comedy, unabashed horniness, and surprisingly understated storytelling of mr boop taken to its absolute max.

crimehot is set in a future where nearly every aspect of human life and culture is controlled by an all-powerful all-seeing computer algorithm. but who cares about all that when theres a ragtag team of ultra sexy ultra horny master thieves going on wacky little misadventures together!

alecs style is blunt and simplistic in a way that comes off as juvenile at first glance, and then uses that presumption to completely blindside you with its actual content, reminding me weirdly enough of memeable classic tails gets trolled. in spite of their potential as works of ironic comedy however alecs comics really give me this impression of total earnestness. crimehot in particular is so blatantly un-erotic, with its complete lack of any subtlety, comically exaggerated (and surprisingly diagetic) anatomy, and impossible physical positions, that it circles back around into becoming, indeed, kind of hot. i think silliness can be hot so sue me!

blind alley by adam de souza

departing completely from my last couple recs, blind alley is a cozy, peanuts-inspired comic strip about the day to day lives of the children of blind alley. its also occasionally a deeply unsettling horror-mystery that has just barely begun to show its hand more than two years in. its distinguishing factor to me comes from the fact that the cozy exterior doesnt seem to be there to conceal or divert your attention away from the growing sense of unease that infiltrates its panels on an increasingly frequent basis as the story progresses. it feels more like the two elements live side by side, horror and mundanity, otherworldly creatures and secret conspiracies living peacefully alongside lazy summer afternoons and goofing off with your friends. it perfectly captures the anxiety of knowing that theres something the grown-ups arent telling you, the powerlessness of being a kid.

blind alley feels to me sort of like if those "what if Nostalgic Cartoon was secretly DARK" media theories were actually real, and actually scary. i might be getting ahead of myself as the series likes to take its time and is really only just starting to peel back the layers, but what ive read so far feels makes me feel like this could be something very special.

boy island by leo fox

beautiful beautiful beautiful first of all. the dreamy, surreal visuals? the colors?? oujhjh.. boy island is set in a world split violently in two, divided into boy island and girl island, and surrounded on all sides by a sea of monsters mutants and ghosts, those sorry souls who committed the trespass of trying to cross from one land to the other, or even live outside of either! a boy named lucille must strike out on his own to make it to boy island, but in doing so begins to discover things about the world and in fact himself that reveal an even greater mission.

im making this all sound very dramatic. its a trans story. its about trans people, being trans. its also about surviving the ripples of a world laid out for you by your parents, managing grief for the ones that didnt, and a funny little blue guy named jounce. also did i mention its gorgeous? hot fuckin diggity it is gooorgeous.

vivians ghost by hal schrieve (18+)

speaking of trans comics!! (plot twist: theyre all trans comics suckerrrr) look, all of hals comics are fucking baller and im sure the book zes got coming out will be too, but ive like Imprinted on this one. its attached itself my brain. much like the main protagonist collin has been attached to by his suicide victim best friend and ex highschool bf viv!

the sketchy art style threw me off at first but it quickly becomes part of the charm and meshes very well with the chaotic pace and gutpunch emotional moments. theres a strong element of magical realism that i honestly think comics as a medium were made for. viv is a ghost, and viv is grief, and guilt, and fantasy, and shame, and glorious trans revenge taken form, and hes not even the only apparition in this story, taking the stage alongside cameos by jesus christ, a detransitioners fursona, almanda palmer, and (checks notes) gonzo for a second there i think.

as a disclaimer (or incentive, depending) no one in this story i think is someone you could really call a good person. some of them are in fact plainly terrible. they are all so undeniably fucking fascinating though. and viv himself gleefully inhabits that moral gray area, deliberately and loudly disturbing any image of himself as a pure perfect victim, blurring lines and thrusting both the characters and audience out of their comfort zone. its a challenging read thats not going to be everyone for sure, but i definitely think its worth the read.

(and if this sounds interesting to you but youre not sure you can handle it, hal has other equally good comics that are still heavy on the trans gay relationship drama but much lighter on the childhood trauma.)

what happens next by maximumgraves

if youre reading this on tumblr i hope that youve at least heard of what happens next by now. thee seminal tumblrina art of our time i swear. it starts with a true crime podcast exploring the strange story of griffin and his accomplice milo, trans teen murderers, the latter of which has since been released from the psych hospital while the former continues to serve his sentence. but thats in the past, and in the present milo still has to figure out how to live the rest of his life.

the story moves rapidly, though not necessarily chronologically, in and out of the real world and the online lives its characters frequently inhabit like its guiding you through a twisted dream. its a comic on the internet about the internet from someone clearly well aware of its more poisonous aspects, as well as the addictive quality it can have for someone who has become otherwise isolated from the world.

at the end of the day though the major appeal i think is the characters, how messy and horrible and tragic they can be, which is all you can really hope for from a largely character-driven narrative. to say much more i think would ruin the experience, but ill say what happens next absolutely delivers on its ominous title, and im waiting on the edge of my seat for the next chapter.

preeny has to repeat 6th grade by momodriller

on a Much lighter note, preeny has to repeat 6th grade is a super cute adventure series about a magical little kitty named preeny who on her first day of sixth grade is called upon to go on a great mission. its a sparklefur comic!! ive been really starting to dive into furry art lately, and if youre the kind of person who raises an eyebrow at that statement, fine, whatever, but im talking to the cool people right now so keep it to yourself.

art from within the furry subculture is such insanely creative and passionate stuff, and the focus on this subset in particular, calling back to the early 2000s deviantart xD rAWR s0 rand0m era of online culture, feels so intensely nostalgic it makes my chest ache, despite never being heavily involved in the sparklefur scene myself.

the author states in the comics description that the story takes inspiration from her experiences as an autistic child, and even before reading that man i felt it. what really makes this comic unique to me though is that the majority of characters that appear are based on adoptables the author purchased off of, as she puts it, the children of deviantart. i LOVE that. not only is that probably amazing for the kids, it makes every character feel truly unique and adds perfectly to the overall flavor of the world shes created. there is just not another comic i can think of that feels alive like this one.

broccoli soup by secretpie

ok so i know how we might feel about webtoon comics but hear me out. broccoli soup is probably the first comic ive seen to really exploit the otherwise sort of bland and restrictive format of webtoons, utilizing the excess of white space to enhance the feeling of emptiness that characterizes the protagonist broccoli's time in the blank void they call home as well as to make the sparse use of color really pop in contrast.

broccoli soup is a mysterious series thats a little hard to pin down in terms of genre. a strange little being named broccoli spends their days in a vast blankness drinking tea with their loving yet highly suspicious Best Friend and benefactor, doris. doris has the ability to move between worlds, coming and going as she pleases, while broccoli is only allowed to leave when they are on a mission on her behalf. these missions vary, but the goal is always the same: make everything Polite and Good.

as the story progresses, little by little more friends and more color come into broccolis still new existence. the art style also changes from world to world, which imo is a very nice touch. and! theres music! its an interesting project that dances back and forth between fantastical whimsy and some surprisingly dark moments. and thats the shit i like to see.

thats all for now! though if im lucky there will be many more fun stories and projects to talk about in the future. keep in mind as well that this is like barely half of all the webcomics im currently reading, just the ones that most stick out to me as really doing something special.

until next time yall!!

oh wait sike honorable mentions time

awful hospital by bogleech

the only reason this isnt up there with the rest is bc im woefully behind at the moment. ill get back to it eventually! awful hospital is an interactive multimedia horror-comedy webcomic about a hospital that is. well this hospital is simply sub-par to say the least.

hedgehog's dilemma by mellodilla

this ones still a little new to say much on but so far it looks like a cute series. what most appeals to me is that the art style looks like something that fit in seamlessly with an early 90s newspaper comic strip. in particular it has a strong calvin and hobbes vibe to me. just, you know, about wacky lil lesbian animals living their lives.

ok now im done for real

*for clarity's sake, im using webcomic here to mean "a series of comics that was first published and predominantly exists online" so even if a print version exists, i still consider it to be first and foremost a webcomic. this also includes comics that contain a multimedia or interactive element. if its a combination of pictures and words to tell a story, its a comic.

also my list is probably going to end up massively favoring serialized fiction because thats just what i like to read, but i dont necessarily think thats a required element.

#ungodly screeching #recommendations #kinda off topic but also kinda not lol #this got way out of hand #oh also if i got anyones pronouns wrong pls let me know! i tried to track everyones down

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desertdollranch · 1 year

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Earlier this month, American Girl re-released a whole lot of long-retired stuff from Kit Kittredge’s collection.

Kit herself never actually went anywhere. There was just nothing to buy for her. Doll, book, and that was it. But it’s the 20′s now, and AG is slowly turning the focus back to the historical characters. They’ve finally acknowledged that Kit is an icon and deserves to have the nice things that we all so desperately want to give her.

I was looking at the new stuff on the Wiki because I was curious to see if there were any changes made to anything. It’s part of the “homework” I do for the purposes of doll blogging. While doing that, I noticed that the page for each product mentions how much each item originally cost, alongside what it costs now.

For example: Kit’s school outfit.

This was first sold for $22 when it was released in 2000, along with the first half of Kit’s debut collection. Now they’re charging $38 for it, an increase of $16 or 72%. I thought that sounded a little excessive, even if 2000 really and truly was more than twenty years ago and inflation has gone wild since the pandemic began three years ago.

So I ran the numbers through the inflation calculator operated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Look at that. It’s basically spot on. $22 in 2000, adjusted for inflation, is equivalent to $38.23 in 2023. I’ve been proven wrong.

I did the same calculation for her birthday dress and her pajamas, and those were both pretty much the same, since they were and still are similar in cost to the school outfit.

Now for her cute little scooter, made from a box of California oranges.

This was a later addition to her collection, coming along in 2006 for the price of $24. In 2023 it is now being sold for $50, a $26 or 108% increase. Let’s see how that tracks when adjusted for inflation.

Ooof. $24 in 2006 should only be $35.70 in today’s money, or $14.30 less than what it’s actually being sold for. So if this one feels a little overpriced, then it probably is, assuming that the materials and quality are the same. Both versions are made of faux wood, which means that the recently skyrocketing price of wood won’t affect this. Maybe there’s another increased cost somewhere that I’m not aware of. Or maybe AG has added a small nostalgia tax, a sort of “buy it from us or pay big bucks to someone selling it secondhand” reminder.

Another accessory that was brought back was Kit’s school lunch.

This set includes her metal lunchbox, an embroidered napkin, a cheese sandwich, an oatmeal raisin cookie, apple slices, and for some reason.... three whole entire raw carrots. (There’s nothing wrong with carrots, but like. When’s the last time you’ve even seen an adult eat three whole carrots for lunch. Carrots are huge.)

Anyway. It was sold for $16 when it was released in 2000, and now they’re selling it for $36, a $20 or 125% increase.

$16 in 2000 would be equivalent to $27.80, so her lunch set is overpriced by $8.20, assuming the cost of materials/labor have risen proportionally.

And finally, Grace the dog. Named for her distinct lack of grace and adorable clumsiness. Sold for $16 when she was released with the second half of Kit’s debut collection. Now selling for $28 which is an increase of $12 or 75%.

A 75% increase is very similar to Kit’s school outfit selling at a $72% increase, so my guess was that this is going to be a more reasonable price hike.

Adjusted for inflation, $16 in 2001 is now equivalent to $27.30, so Grace is in fact underpriced by 70 cents! Personally I think AG charges a bit too much for all of their doll pets, but that’s just me.

All of this was really surprising to me. Inflation happens so quietly in everyday life. It’s only been really noticeable in the last three years, when it seems like everything has shot up in price.

The inflation calculator goes all the way back to 1913. Now if you really want to see what those small changes look like after 90 years, check out how much a $150 doll like Kit herself would have cost in 1932, when her stories began:

You’d only need $6.71 in your pocket to bring Kit home. Imagine that.

#kit kittredge #numbers #data #<---see these tags for more posts like this #I love running the numbers when it comes to doll stuff

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fornshinoyaz · 11 months

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★ — CHAPTERS :

08. surprise visit

❝ YOU ARE MY STARLIGHT ! ★ ☆

before you came into the picture, before kageyama met you, it was yamamoto aoi. he didn't expect for things to go the way they did. not with her. but with you, from the moment he'd met you, he knew you would be the one.

it was his second year. he was stupid. kageyama was a confident setter with a freak quick attack that struck fear into rival schools. he felt untouchable.

he was untouchable.

kageyama moved with purpose through the hallways of inarizaki high school, bracing himself for the upcoming tournament. with each step, he exuded confidence. he already knew success was within his grasp. he just needed to do his own part and trust his teammates would do the same. hinata is beside him, as usual, sounding more like a dog than a human. he couldn't be paid to give a damn about whatever he was talking about.

they turned the corner, and the gym came into view with its door open. their coach was waiting inside for them to begin warmups. the sheer size of the gym felt overwhelming, suffocating even, as kageyama cast his eyes inside.

both of them said they had left the gym to refill their waters. though neither of them would admit, it was actually to de-stress as well. kageyama never got nervous when he played volleyball. to him, volleyball was something nerves never played a part in. this feeling inside him was so raw and new.

hinata can feel the slight shift in him. he glanced up at him and said, "you aren't scared right, kageyama?"

kageyama doesn’t get the chance to respond.

"of course he's scared."

the unexpected girly voice spooked them both. hinata instinctively took cover behind his friend, startled by the suddenness. meanwhile, kageyama’s expression remained indifferent. his eyes roamed across her. inarizaki’s manager? since when? he would’ve remembered her.

she exuded a sense of determination that was different from hinata’s own fire and nature. this was a confidence that bit at kageyama, a confidence that said without a doubt — her team would not fail.

"i'm not scared." kageyama scoffed.

"you should be. you're going to lose." she said with a shrug. he could hardly believe what he was hearing.

hinata and kageyama stood there in shock, taken aback by the confidence that dripped off her every word. without a trace of hesitation, she coldly pushed past them, leaving hinata shivering and kageyama interested.

he knew he shouldn’t. their coach was waiting for them. but it was like he couldn’t stop himself.

"wanna bet on that?" kageyama called out, making her stop on her heels.

himata appeared dazed, his eyes darting back and forth between his setter and the manager of the opposing team. he gnawed at his bottom lip - was this a good idea? kageyama might end up losing his hard-earned money, money he usually spent on buying hinata his beloved ramen. hinata couldn’t survive without it!

a mischievous smirk crossed her face as she thought over the request. she turned and said, “fine. if i win, you take me out to dinner after the game. but if you win, i’ll take you out to dinner instead.”

hinata gasped, realizing that this wasn’t just about scoping out the competition; it was about getting a date! he raised an eyebrow. although he had never seen kageyama actually interact with a woman before, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was an unstoppable flirt like his senior, tooru? maybe he would prove himself to be more than a volleyball junkie?

a blush crept up kageyama’s neck and settled on his cheeks. he rubbed the back of his neck, and hinata can’t miss the slight stutter that escaped his lips, “..i-i..” kageyama jabbed at hinata’s side when he obnoxiously laughs, “i don’t even know your name.”

what a loser. hinata snickered.

"yamamoto. second year. but you can call me aoi." she said with a little grin.

kageyema tried to hide blush and forced out a determined tone, "...well...i accept your bet! but just know, i won't be losing. pork curry with egg on top will be my order."

“and ramen!” hinata added in.

kageyama rolled his eyes. “ramen too.”

aoi grinned. "okay. deal. mine will be yakitori. see you on the court. #9.”

it’s safe to say, kageyama and hinata both came home with massive tummy aches.

• AOI and KAGEYAMA dated as second years, but for unknown reasons broke up during the first part of their third year.

• NONE of kageyama’s friends liked AOI. however because of aoi, kageyama became friends with OSAMU and ATSUMU. OSAMU and AOI were childhood friends, while ATSUMU could never stand her.

• aoi and kageyama were very friendly with each other and hung out frequently after their break up until he started dating YOU in his third year. in osamu’s opinion, they have a trauma bond because of aoi’s manipulative tendencies and kageyama’s inability to say no to her.

• originally, kageyama was suppose to go straight to the league after high school. however, he wanted to stay with you and go to university together.

• when aoi first texted you saying kageyama had cheated, you believed her for a couple of reasons. before, it was rumored that kageyama had cheated on his last ex. you never knew WHO his ex was. when kageyama lies about aoi’s identity, it breaks your trust in him. plus, aoi sends very convincing receipts of kageyama cheating on you with HER and another woman.

• after this happens, you leave waseda university after the semester ends and enroll at tokyo university.

• AOI often posts random things on her twitter, to the point where most of her friends ignore her or like osamu, tell her to put her phone down. she has bad attachment and jealousy issues that fractured and still hurts her relationship with kageyama.

• OSAMU tries his hardest to continue being friends with AOI, but finds it hard after what happened with you and kageyama. he doesn’t blame you for believing AOI so easily. but it creates a riff between you two, as you believe he placed his friendship with kageyama above yours.

• aoi goes to university in the area where kageyama and hinata grew up. she sometimes comes to tokyo, mainly to visit osamu and kageyama. she talks about coming and kageyama’s first mistake was NOT BELIEVING HER.

> ♡ ̷ m. list / next. / previous.

synopsis refresher : he was your sun, the center of your universe. you thought you were the sun of his world too. but tobio kageyama was always too selfish for his own good. with both of you being bitter exes, sparks fly when you become the boys’ manager for your ex’s rival volleyball club. or where bitter exes turn into bitter rivals & kageyama can never seem to stay away from you even if it feels like choking on stardust. a/n: get ready for some angst i apoglozie in advance. this chapter was mainly context and so we can get into the knitty gritty of what happened fr taglist: @thechaosoflonging @joonseuph0ria @marga-j @literally-a-ferret // send an ask to be put on the tag list !

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ofliterarynature · 6 months

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OCTOBER 2023 WRAP UP

[loved liked ok no thanks (reread) book club* DNF]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I am getting to this SO LATE, forgive me if I don't say a lot because I have forgotten so much. Work has eaten all of my time and energy against my will (should I get a new job? Probably). Anyways.

The Hourglass Throne - Will definitely need to reread this before the next book comes out (even thought they're all pretty well self contained for a series!) because WHAT? I have only half an idea what's going on, and no idea how to feel about the ending. Do I grieve? Not grieve? ??????? I think book 2 is still my favorite, but these books are addictive and a joy to read.

The Magicians of Caprona - I think at this point it's fair to say that I don't think DWJ could write a book that is uninteresting to read, but this is definitely my least favorite of at least the Chrestomanci books so far.

Realm of Ash - book 2 of the Books of Ambha series; I didn't like the first book in this series, why did I continue? Hope, that it would build on the things in the first book that I actually liked, and bring the sisters back together. It was better, I guess, but not in any way that really made me like it. I wish I'd followed my impulse and returned it to the library without listening.

A Murderous Relation - another Veronica Speedwell mystery, reliably enjoyable as always :)

Small Miracles - This was a DELIGHT. This was a fun romp (I'm told) in the vein of Good Omens, but with small stakes - and small miracles. The fallen angel of petty temptations is hired by an angelic friend to help the most sinless (and miserable) mortal have a little fun. But there's more to it than meets the eye, and the case gets tangled up the mortal woman's niece, pretending to be a school counselor, difficult family relationships, rants about chocolate, and inconsiderate siblings who rudely keep picking the same human gender as you. It's sweet, comforting, very queernorm, and a little romantic (f/gf)

A Conjuring of Light - I finished my Shades of Magic reread! Thank god. I was so thoroughly not impressed with books 2 & 3 this time around - they're just one book, divided in two, and I don't think it was divided in the right spot. It's so disappointing that these did not age with me, but you will also have to pry my copies away from me because they're one of the few books I've ever gotten signed in person (and the original covers are just cool). I fully intend to submit myself to the new spinoff series because hope never really dies lol.

The Twyford Code - This was such a strange and delightful book, that I'm not even sure I'm mad about the twist at the ending, I had such a good time reading it. (past me, listening: wow, this would have made such a cool fiction podcast, right? Joke's on me haha). I did honestly think I'd forgotten what this book was about for a bit, but then I was going through some old kid's books from my grandma that were *exactly* like the series in this book, and I had a big AHAH moment that delighted me.

Over My Dead Body - this was my first/nonfiction attempt at jamming in some spooky-ish books before the end of October. Overall, good. I did learn some new facts and there were some interesting parts; but I didn't always appreciate some of the author's commentary, and when it say's "America's Cemeteries," it really only means its urban cemeteries, which was a bit disappointing.

All Systems Red/Artificial Condition - Murderbot, my Beloved. rereading for the new book, and I'm trying my hardest to NOT do it on audiobook this time - and it's really worth it to read it in text, I promise, even if Kevin R Free's voice still echoes in my mind.

The Saint of Bright Doors - this was such a strange and wonderful read, I am so delighted to have read this, I love an unapologetically weird book. The vibe definitely reminds me a bit of The City & The City, or in some ways The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy; except I had other problems with those books and didn't finish them, but I did like this one. I know this won't be everyone's cup of tea, but maybe give it a shot.

Creatures of Will and Temper - another spooky book, and ooh boy could I go on an entire rant, I didn't want to finish this one but felt I had to for reasons. I'll let you look up the plot yourselves, but picture this: Victorian London, two sisters (one who likes swords!), and a whole lot of queer characters I wasn't expecting. I was delighted! Except you gradually learn every single queer character is involved with this club that has made a pact with a demon. What exactly does that mean? Who knows, because the book does not tell you until at least 3/4 of the way through, and we only have the word of the jacket copy and our sainted demon slayer, who is sketchy af the moment we get him alone. Turns out it's a chill demon who doesn't want blood sacrifice, cool cool, but maybe it should have been thought through a little more? Also the main/only successful romance in the book is between a 17 year old girl and a woman who is at minimum in her 30's, explicitly encouraged in part by the demon. hmm. Overall the writing and rest of the story was just ok, and the ending was disgustingly saccharine and just bad. Would strongly not recommend, but if someone wants my copy you're welcome to it. 2 stars.

From Below - another spooky book, and somehow still the most successful even though I didn't like it much. I almost DNF'd this in the first half, and while I wouldn't say I wish i had, I think my time could have been better spent. But really - if you are diving at an untouched ship wreck, that went missing with hundreds of unaccounted passengers and crew, in an area of the ocean entirely inhospitable to life, shouldn't one of the things you expect to find be human bodies??????? I got so worked up, lol, but once the spooky stuff started I had a better time.

The Game of Courts - new Nine World's novella! I love that Victoria takes the time to explore the various characters in her books outside of the main narrative. Getting to learn more about Conju ourside the current story was much appreciated, even if getting to see an outsider POV of earlier Kip was maybe the main draw. Probably not my favorite of the Lays novellas, but worth reading - and maybe a good starting place for those who are new to the series? Now if only I could get myself to read Derring-Do...

All the White Spaces - bookclub pick that got rescheduled to Nov (more time to reread Murderbot tho, so yay me). The description of this - trans guy on an antarctic exploration that goes wrong - sounded interesting, but it was kind of meh for me in the end. For one I was expecting more horror, but the description of "polar gothic" I've seen since really fits better. I also wasn't a fan of the supernatural explanation, and the whole thing felt hopeless from the beginning, once we got a grasp on the *actual* details of the situation, so I didn't quite know what we were here for. Not my cup of tea.

Hold Fast Through the Fire - NeoG book two!!!! This series is turning out to be very akin to the Tarot sequence in that they not perfect books or 5 stars by any means, but are so fun and addictive to read. This series is space opera, post-post-apocalypse where Earth has two colonies, and the series is about a team in the space!coast guard. Getting into the specific plot of this book isn't actually important, but there's a good 50/50 split on plot vs talking about our emotions!!! I love it, it definitely shows some improvement over book 1, even though I don't know that the author has got the POV's quite balanced out. Jenks is lucky I love her because her drama sure does keep taking over (and I cried so hard for her in this one you guys). Would recommend. Did I mention that almost everyone is queer?

Conrad’s Fate - a good book, but this is also the point where I really started questioning the recommended Chrestomanci reading order. I think chronologically it's book 2? And I'd already forgotten so much from The Lives of Christopher Chant, I do not understand and wish I'd read them chronologically. Much more fun than the Magicians of Caprona.

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp - I was SO excited when I saw there was a new Leonie Swann being published in english, even if it wasn't the sequel to Three Bags Full (which I read last year and loved). I was even MORE excited when the book opened and was being narrated by the pet tortoise!!! Alas, it was not to last, I did not get another murder novel narrated by an animal. That being said, still pretty good, it reminded me of the Thursday Murder Club (which I liked less), but probably won't be a favorite.

DNF'S - Graveminder and The Devil and Winnie Flynn were both books I own that I tried to fit in for spooky month that did not work out. Winnie Flynn I admit I dropped almost immediately, the vibes were peak bad YA and I wasn't going to torture myself. Graveminder I tried, because I liked the idea, and it wasn't bad per-se, but something about the way it was executed (and the many many POV's) just wasn't working for me. Might fit someone else better though.

Raw Dog I really wanted to like, because the history of hot dogs and a description/ranking of hot dogs are both extremely up my alley - and I did make it 40% in! But there were just a number of factors building up against this - the author's sometimes very (overly?) sharp commentary, my lack of interest in her dysfunctional life, the lack of any comparative rating system for the hot dogs, the food waste, and the sheer number of bodily excretions used as descriptors for the food finally tipped me over the edge. I could have kept listening but I didn't really want to. Perhaps for someone, but not for me.

#book log #wrap up 2023 #2023 #books #booklr #bookblr #neog #hold fast through the fire #chrestomanci #small miracles #olivia atwater #the twyford code #murderbot #victoria goddard #over my dead body #tarot sequence #the sunset years of agnes sharp #the saint of bright doors #creatures of will and temper

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iheartgracie · 1 year

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redarthur quotes

“Arthur was standing just behind Oliver and Reyna, now shooting a closed-mouth smile as he caught Red’s eye.”

“Arthur had sat with her the whole time, calmly directing her, as though he could tell when she was zoning in and out, or when she was panicking about the size of the RV and how small everything looked from up here.”

“Red liked his glasses, standing out against his tan skin and curly dark brown hair. She wondered whether she needed glasses; faraway things seem to have gotten farther and fuzzier lately. Another thing to add to the to-worry list, because she couldn’t do anything about it. Yet. Arthur caught her looking, smiling as he ran a finger over the light stubble on his chin.”

“What’s up?” she said. “Deathly allergic to cheese puffs?”

“No, thankfully,” Arthur said, feeling his way as he sat down on the sofa bed.”

“Red turned back to Arthur. “Well, good thing you’re not spending a whole week in this cramped RV. Oh…wait.” Red smiled at him.

“I know, right.”

“Red guessed Arthur didn’t much like his friends at his own school, because he’d been coming to all their parties and hangouts since senior year began. And that was okay, because she liked having him around. He always asked how she was and how was her day, even though Red usually answered with lies or exaggerated stories with only faint traces of the truth. He showed interest when Red wasn’t interesting at all. And there was that time he dropped her home after that New Year’s Eve party and let her sit in his car, warming up in the dry air of the heater before she had to go inside the cold house and find whatever mess her dad had left for her. Arthur didn’t know that was happening, he thought they were just talking, talking the night away at two in the morning outside her house. A small kindness he never knew he’d given her. She should give him one back.”

“Well, if you did it, why haven’t you checked it off?” Arthur said, pointing to the small empty box on the see-through flesh of her hand. “Here.” He stood up, grabbing one of Maddy’s pens from the table that she’d used in an earlier game of Hangman. He uncapped it and leaned toward Red, pressing the felt-tip end against her skin. Gently, he drew two lines: a check mark in the little box. “There you go,” he said, standing back to admire his handiwork.

Red looked at her hand. And it felt stupid to admit it to herself, but the sight of that little check mark did change something in her. Small, minuscule, a tiny firework bursting in her head, but it felt good. It always felt good, checking off those boxes. She held out her hand proudly for Maddy to examine and got the nod of approval she was looking for. Arthur was still watching her, a look in his eyes, a different one that Red couldn’t decipher.”

“Red wasn’t any help, was she? Standing here looking at the moon.

“It’s big tonight,” Arthur said, following her eyes to the sky.”

“Must say, exploding the tire with your mind was a slightly drastic measure.”

Arthur clicked his tongue. “Desperate times,” he said.

“What do you think it could have been, really?”

He shrugged. “Probably a sharp rock or glass, like Oliver said.” And was Red imagining it, or did his voice sometimes soften for her? No, he was just nice to everybody.”

“At least it’s only raw tomatoes,” Red said, “so you can still eat pizza.”

“What is she talking about?” Oliver said, almost there with the final nut.

“Oh, my allergy.” Arthur smiled, somehow staying with her. That was rare. Red lost most people at least a few times a day, sometimes a few times per conversation. “I know, not sure life would be worth it without pizza. I’d just have to have a perma-rash.”

“Hey, grow a beard and no one would know,” she said. It would probably look good on him too.”

“Need to get yourself an outside job, then,” she said. “Dog-walker?”

Arthur shook the expression out of his face, recovering as he turned to her.

“Farmer?” he countered.

“Nature conservationist?” she said.

“Ooh, nice.”

Red had another one: “Axe-murderer?” she said.

“I hear that’s taken.”

“And Arthur was crouched here, next to her.

“I tried to get you,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Last chances to smile, to laugh, to tell Arthur she liked him and it was okay that he didn’t like her back because she was unlikable at times, she knew that”

“Red watched the dark shape of Arthur struggle with his, fiddling with the front of his jeans. Close enough to reach out and touch. To hold hands, even, if they didn’t need both hands for this plan.”

“So,” he said, nodding his head back the way she’d just come. “Using a mirror to reflect one of us to bait a shot,” he summarized, again, better than Red ever could. “That’s smart,” he added.

“The Lavoys are very smart,” Red said.

“Want to know a secret?” Arthur said, his voice dipping into whispers, eyes flashing from behind his glasses. “I think you’re smarter.”

“I think you’re lying,” Arthur retorted, knocking away at it.

She looked up at him, that same drunk-warm feeling behind her eyes. Why was he so kind to her? And why did that make her want to be un-kinder back? Because she didn’t deserve it, that was why. She was just Red. Just Red and Just Arthur, and they should probably just stay that way, because she didn’t know how to be somebody’s someone.

“That’s okay,” Arthur said, like he could read the thoughts racing behind her eyes. But he couldn’t, he didn’t know what lived back there, in her head. “Your secret is safe with me. It always is.”

“I don’t have secrets.” She hid behind a smile again. Oh, stop it, grinning like an idiot.

“International spy?” Arthur asked.

“I wish.”

“Your real name is Agatha?”

“Only if yours is Edgar.”

“Secret frog-racing champion?”

“You got me,” she said.

“Nice.”

“She stepped down, the shirts bundled in her arms. They smelled clean, and yet somehow they still smelled like him. The same as the hoodie he’d let her borrow after New Year’s Eve when he dropped her home. She’d slept in it that night, under her coat, and in the morning it only smelled like her. Arthur had never asked for it back. Maybe he was used to losing things too.”

“Red reached, stretching out her fingers, each one too aware of itself and of what she was making them do. She rested her hand on Arthur’s head just for a moment, near the back of his neck. Mom used to do that to her when she was upset, and Red didn’t even realize until right now that she missed it. She shouldn’t think of her, why did she keep thinking of her tonight?

Arthur glanced up, her hand sliding off. He caught it in one of his waiting hands, squeezed, his fingers warm against the cool of her knuckles.”

“Red?” Arthur’s voice interrupted the thought; he was standing behind her. She straightened up and turned.

His eyes were drawn and sad behind his glasses, lashes long and downcast.

He didn’t say anything, just raised his eyes to meet hers and then raised one hand.

There, on the back of his hand, written in that same black felt-tip pen against his tan skin, were the words: YOU OK?

Beside them were two options. YES with a square checkbox drawn next to it, riding up one knuckle. And below that, NO, with an empty box.

Arthur gave her the pen, pressing it into her hand, fingers warm against hers as they lingered there. Something passed between their eyes. Red held up the pen, uncapped it. She was always fine, when people asked. Of course she was fine, thanks, yes, she and Dad were doing just great, thank you. Fine, okay, fine. An elaborate lie squeezed into those two tiny words, the greatest gifts to a liar like her. No one asked for more detail if you were fine. But Arthur, he was really asking, she could tell. And so Red really answered.”

“Something touched her floating hand, in the darkness of the backs of her eyelids, the yellow glow of the overhead lights fighting through. Skin, fingers, intertwining through hers. Red opened her eyes, blinking in the new light, and there was Arthur. ”

“Arms around her waist again, locking on.

“I’ve got you, Red,” Arthur said in her ear, hoisting her to her feet, dragging her back up the steps, her body pressed against his.”

“Arthur drew Red’s head back, brushing the wayward hair out of her eyes, and the dirt and the grit.

“You’re okay.” His words against the back of her head, warm and spreading. One hand against her forehead. “You’re okay.”

“You okay?” Arthur asked her.

“You don’t care,” she replied.

He looked hurt by that, a flicker by his mouth.”

“Red staggered sideways, one leg buckling beneath her. Someone caught her.

Arthur.

His hands under her elbows, keeping her on her feet. He looked her in the eyes, blinking slowly, twin tears chasing down his face.

“Red,” he said, low, soft, almost too soft to cut through the air in this RV. “Look at me.”

She was looking at him.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

“What?” Red sniffed.

“It’s not your fault your mom died.”

“Arthur stroked his hand down the back of her hair, to the ends of her ponytail.”

“I’m sorry for every hurt I caused you. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to protect you. I’m sorry I never got to tell you. I’m sorry I never kissed you.”

#redarthur #redarthur quotes #redarthurquotes #hollyjackson #holly jackson #five survive red #five survive #five survive quotes #five survive book #book quotes

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johnslittlespoon · 2 months

Note

It just makes so much sense that you were writing in 2013, you have the unhinged vibe that the golden fics from that era had.

I'm just here to compliment you really lol, mostly because I am giving a try to write a lil something for the first time and god I can only dream of ever being able to write as good as you. I've been writing poems and music for years now but i find writing actual coherent storys with characters and dialogue so so hard.

I was wondering if you have any tips, or like little rules you follow when you write.

all the love, xxx

🌷

I'M GONNA CRYYYY this was the sweetest thing in the world to wake up to wtf wtf <333 thank you SO much, i really appreciate this wahh my heart :'))) but also you are SILLY. don't compare yourself to others!! if we all did that constantly we'd never get anything written!! there are SO many authors i adore on here that will always have me chasing the "i wish i could write like that" feeling and it's a great motivator but alsooo at the end of the day. you gotta fall in love with your own words and characters and stories <33

and i feel that so much!! we are twinsss, i also started out writing poems and music and then realized i had stories i wanted to tell that wouldn't fit in shorter form, then discovered fanfic in middle school in the early '10s and it was all downhill from there LOL. truly such a golden era tho oh my god. growing up reading the hat fic and borderline illegible wattpad stories was certainly... formative!

yapping ahead vv (i don't have much advice bc i'm still just learning as i go but hopefully some stuff i picked up on can be a bit helpful!)

i have zero method to the madness when writing so it's a relief to know it doesn't come off that way LOL but i do have a few little things that i follow and i always look for them when beta–ing as well! they're pretty small technical things and they're generally up to personal preference, but some of them come from authors i admire and i think they can really take anyone's writing up a notch <3

i don't feel qualified to give advice because i'm just raw–dogging everything lmao i've never taken classes or anything, so take all this yapping with a grain of salt bc it's just what's worked for me!

– i try to use descriptors like "the man" or "the blond" or "his friend" etc sparingly. i wish i could remember the source, but i read a great piece about why it's better to just go with the character's name 99% of the time, and then i went through so many of my works to edit them and i felt so much more confident in my writing afterwards– it made a big difference in readability (imo).

ofc there are exceptions, like if the name of a character is unknown, or if there are too many names being thrown around in one sentence and a "the man" or "the soldier" etc just sits nicer. i definitely still use them occasionally! but it does sometimes put some distance between the reader and the story when those descriptors are used too often instead of names, so it's a good thing to keep an eye out for when it comes to flow. sometimes less or more or whateva ??

– sorta on the topic of less is more, i love challenging myself to show vs tell when i can! whether it's by keeping dialogue short and letting actions speak instead (can add to intimacy/realism– we communicate so much through body language yk), through metaphors (literally how my whole '#john egan is dog coded' fic was born LOL), or describing feelings rather than spelling them out (his heart ached vs he was sad, his pulse raced vs he was scared, you get the gist). you said you've been writing poems so i feel like stuff like that would already probably come easily to you tho! <3

– this guide on ao3 is great for smut writers! whether someone's a beginner or just looking for ways to elevate the filth, i found it really helpful, it's a fun read as well lol. it calls out stereotypes/cliches and teaches you how to reword them, gives lists of slang and reactionary words, do's and don't's, etc. i don't follow everything in it but that's the beauty of writing; we all have things that work for us and things that don't and that's so okay. :-)

– in the same way that artists use references to practice and find their style, you can do that with writing too! i know a lot of writers have a doc or note where they jot down stylistic things they find while reading that they'd like to emanate, or words they want to use, specific phrases, descriptors, etc. if i'm reading a fic and find an auditory descriptor i like, i might take note of it, stuff like that. sorta like a text document version of a pinterest board!

– thesaurus.com is my best friend truly. often going with the 'simplest' version of a word makes for smoothest reading so someone isn't taken out of the story being like wtf does that word mean lol but sometimes things can feel repetitive, or like there just needs to be a little bit more spice; i probs go back and forth btwn my doc and thesaurus a dozen times an hour tbh.

that's all i can think of rn and ik those are pretty basic so i'm sorry about that!! i really do just kinda write what evokes emotions in myself, and then i hit post and hope it translates over to whoever is reading too :') drawing from your own experiences if you can/really sitting with what the characters would be feeling in whatever scenario you're writing is probably the most powerful way to present what you see in your mind.

i have a hard time writing about emotions/things i haven't personally experienced, so i usually stray away from it out of fear of not getting across what i want to, but some people are great at winging it and putting themselves in unfamiliar shoes so!! it's again just personal preference really.

and alsooo be kind to yourself! i'm an anxious wreck every time i post any of my writing, i am very much not confident when posting new fics and i agonize over my docs so much and trash a lot of works, but i know at the end of the day i can't grow or learn if i don't get the words down, and i can't get feedback or gain confidence if i don't post. becoming your own hype man and giving yourself the opportunity to improve is essential <33

sooo much love and best of luck!!! lmk if you end up writing smth, i'd love to read it (◠‿◠✿)

#also tentatively offering beta services to mota/sb moots bc i love helping w fics <33 hmu #if i am not super busy i am SAT #this got so long WHOOPS so sorry anon #johnslittlespoon asks #johnslittlespoon yaps

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hazardworld · 1 year

Text

Monster Town AU. Vibes.

------

He was being obvious, right?

It’s not like Steve ever needed to hide it in a hidden away town full of monsters.

It was well-known the Harringtons were a family from old old money, so why else would they live somewhere so random in the middle of the midwest?

And while yeah, Steve knew that was could be a more nuanced thing to realize, he thought he’d made it glaringly obvious during his whole reign as "King Steve." How else did anyone think he got so many girls, or convince the Hawkins High halls he was top dog, or pull Nancy Wheeler to even notice him in the first place?

His teeth and nails were pretty obvious of inhumanity, if anything else failed!

All this to say, Dustin was staring at him wide-eyed, slack jawed, ears alert, and his bushy, curly tail, usually happily wagging now slack, when all Steve had done was grab a snack from the freezer and bitten into it.

"Steve…?" Steve swallowed his cold bite.

"Yeah, Dust? …everything good?" He raised his eyebrows expectingly, but nothing changed about Dustin’s expression.

"Why—you—Steve, you just bit into the head of a raw fish. A raw live fish." Steve blinked and looked back down at the fish. Wasn’t alive anymore, was it? He shrugged and looked back at the rising sophomore in front of him.

"Yeah, so?" Dustin sputtered, hands moving wildly in front of him.

"So? SO? Steve, Steve, you bit the head off a live raw fish and all you say is so?!" Steve took another bite of the fish as he watched Dustin’s flabbergasted expression grow into disgust, savoring the fresh, vibrant taste and the crunch of the bones under his teeth.

"Dude, don’t hate on my eating habits!" He said, food in his mouth, and swallowed, "You eat raw meat man, it’s literally the same thing." He finished off the tail with a satisfying crunch and moved to wash his hands as he waited for Dustin’s response.

"Steve, that’s…different! You know it is!" Steve snorted and turned, trying his hands on his mother’s dish towel.

"How the fuck is that different, Henderson?" Dustin rolled his eyes.

"I eat raw meat because I’m a werewolf! It’s in my nature! Last time I checked though, humans don’t eat raw live fish, man!" Steve recoiled. Human? Human? Dustin, his pseudo little brother of three years, who he coached on form shifting, taught how to shave, tried to teach to be confident in himself (though that eventually fell to Eddie), thought he was human??

“What the fuck? Dustin? You can’t seriously be that dumb man!” Dustin blinked, stepping back slowly, looking him up and down, studying him.

“I thought…you haven’t been human all this time and you didn’t tell me??? STEVE!” Dustin launched into him, squeezing him tight with what could only be attributed as a combination of love and werewolf induced strength. It was a little suffocating, but breathing through his mouth gave Steve enough air to get by. He ruffled Dustin’s hair and laughed.

“It’s not like I was hiding it!” Dustin leaned back, releasing his grip but still touching Steve (he had to admit made it a little easier to breathe). He gave Steve a puzzled look, as if what Steve had said was false, but it hadn’t been!

“Yeah, you kinda were, Steve. I don’t even know what you are, man.” Steve frowned.

“Wasn’t King Steve glaringly obvious? Like why else do you think I pulled babes in high school, and the minute I have respect for other people I don’t?” Dustin blinked, thinking, and shook his head.

“I dunno. Stupid high school politics? Upside Down residue smell?” Steve groaned.

“Dude, you’re the little shit genius kid, and you’re being super dumb right now.” He paused and Dustin shook his head again, lost, “fine, fine. Just…go grab me a towel, and meet me poolside.” Dustin frowned, but left anyway over to the public linen closet, where all the personally monogrammed Harrington towels laid.

Steve himself made his way outside, and yanked off his shirt, gills fluttering open in the outdoor, clean air. It then dawned on Steve that the last time they’d been this exposed to the outside, they’d taken in ashes and shitty gunk from the Upside Down.

He dove into the water, and felt his gills and ears and hands expanded like they usually did in the shower to their full form. His gums throbbed as his second and third set of fangs extended, happy to exist in their natural places again.

Steve concentrated: it had been awhile since his last full shift. He usually let his form run where it felt most comfortable, and luckily, it agreed with his parents’ sentiments of human forms always being better.

He breathed into the sore sensation of his legs stretching and shifting, accompanied by the incessant itching across his cheekbones, upper arms, and chest. Soon, Steve felt the (relieving? He felt really calm, like almost too calm) heavy swish of his long, muscular, scaled tail, and opened his eyes. The sight of it made him giddy: he’d been swimming with two legs for so long he’d forgotten what it was like to see it attached to him.

Its color was gorgeous, a bright medium blue, with flecks of purple, navy, and yellow scales scattered here and there for extra depth, and each scale reflected the sunlight that fell into the pool like a tiny disco ball: bright and holographic. The scales trailed up the center of his chest and his arms, and along his cheekbones to his ears, where his hair had once been, and where the itching sensation from before had subsided.

He looked up above him, to the ripples of the surface, to see Dustin peering over the edge, gaping again, and Steve ginned, rising his head above the surface. Dustin backed up with him, tail wagging wildly, as Steve hung his hands (or, claws now, really) and head over the pool’s edge.

"Dude—dude, you’re a merman!" Steve laughed.

"Siren, actually. Mermaids—that’s gender neutral, like witches, by the way—are way more eye-pleasing, and have to stay near coastlines." Dustin tilted his head in what Steve liked to call his 'puppy confusion' face.

"Eye-pleasing?"

"Less gruesome looking. More pleasing to a human’s eye. Obviously, we all grew up in Hawkins, and with all the Upside Down shit, your opinions of eye-pleasing are pretty skewed, but like, they don’t have claws, or as many fangs, shorter tails, stuff like that." Dustin nodded, understanding.

"I read somewhere mermaids are from freshwater and sirens are from saltwater, is that true?" Steve shook his head.

"No man, absolutely not. As long as the body of water is big and deep enough, you can find either. Mermaids are usually closer to shorelines, whereas sirens prefer deeper, colder waters," Dustin nodded, as if he was taking it all down in a little notebook in his head, which was a look he made often. He moved closer to the edge now, sitting criss-crossed in front of Steve with his face in his hands.

"So...how often to you have to shift like this? Cause you know about me and stuff, I wanna know about you." Steve smiled at this. Obviously, Dustin felt some sort of embarrassment asking him, otherwise he wouldn’t have said the last part so sheepishly.

"Well, as long as I shower often enough, I’m good. I kinda just let my form rest where it wants. My parents always said human forms were the best forms, so I guess it sorta settled there." He shrugged as Dustin’s face turned into something absolutely horrified. What? Was something behind him? He checked, and nothing bad was there. Had something bad happened? Could he smell something Steve couldn’t?

"Steve, that’s not ok!" He blinked. What? Did he do something bad?

"What’s not ok?" He swished his tail a bit to ensure he hadn’t caught it on something, but it was free, so that couldn’t be it.

"Steve, Steve—" Dustin leaned across and grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. "That’s not fucking healthy, man!"

"I’m still very confused, Henderson."

"You’re completely binding your form without any breaks! That’s not healthy!" Steve frowned. No, no he wasn’t! His parents said that’s what he had to do, let his form go human, it was natural, as it should be…

Oh, he was binding his form, wasn’t he?

"Oh, shit." He stared at the edge of the pool, eyes wide, as Dustin reacted above him.

"You’re just now realizing this? Jesus, Steve!" He tutted angrily before grasping Steve’s jaw and forcing him to look Dustin straight in the eyes. "We’re going inside, and I’m calling Robin. We’re getting you a proper everyday siren form." Before Steve could protest, Dustin was up and storming back inside, leaving Steve to get out and go after him.

Part 1/Part 2/Part 3

#siren steve harrington #werewolf dustin henderson #they're brothers your honor #eventual steddie #steve's a bit of a dumb here but it's ok so am i #we don't like steve's shitty parents

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