#she basically went everywhere with me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pucksandpower · 2 months

Text

Of Roomates and Revenge

Lewis Hamilton x fake girlfriend!Reader

Featuring Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc, Pierre Gasly, Esteban Ocon, and Nico Rosberg

Summary: in which your search for a free place to stay leads to helping one half of Brocedes live out his petty fantasy for revenge … and falling in love while doing so

Cat and Apartment Sitter Needed (Monaco)

Compensation: €1500/week plus all the Red Bull you can drink

I’m a world-traveling young professional who is rarely home. My two beautiful and rambunctious bengal cats need someone to stay with them in my Monaco apartment whenever I’m away for work.

The ideal candidate will be an experienced cat person who is prepared to deal with a lot of energy, chaos, and shenanigans from these two little terrors. They knock everything off every surface, wrestle at 3am, and will likely attempt to smother you while you sleep. If you can handle that, we’ll get along just fine.

In addition to caring for the cats, you will need to keep my place relatively tidy (i.e. no crushed Red Bull cans or fast food wrappers everywhere), collect any packages or mail that arrives, and randomly turn a few lights on and off every evening so the neighbors don’t get suspicious.

The position is ideal for a mature student, digital nomad, or someone between living situations who wants an amazing place to stay for free in one of the world’s hotspots.

Drop me a line if you think you can handle the cats from hell and wouldn't mind living in a 230 m² penthouse apartment with a private terrace, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a badass view of the Mediterranean. Preference goes to non-smokers who follow directions well and won’t throw ragers when I’m gone.

Send a brief intro, your experience with cats, and a couple photos attached. Urgently need someone for various stretches starting mid-February.

Do NOT contact me with unsolicited services or offers.

Live-in Cactus Caretaker Needed (Monaco)

Compensation: €1000/week, free snacks, and you can play my Xbox

I’m a young dude who’s rarely home because of my job that involves a lot of international travel. I have a single cactus plant that I promised my mum I would keep alive until she visits again. The thing is ... I have absolutely no idea how to care for plants. Like, I nearly killed it the first week by forgetting it existed.

What I need is someone responsible who can essentially live in my swanky Monaco apartment whenever I’m gone and keep my tiny cactus friend alive.

Duties would include:

Watering the cactus like ... once a month? Twice a month? I don’t know how often it needs water

Not letting the cactus die in any other way (pretty sure they need sunlight too … I think)

Keeping the place tidy (I’m a bit of a mess)

In return, you’d get:

A sick apartment all to yourself with a stunning view, giant TV, and full kitchen (please for the love of god be careful in there ... I almost burned the place down trying to make a grilled cheese once. Seriously, I'm not exaggerating. I almost went up in flames over a silly sandwich. If you can't even operate a microwave, we may have problems. There’s only room for one idiot like that in Monaco — and it’s me)

Unlimited snacks/drinks from my well-stocked pantry

Free rein over my gaming setup (just don’t break anything)

First dibs on any events/reservations I can’t make

The ideal person is responsible, shows they can follow basic instructions for cactus care, laidback since you’ll be alone a lot, and trustworthy enough not to wreck the place or throw illegal parties. Having a green thumb would be great, but frankly if you can manage not to kill the one plant, that’s good enough for me.

Send a brief bio about yourself and your qualifications as a cactus/housesitter if interested! I’m gone quite frequently starting in February so could use someone ASAP.

No scammy offers or soliciting, please!

Roommate Needed to Drink Wine and Listen to My Woes (Monaco)

Compensation: Free rent in a nice apartment, plus all the wine you can drink

Are you a good listener? Do you enjoy dry red wines and occasional bouts of tears and venting? If so, I’ve got the perfect living situation for you!

I’m a youngish guy with a high-stress job that involves a lot of traveling. When I’m home in Monaco, I tend to unwind by polishing off a couple bottles of nice Bordeaux or Burgundy while complaining about work, my colleagues, and my rival who is giving me really mixed signals.

What I need is a roommate who doesn’t mind a little drunken blubbering here and there.

You’ll get:

Your own bedroom in my spacious 2BR/2BA apartment in the La Condamine district

Rights to my kitchen, living room with large TV, piano, and music recording equipment

Access to the building’s pool, sauna, fitness center, and lounge areas

As much wine as you can drink (and more)

In exchange, you’ll be expected to:

Listen to my periodic rants and rave sessions without judgement

Preferably nod along or offer supportive-sounding feedback like “Yeah, that’s really tough man” or “Wow, they sound terrible”

Refill wine glasses as needed

Maybe rub my back or pat my head if I’m really going through it

The ideal candidate is a decent human being who can empathize with the high-pressure struggles of a young professional trying to make it in a cut-throat career.

You’ll need a decent amount of free time and lots of patience. Prior experience as a life coach, therapist, or sympathetic drinking buddy is a plus.

If you can handle crying guys after a few too many glasses of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, inquire within! Include a little about yourself and why you would make a good non-judgmental wine friend. Merci!

Expand Your Search? Similar Opportunities:

Impartial Referee Wanted for Parking Lot Brawls (France)

Compensation: €400 per event

Two athletic young men in their late-20s are looking for a level-headed third party to oversee and officiate their semi-regular parking lot boxing matches. Yes, you read that right — we’re talking straight-up fisticuffs in the back alley behind the Circuit Paul Ricard.

A little background: We’ve been frenemies/rivals since we were kids — constantly competing in friends, employment opportunities, you name it. There’s a healthy amount of hatred between us that simply can't be resolved through words alone. Every few months, we feel the need to just take out our pent-up aggression on each other's faces.

Up until now, it’s been an unregulated shitshow with no real rules or oversight. We’re looking for someone impartial who can:

Set some fair ground rules around where/how we can strike

Ensure no prop weapons get involved (last time he tried to scalp me with a wrench)

Officiate and declare a winner once one of us is knocked out or quits

Ideally have some basic first-aid skills in case of a nasty cut or broken nose

We will pay €400 cash at the start of each bout. You’ll get a free show of two extremely fit dudes wailing on each other until there’s a clear victor.

Loser exits with his tail between his legs, winner gets to gloat for the next couple months until we run it back.

If you can be a neutral third party and aren’t squeamish about a little blood, send us your info with some details about yourself and your experience resolving conflicts (legally or not). First come first served — our next fight is tentatively scheduled for mid-May!

No flakes or perverts, please. Serious connoisseurs of violence only.

P.S. Don’t be scared to give out penalties (one of us is used to that)

Actor or Actress Needed to Annoy Ungrateful Ex-Friend (Monaco)

Compensation: €2700 per week, free luxury accommodations

I’m a successful guy in my late 30s looking to hire someone to pretend to be my significant other for a few months. Before you get the wrong idea, let me explain ...

I had a major falling out with a former best friend who stabbed me in the back years ago. We live in the same apartment building, just one floor apart.

I’m trying to show him how amazing my life still is without him … and maybe make him jealous in the process.

That’s where you come in. I need you to move into my penthouse temporarily and act as my gorgeous new boyfriend/girlfriend.

Your main duties would include:

Loudly introducing yourself to said ex-friend by knocking on his door and being line “Hi, is [insert my name] here?” Then pretend to be embarrassed and apologize when he tells you that you’re at the wrong apartment

Hang out in the hallway near his place and have very loud fake conversations detailing our imaginary passionate nights together (rated R)

Post cringy coupley photos on your social media of us dressed up going out, cuddling on my yacht, etc

Ideally you’re an aspiring actor/actress or just a really convincing liar. Being somewhat loud and dramatic is a plus. You’ll need to be willing to play along if my petty ex-friend tries to confront us.

In return, you’ll be living in a lavish penthouse with all the amenities for free. You’ll have your own private suite and can hang out on the oversized balcony, by the pool, or in the media room when you’re off the clock. Might also be able to introduce you to some high-profile people if you’re trying to network.

Oh, and my bulldog will provide plenty of cuddles.

If you can pull off a remarkably realistic fake partner act and aren’t afraid of a little light deception, hit me up! Please include a couple photos plus a bit about yourself and your acting experience. Aiming to start mid-April.

I’m an equal opportunity employer — girlfriend, boyfriend, nonbinary partner, you name it. All genders welcome to apply for the role if you’ve got what it takes! Only preference is that you have especially luscious hair … for reasons.

No weirdos please.

Hi,

Okay, I have to admit — your ridiculous request to hire a fake girlfriend to make your ex-best friend jealous is quite possibly the pettiest thing I’ve ever heard. And I absolutely love it.

I’m literally the perfect person for this role. Petty vengeance is my middle name (well, not really, it's actually Y/M/N ... but you get the idea).

A little about my qualifications:

Took some theatre electives in university so I can really sell the dramatics

Lots of experience putting on an Oscar-worthy performance faking ... well, you know ... thanks to my douchebag ex-boyfriend who couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pleasure a woman 🙄

Not afraid to get LOUD and will happily reenact our “passionate nights” at earsplitting volumes in that hallway

Can pull off playing dumb if your friend tries to interrogate me about you (“Oh [whatever your name is]? Yeah he’s just the best at ... stuff”)

No shame in my pettiness game — I once spent my weekly paycheck on a Cameo just so an ex’s favorite celebrity would call him a dingleberry

In terms of looks, I’ve been told I have just the right amount of “hot” to make your poor pal jealous without it being too unbelievable. I’m attaching a few photos for reference.

Let me know if you want to meet up for a glass of wine and we can workshop some juicy storylines for our imaginary romance. Perhaps I was a former fling you rediscovered? A hot younger thing giving you a new lease on life? The possibilities are endless!

I’m a pro at faking it, so selling our relationship will be a piece of cake. Your ex-friend will be bright green with envy by the time I’m through!

Let’s make him regret the day he double-crossed you, babe.

Cheers,

Y/N

r/offmychest

u/NotBritneySpears · 16h

My ex-best friend’s new girlfriend is the WORST!

I really need to get this off my chest. My upstairs neighbor’s new girlfriend is, without a doubt, the most insufferable human being on the planet. She’s loud, obnoxious, and seems to take immense pleasure in tormenting me for some reason.

A little background: I used to be really close friends with my neighbor. We had a big falling out a while back over ... well, it’s a long story. We don’t talk anymore and there’s a lot of resentment between us. Clearly the universe is trying to get back at me now with this new girl.

This chick has made it her personal mission to give me a play-by-play account of every single intimate encounter she has with him. And I mean DETAILED accounts. The other day I was just trying to enjoy my morning coffee and I hear her incredibly shrill voice from right outside my door:

“Oh he was an ANIMAL last night! The things he did with his tongue, I thought I was going to pass out!”

Like, seriously? Keep it to yourself, weirdo! That’s just the tame stuff too. Sometimes she’ll go into pretty graphic detail describing body parts and positions that I really didn’t need a mental picture of.

Here’s the thing — she quite obviously positions herself to be as close as possible to my apartment without actually trespassing — I mean, she doesn’t even live on my floor for god’s sake! So every word comes through crystal clear. I’ve confronted her about it a few times and she just plays dumb, like:

“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry if I was being loud! We just get so carried away sometimes, you know how it is,” with this stupid ditzy valley girl voice and hair toss.

I don’t know if my former best friend put her up to this or if she’s just a massive troll in her own right. But it’s like psychological warfare at this point. Literally ANY time I’m home, I have to listen to her yap about their Sex Olympian-level escapades.

My wife even heard them once and thought I was playing porn at an insane volume! She doesn’t believe me that it’s just this deranged lady running her mouth constantly.

I’m half-tempted to start recording her rants and blast them back at full volume to give them a taste of their own medicine. Or maybe start describing lurid details of my own (admittedly not quite so colorful) sex life in retaliation.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being oversensitive. But living under these two insufferable assholes is a waking nightmare. I need to move or something because this is massively affecting my peace of mind. Who knows if they will ever get bored of tormenting me and move on.

Rant over. Thanks for letting me vent about the neighbors from hell.

u/chronicgossiper · 12h

Damn, that sucks man. Your neighbor and his gf sound like immature assholes trying to get a rise out of you. I’d look into noise complaint options or even see if you can get them evicted for harassment.

Reply to u/chronicgossiper · 11h

Seriously? You really think the landlord would evict someone over this? It’s not like they’re blasting music at 3am. Sounds more like passive aggressive pettiness than anything illegal.

u/chronicgossiper · 10h

Idk, having to listen to people loudly describe their sex acts against your will seems like it could qualify as harassment or creating a hostile environment. Worth exploring at least if they won’t stop.

u/NotBritneySpears · 9h

Eviction isn’t really an option here since we all own our apartments and there’s no landlord dictating that. It’s not that type of building.

u/nosyandproud · 8h

Did your former friend move into that building first or did you move in knowing he lived there?

u/NotBritneySpears · 7h

He was there first, I bought my place a few years after him when I could afford it. Never expected he'd pull something this childish.

Reply to u/NotBritneySpears · 6h

So you willingly moved into the same building as your ex-best friend that you aren’t on speaking terms with? That’s just asking for drama, dude.

u/NotBritneySpears · 5h

It’s a great building in an amazing location. I wasn’t going to not pursue the opportunity just because he lives there too. It’s a big place, I didn’t think we’d be running into each other much.

Reply to u/NotBritneySpears · 4h

Still seems like a weird decision to willingly insert yourself into his orbit like that if the relationship was so fractured. Probably should’ve seen some fallout coming.

u/nosyandproud · 3h

Yeah exactly, why would you move somwhere your ex-friend lives if you two clash that much? Kinda put yourself in this situation.

u/NotBritneySpears · 2h

Okay, let me be clear — he and I were best friends for over a decade before we had a colossal falling out a few years ago. We’re not just some casual ex-buddies who don’t get along. We were legitimately very close for most of our lives until things went nuclear between us. When I decided to move into the building, our friendship had been over for a while already. I really didn’t anticipate he’d take things to this vindictive level years later. I’m not going to miss out on my dream home just because of what happened between us.

Reply to u/NotBritneySpears · 1h

This is getting juicyyy, do tell about what caused the falling out!

u/NotBritneySpears

Not really trying to dredge up old drama, that’s a whole other can of worms. The girlfriend situation is annoying enough as is.

Reply to u/NotBritneySpears · 51m

Fair enough, you gave context. Still think you two need to have an adult conversation about boundaries. Purposely trying to loudly narrate their sex life at you is unhinged.

r/relationships

u/yourusername · 19h

I’m catching real feelings for the guy who hired me to be his fake girlfriend to get revenge on his ex-friend ... help?

Buckle up folks, because I’ve got one hell of a tangled situation to unpack here. This is going to be a long one.

About a month ago, I responded to this Facebook Marketplace ad from a guy (let’s call him L) looking to hire someone to pretend to be his new girlfriend. The goal was to make his former best friend/downstairs neighbor jealous after a brutal falling out between them.

I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous. But the benefits were good and I’d be living in his insane luxury penthouse in Monaco rent-free. More importantly, I really vibed with L’s pettiness and desire to get deliciously pathetic revenge on his ex-friend. My last boyfriend was the actual worst, so I was absolutely here for any slightly insane Karen antics.

Anyway, we hit it off immediately at the “audition” over drinks. L is brilliant, successful, gorgeous, and fucking hilarious in a sarcastic, unfiltered way. We both have a wicked mean streak and frankly get off on emotionally messy situations. It was like looking into a mirror — two beautiful trainwrecks finding each other in the wreckage.

From night one, we had crazy chemistry. The back-and-forth banter was electric, we finished each other’s sentences, etc. I felt so comfortable around him despite the bizarre circumstances. I assumed it was all fun and games to toy with his former best friend.

But over the last few weeks of loudly chronicling our “sex marathons”!outside said ex-friend’s door and doing phony coupley things around the city, I’ve realized my feelings are ... complicated. L and I CONNECT on a deeper level, in addition to just being partners in crime. We’ll be tangled up watching movies and he’ll make some perfectly timed quippy comment that has me cackling until my abs hurt. Or we’ll get deliriously wasted and end up baring our souls about our upbringings, dreams, fears — everything.

I’ve never been so open or comfortable around someone before. Our walls are gone. And the most messed up part? Some small, perverse part of me loves the strange intimacy we’ve manufactured through this farce. How much closer can you get than meticulously co-creating a fictional relationship?

In the beginning, I think we were both just in it for the laughs and pettiness factor. But something shifted for me recently. One night we were drunkenly rehearsing how I was going to describe our latest imaginary tryst to his ex-friend and ... I don’t know, I couldn’t stop staring at his lips while he was talking. His face was so close to mine and I felt breathless. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to ditch the script and really kiss him. I had to physically stop myself from lunging forward.

Later, when I went back to my room, I was hit with a crushing wave of realization — I have actual romantic FEELINGS for this basketcase who hired me to play-act as his girlfriend! What the actual fuck?

Guys, I’m in too deep. How did I let this happen? L is technically still my employer and this whole operation has an expiration date. His former friend is already growing visibly annoyed, so Phase 2 (feign a dramatic breakup, I move out, L moves on with his life) is likely coming up very soon.

Do I just bury my feelings and end this gig without saying anything? Do I risk the humiliation of confessing my heart to someone who was only pretending to want me around? Or should I just go for it and make out with him next time we’re tangled on the couch? I’m spiraling here!

The pettiness that brought us together may also tear us apart. Or maybe I’m just a sad clown who read too much into a fake relationship. Someone slap me with a reality check, please! I need perspective from the outside.

Tl;DR - Developed legit romantic feelings for the guy who hired me to be his fake girlfriend as part of his weird revenge plot. Not sure if I should come clean, keep it professional, or start actually making out with him for real. This was NOT part of the deal!

u/judgingloudly · 18h

Oh honey, you are in a MESS. This is like a bad romcom plot but IRL. I think your only real option is to fess up and tell L how you’re feeling. Contrary to popular belief, the fake dating trope doesn’t always have to stay pretend!

If he doesn’t feel the same way, at least you put it all out there and can move on with some dignity intact. But who knows — from how you describe the crazy chemistry and connection, he might feel relieved you said something first! Don’t let this fire burn out without taking your shot. Oh and definitely keep us updated, I’m invested now!

Reply to u/judgingloudly · 17h

I agree with this take. You already acknowledged you’re in too deep emotionally. Might as well put those cards on the table and let the chips fall where they may. Shooting your shot is always better than letting the “what if” eat away at you forever!

u/livefordrama · 16h

I’m sorry but I simply must ask — how did you land a gig like this? And does he happen to have any more openings for a fake girlfriend? Asking for a friend …

u/yourusername · 15h

Honestly it was a random Facebook ad looking for exactly this — a girl to move in and fake date this guy to drive his feuding neighbor up the wall. I applied semi-joking but he picked me!

As for openings, not that I know of ... yet. I may have to quit soon depending how this all plays out, so will keep you posted if my spot opens up!

Reply to u/yourusername · 14h

Omg please do! I would 100% take on a role like this, it sounds like a total riot.

u/unpaidtherapist · 13h

Girl, I think you already know what you have to do here. Is keeping things professional and never admitting your feelings really an option at this point? You’re clearly enamored with this guy and he seems to reciprocate the intensity at least platonically so far. I say GO FOR IT!

Just pull him aside one day, say “hey this isn’t just an act for me anymore, I really like you and need to know if there’s a possibility for us or not.” If he’s as caught off guard and freaked out as you’re implying, a direct conversation is needed to get those cards on the table. Don’t die wondering “what if?” That’s my advice.

u/everydayopportunist · 12h

This is so wild, I’m living for this drama! Seriously might need to pursue some similar gigs myself, apparently that’s where all the romance happens these days 😂

u/devilsadvocate · 11h

I’m sorry but I have to go against the grain here — please do NOT make a move or confess any feelings! This guy hired you for a very specific job under very specific pretenses. Catching real feels was not part of the deal at all. Selfishly throwing that at him out of the blue would be so unfair after he opened his home to you. I worry he could feel betrayed and violated even if he did secretly like you back.

My advice? Give it a few weeks, see if these feelings persist or if it was just a passing crush brought on by the intimacy you’ve found yourselves in. If it’s still intense after cooling off, then maybe consider looping him in. But don’t go nuclear until you're absolutely sure. You could risk imploding a good work situation and friendship over a temporary infatuation. Tread very lightly!

Reply to u/devilsadvocate · 10h

I’m with this take, OP shouldn’t jeopardize her living situation if her feelings might be fleeting. Taking a step back and giving it more time could provide clarity. It’s easy to get caught up in the fantasy.

The more prudent move is to wait until the “job” wraps up before considering opening that can of worms. If feelings persist minus the contrived closeness, she’ll know it's real. But springing it on the guy now seems wildly unfair and could blow up in her face.

r/AmITheAsshole

u/veganGOAT · 15h

AITA for turning down my fake girlfriend after she admitted feelings, only to want her back days later?

I think I may have tremendously fucked up in a spectacularly messy way. Let me walk you through the tangled web I’ve woven ...

A couple months ago, I (39M) hired this woman to essentially move into my apartment and pretend to be my new girlfriend. I know it sounds batshit crazy … but I was trying to make my ex-best friend/neighbor jealous after a bitter falling out between us.

She was the perfect partner for this ruse — sarcastic and spunky, with a hint of unhinged energy. We bonded instantly over bottles of wine and throwing deliciously overblown “loud sex” performances in the hallway to drive my ex-friend nuts. What was meant to be a transaction quickly bloomed into a legitimately fun, effortless friendship.

Soon after, we started having real sex. It sort of just … happened, albeit very awkwardly at first. Like “well this is weird, want to try it for real just to see?” And what do you know, we had insane chemistry between the sheets too! We were soon sleeping together nearly every night, always swearing afterwards that it was “just for fun” and didn’t mean anything more.

But I started catching feelings. She was hilarious, confident, beautiful — everything I could ever want in a partner. We had connected on a deeper level through the medium of batshit pettiness. And our physical intimacy only amplified that bond.

Cut to a couple weeks ago. We had just finished a particularly athletic round and were cuddled up, spent. Out of nowhere, she pipes up nervously: “Hey … I think I’m really falling for you. I don't want this to just be sex or games anymore. I want to really try being together.”

I froze. The words I had been longing to hear suddenly terrified me in that moment. My throat clenched up as a wave of panic crashed over me (yes, I’m well aware of how stupid this was in hindsight). After an agonizing pause, I managed to choke out: “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. This thing between us was only ever supposed to be fake. I don’t think of you that way.”

I could actually see her face crumble. She quickly mumbled “okay” and slid out of my bed, wrapping a sheet around herself to cover her dejection. I swear I heard muffled sobs through the wall once she was back in her guest room. I felt like a piece of shit.

The next few days were some of the most awkward, brutal tension I’ve ever experienced. She was now acting like a scorned woman just doing her job, no intimacy whatsoever. We could barely make eye contact.

It took seeing her so closed off, so cold, for me to realize how much I desperately missed her warmth, humor, friendship. How much I longed for the easy intimacy we once had, both emotional and physical. I tried a few times to apologize or explain myself, but she brushed me off — utterly walled off to protect herself.

After days of wrestling with my suppressed feelings, I realized that I was in love with this wonderful woman. Hiring her as a fake girlfriend was one of the best things I had ever done because it brought her into my life … and now I didn’t want to let her go. She was becoming my person, even if she had started out as a farce.

But here’s where I really need some impartial perspective — AITA for freezing up and rejecting her confession?

I didn’t meant to tank her feelings so callously. I think I just ... panicked in that moment. The idea of committing to a real relationship terrified me in ways I didn’t expect. My career keeps me constantly on the go, always jet-setting to the next thing. Could I really give a romance the time and energy it deserves right now?

Part of me also felt massively conflicted about the circumstances. I’m literally paying her to pretend to be my girlfriend as a sort of ongoing petty revenge. If I admitted I wanted to actually date her, wouldn't that blur consent lines in some messed up way? Like, is she just going along with it because she’s on the payroll?

I know these both sound like flimsy excuses, but they were very real fears racing through my mind in that moment. Fears that made me impulsively reject her, despite how utterly gone I was.

Now, days later, those same hangups don’t seem so insurmountable. Maybe she and I could make something work, travel schedules and all. And if she reciprocated feelings, it would be a starting point — not her just placating me for a check. We could rip up the old arrangement and start fresh.

But I haven’t confessed any of this to her yet out of gut-wrenching cowardice. She’s still giving me this cold, professional shoulder. I don’t know how to begin recanting my idiotic reaction and opening up about the REAL reasons I panicked — the commitment fears, the moral dilemma, all of it.

Part of me wonders if I even have the right to try and pursue things with her at this point? I absolutely shattered her feelings for my own hangups just days ago. AITA for potentially stringing her along further by trying to retroactively take it all back? Maybe I’ve missed my window and should just let this phase of my life be over before it gets even more painful and messy?

Ugh, I’m rambling now. The crux is — AITA for how I recklessly rejected her in that moment? Do I even have a right to try and make amends after that thunderous fumble? Or should I just take the L, chalk it up to collateral damage of being in the world’s most messy pseudo-relationship, and move on?

u/juryofone · 14h

YTA, but only because you handled the initial rejection in the worst way possible. Your reasons for hesitating are somewhat understandable. But you really dropped the ball in communicating that to her in the moment.

Instead of calmly explaining where your headspace was at, you just blurted out a kneejerk rejection that crushed her feelings. No wonder she went ice cold — that had to sting like hell! If you had taken a breath and talked it through with more nuance, maybe you could’ve reached an understanding.

The good news is, you’ve now realized how much you DO want this woman in your life as more than a pretend romance. I don’t think you’re an AH for having those feelings or wanting to pursue her again, provided you make a sincere, thoughtful effort to apologize for your tactless approach before.

My advice? Explain the real reasons you froze up, how torn you felt over everything, and make it clear you still have feelings. But lead with a heartfelt apology for how horribly you botched it at first. If she’s willing to give you one more chance after that, DO NOT blow it.

Reply to u/juryofone · 13h

I agree with this take. He’s not an AH for the situation, but majorly the AH for the WAY he handled rejecting her. That had to sting badly after putting herself out there. The mature thing is to own up to that and properly communicate where his head was at.

Reply to u/juryofone · 12h

Yeah, going straight for “I can’t do that, I don’t think of you that way” after she bared her soul was so harsh and unnecessary. He could have let her down wayyyy more gently if he was that conflicted about it all. She must’ve felt like a fool!

u/neutralpartier · 11h

NAH — I get that you panicked in the heat of the moment and why this whole situation is heavy with ethical quandaries. The reality is, you two started off pretending but real feelings developed, and that’s okay! It happens. The moral issue only remains if you knowingly took advantage of or manipulated her feelings while she was on your payroll. Since you seem just as confused as she was, I don’t think any lines were really crossed.

The way forward is to rip off the bandaid once and for all. If you have mutual feelings now, figure out if you want to date as equals. If not, it’s time to part ways amicably while you both still can. But don’t keep paying her while catching feels — THAT would make you an AH.

u/glasshalfempty · 10h

ESH ... look, you suck for how you handled rejecting her confession. That was really hurtful and avoidant no matter your internal struggles. She sucks for going into this thinking it was all pretend, catching real feelings, and expecting you to want to be serious too. You PAID her to be your fake GF and made that clear.

My suggestion is to have an honest discussion about whether you can BOTH separate the transactions from reality. If you’re both all-in on trying for real, great! But one of you is going to get burned if expectations don’t align. And please, for the love of god, stop paying her!

Reply to u/glasshalfempty · 9h

This is exactly what I was thinking too! Way too messy ethically to keep paying her as the lines blur between fantasy job and real romance. Either take the plunge and date properly or go separate ways for good.

Reply to u/glasshalfempty · 8h

Agree but like ... is this even real? How does someone end up hiring a fake girlfriend to make their former best friend jealous? That alone sounds like a bad romcom plot.

u/criticaloverthinker · 7h

I’m calling cap on this whole wild story. Childhood besties turned feuding enemies living in the same building? A fake girlfriend who moves in as part of an elaborate revenge plan? It’s all too unbelievable.

u/struggling-with-reddit · 6h

I’ll play along and rate, but no way is this post legit lol. Having a fake girlfriend you eventually catch feelings for while pranking your neighbor? What’s next, one of you is actually royalty or a secret millionaire? Too much happening here.

Reply to u/struggling-with-reddit · 5h

Hahaha I know right, the excessive details and backstory gave it away as creative writing practice or something. No judgment from me, it was an entertaining read at least!

u/struggling-with-reddit · 4h

Next thing you know, OP will be claiming he’s Michael Schumacher or something 😂

r/AmITheAsshole

u/veganGOAT · 8h

UPDATE — I’m the idiot who rejected then realized I loved my fake girlfriend … and she took me back!

When I made my initial post a bit over a month ago about this whole fake girlfriend situation, most of you understandably called it outrageously far-fetched.

Which, fair. How does someone actually end up hiring a woman to fake date them just to make their neighbor jealous? It does sound ripped straight from a Nicholas Sparks fever dream.

Well put on your straight jackets, because this ridiculous saga is 100% real. And I’ve got an update that’s even crazier than the original tale ...

After reading the feedback on my initial post (and getting a whole lot of shit from some friends too), it became crystal clear that I had to make things right. I put her through the emotional wringer by callously rejecting her in the moment, when her feelings were just as tangled up as mine were. I owed her a sincere apology and a proper explanation of why I froze — with no more deflections or excuses.

So I wrote her a long letter. I laid it all out there. How torn I felt about the ethical and emotional complexities of our arrangement. How her vulnerability awoke my own fears about commitment, my transient lifestyle, and whether I could realistically be the partner she deserved. Mostly, I repeatedly owned up to being a thoughtless prick who shattered her trust out of pure pathetic self-preservation.

But above all, I made one thing clear — despite my bumbling, I had fallen for her too. Completely and utterly. She had cracked through my defenses and healing her hurt became the only thing that mattered.

I ended the letter by owning up to the fact that she now held all the power. While she had moved into this arrangement under certain pretenses, I had violated that implied contract. The ball was entirely in her court now. I would abide by whatever decision she landed on — friendship, an amicable parting of ways, or taking the terrifying gamble of trying to make this the real deal.

When she emerged from her room the next morning, I could barely look at her. I was a sweaty, nauseated wreck, steeling myself for the worst. She sat down next to me in silence and unleashed the longest, most blistering dressing down of my life. How I had made her feel so small, so foolish, so painfully vulnerable. Words like “coward” and “asshole” were thrown around. But you know what phrase stung most?

“I wish you had told me all of this up front instead of dealing with it like a child. I could’ve understood where you were coming from.”

It was a dagger — she was absolutely right. My dumb automatic rejection utterly betrayed the openness and intimacy we had built. Still, she didn’t dismiss me entirely. She would need some time to think, but asked that I stand by for an answer.

The limbo period was … not fun.

After four excruciating days, she came to me again. This time, she was almost shy, like her old self. She told me she had thought it over extensively, and ultimately my explanation and full-hearted apology won her over. I may be an idiot, an asshole, and a bit of a mess (her words), but I was an honest idiot with a good heart under all the bravado. And that’s what had drawn her to me in the first place.

So with the understanding that we would both need to work on our communication skills and respective hang-ups, she was in. We would press the reset button altogether, end our old arrangement, and try to make this relationship happen for real — messy origins be damned.

That was exactly a month ago today, and things have never been better. Sure, we still lean into some harmless (and vaguely unhinged) pettiness with my former friend from time to time. Some habits are too fun to quit cold turkey. But ultimately, I’ve never been so grateful for the insane set of circumstances that brought this amazing woman into my life. We may have started as an acting exercise, but we took a leap together into something beautifully real.

And yeah, I still have to hear shit from literally everyone about how our romance origin story is the most unbelievable meet-cute of all time. But I’ve learned to lean into the absurdity. After all, what’s life without a little chaos and a perfect partner to share in the pandemonium?

Thanks to everyone who offered candid advice on my original post. You may have received an update sooner if not for all the people accusing me of faking it! All I can say is … this is my blissfully ridiculous reality now.

u/juryofone · 7h

Well hot damn, I have to hand it to you — this saga is even wilder than the original post let on! I went from being totally skeptical of the whole outrageous situation to being fully invested in this insane romance. Love that she put you through the wringer a bit before taking you back. You absolutely deserved that and more after treating her like you did.

But huge props to you for manning up with that apology and giving her the power to make the next move. That vulnerability and respect for her feelings despite your own doubts is what true partnership is all about. I have a feeling you two chaotic bastards are going to be just fine as a real couple now that all the crazy pretenses have been stripped away. Wishing you both nothing but more pandemonium and pettiness together!

u/neutralpartier · 7h

I’m officially obsessed with this love story. You went from hiring a woman off to punk your neighbor, to breaking her heart over catching feelings, to doing the MOST to grovel your way back into her good graces, to ACTUALLY SUCCEEDING. It’s romcom gold! I need this to get optioned for a movie immediately.

u/glasshalffull · 6h

As wild as this story has been from start to finish, this update has me straight up emotional! The groveling, the way you explained your fears, her roasting you for days before mercifully taking you back … my heart. Love that she cut straight through the bullshit by calling you an idiot AND acknowledging your good heart. That’s the ideal balance.

I’m so invested in this nonsense and need regular updates on how things progress from here. You better not blow it after all this chaos or I’ll be leading the charge to vandalize your apartment!

u/romanticempath · 5h

What a journey! To go from manufacturing a fake relationship purely for petty vengeance, to developing REAL emotional stakes, to breaking each other's hearts quite viscerally, to finding your way back together through sheer vulnerability? Incredible stuff.

I laughed, cried (a little, don’t judge), and cringed throughout this entire saga. Thank you for bringing us all along for the insane roller coaster. I wish nothing but ridiculous happiness for you and her moving forward!

u/fairytaledreamer · 4h

I’m sorry but I still can’t get over the fact that this is somehow a real series of events? You’re a madman and this is truly unhinged (but also incredible). How did ALL of this unfold before your 40s?

Romcoms have been put to bed. Welcome to 2024, where people actually hire fake GFs to get revenge on their scorned former friends, develop legit attachment issues, torpedo everything in a panic, grovel for redemption fit for cinematic history, and somehow STILL end up together in some sort of demented happily ever after!

All I can say is cherish the chaos you've manifested. I can’t wait to see what bonkers plotlines await the two you. Start recording everything for the biopic!

Reply to u/fairytaledreamer · 3h

“Cherish the chaos” is absolutely the perfect sign off for this update. I’m deceased at this whole wild drama, but also soooo invested! Cannot wait for the inevitable Netflix mini series. Thanks for the laughs, drama, and emotional whiplash!

r/offmychest

u/NotBritneySpears · 21h

My ex-bestie’s wedding to his obnoxious girlfriend was a nightmare … and so was their wedding night (unfortunately)

You’ll have to bear with me on this one, because I’m still reeling a bit from one of the most cringey, uncomfortable, and downright baffling weekends of my entire life. I need to get this off my chest before I have a full mental breakdown.

A couple years ago, I made a post venting about my former best friend’s new girlfriend at the time. For those who missed the saga, she was an insufferably loud woman who seemed to take immense pleasure in loudly narrating her sex life with my former friend right outside my apartment door. It was psychological warfare, plain and simple.

Well, I’m sure you can all see where this is going based on the title. Against all odds and reason, this woman and my ex-friend somehow stuck it out … until he put a ring on it last year. Which leads me to the first in a cascading series of mind-numbing events — receiving a wedding invitation from the happy couple!

Now, let’s be clear — I have not spoken to my former best friend in almost a decade at this point. Not since our cataclysmic falling out (a story for another day). We were thick as thieves until our bond was shattered beyond repair. For him to invite me to his wedding with the woman who crudely mocked their intimacy for my benefit was … certainly a choice.

On one hand, why on EARTH would you invite the person whose heart you deliberately stomped on so many years ago? It felt like a cruel joke, rubbing salt in an open wound that never fully healed. A reminder of their domestic bliss and my bitter ostracism.

Yet on the other hand, maybe there was a subconscious part of me that would have felt insulted if he didn’t invite me after so many shared years? As if he had utterly erased me from his life without a second thought? The thought gut punched me too in an admittedly unhealthy way.

Long story short, I RSVP’d yes … half out of morbid curiosity and half out of a deeply unwell desire to not get excluded from such a significant life event. In hindsight, a foolish decision that kicked off a horrifically uncomfortable series of events.

The wedding itself was … a lot. An over-the-top spectacle at an insanely expensive venue. My miserable self stuck out like a sore thumb surrounded by all the adoring couple’s friends and family. I sat through mushy vows reaffirming their “unlikely origin” in the “most unexpected yet fortuitous way” … while trying not to puke.

So yeah, sheer cringe start to finish. Little did I know the worst discomfort was yet to come!

In perhaps the most on-brand grand gesture of the entire weekend, the groom rented out an entire boutique hotel for all out-of-town guests to stay at after the reception. That way we could all keep the party going nearby before he whisked his new bride off to parts unknown on their honeymoon the next day.

Ever the gracious host with a penchant for the spectacle, he let wedding guests draw for their room assignments out of an actual top hat. I somehow managed to get seated right next to his parents who, while cordial enough, knew me as the ex-best friend responsible for so much fractured history.

But wait, there’s more! Wouldn’t you know, the universe is supremely messed up because I ended up with the room directly underneath the newlywed suite. Yes … I spent their wedding night listening to a live-streamed porn broadcast courtesy of the paper-thin walls and floors.

Dolphin sounds didn’t even BEGIN to cover the unholy noises raining down from above around 2am. I’m talking full-on screams of unbridled passion echoing off the walls at maximum volume. Mind you, this woman had become infamous for over-enunciating their coitus for my benefit previously. Now it was a frighteningly real-life rendition that no noise-cancelling headphones could drown out.

I finally had to flee my room to the lobby. I ended up crashing on one of the lobby couches until an employee politely asked me to leave around 6am. Disheveled, disoriented, and officially diagnosed with PTSD from the sounds I cannot unhear.

So yeah … not exactly a therapeutic reunion that could have allowed my ex-friend and I to bury the hatchet. If anything, this wedding was one massive “screw you” that opened up all the same unresolved wounds. I need about 20 years of intensive therapy to move on.

I also need to find a new place to live because I can’t bear returning to that cursed apartment building.

u/chronicgossiper · 18h

Dude, I think you need to get some serious perspective here. Your ex-friend getting married and going on a honeymoon has absolutely zero to do with you. That level of self-centeredness is off the charts.

Why in the world would this guy plan an entire wedding — one of the biggest days of his life — around secretly tormenting you again over ancient history? That makes no sense. He invited you as a polite gesture after years apart, probably hoping to start burying the hatchet. The room assignments were random by your own admission.

As for the … “noises” … look, they were on their wedding night. Maybe overenthusiastic, but 100% to be expected between newlyweds. It’s not some psychological ploy, just poor planning on their part for thin walls. You’re projecting like crazy if you think that was directed at you specifically.

At a certain point, you have to realize the universe doesn’t actually revolve around your grudges or history with this person. They’ve clearly moved on to live their best life. It’s on you to stop obsessing over them and do the same.

Reply to u/chronicgossiper · 16h

I agree, this is just pure paranoia from OP. No newly wedded couple is sitting around thinking “how can we sneakily stick it to your ex-best friend during our wedding festivities?” That’s deranged thinking.

They invited you to be polite, you drew an unlucky room assignment near their suite, and then biology happened on their wedding night. Hilarious and awkward coincidence? Yes. Intricately designed fuck you from the bride and groom? Come on now, that’s giving them way too much credit.

u/NotBritneySpears · 13h

Maybe you all have a point, and I am still holding onto way too much resentment and baggage from our falling out. My intention wasn’t to imply they orchestrated an elaborate sting operation around their wedding. More just a general sense that the universe has a funny way of reminding me about them at highly inconvenient times over the years.

Reply to u/NotBritneySpears · 12h

Even that line of thinking is incredibly self-centered though. Why would random coincidences or them just … living their lives be the “universe’s way of reminding you” about your failed friendship? That makes it sound like they should perpetually be walking on eggshells and avoiding certain life events just because you can’t get over the past.

Look, it sucks that things fell apart so badly between you two. But they have clearly moved on, as you should too. This obsessive framing of their marriage as some universal affront to you is … not healthy, my dude.

u/nosyandproud · 10h

The wedding itself sounds like it was in poor taste for sure, so I can certainly understand feeling aggravated and triggered being there as the scorned former friend.

That said … you’re borrowing A LOT of trouble by assuming any of their private wedding night activities were purposely being broadcast to you specifically. Projection level 1000 there.

At the end of the day, these people have built a whole entire life and future together now that quite literally has nothing to do with you anymore. You looking for “signs” that they’re still fixated on you is just self-involvement. For your own mental health, you have to let go of whatever happened and see them as background characters in the story of your life now.

u/realitychecker · 7h

OP, you need to take a step back and realize that the sheer logistics involved in purposely torturing you at their wedding are just not plausible. Do you really think they were like:

“Alright honey, for our wedding night I was thinking we should make sure your former friend gets the room directly below ours! That way when we really get after it, he’ll be able to hear every excruciating moan and body smacking sound in haunting detail! That’ll show him for being your friend a decade ago! Mwahaha!”

Come on, mate. That’s delusional cartoon villain level scheming you’re attributing to them. Occam's Razor — they just wanted to consummate their marriage in privacy and didn’t account for the thin hotel walls. The world doesn’t actually revolve around your history with this!

Reply to u/realitychecker · 5h

Lmaooo the idea of them sitting around strategizing the most psychological warfare possible on their wedding night is killing me. “Yes honey, we simply MUST reenact scenes from our noisiest adult films for your ex-best friend’s terrible pleasure!”

u/buildingbridges

OP, it seems like you really miss having your friend in your life if I’m reading between the lines here. Getting invested to this level over random coincidences at his wedding doesn’t come from a place of hatred, but hurt and longing for that bond again.

My advice? Use this weekend as a wake-up call to stop obsessing, reflect on whatever caused your rift, and decide if you want to properly reconnect. If not, you need to rip that band-aid off for good and stop torturing yourself over what will never be again. Or the walls between you two will just get thinner and thinner ...

r/ask

u/amateurdetective · 15h

I think these juicy Reddit posts actually interconnect … but I need your help cracking the code

I think I’ve stumbled onto something wild here and I need the Reddit hive mind to help me piece this tangled web together. Are you ready for some batshit conspiracy-level connecting of barely-there dots? Too bad, I’m going in anyway.

So, over the past few years, I kept seeing these extremely juicy, dramatically-written posts pop up every few months that seemed … oddly interconnected despite being in different subreddits.

Hear me out:

First there was the unhinged post in r/offmychest from a guy ranting about his former best friend’s obnoxious new girlfriend. Dude was griping about how this woman would loudly recount the smutty details of her sex life with the ex-friend whenever she was in his general vicinity, seemingly just to mess with the OP. We’re talking legitimately disturbing stuff about feeling “psychologically tortured” by her oversharing.

Fast forward a few months and I stumble across a wild post in r/relationships from the perspective of this same “obnoxious” girlfriend! Except her story painted a whole different, unhinged picture — she was hired on FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE by the former friend to literally move in and fake date him as part of an ongoing revenge plot against the OP from the first post. She rapidly develops legitimate feelings for the guy and it becomes a messy will-they-won’t-they romcom situation.

But THEN there was a follow-up post from the fake boyfriend’s side in r/AmITheAsshole about him realizing he caught feelings too before nearly blowing it, followed by another saga-capping update about them deciding to pursue a real relationship against all odds and absurdity.

Are you seeing the parallels here? These three posters each gave one side of an absolute dumpster fire of a convoluted love triangle situation that seemingly intersected. And based on the intricate backstories, my crackpot theory is they all emanated from the same formerly tight friend group that experienced a bitter falling out.

The insane attention to detail, literary flair, and geometry of it all almost had me utterly convinced these were all fictionalized creative writing exercises posted separately across Reddit … but building on the same unhinged storylines each step of the way.

I’m utterly obsessed with mapping this all out into one cohesive narrative now. My working theory is something like this:

Some guy hired an actress to pose as his fake GF and torment his former friend as revenge for some past betrayal

The two fake partners rapidly caught real feelings amid the ruse, he panics and nearly torpedoes it

Meanwhile, the ex-best friend is losing his mind overhearing the fake girlfriend’s loud performances and comes to Reddit for advice, not realizing it’s all a ploy

After a saga of miscommunication, the fake boyfriend comes clean and the couple decide to actually date for real

Capping things off, the former friend is forced to attend their wedding where he’s subjected to one final night of unholy noises

Does it all track? Or have I completely unraveled the conspiracy and stumbled onto a drastically personal set of circumstances being workshopped on Reddit? If so, that’s some ludicrously elaborate storytelling!

I need to know if I’m onto something here or completely off my rocker. If the former, I’ll burn every last calorie mapping out a master record of events across all the posts. If the latter … someone needs to drop their juicy fanfic writing prompts because these were WILDLY entertaining reads.

Help me connect these dots or point me towards any other potentially linked tales! This has been a public service aneurysm brought to you by pure boredom.

u/scepeticbynature · 14h

Wow, you’ve gone full Sherlock Holmes with this. I’m dying at how insanely detailed your working theory is in tying together these random Reddit posts into one cohesive narrative. This is either a brilliant piece of performance art … or you need your meds adjusted, my friend.

Reply to u/scepticbynature · 12h

Hahaha exactly! The amount of time and brain power OP has devoted to mapping this out is beyond obsessive. I don’t know whether to applaud the commitment to the bit or get them professional help.

u/amateurdetective · 10h

I’m sorry, did you actually read through the posts in question? The intersecting pieces of random, elaborate backstory between all three distinct voices is way too specific and layered for it to be an accidental alignment. There are unambiguous throughlines about:

A pair of feuding former childhood best friends

One hiring a woman off Facebook to pose as his fake GF and torment the other as revenge

Said fake relationship descending into a very real emotional entanglement for both parties

The eventual fallout of the ex-friend having to bear witnessing the real couple’s wedding and chaos that followed

Like that’s such a bizarrely specific plot keeping consistent across three different users’ lenses! So you’re either pointing out the artistry of someone doing an incredibly elaborate creative writing exercise across multiple subs … or these people are just leading unbelievably unhinged lives. And part of me hopes it’s the latter? It’s too batshit crazy not to be true!

Reply to u/amateurdetective · 9h

Or, and hear me out … it’s all an internal dialogue you’re having with your numerous Reddit personalities to work out your own unresolved relationship issues. We’re all just incredibly intricate fragments of your aching psyche!

u/opinionatedtruther · 7h

Lmao you are both nuts, but I have to side with OP on this one. The chances of these being all interconnected fabricated stories is way too perfect to be an accident. All the tiny threads and recurring backstories/character details woven between wildly different subreddit posts? That’s not a coincidence.

I could buy it maybe being some extended Reddit fanfic experiment between a couple of redditors seeing who can craft more engaging characters and drama while world-building off each other’s plot threads. Like a weird form of collabing through the confined lens of Reddit posts. It would be pretty genius if so.

But for it to be entirely real with all the coinciding details scattered across entirely unrelated posts like that? I’m sorry, but there’s just no way. That’s beyond the scope of believability for me. OP may be bungling the conspiracy, but they’re onto something for sure!

u/amateurdetective · 6h

THANK YOU, someone gets it! And to answer your other theory … while I can’t 100% rule out some sort of viral Reddit fanfic experiment, I struggle to believe even the most creative writers would be capable of improvising THAT intricately interconnected of a storyline stream-of-consciousness style like that.

Like each voice and perspective they inhabit remains remarkably consistent across such wildly different contexts (relationship drama, life events, ethical debates, and updates). It would take incredible skill to stay in the headspaces of these distinct individuals and keep their personalities/plot orbits from tangling into an incomprehensible mess. While possible, it seems incredibly unlikely.

That’s what has me believing there’s a remarkable kernel of stranger-than-fiction truth at the heart of this whole saga being teased out piece-by-piece. Or again … I’ve finally been gaslit into being a tin foil hatter of beautiful Reddit fantasies. Either way I’m here for it!

Reply to u/amateurdetective · 3h

All I have to say is please touch some grass and post to r/creativewriting instead 🙄

1K notes · View notes

majorblinks · 6 months

Text

DOWNRIGHT ICONIC (aespa karina)

(smut, male reader, screenwriter you, stranger karina, public sex, rough sex [choking/slapping/biting/spanking/hair-pulling etc], oral, anal, facefucking, titfucking, facial, bondage, degradation, name-calling, other weird stuff, 26k words, it's been 1 million years..., BUT WE'RE SO BACK BABY <3)

Hey, turns out the critics really are onto something:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this.

You aren’t surprised when the nominations are announced. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’re this up-and-coming screenwriter, this newly-minted visionary, and - cue the applause - you’ve just made the movie of the year. Clips go viral everywhere; the reviews are calling it extraordinary. They all want to know how you - a relative nobody - managed to pull it off. What’s your secret? What’s your inspiration? Where’d you get this billion-dollar box office idea?

And here’s one version of the truth:

“Well,” you’re quoted saying in every single interview: “honestly, it’s about a girl.”

Everyone eats this up, of course. It’s so fucking romantic.

You’ll tell an abridged version of this story for the rest of your life. A blip in time in early January - a certified slow-motion movie moment. You’ll say things like she was the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen. You’ll say things like, I know it sounds lame, but that’s how it went. She took my breath away. She fascinated me. I saw her and I don’t think my life has ever been the same.

You’ll never once say her name.

“It’s weird, actually,” you’ll say in an interview after the news of the nominations drops. “Making this movie about her. She’ll last forever there, you know? She’ll always exist in this film, in this one moment in time. She’s in all of it, basically - every scene, every line. It’s all her.”

“You make it sound like she’s dead,” the interviewer will say, all open-mouthed melodrama.

You’ll laugh. “Oh, God, no,” you’ll say. “She’s alive and well.” As if it hasn’t been years since you last saw her face, watching you from down the corridor, looking lost and torn apart and very, very small. “She’s okay. I mean - I think - yeah, she’s okay.”

As if you’d know.

Because here’s another version of the truth:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this. You’re going to stand up on that stage and thank your family and your friends. You’re going to stare at all those faces until they swim together into one golden, glittering blur, and then all you’ll see is her - her dark eyes, her glossy hair, her wrist in your grip, her throat between your fingers - her in your sheets, her smiling in your doorway, her shivering in your shower, her sobbing into her hands, her bleeding in your bed, her walking away. Her, her, her. Immortalized forever in this perfect thing you made, winning awards off the reconstruction of a memory. Art imitating life; reality warped into something magnificent, and beautiful, and better.

And the only thing you’ll feel like doing is throwing up.

Sure, you’ll bask for decades in the thrill of it: the fame, the fortune, the glory; the adoration, the worship, the attention; the eternal, endless love. You’ll be able to look back on your life when you’re decrepit on your deathbed and know that you - brilliant you, utterly superior you - were divinely blessed with earth-shattering success, and no one will ever be able to take that away from you. You made your mark. You meant something. You were the best, for fuck’s sake, and you have the accolades to prove it - you really, really were.

So here’s the full truth - the final bottom line:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this. You’ll live the kind of life people beg God for. You’ll get everything you ever wanted.

It won’t be worth it at all.

First, though, there’s this.

Disturbingly enough, you’re in the romance section of a bookstore when everything starts.

This is really not your genre - that’s the funniest part. Historically, you’re bored to death by the cartoonish pastel covers; you don’t get your kicks from seeing the same delightfully quirky heroines fall for brooding bad boys, or whatever the fuck goes on in those books. You have your standards. You prefer your art a little gritty, a little fucked up, a little more interesting - the kind of thing that can leave you shellshocked in a movie theater, overcome with the sort of full-body, lightning-struck epiphany only truly good work can manage. It’s not a judgment call - you’re not trying to be pretentious. It’s just that you prefer something with some fucking bite.

The second funniest part is this:

You’re pressed against the shelves, surrounded by the cutest, chastest love stories ever told-

“Are you serious?”

-and Karina’s on her knees, about to take your cock down her throat.

Maybe this is what your contemporaries call cinematic irony.

That’s gotta be the only phrase for it, really. The scene itself dripping with classless, crude, erotic filth - the way she ducks her chin to spit on her hand, the slow pump of her fist around you, the rough hum in her mouth at how achingly hard you are - nasty and irredeemable, too fast and too loud. The gross lack of subtlety in her sex appeal: all pale thighs and porn-star tits, the wet pink flash of tongue. Seductive in a way that screams at you. It’d be so easy to write this off as some deliberately controversial opening scene, gory shock value, horror-film suspense - starring you and the slut you’re about to ravage and ruin and potentially leave for dead.

“Baby - are you sure?”

It’d be so easy, if Karina didn’t look like an angel incarnate.

“I mean, you-” You’re stammering. You’ve got both hands in her hair, fingers sliding through the glossy black in petting, soothing motions - your clumsy attempt at reassurance. “You don’t have to, if you don’t - we’re in public - I’m not expecting you to - I don’t need it-”

Karina’s fine, sculpted eyebrows twitch upwards. Her lips are a twist of scarlet, distinct and amused. She doesn’t quite smirk, doesn’t give a voice to the sarcasm, but the sentiment is the same - yeah, right.

And then she lowers her mouth to lick.

“Jesus fucking Christ-”

Scratch that, then. This is the funniest part. The most inhumanly beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, debasing herself in public like some sort of desperate common whore - come on, bring in the laugh track.

Not that anyone’s laughing now.

You’re no poet - they’re a few sections over, Plath and Yeats and Dickinson - but Karina’s the kind of thing that makes you understand the motivation completely: only capable of being captured in metaphor, without context, painstakingly interpreted hundreds of years from now by people who will never get this right. All carved-out cheekbones, fluttering lashes; tight fuckable body clad in a little low-cut dress, feet tucked neatly behind her like she’s simulating worship. Dirty and religiously devoted in how she stretches her full glossed lips around your cock and lets your grip tangle in her hair and-

“Karina,” you get out, but her only response is to blink sweetly up at you and suck.

Well, who gives a shit about the poets, anyway? You doubt any of them ever got to fuck a mouth like this.

There’s an unfamiliar caution to the rut of your hips, a wincing fascination every time she gags - and she gags loud, choking and heaving, saliva dripping slick around you and down her chin - that seems to both entertain and confuse Karina. A skeptical crease in her forehead, saying everything she can’t: you don’t wanna fuck me up? Ruin me? Cloudy spit falling in strands to her tits, seeping into the crimson fabric of her dress; she’s wearing a worn black sweatshirt that’s slipping off one shoulder, exposing the clean line of her collarbone. The hollow of her cheeks, the obscene painful sound of your cock clogging her throat - it’s subtext, explicit suggestion. A preternatural understanding. I know what this is. I know what you want from me.

Which - she couldn’t possibly.

“Baby.” You sound so wretched that it’s humiliating. Karina’s sharply lined eyes seem to flash with humor, smug and lazily self-satisfied. “You’re gonna make me fucking cum.”

The thick, sloppy, choked noise she makes is the closest she’s gonna get to a laugh.

Oh, sure, whatever, it’s not like you’re not thinking about it: digging your fingertips into her scalp and really fucking her face, relishing in the way those eyes would go wide and glassy with unshed tears; refusing to let her have control, to let her lick and lap and breathe. You’re scripting it in your head already. You’d strip her bare and make her sob. You’d wreck her throat and cum all over her face and force her to walk out like that: coated in the sticky, filthy evidence of everything you’ve made her - look at this, you’d say, look at what I have. Look at what I did - all this, all me.

“God.” Your thumb braces against Karina’s temple, like the gentle stroke of a brush, like you’re painting her right into existence. “You’re just-” A harsh gag; a fall of dirty, drooling spit. “You’re really enjoying this, huh? Getting on your knees in public for a fucking stranger?”

That’s why the fantasy of fucking her into brutal submission is actually so understandable. You don’t know her. You don’t owe her shit. You could destroy her and it’s not like she could do anything to fight back - not when she’s already below you, looking up. When she asked for this.

Except-

“Karina.” You can’t stop saying her name. “You’re - fucking perfect.”

And it’s true.

So you cum.

Karina swallows it all with the same amount of sultry grace she seems to do everything - how she laughs and walks and talks and takes your cock like a fucking professional - languishing in the practiced bob of her throat, the preening flicker of her eyelids, her face shiny and pale. It tugs the same feeling out of you as a flawless shot in a film, a well-timed bit of dialogue: watching an expert at work, pulling out all their stops. One hand through her hair. Her nails the same rich color as her mouth and her dress. Nasty, slutty, impressive attention to detail - Christ, get this girl in front of a camera, get the moon to be her limelight - you’re breathless, you’re enthralled, you’re so fucking far gone.

Then: the sticky retreating glide of her pouty mouth, lipstick smeared badly down her chin, stark and arresting as blood.

“In my experience,” Karina says, finally, “being perfect’s never gotten me anywhere good.”

She pulls the sleeve of her sweatshirt up and wipes her face with her wrist.

“You’re unbelievable,” you say, dizzy.

“Thank you,” Karina says, sweet like she means it, and sits back on her heels.

You can’t help yourself; you’re petting back her hair again, cupping her face softly in your hand, caught on the dark glint of her irises. Angel was an understatement. She looks more than that - looks like something holy and all-powerful, something omniscient and blindingly beautiful, something who knows exactly what you need and knows exactly how to follow through. Something worthy of mythology. Something like a god.

And any sort of rough, ruthless, fucked-up fantasy - it’s never going to happen.

You just can’t ruin a girl like her.

“So?” Karina’s voice is a smoky bombshell lilt, like she’s just stepped out of some film noir from the 1950s. Hands folded primly in her lap, fingers interlocked like a lady. She could be a pop culture icon, an eternal sex symbol - a Marilyn, a Bond girl, a timeless universal beauty. “What now?”

You think your brain actually short-circuits. “Sorry?”

Head tilted, lids dropped low. Smirk still sharp and scarlet. “Are you gonna take me home?”

You open your mouth to respond, but then a customer walks by the aisle.

You’re a panicked flurry of motion - zipping up your pants, turning away, frantically patting down your clothes - but Karina just stays kneeling on the floor, little chin on an incline, utterly incriminating. It doesn’t matter. The customer passes you by. The world returns to the way it should be: just the two of you.

“Karina,” you say, flabbergasted by her composure.

Karina’s lips quirk. “What?”

You shake your head and offer your hand to help her up, but Karina laughs instead - actually laughs. It’s peculiar, beautiful: raspy like a chronic chainsmoker, as though there’s something foreign she’s trying to dislodge. The raw, gravelly aftermath of a skinned knee, a grisly scrape over skin.

“Wow,” she says, and stands all on her own, tugs the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fingers. “That’s a yes to taking me home, then?”

“What are you doing?” You’re laughing too - you can’t help it - reaching for Karina’s tiny waist to pull her in. “What are you - what do you want?”

When Karina smiles, it seems to set her eyes aflame. Bright and dancing, lashes like a shroud of smoke. “What do you mean?”

“You just met me.” It sounds feeble, somehow: a thin, useless excuse. Nothing against the way her body slots between your hands, a smooth effortless fit; nothing compared to how she kisses you between sentences, so quick and easy it already feels like a habit. “You don’t - you don’t know me.”

Karina’s mouth puckers, coy. “No?”

“No,” you shoot back, grinning, but it doesn’t sound convincing at all. “Come on, baby, seriously. What do you want?”

There’s gotta be some motive, you’re thinking. There’s gotta be a reason. Karina is so still, so soft and pliant under your hands, all the carved porcelain perfection of a marble sculpture but with none of the cold stiffness. Spine curving under your fingertips, jaw tilting into your touch.

A complete stranger, maybe - but every part of her body is begging to be known.

“Don’t you get it?” Karina says. “I want whatever you want.”

It’s so simple and earnest it takes your breath away.

“I - Jesus.” You’re biting on the inside of your cheek, drinking her in. “What if I told you I don’t know what I want?”

Another rasp of a laugh, sound like the serrated edge of a blade. “I’d say fine, okay.” Karina’s voice is low, conspiratorial. “But I’d think you’re lying.”

And here’s the thing you know for sure:

The very second you saw Karina you swear you saw the next hundred pages of a manuscript unfurling in front of you, lines and themes and gorgeous dark-eyed heroines, tragically beautiful endings and stunning cinematography - infinite narratives in the glossy sweep of her hair, in the seductive stretch of her legs, in the way she looked at you in a crowded room and smiled a lovely, secret smile and told you she’d follow you anywhere. She’s worth making art about. She’s worth devoting lifetimes to. The most honest thing you could say to her right now is baby, I’m writing a movie about this one day, and I think you’re really gonna like it.

Karina couldn’t possibly know any of this, but it still feels like she does - impractical knowledge in how she loops one arm around your neck and kisses you again, no hesitation. Like she actually knows you.

“I want to fuck you,” you murmur against her mouth, because it’s the next most honest thing. “Is that enough for you?”

You’re a screenwriter. You know your horror movies. A small part of you recognizes that this is precisely how they start: fanged vampires, wicked succubi, femme fatales out for blood. Karina’s so gorgeous she can’t be human - teeth so sharp there’s no way her intentions are pure.

“Sure,” Karina says, smirk glimmering like starlight. “Then I want that, too.”

It’s a murder plot waiting to happen.

You take her home anyway.

(Oh, and about your Oscar-winning script-

In theory, this is how it begins.

It’s classic. There’s a stranger and there’s a beautiful girl and they’re both sitting at a bar, talking for the very first time. The girl has a rose tucked behind her ear; it matches the crimson color of her lipstick perfectly. The stranger had asked her what the deal with it was, but she’d said something vague and nonsensical about it being a gift, so now they’re talking about normal, average things. Jobs, names, flirtatious pickup lines. It’s obvious because it’s meant to be, like a set-up to some predictable porn - everyone watching knows they’re going to fuck.

She keeps getting closer to him. At one point he thinks she’s going in for a kiss.

Instead, all she does is pluck the rose from behind her ear, and hand it to him.

It’s okay, she says. No thorns.

He stares at the rich furled petals and the whittled-down stem.

Thanks, he says, amused, charmed. He thinks there’s something odd about her. He likes it, though; if she were as beautiful as she is - which is very beautiful, exquisitely fucking beautiful - and she behaved like most people do, he’d find her terribly boring.

He takes it from her. Turns over the rose in his hands absentmindedly as she keeps talking. She’s got all this hair: wild and glossy black, pouring over her thin shoulders, her ribs, her tiny waist. After a moment he feels the sharp prick of a thorn against his fingertip and releases the rose in surprise.

You said there weren’t thorns, he tells her, laughing. Ow.

Whoops, she says. Then: Did it get me too?

She turns her head, pulls her hair out of the way. There’s a scarlet bead of blood trickling down the side of her perfect pale neck. He can’t quite tell where the point of entry was, where the thorn had dug in and broken skin. It’s bleeding a bit too heavily. Covering its tracks.

She swivels, slightly. She sees the look on his face. Is it bad? she asks.

No, he says, though he can’t really tell. But - couldn’t you feel it, though? The thorn?

The girl presses her hand to the side of her throat. It comes back bloodstained, a neat smear of red along the lifeline of her palm.

No, she echoes, though this can’t possibly be true. Hey, you wanna get out of here or something?

Alright, he says, smiling. They both stand. They leave the rose where it is. Let’s go.

He cups her cheek instead of her neck when he kisses her for the first time, so he doesn’t have her blood on his hands.

It starts simple like that.)

Karina’s so out of place in your apartment that it’s almost laughable - or it would be, if you were capable of thinking about anything but her mouth and her hands and her tits crushed up against your chest as you pin her to the doorframe. She keeps making these little sounds into your mouth: low and throaty, almost agonized. You swallow all her moans off her lips - oh, baby, you’re okay - and you only kiss her harder. She doesn’t belong, among your carpet worn-down from pacing and your laptop still open and idling and the mess of incoherent colorful post-it notes pasted to your fridge. She doesn’t fit here. Here kissing your mouth, here in your arms, here on fucking earth with the rest of you heathens-

“You wanna fuck me so bad,” murmurs Karina, chin on an incline, staring up at you, “then do it already.”

She doesn’t squirm or fidget; she doesn’t get needy or start begging. She stays pinned down by your body, lips parted, and stands completely still.

It’s like she’s telling you to make your move. Waiting for something inevitable.

“What happened to patience?” you say, anyway.

Karina’s mouth curls. She palms your cock through your pants. “What the fuck is that?”

You try to laugh, breathless and turned on, but all she does is kiss you again.

You’re a creative - you’re ready to attribute meaning to every movement - but there’s nothing so profound about it when you get Karina on your bed, all that thick black hair fanned out on your sheets, her hands grasping to get your shirt off - off, she murmurs, off. Even that comes out measured. She never shakes. She’s so sure. You kiss her everywhere you can reach, her face and her neck and her collarbone and her tits, drunk on the soft, humming sounds she makes when you do. You’re so fucking gorgeous, you can’t stop saying, and Karina keeps laughing that same raspy laugh, like it’s the most hilarious thing she’s ever heard.

“You told me you already know that, right?” You’ve got her face cupped in one of your hands and your other one at the neckline of her scarlet dress. “So what’s so funny?”

“Everything.” Her teeth glint the way fangs would, a deliberate trick of the light. She’d be villainous if she weren’t so content to be trapped underneath you. “All of it.” She presses her palm to the side of your neck. “You’re too nice.”

“Fuck.” Your thumb accidentally digs too hard into her cheek. She doesn’t wince, but you feel it - the stomach-turning thrill, the possibility of leaving a bruise. Your hand drops low - lower, down her throat and her tits and her flat midriff - and slips between her thighs, up her dress. It feels safer, somehow. “How do you manage to make the word nice sound like an insult?”

“It’s not,” she says, simply, and spreads her legs.

And it must not be - because Karina’s so wet.

She makes another low velvety sound when you first touch her, seems to melt into the stretch of your finger in her cunt - just one finger, and her back arches faintly, prettily, hips lifting to take more. “Jesus,” you mutter, but Karina’s not looking at you: her eyes are shut tight, lashes fluttering black, tits heaving in her dress with each draw of breath. You’ve fucked girls who’ve seemed unsure of themselves - embarrassed by their own wantonness, how wet they are, how bad they want it - but all Karina does is wrap her hand around your wrist and tug, once: a clear soundless plea for more.

For a second you’re actually, positively certain that you’ve lost it.

It’s abject fantasy. It can’t be real. You in your apartment with the dream girl - the personal Aphrodite - the muse; God, if anyone was ever made to be a fucking muse, it’s her - underneath you with her ridiculous tits and her tight little pussy, face like a Hollywood dream. Ludicrous. Impossible. Bucking as she tries to fuck herself deeper on your fingers, all the way to the knuckle - slowing down only to say you wanna fuck my cunt open with your big fat cock or what?

“I,” you try to say, strangled - her mouth’s so fucking filthy. “I was - I mean - we could take it slow-”

“How romantic,” says Karina - and this, too, sounds like a heinous insult coming from her - but she drags your wrist to her lips and sucks her own slick off your hand anyway.

You choke on your next breath. “Karina-”

She looks up at you, unflinching, tits half out of her dress and cunt dripping down her thighs. Lipstick worn-down, kissed-off. All over your mouth, or your throat, or your shirt. Mouth chapped from the cold and stained marvelously pink. There’s something in the way her smile forms slight and crooked every time you say her name, as if there’s some private joke you’re not in on.

“You’re such a gentleman,” Karina purrs, all syrupy-sweet condescension. Then: “You really don’t have to be.”

She licks the pad of your finger. She’s so completely shameless. You feel monstrous on top of her, in this sick, superior way, like she’s just too small to be so sopping wet and slutty and fuckable - too beautiful to be anything but treated just right.

“If you want me to fuck you like a whore, baby,” you tell her, half-joking, “then just say that.”

It’s a mistake the moment it leaves your mouth - a line crossed. Because all Karina does is cock her head, your wrist gripped delicately in her hand, her legs parted underneath you, and stares. Almost droll, bemused. Like you’re so goddamn predictable.

“Didn’t you hear me?” That perfect face sears right through you. You’d nearly fucked that face. Not quite. Not yet. “I want whatever you want.”

She’s even tinier than you originally thought she was. You only realize this now, tracing her stomach under your fingertips, feeling the sharp relief of each rib straining beneath her skin. You don’t know it until you touch her, but you can span the width of her thigh under one hand. It sends a strange shiver through you: mapping every jut of bone, every startling edge. She’s tiny. Breakable, practically. Men meaner than you have probably thrown her around, fucked her up against walls, used her like a toy.

“So,” says Karina. “What do you want?”

Your fist clenches tight in her grasp, right in front of her face, knuckles going horrifically white.

Like you - like you’re going to-

An accident. A primal sort of gesture, like you’re less than human, turned under her touch into some feral hot-blooded animal who can’t control itself: carnivorous, predatory. You stare at your own hand and then the sharp scythelike curve of her mouth and feel revolted embarrassment crawl straight up your spine.

It’s abhorrent.

It also doesn’t even seem to matter.

Karina doesn’t go wide-eyed and nervous; she doesn’t look at your wound fist like she’s scared of what it could do to her. She clicks her tongue, once. Like this, too, is something she already saw coming.

“I thought so,” she says, anyway. Maybe this is it, what does it for her; looking the devil full in the face and begging to be burned. “Then do it.”

“I can’t do that to you,” you mutter, but you tug her dress up, and you fuck her anyway.

She’s a stranger. This is the point of fucking strangers. To do things to them that you’d never do to anyone else - to take out your worst impulses and tell your best lies and know that none of it matters, in the end. Because they’re nobody, and because you’ll never see them again.

But you just can’t.

She’s too indulgent and stunning and soft, with her low moans and the addicting drenched heat of her cunt, hand gentle and careful on the nape of your neck so she can keep pulling you into a kiss. She’s made up of curves, delicate edges - those hips and those tits you can’t keep your hands off of and her lips in a dreamy smile - and you find yourself stroking her hair back from her face so you can drink it all in: the blush in her cheeks, the almost serene way she lets her eyes slip shut and her mouth drop open, slack and enticingly wet. So good, baby, you keep telling her, because she is, her entire body warm and wanting and so easily fucked open, little pussy swallowing your cock right up. She doesn’t fidget or plead. She’s so sweet, such a perfect fit, humming into your mouth as your cock eases her open; so wet you can hear it, the sloppy squelch of her cunt when you bottom out. Your voice comes out coaxing. You like that? That feel good? Taking my cock so nicely, huh?

“Mmm,” Karina breathes, in an exhilarating moan, right into your mouth, against your tongue. “Mm, mm-”

She never quite manages full sentences. Never finds it in herself to make any more obscene demands. Just gets all small and soaking underneath you, licks messily at your bottom lip, and lets you do all the talking - lets you draw a careful hand through her hair and drop your other one between her thighs, clenches tight around your cock when you rub at her clit, keens low in her throat and listens. To the good girl, to the I got you, baby, to the that’s it, there you go, this is what you wanted - I know, honey, I know, you just needed to get this cunt fucked right, you just needed to cum real bad. I know what this is. I know what you need.

“Fuck.” She’s flushed pink to her chest, delightfully ineloquent. “Yes-”

Well - good thing you’re decent with your words, when it counts. Let Karina blush and drool and slick up your cock with every stroke. That’ll work just fine with you.

It’s the kind of juxtaposition you’d really lean into - the kind of thing you’d write just to get so self-indulgent with, a personalized note to the director, a wink and a nudge to every audience member. Look at that. Look at her eyes like something straight out of poetry. Look at her body like a pornographic fantasy. Look at how she gets so tamed and docile and compliant when she gets her tiny pussy stuffed full, creaming all over that cock, huge tits bouncing - look, that’s art, isn’t it? What else would you call it? What else could it be?

“You gonna cum, baby?” She’s so fragile underneath you. Color staining her cheeks apple-red; lips swollen and begging to be kissed. Fictive little fairy tale. “You gonna cum for me?”

“Yeah.” It’s breathy and barely-there. Her chin trembles, jerks in a weak nod. “I’m - I - fuck-”

See: you just can’t rough her up. It’d be blasphemous. Sacrilege. Taking one single look at the stained-glass windows of a church and tearing it all to the ground.

Still, you’re mesmerized by how utterly vulnerable she looks: the glossy shine to her irises; the way she inhales all slow and shaky, body slipping from some sort of precipice. Not just like she’s near-tears, but like she’s stunned - struck dumb from a violent blow, mouth wide open in the aftermath. And it’s just sex - and, fuck, you’ve said it, you see things the way every obsessive artist does; sex is never just sex. Every one thing means something more. A metaphor. An allegory. You get nasty and debauched and dirty because you know exactly what you can spin it into. Put the entire scene in a silent film and everyone can swoon about the things you might be saying to her, this impossibly captivating stranger in your bed with her graceful name, her dizzying moans, her shuddering frame in her orgasm. Don’t you get it? you could be telling her, hand brushing gently over her sweat-damp hairline. Don’t you feel that? You’re a stranger to me, baby, but you don’t have to be. There’s a reason we met. There’s a meant-to-be here, somewhere. I’m not a believer, sweetheart, but you could make one out of me - I swear you could, I promise-

But that’s the reason why these things are best left to the imagination, anyway.

A million scripted sweet nothings - and none of them manage to make it out of your mouth.

“Karina.” Your hips jerk hard. You sound half-possessed. “So pretty, cumming all over my cock like that. Such a perfect little cunt, baby - so fucking good-”

Her eyes suddenly shut tight; her body arcs into your touch, lips parted in a silent gasp. And for a second it seems like such a snapshot of innocence, like she’s brand-new to getting fucked quick and rough and dirty - though you know this can’t possibly be the truth, not with the way she flirts and whines and drips for more like she’s made for it - but she’s trembling under your fingertips, and you can dream. She’s your beautiful stranger, your pristine muse; you can pretend she’s whatever the fuck you want.

“God,” Karina murmurs, so soft and weak it makes your head spin.

Before you know what you’re doing - before you can even think twice about it - you’re pulling out, and cumming all over her stomach.

You can’t help it. You shouldn’t have had that thought about innocence. Jesus. This is what you mean, about you and your own painful humanity; you’ve got all the same vile desires. When you see a pure thing - all that porcelain skin, all that thick glossy black hair, all those gleaming white teeth in her open mouth - your very first instinct is to fuck it up bad.

You’d do worse, if you were worse - you’d make a real fucking disaster out of her.

“Baby,” you say, breathlessly. “Are you…”

And Karina, then, does something truly evil:

Sighs luxuriously, stretches her arms above her head, eases those gorgeous eyes open, and smiles.

As if she’s reveling in it. The scent of sex - the defiled tautness of her tummy - the way you’re not sure where her little red dress or her shoes or her panties are, how her cunt’s dripping wet onto your sheets, her hair a glorious mess. Grinning in the face of utter filth.

“You,” you exhale, running your palm down her side. “You’re so…”

Karina’s mouth pulls up at a corner, like she’s daring you to finish the sentence, but you never do.

You can’t stop staring at the stretch of cum-covered skin before you. Coating her belly, pooling into her navel. You realize with a start that there’s a new bruise blooming on her chest, a vicious sort of bite mark. You can’t remember when you did that. You’d been kissing her - of course you kissed her - her mouth and her neck and her tits, but you’d been so gentle, sucking light and soothing her skin with your tongue after-

“You didn’t want to cum inside me?” Karina asks, hoarsely.

You blink so hard your vision blurs. “What?”

“Right.” Her eyeshadow’s smudged dark underneath her eyes, making her look deliciously used up. “You did want to cum inside me.”

“Karina,” you warn - or, at least, you mean to make it sound like a warning - but her name comes out too faint. It’s horrific. Your hand traces her hipbone so reverently. You’re no match for her.

Karina arches a brow in unhurried challenge, ghosts her hand across her tummy. Takes two fingers and drags them through the cum you spilled, pulls back with it clinging thickly to her skin. Drifts down, down, down.

“Karina,” you try to say again, even more pathetic than last time. “Jesus-”

But you saying her name holds no weight here; she’s made that more than obvious. Nothing to stop her as she smears her cum-slick fingers across her glistening pussy, gaze locked amusedly on your face, tracking your reaction. She’s still so fucking wet - she rubs your cum in circles across her clit - tossing her head back a little, chest heaving and falling, fingertips just barely dipping inside her cunt-

“I can’t.” Karina lifts her hand to pop her fingers in her mouth, sucks them clean. Pointedly flashes her too-sharp nails at you like she’s unsheathing claws. “If you want it, you’re gonna have to do it yourself.”

“You,” you say, though your hand’s already pressing hard into her ribs, “are fucking cruel, baby.”

“And you,” replies Karina, head tilting, “just want to see my cunt all filled up and leaking your cum.”

Oh, she hasn’t been wrong about you all night. She certainly won’t start now.

“What?” A sly, languid smirk tugs at her lips. “Afraid you’re gonna knock me up or something?”

Your breath halts right in your lungs.

You’d been right about her too, it seems. Succubus. Vampire. She must be; she’s bloodthirsty. Tits gleaming with sweat, the scarlet stain of that bite mark you can’t remember leaving, cunt all dripping wet and desperately empty - body like a fatal fucking blow.

Karina’s eyes glint. I want what you want, she’d said.

With the way she spreads her legs, she’s gotta be ready to prove it.

So you never stood a chance. You give in and scoop up cum with one finger and sink it deep inside her aching cunt, feeling as she clenches down, as she takes it so well; like a good girl, you tell her, letting me do whatever I want with this needy little cunt; that’s my good girl. Karina lifts her hips - goes so still and so obedient - and lets you repeat it over and over again, fucking into her with your fingers until the plane of her stomach is bare and sticky and her cunt’s dribbling your cum onto your sheets. It’s completely nasty. It’s hot. It’s Karina craning her neck back and shutting her eyes as you bury three fingers inside of her and fill her with your cum, every part of her in utter surrender, entirely at your mercy, breathing out hard through her nose until your thumb rubs at her clit and she’s cumming again, all over your hand. She gets this look on her face, afterwards - exhausted, every line of her face gentle and lax - staring up at you like you’re the only person still left on this planet. Adoring, almost. As if you’re something out of another world.

It’s an expression too sweet for a scene like this - and it’s exactly what men like you make art about.

“There,” you say, soft and mesmerized, wiping your hand across her chest. “Satisfied?”

Karina laughs her strange, gravelly, gorgeous laugh.

“No,” she says, shamelessly. “But that’s not your fault.”

Your fingers curl around the curve of her jaw. “No?”

She barely looks like she belongs in your bed - she must be something divine, lit from within, god-blessedly gorgeous. She’s a fucking fever dream: stunning eyes and the bob of her throat and her tits and her curves and all that hair. Stay, you think of telling her. Let me see what I can make of you. I don’t know you yet but I could, baby, I really could.

“Nope.” Karina smiles, and somewhere, soliloquies are writing themselves. “I always want more.”

“Okay,” you say, mouth hovering over hers. “Then stay.”

So she stays.

(An update on your script:

The stranger and the girl are back at his place. They’re sitting on his couch. Nobody has cleaned off her neck. He’s been too busy pawing at her: at her face, between her legs, at her tits in her tight dress. I need you, he’s been murmuring to her, and it feels like he really means it: like he’ll die if he doesn’t get her desperate and whining underneath him, his cock stretching her tight little cunt wide open. He doesn’t feel too bad about it. She’s a dirty slut. She’s said as much. She’s got her own needs, too.

What happened to your window? she asks, suddenly.

He pulls back from her chest, his spit clinging shiny to her skin.

She isn’t looking at him. He has the sudden, unnerving feeling that she hasn’t been looking at him the whole time. Not like she’s had her eyes closed in blinding, overwhelming pleasure - but like she’s deliberately been trying to look at anything else.

But his hand falls between her thighs, and he realizes she’s already wet.

A bird flew into it, probably, he says. That happens, sometimes.

They’re talking about the stain on the once-clean glass of his window. The backdrop of the night sky behind means it’s barely visible, but the suggestion of it is enough. Implicit gore. Tiny little black feathers, caked in blood from the impact, dark and dried. It’ll be scrubbed off soon enough, he knows. It’ll be all gone eventually.

Oh, she says. She doesn’t apologize for potentially killing the mood. She hasn’t, anyway, not really. She’s still wet and small underneath him, begging for it. Poor thing.

Yeah, he says.

She turns back to him. Her hair’s everywhere, all over the arm of his couch, wayward strands beneath his fingers. She’s clearly expecting something - to be kissed, to be fucked hard, to be called baby and angel and good girl. It doesn’t really matter either way. Those are the only things he can give her.

He stares at the blood on her neck.

Let me clean that off for you, actually, he says, and goes to the kitchen to get a washcloth.)

Much, much later:

“I admire you,” Karina says, all tucked up in your bed, underneath your sheets, half-buried into your side. Moonlight bleeds into the room. Her eyes gleam like galaxies. “For showing some self-control.”

“What?”

Karina’s hair pours over your pillowcase. She takes your hand and brings it close to her face, working your fingers into a tight fist.

“Fucking bitch,” you mutter, and then regret it immediately. It lands too harshly, too strange and serious. “Sorry. I didn’t - that came out weird. I don’t think you’re a bitch.”

Karina’s lips brush your knuckles. “Not the meanest thing I’ve been called.” Her voice twists with humor. She shouldn’t be so comfortable curled up with a man she doesn’t know in the middle of the night. You think of kissing her hard, of scraping her neck with your teeth, of warning her about self-preservation - sweetheart, you could tell her, this is how people end up dead. “Not the meanest thing I’ll be called, either.”

You shift. Your fist, unconsciously, goes tense in her hand. “What’s your deal?”

Her mouth tilts. “What’s yours?”

You huff out a laugh. “You’re unbearable,” you say softly, which feels much kinder than calling her a bitch. “What are you - what do you mean?”

I’m not hard to figure out, you want to tell her. I’ll let you in if you ask me to. But you - you, you imagine saying, cupping Karina’s face in your hands and saying her name like you’re praying to her, drafting scenes in your head with each whispered syllable - you. Look at you. I’d fill a thousand pages trying to find a way to understand you.

“If you want to hurt me,” Karina says, “then hurt me.”

Your throat dries up. Your fist falls open. “What?”

“I wouldn’t blame you.” Her voice is matter-of-fact. You see her tongue dart over her bottom lip, the slick glimmer of spit. “If that’s what you wanted.”

You stare at her, hard.

It’s not difficult to make out her silhouette in the dark; she’s illuminated so distinctly by the moon, like it’s her own on-set spotlight, professionally arranged - she’s got the cosmos calling her shots. You think about how careful you’d been with her: doing what she wanted and making her cum and kissing her like you have history and maybe fucking her like you love her, just a little.

You think about that bruise you left on her chest, her skin between your teeth, the feeling of biting down.

“It’s not,” you say, and the lie tastes acrid in your mouth. “It’s - it’s not, Karina.”

“You fucked my face in public within like an hour of meeting me. And fucked me and came on my stomach. And fingered your cum inside of me.” It’s far past midnight. She sounds more alert than she should. “You’re gonna start being polite now?”

It sends an odd knot to your gut, the way she puts it. Equating all of that to hurting her. Laughing in the face of your clenched fist - not because she thinks you won’t do it, but because she knows how bad you want it.

Hurt me. She says it like it’s so easy. Fuck me. Let me stay the night. Hurt me; you’ve earned it.

“I’m not polite.” The truth doesn’t taste much better. “I just have, you know, common fucking decency.”

“Hm,” Karina says, a nonchalant little noise, and nothing else.

You brush her hair off her neck and your fingertips graze the hollow of her throat. You feel her swallow under your touch. You open your mouth, though you’re not sure what you’re about to say - Karina, like a chant, like she’s consumed you in a matter of moments, Karina - but she shuts her eyes delicately, and curls close to you, and just like that the moment is over.

I have common decency, you’d said. I won’t hurt you. I promise. I can control myself.

So maybe you weren’t right about everything. You’re not the devil. That’d be a delusion of grandeur - the idea that you’d ever have that kind of power over a girl like her.

Not for long, she’d replied, in the knowing tilt of her smile. Not if I can help it.

In the morning, it’s a picture of crime-scene proportions. It takes a little work to piece it all together.

Karina’s not in bed when you wake up, but there are traces of her everywhere - telltale, incriminating bits of evidence. Strands of her hair on the pillow. Blood-red lipstick stains on the fabric. Her crimson dress crumpled on your bedroom floor, sporting a tiny tear in the hem that you don’t remember leaving; you can still smell her perfume all over your sheets, like a calling card. If this was a TV drama - a clichéd police procedural - she’d probably be dead in your living room right now, blank-eyed and beyond saving, rigor mortis deforming her perfect body into something grotesque.

This is also probably not a thought you should ever relay to Karina, but you do anyway.

“Sorry to disappoint,” she replies. She’s perched on your kitchen counter, dressed in one of your t-shirts, bare legs swinging. “I’m very much alive.”

“I was being dramatic,” you try to say, gesturing with your hands to set the scene - the lighting, the fake blood and the special effects, the potential pallor of her face. “I’m - I’m a screenwriter. It’s in my nature. I didn’t mean I wanted to find your fucking corpse out here-”

“It’s okay if you did.”

You choke. “What?”

“I’m right with you, babe.” Karina leans forward conspiratorially. There’s a sharpness to the dark glint in her eyes that kind of makes you think she really does understand: that she has the same tendency to jump to the worst possible conclusions. A kindred, morbid spirit. “I get it. I’m pretty devastated that I’m still breathing, too.”

She says this all in a scratchy, sultry voice, hoarse as though she’s been sleeping for years instead of hours. Lashes fluttering like she’s just told you something very adorable and sweet.

“God,” you say, desperately charmed, and laugh until you feel light-headed. “You’re sick.”

Karina’s mouth curls. “Right.”

“I’m serious.” It’s surreal: her wearing your clothes and sitting on your counter like this is an everyday occurrence, indulging every fucked-up thing you say to her. Maybe you’re still caught somewhere in a dream, just waiting to wake up. “You’re, like - not normal.”

“Hey.” A light, careless shrug; her palm rests over the back of her neck. “No arguments here.”

You rub a hand over your eyes, smiling like an idiot, and take a breath.

It’s late January, and cool sunlight drips into the room, over your furniture and your floors and the angel right in the middle of your kitchen. It should wash her out, blur her at the edges; it doesn’t even come close. Turns her to a freeze frame instead, carefully color-graded, every hue just a bit too intense: skin ghost-pale, lips pouty and pink, hair jet-black and tangled to her waist. Your shirt hangs off of her slender frame like it aims to swallow her up. You thought you’d been stunned by Karina before, lulled by the late night, the electric rush of touching her - you’d assumed you could blame it on the alcohol, the slutty dress and the sultry makeup and the long-held habit of artistic romanticization-

But it’s nothing compared to seeing her now.

Karina crosses one leg over the other, and waits as though expecting a rating: to be starred out of five like a film.

Face scrubbed clean. Bone structure a study of faultless symmetry, delicate in a way that feels both inhuman and invulnerable. She��s so classically breathtaking - a miraculous second coming of a tragic, iconic movie star, a phenomenon back from the grave; jaw and nose and mouth all clean lines, aesthetically precise art - but God, those eyes. Enormous without the thick liner, suggestive only of impossible innocence. Like some darling baby animal, some long-lashed lamb to the slaughter - something pristine and completely untouched.

The morning after, the direct light, the exposed behind-the-scenes - she’s still beyond beautiful.

And somehow she’s still here with you.

“That’s insane, by the way,” you say, unable to stop yourself. “That you stayed.”

There’s a loud cracking sound.

You squint, disoriented. “What-”

Karina blinks at you, wide-eyed; her jaw shifts. The sound echoes again, startling and sudden. “What?”

“Are-” You step closer. “Are you chewing on fucking glass or something?”

“Or something,” Karina replies, smile’s tiny and closed-off. She gestures to the cup next to her. “It’s just ice.”

She’s so calm watching you approach her. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the freakout, for the breakdown - or, at the very least, the scrambling excuses before the walk of shame. Here’s the truth: she doesn’t know you. Here’s an even worse truth: judging by her hickey that looks like you might’ve tried to rip her throat out earlier, she’d have every right to take one look at you and run.

Karina doesn’t do any of it. Just raises her cup to her lips and tips it back, the arc of her neck so inviting.

“That’s so fucking bad for your enamel.” You’re laughing again. You’re in front of her now, settled between her legs. “You’re gonna break a tooth.”

Karina sets her glass down. Wipes the corner of her mouth with her wrist, eyes locked amusedly on yours - heavy-lidded enough to seem lazy, but pupils blown enough to be a siren call, a deliberate suggestion.

“Oh, no,” she says, all smoky sarcasm. “Who’d ever want me then?”

She parts her thighs the second you touch them; her body’s so obedient under your fingertips, like a doll’s, something to be dressed up and posed and played with. Daring you to do everything you’re already thinking about doing.

“You’re ridiculous,” you murmur, and give in completely.

So:

Look, you know exactly how the movies would frame this. Pandering to the wide-eyed teenagers and hopeless romantics; adding the swell of strings every time your eyes or hands or lips meet, each motion accompanied with unsubtle cues - there’s the meet-cute, there’s the moment, there’s the love-at-first-sight. It’s ridiculous to drag any of that into your real life, of course. It’d be like believing in God. Giving up logic to put your faith in something silly and mythic and implausible - to follow true love like a religion, expecting it to save your soul; to pray to the one like a healing property, a benevolent higher power.

You can’t believe in that. You can’t.

But-

Karina pulls back the barest amount, eyelids fluttering open like a new day dawning, and smiles when she sees the look on your face. So sweet and gorgeous; so struck and adoring. So comfortable wrapped up in your arms.

“Hi,” she murmurs.

And - as though it’s some bone-deep instinct, saturating your bloodstream - you just have to kiss her again.

Don’t you feel that? you think of telling her again, your hand slipping to cup her cheek - the sentiment always seems to come back around. You swear you can see scenes flashing behind your eyelids, the beginnings of a creative epiphany; it must be seeping through your fingers, staining her skin with ink, every possible action depicted neatly between brackets. A laugh, a look, a touch. A version of Karina projected across the silver screen to a wild, wanting audience. Don’t you see what you could do for me? What you’re capable of becoming?

You can’t believe in any of this, but it’s gotta be something close.

The feeling doesn’t end when the kiss does: only intensifies, made tangible somehow. Sculpted into the spit-slick curve of her lips, the flinty gleam in her eye. Like she feels it too. Like she knows.

“And it’s not insane that I stayed,” Karina says, belatedly. “You asked me to.”

For a moment you just stare at her, seconds from her mouth and speechless.

It’s the truth without difficulty. It’s a confession with no strings attached. It’s the fucking dangerous way she says it - as if whatever you want extends to a lot more than sex.

“And you don’t-” Your throat closes over a swallow; you find your eyes darting between hers, searching for anything but honesty. “You don’t think that’s insane? Doing whatever a stranger tells you to?”

Karina only laughs her strange laugh, gritty the way good music is, demanding to be heard.

“Nope,” she says, like this is all so simple. “That’s just what I do.”

It’s unbearably filthy in its implication - and it’s exactly what you need.

The room seems to fill with potential, fantasies pouring in from the ceiling, enough to bloat any manuscript to its breaking point. You let out a breathless laugh, loud and unabashed. You think of pushing for even more, pressing your nails in and digging deeper - why me, why this, why now - but Karina leans in close before you can and slots her mouth to yours, and you’re no fool: there’s no line of questioning worth giving that up.

Seems like you’ll have to come up with this character motivation all on your own.

“Look at us,” she murmurs against your lips - meaning this very minute, the chemistry, how every glittering star must’ve conspired to get you here. “Kinda feels like this was meant to be, huh?”

She’s clearly kidding, because it’s too soon and too fucking crazy, but-

Well, the way you kiss her then is absolutely your version of a yes.

Here’s something people should probably know about artists like you:

You’re rather enamored with the idea of a magnum opus.

It’s a natural thing to reach for, to visualize - the concept of your one great masterpiece. Something you can pour years and years into, water into roaring reckless oceans; time transforming the things you make into something worth remembering forever. Everyone you know - your sculptors, your songwriters - has their own version of this, somewhere. When I finally create this one perfect thing I’ll be - go on, fill in the blank. Fulfilled. Gratified. Happy. When I finally do this, I’ll feel whole.

It’s strangely fantastical. A lifelong dream a kid would have - a childlike, storybook aspiration.

Yours - as far as you’ve figured out - looks a little like this:

“It’s not as romantic as it should be,” you admit, now. “I’m not really into that as a theme. True love, I mean. Or optimism. Or hope. I want something more…” Something rougher, you mean. Something with pain. Something with blood and bruises. “Nuanced, you know? Complicated, messy.”

“I get it,” replies Karina. She has her hands twisted in her lap, watching you very closely. You’re obsessed with the way she looks at you - like she’s drinking every word in with those smoldering dark eyes, greedy for more. For you. “All the best art is about pain, huh?”

You snap your fingers, pleased to be understood. “Exactly.”

Karina smiles, small and knowing, and gestures you on.

In your vision, your magnum opus is always about a girl. Like you said, it’s the way it goes with all the best films ever made: not about love, but the futility of it lasting. Think of all the famed examples - think of the filmmakers and their obsessions, sneaking the great loves of their lives between each line: there’s something she said, there’s a dress she wore, there’s a conversation they had in the middle of the night, tangled up in sheets and whispering against skin. Your future muse will be just like that. A reincarnation of the infamous women who haunt all the greatest artists - an amalgamation of their bodies contorted into narratives and replicated in loving, graphic detail. Someone with skin like marble, a statue you could take a sledgehammer to. Someone who looks unfathomably pretty when she cries.

Someone like-

“Uh-huh,” says Karina. She must’ve just gotten out of the shower before you found her, because her hair’s damp enough to have left wet patches on your t-shirt. She licks her bottom lip, once. “Sure.”

Someone to be what you’ve always wanted: a flawless girl to fall from the sky into your lap. To fulfill your promise to yourself: when I meet her, I’ll know. I’ll be able to make this movie. When I meet her, everything will slip exactly into place.

Karina cracks another ice cube between her teeth.

“So,” she says, low with insinuation. “When you told me last night that you found me inspiring…”

She doesn’t need to finish the question. She knows exactly what you want.

“You’re…” You shake your head. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I saw you and I just - I felt like I knew. I knew. I wanted you.” You shrug helplessly, smiling. “Do you think I’m nuts?”

She should, probably. You’re a total stranger, a practical lunatic, an artist talking of your visions like you’re possessed. You don’t know her - that’s the reality of the situation. You don’t know her.

But then there’s everything else.

The unbelievable sex, the staying the night; the way she lets you touch her, blinking slow and subservient, like you already have a claim to her body. You think muse and you think in abstract concepts, glittering stars, guiding lights; you think of skin cut up and sewn together, of creators and their finest monsters, of the implicit poetry in the undoing. You think muse and you think of the way Karina smiles at you now, full lips and frail bones, a painter’s portrait reference. Unmoving, unafraid. Too otherworldly for your day-to-day but just right when she’s in your arms, like a trial-run demonstration: this is what we’re capable of. You could make it happen. You could make me fit.

You swear you’ve been dreaming of someone like her your whole fucking life.

You think muse, and now you can only think of her.

It’s a sign. It must be. And this, the next one:

“No,” Karina says, easily. “I think you’re just like everyone else.” But she raises an eyebrow, so you know it’s a joke. “I think you’re all the same.”

You laugh, delighted; Karina’s smile widens, shows her teeth. “Shut up.”

Karina acquiesces immediately - claps a hand over her mouth like it’ll keep any other words from escaping. It’s so adorable that you can’t keep yourself from pouncing, suddenly all over her like an animal: wrenching her thin wrist down, fingers threading through her hair, tugging her lips to yours as if you’ve been starved and she’s something to devour. She’s so cold, ice still melting on her tongue; even her body feels glacial, more porcelain than real. It drives you wild - the stunning impossibility of her. The desire to see it all reworked, unwound, shattered.

“So,” you breathe over her mouth. “I can write about you?”

“Babe.” Karina’s dark eyes sparkle, frozen-over streets in the mid-winter sun. “You can do anything you want with me.”

That’s the whole point of having a muse, after all. Everything they are becomes yours.

“But,” you can’t help saying right after: “you don’t have to be, like - concerned. About what I said. About art and pain. I mean…” You falter. You’re standing in between her spread legs now, thumbing the sharp curve of her jaw. “It’s fiction. I’m not that kind of guy in real life - I’m not going to hurt you.”

Karina just stares at you, sentiment clear and unspoken.

“Not like - not seriously.” You roll your eyes, laughing it off. “Not like that.”

“Not like that,” Karina echoes. The hickey on her neck seems to flush redder every time you look at it - a photograph in a darkroom, developing. “But in other ways.”

Your mouth opens, but whatever defense you might’ve had gets traitorously stuck in your throat.

Karina laughs hoarsely, lets you trace her bottom lip with a finger. She seems to get the picture - that you’d love to see it bitten and bloody, but only ever in the name of art. There’s a kind of sick, sadistic beauty in destruction, battles waged and lost. She leans into your touch like she’s seen all the war films and knows precisely why they’re so well-loved.

“For the record,” she tells you, arms looped loosely around your neck: “I look very pretty when I cry.”

“Jesus Christ.” You’re smiling. She couldn’t be more perfect if you’d dreamt her up yourself. “Then I guess I’ll have to make it happen.”

It’s like fate, probably.

(Up next in your script:

The girl is standing in the stranger’s bathroom. She’s turning a little glass perfume bottle over in her hands when he stops in the doorway. He’s perfectly content to watch her; she’s the kind of beautiful that deserves to be observed, like some exotic wild animal caged between four walls in an elaborate exhibit, mildly unaware of all the attention. Her hair is messy; her head is tilted down. Unseeing.

Oh, he says. That was my-

Except he doesn’t even get the rest of the sentence out before the girl whirls around, and the bottle slips from her hand and shatters on the floor.

Jesus. The stranger jolts back. Jumpy. He’s not too concerned about the broken bottle; it’s not his, anyway. Why the fuck did you do that?

Sorry, the girl says. She’s leaning rather casually against the counter, observing the glass covering the ground, the sickly-sweet smell of the perfume sticking to the tile. Honeysuckle and the sharp note of alcohol, rendered unrecognizable. You scared me.

He looks down. A crystalline stretch of tiny little shards - if she tried to move she’d slice her foot open.

No worries, he says. Hold on.

He ducks into the kitchen to get a broom and when he comes back he stops in his tracks. There’s something slightly off about the picture in front of him. She’s small against the background counter, frozen, barely blinking. Everything about her looks suddenly frail, fair skin ghostly underneath shitty bathroom lighting, cheekbones gaunt and sunken-in, hair pouring ink-black in endless waves. A vengeful spirit. An incorporeal haunting.

Did you…? he starts to say, thrown.

She blinks, finally. Did I what?

He pauses, reassesses. She’s gorgeous. She’s art. She’s vibrantly alive.

Never mind, he says.

It seems kind of like she’d moved, but he can’t tell. He forgets about it. She’s still beautiful and she seems okay and so he steps forward and clears the worst of the glass out of the way.

It’s silly, she says, watching him. I used to know someone who wore that perfume.

It was my ex-girlfriend’s, he says. She left it here a while back. I think it’s a common brand or whatever. Hey, let me help you.

He’s very chivalrous about it, sweeping her off her feet, cradling her bridal-style across the possible remnants of glass. She laughs all the while, playing into it - a princess out of a fairy tale, being carried to safety by some gallant knight. But then he sets her down and cups her ass and says, You gonna pay me back for the property damage or what? and she laughs harder, because there’s nothing funnier than that: sweet moments turned filthy, a startling hairpin turn in intention.

Or - conversely - a revelation of the absolute truth. Because what else could he ever want from her?

So she says, Yeah, sure, take everything, and leans in to kiss him.

It’s a normal kiss, mostly. It’s just that it begins pointedly erotic but seems to turn strange after a second, like he might be gripping her hair too hard, like she might be corpse-limp in his arms, like at any moment he could unhinge his jaw and sprout fangs and swallow her whole, cannibalistic, viperous. There’s too much spit and sound. There’s too much teeth and selfishness. It stretches on too long and lingers where it shouldn’t and overstays its welcome terribly - the score seems to fall off-beat, the lighting seems to shift dark and discolored-

But then the kiss breaks, and it’s over.

When he pulls off of her she looks like the perfect picture of flushed contentment. Eyes half-lidded and lashes fluttering, her pouty lips swollen and rosy. Smiling like she wants more, like she wants it so, so bad.

It didn’t get you? he asks finally, looking at her neck, thinking of thorns and pinprick pain and the rivulet of crimson that’d decorated her throat. The glass?

No, she says. Don’t you wanna fuck me now?

Oh, God, he says, grinning, and every other thought melts away into nothing. He likes how she doesn’t play coy. He likes how she’s smaller and has to tilt her chin up to look at him. He wants to fuck her, so he does.

It’s excellent sex. The blood on the tile doesn’t really matter.)

Before you really start writing, there’s just one singular problem: you don’t know anything about her.

“That’s not true,” Karina replies, right away.

You open your mouth, then close it, because - okay, she’s not completely wrong.

For about an hour now you just haven’t been able to stop talking to her. About anything, everything: your start into screenwriting, your favorite novels, your greatest inspirations, your neverending passion for eerie, erotic art. You can’t seem to shut up. And it would be bad - would be making you feel self-conscious right now, if it were anyone else - but it’s just not. Because it’s, well-

It’s you, you told her, thoughtfully, watching as the sun climbed higher into the sky, golden light grazing each scalpel-sharp edge of Karina’s body. You’re easy to talk to. Has anyone ever told you that?

Karina blinked at you. Tucked a strand of silky hair behind her ear and looked away, considering it.

She has this way about her: this serene openness to her big eyes, her body language. Leaning back on her hands, humming and nodding and saying I get it, I feel that way too, I understand with such sweet sincerity that you can’t help but believe her. Like a Catholic confessional, a pristinely blank page - something you could pour hours and hours of words into that would never, ever complain.

Yeah, Karina said, finally. She pulled one leg up to her chest; you could see the lacy black of her panties. I get that all the time.

Just one of those people, huh? Her character was taking shape already. A vault for everyone else’s thoughts and ideas, cradling them between her fingers like something infinitely precious. A listener. Such a lovely trait; a perfect protagonist characteristic. An observer.

Yeah. Her cheek rested gently against a knobby knee. Exactly.

It’s something of an art study. You’ve been filing away these details about Karina since the moment you met her, unraveling her bit by bit.

She always seems to think deeply before she speaks, a sort of charming self-scripting, like she wants to make sure she gets every sentence just right. She makes silence seem like the most natural thing in the world. She doesn’t laugh nervously or blush or get embarrassed, ever. She’d mentioned offhand during one of your tangents about your most beloved movies that she tends to like films about gorgeous, dangerous, scarily self-possessed girls: Thirteen and Black Swan and Girl, Interrupted. She seems both intensely present and consistently lost in thought, there one moment and gone the next, her long-lashed gaze falling in and out of focus like a camera lens. A contradiction, you think to yourself. An enigma, even. Profoundly complicated. Not just a girl but something more.

Art in and of itself, displayed deliberately on your kitchen counter, waiting to be understood.

“No, you’re right.” Your fingers have strayed to your open laptop; you’re seconds from typing Karina’s name like a title, something you’ve created all on your own. “I know…”

You’re trying to think of something nonchalant to say and failing. I know you - the first instinct, somehow. I know you’re something brilliant and remarkable and new. I know I’ve never felt this way before about anyone. I know there’s something here, I know what I feel, I know what I want - you, you, you.

Karina stares at the ice melting in her glass.

Then she says, mouth tripping up at a corner: “You know I’m a world-class fuck.”

“Jesus.” You laugh out loud, surprised. “Okay, yeah. That.” A pause. “And, obviously-”

“Obviously,” Karina echoes, like she knows where this is going.

“I know that you’re, like - outrageously fucking beautiful.”

Karina hums once, letting the compliment wash over her, and turns to look out the window.

You bite down on your lip - bite back all the other too-soon things you could say about her, threatening to claw their way out of your mouth - and go in on your script instead.

It’s shockingly easy to write with her in the room. The details seem to stitch themselves together on-page, the restorative aftermath of an autopsy: sealing the slit chest cavity back up, prepping a corpse for an open casket, making something disconnected whole and beautiful again. You’d pulled these specifics from her like pulsing, throbbing organs - her tits, her tone, her tiny waist - and now all you’re doing is repurposing them. You know her body now. You turn stretches of pale, bruised-pink skin into prose, the curl of her little fingers around her thigh into dialogue. You imagine taking that perfect frame and picking it apart again, bit by bit; not just undressing her but peeling back layers of flesh, familiarizing yourself with the stark scarlet of her bloodstream. Until there’s nothing to hide and you can finally say it - I know you - and it’ll feel earned, and real, and honest.

All very melodramatic, of course. It’s just the process: the natural consequence of being a writer.

Your eyes trace the jutting protrusion of muscle in Karina’s throat, and you think about fucking her again.

“Also,” you say, as though your earlier conversation isn’t long over. “I want to know-”

Karina makes a huffy, half-impatient noise.

You grin, gaze flicking back to her face. “What?”

“You want to know more?” Her brows furrow in exaggerated confusion; her smile is absurdly self-deprecating. As if there’s anything she could possibly be insecure about. “You already got the two most interesting things about me, babe.”

“Stop.” Your mouth twitches. “No way.”

Karina’s smile stills in place, expectant. “No?”

“Come on.” Your hand slips from the keyboard to trace her knee. “I’m sure there’s all kinds of interesting things about you I haven’t learned yet.”

The laugh she lets out is quiet and nearly secretive, legs parting to let you touch her. You’re already half in some faraway daydream, wondering if you can bottle the color of her eyes and turn it loose on the page.

“Okay,” Karina says, easily. She nudges your laptop away, scoots closer to you, her sharp chin pointed down at you. “Come and learn them, then.”

“God.” As if that’s what you’re doing. Memorizing her body as some private education; taking her apart in a classroom dissection. “Can I - I’m trying to write, Karina. I’m being productive. I…” You’re shaking your head as though you’re not already giving in, fingers slipping up her thighs - she’s smirking at you like she knows it. “You’re fucking insatiable, you know that?”

“Then satiate me.” Karina’s head tilts, lids heavy. “Fuck me. Use me.” She leans down like she’s telling you a filthy, sordid secret. “Cum in me like I know you want to.”

There’s something surreal about how certain she is: never tripping over her words or waffling over intentions, the most practiced actress you’ve ever seen. Every move - her tongue wetting her bottom lip, her hand sliding gracefully through her hair, her mouth forming a sweet little pout - all clean, choreographed precision.

I know you, she says - like it’s earned, real, honest. Inexplicable, but there anyway. I know you want to.

“Karina.” Her name comes out embarrassingly strangled. You’re pulling her thighs further apart, toying with the edge of her underwear. “You’re such a fucking - you’re so needy.”

Her smirk sharpens even as you tug her panties roughly to the side. “I’m what?”

“Needy.”

“No.” She’s so wet - she’s probably seconds from dissolving into a whimpering breathless thing, begging to be underneath you, begging for more. That damn smirk is probably seconds from shattering completely. “What were you going to call me?”

“Nothing.” You drag a finger down the slick drenched heat of her cunt.

“A slut.” Her voice is a purr, gravelly and sensual. “You think I’m just this fucking slut who needs your cock all the time, huh?”

But it’s the kind of question that you already both know the answer to. Karina takes your finger-fucking so well, hips raised and rutting, hair cutting across her cheekbones - seems to give herself over to desire so fucking easily, with her whole body, back arching and neck craned and hot little cunt a sloppy mess. Never puts up a fight, never demures or acts shy; never says wait or don’t or stop. Only spreads her legs, and drips down your hand, and waits to be fucked good and hard.

And - hey, there’s one dirty word for a girl like that.

“Well.” You raise your eyebrows at her: a challenge. “Are you?”

It’s dangerous. This is all dangerous. Stumbling down a treacherous path, asking a stranger something like this. Are you what I think you are? Do I know you? Do I really?

Karina makes a low, luxurious noise at the stretch of your fingers in her cunt, buried to the knuckle.

“Sure,” she says - and the gleam in her eye tells you she knows exactly what she’s getting herself into. “I’m whatever you want me to be.”

So, it’s possible this is really the most interesting thing about her: she’s the kind of girl who never says no.

That scene goes down how all scenes should:

“Fuck, fuck, fuck-”

Karina’s choking out curses like she can’t recall any other words, head lolling back to expose the pretty bob of her throat. You thrust deep right then and she lets out a sound like an aching gasp, like you’ve doubled down with a fist to her gut, like you’re knocking the the air right out of her; you might as well be - oh, she moans, like she could be in shock or awe or pain - with the way you’ve got one of her thighs pulled up so you can fuck deep into her tight dripping cunt. It’s not nice, not really. Her back keeps hitting your counter. You keep staring at her neck and her hair and her face: the faint flush of her cheeks, the flawless construction of her bones underneath - there’s so much unmarked skin - God, she’s so clean, it’s like she’s never been fucking touched-

“You gonna cum for me?” you murmur, voice coming out thick and half-animalistic.

She has one hand curled around the back of your neck. She’s got those ridiculous clawed nails on her but she never presses down. Her pussy can’t stop clenching around your cock but she takes it so well, lets you make room inside her little cunt, shuts her eyes and trips over her own breath as you force her spine hard against your counter over and over again.

“Karina.”

“Yeah,” she exhales, raspy and strained, as your cock stretches her out. “Fuck, yeah-”

“Cum for me, honey. Cum all over my cock - oh, there you go, good girl-”

It’s hypnotic. The tiny bitten-off sounds spilling from her ice-cold mouth - that small pristine face and all that hair tangled to her waist, just available to be knotted and tugged and fucked all the way up - Karina clings to you when she cums, and you feel so much bigger than her when she does, like you’ve got her sloppy and open around your cock and you could do anything to her, that’s what she told you, and even if she hadn’t, it’s not like she could stop you - she’s gorgeous but she doesn’t have it in her - she’s just too fucking delicate-

It happens too fast to process.

One minute you’re buried inside her pussy and the next Karina’s on her knees, on the ground, and you’re jerking your cock until you’re cumming all over her.

It’s obscene. It’s fucking inevitable. Thick ropes of creamy cum coating her forehead, her cheekbone, her nose and mouth and getting all in that hair-

Her hair. You don’t realize how hard you’re gripping her hair with one hand - balled in a brutal fist at the back of her head - until you disentangle your fingers from it and Karina sinks to the floor like she’s just been cut loose from marionette strings, breathing fast and hard. She doesn’t even say anything: doesn’t comment on the fact that you’d just shoved her straight to the ground or complain when the head of your cock smears cum across her jaw. Doesn’t even flinch when your cock slaps heavy across her cheek, at the indecent sound of the impact.

You’re staring at her, open-mouthed. At her gorgeous, breathtaking, defiled face.

Karina’s not looking at you. Instead, she’s preening in the most lewd, pornographic way possible: swiping her thumb through the cum streaking across her forehead, popping it into her mouth to suck. Halfway through she seems to remember you’re still in the room - seems to recall the value of a performance - and she redirects her gaze up at you, lids heavy, and smirks.

“Did I…” you start, without knowing how the sentence will end. “Did I - was I-”

Karina lifts a cum-covered eyebrow. Her mouth’s an arresting pink, puckering around her thumb like it puckered around the cubes of ice, how her lips formed a ring around your cock back in the bookstore yesterday. She lets it slip free, shiny with spit.

“No,” she says. “You’re good.”

You can’t stop looking at the cum caught in her hairline. She’d been so fucking clean.

You glance down and realize there are strands of black hair broken off in your clenched fist.

Karina’s looking at her hair in your hand too, now, but with a sort of amused detachment. She stands shakily, using the counter for support. There’s cum all over her. Her knees are red from how hard she’d been pushed down.

“You’re so cute,” she tells you, grazing the side of your neck with her fingertips. “There’s no shame in being rough with me, babe.”

“Right.” There’s an unnamed pressure coiling in your chest. “But - but you-”

“Hey.” The word comes out in a rasp, and then Karina laughs, pushing the low hoarse lilt of her voice to its limits. She steps closer, angles her little cum-stained chin up at you. “Are you really gonna tell me you don’t like seeing me covered in your cum?” She’s tonguing the corner of her mouth. “Turning me into a-” her smirk pulls wicked; your next breath hitches so badly- “messy fucking whore for your cock?”

“God,” you get out, because she’s winding an arm around your neck, and her pretty face is still sticky with your cum. “I-”

“It’s what you wanted.” Karina blinks, in a show of such doe-eyed naïveté that saliva begins pooling hot in your mouth - like you’re feral, like you’re rabid. “Isn’t it?”

You’re looking down again. Her knees are going to bruise. Black and blue, as if someone’s bullied her in the schoolyard, pulled her pigtails and knocked her to the asphalt. An echo of something teachers could’ve told her years ago: oh, look, he’s mean to you because he’s got a crush. It’s okay, really - he only hurts you because he likes you.

“You like me like this,” Karina murmurs, dangerously low. “All sloppy and slutty for you.” Her gaze is trained on your mouth. “Marking me up.” Her hair slips from your hand. “Owning me.”

Her name clogs your throat, cloying and candy-sweet. “Karina-”

Karina’s head tilts. “Yes or no?”

She’s too close to you. She’s so filthily beautiful she seems somewhat alien, some kind of foreign invention. Her jaw is smeared with your cum and her flawless teeth shine like jewels and she’s like every creative vision you’ve ever had cut in clips and playing back in a movie theater, made to be scrutinized.

“Yes,” you tell her, winded. “You’re fucking - you’re unreal, you know that?”

You’re smiling like it’s flattery, like it’s an exaggeration. Like she’s not living, breathing, visionary art.

She smiles back, like she knows just how much you really mean it.

“So I’ve been told,” Karina says, and taps your neck, lightly. “Go make breakfast.” She shakes her hair out; some of it gets stuck to the cum on her cheekbone. “I’m taking another shower.”

“Right.” You bite into your bottom lip, hand skimming down her side. “Go get clean.”

“Clean?” She steps back and flashes a disbelieving grin, gestures pointedly at herself - her creamy thighs, her porn star tits in your t-shirt, her body like sex itself. Dirty by design. “Never happening.”

Some cynical part of you keeps waiting for a slip-up, some mistake in a masterfully crafted script - no one can be that gorgeous and still be here with you. But Karina moves and your eyes are hopelessly drawn to the disheveled curtain of her hair spiraling down her back, the sharp distinct lines of her calves, the flex of muscle in her thighs. Her hands, balled into little fists. She’s alluring as if manufactured that way: engineered to be perfectly bruisable, ruinable. It defies logic. It’s movie magic.

“Well.” You snort with laughter, swat at Karina’s ass as she turns to go. “At least you can try.”

You don’t even think she can help it - that’s the thing. It’s just what she was made for.

“What would you have done if I said no, though?” you ask after a moment, as she wavers in the doorway. “Like - what if I told you I didn’t like you like this?”

Karina shrugs.

“I would’ve been something else,” she says, and closes the bathroom door behind her.

(Next:

The stranger and the girl fuck and afterwards he promises her breakfast and then he realizes his cabinets are bare, his fridge painfully unstocked. Sorry, he says, as she pokes around his kitchen. I don’t know how that happened. I usually have something to eat here, I swear.

I don’t mind, she says. Her fingertips sweep his shelves. She seems fascinated by the emptiness, admiring the vacancy. Oh, wait, look.

She finds a half-eaten jar of honey that she ends up scooping up crudely with her fingers, dripping sticky amber down her hand. He’d tell her that’s disgusting but she makes it - as she seems to make everything - into a pointed seduction, her tongue pink and wetly visible, her skin gleaming as she licks it off. It’s funny. He’d never thought it possible to turn eating into some sort of sexual performance but she manages it anyway: meets his eyes, sucks loud and lewd, smacks her lips and wipes her mouth with her thumb, ill-mannered and stunning.

I can’t imagine that’s very filling, he says, delighted by her commitment.

Yeah, well, she says. It’s a good thing I hate feeling full.

But it seems like a moment of hilarious irony when ten minutes later he’s got her bent over his kitchen counter, tits pressed punishingly to the flat surface, honey stuck to her neck and collarbone as she’s fucked hard again and again, stuffed with his cock, his fingers everywhere, like her own body barely even belongs to her - all mine, he keeps saying, and means it; you’re all mine. All filled up. Overfed. Bursting.

Sex is a manner of consuming, it seems. He might as well be eating her alive.)

“Do you do this a lot?”

Eventually, it turns into one of those lazy Saturdays. An afternoon of sitcom plot points.

It’s just so easy to fill the time, the space, the page - you tell Karina some inane story from your college years and she reacts in all the right places like your own built-in studio audience; she says something off-handed and enticingly vague and suddenly you have a new thread of dialogue to explore. You’re both sprawled out over your couch, Karina’s got her thighs tucked over your legs, wearing another one of your t-shirts, a fresh hickey bruising over her throat. There’s something delightfully domestic about it - like you’ve been doing it for a lot longer than you have, or like you could do it eternally if given the chance, holding all the silken comfort of an old routine. When you’d mentioned it - I kind of feel like I could do this forever - she’d laughed her scratchy laugh and said forever’s nowhere near as long as you think it is, babe. A perfectly cinematic line. You stared at her, leaned over, and added it immediately to your draft.

“This whole…” You’re trying to elaborate now, staring at the blinking cursor on your laptop screen. Your knuckles skim her bare, bony knees. “You know.”

“Eloquent.”

“Shut up.”

“I thought you were a writer.”

“Karina.” You’re charmed by the drawl of her voice, the raspy roll of sarcasm. “I’m just wondering.”

Karina shifts in your lap. You’ve got one hand sneaking up the hem of her shirt - your shirt - skating up her tummy, her ribs. You’re probably about five minutes from snapping your laptop shut and pulling her on top of you and saying something crass about her tits and passing it off as a character study.

“What do you mean?” She’s as close to clean as she can be. You made sure of it - licked the hollow of her collarbone earlier after she got out of the shower, tasted nothing but soap and skin. “Do I have a lot of sex with strangers? Or do I stay the night a lot after I have sex with strangers?”

“Both.” You think of taking her hair down, sifting your hand through it, wrapping the strands around your fingers. “All of the above.”

Karina shoots you a look, fluttered lashes, suggestive understanding. You hear it without her having to say it. You want me to tell you that you’re special.

“I’ve kind of been going through a phase,” she says instead, nonchalantly.

Your eyebrows fly up. “A phase?”

“I’ve been, you know.” She gives an airy sigh. “Trying to find myself in the big city. Running wild. Terrified of monogamy but being very brave and quirky about it. Sordid past with love and romance and general human connection. Doing the whole manic pixie dream girl thing.” Her eyes flick to your open laptop, abruptly too wide and innocent. “That sound about right?”

“Fuck off.” It’s a complete non-answer. You run a hand past her stomach, laughing. “You’re fucking with me.”

“What?” Karina inches closer. “Isn’t that what you wanted? Your textbook rom-com love interest?”

You make a rather disparaging sound in the back of your throat. “Ugh.”

“Oh, my bad.” Her mouth curls, contradictory. There’s nothing apologetic about her. “I forgot. You don’t believe in art about love. You wanna see broken people and broken people only.”

“See?” You’re obsessed with her tone; all flirtation, some distorted version of come-hither charm. Talking of suffering like it’s a seduction tactic. “You get it.”

Karina rakes a hand through her hair; her fingers fall to the back of her neck and linger there. She pulls herself out of your lap and turns, hooks one bare long leg over you until she’s straddling you. Your hands find her hips. You’re disarmed by her strange weightlessness, like she’s seconds from either shattering or taking flight.

Then she asks, “Is that what you’re doing with me?”

It’s gotta be a very roundabout request to fuck her stupid, because she follows it up torturously: ducks her chin, parts her lips, rocks her hips down until you groan. You watch her throat, the way muscle works over bone, picturing unspeakable things: taking her by that pretty neck and pinning her to the wall, ripping your shirt right off of her with your fingertips leaving bruises - bending her over to fuck her fast and cruel until her cunt’s raw and aching and leaking your cum - until she’s begging pathetically, saying please, God, please - and you’re triumphant, victorious. Telling her you asked for this, didn’t you? You said anything. You said anything I want.

“Depends,” you reply, when you can breathe again. “Are you a broken person?”

Karina stops, moments from your mouth.

“Depends,” she echoes. “Is that what you want from me?”

It actually takes a beat for the question to sink in. Then two, then-

“No,” you say, loudly. “Obviously not, Karina, Jesus. Why would I…”

You falter.

Karina only looks back at you, patient, tolerant. Like if right now you said that’s exactly it: I want you broken, I want you ruined, I want you decaying and dead and buried, she’d smile and say do your worst. Flashing those white, white teeth, perfect like pearls, ready to be knocked right out and strung together.

You blink the bloody vision away. “Why would I ever want that?”

Karina studies you for a second longer, expression indecipherable.

“Okay,” she agrees, breezily. “Then I’m not broken. I’m just going through a phase, like I said. I don’t like being tied down.” Her shirt rides tantalizingly high up her thighs; her hand slips down to palm your cock. There’s a twist to her lips, a dirty sort of smirk. “You understand that, right?”

You stare at her.

“Right?” Karina prods, again, low and sultry.

“Right,” you say, unable to fight your sudden smile.

The pout of her mouth’s an inevitability; her little body in your lap’s a seductive form of foreshadowing. You dig your fingers into her protruding ribs, playful, and you don’t quite get the squeal of laughter you were expecting - all Karina does is curl closer, expecting more, expecting harder. She knows what you’re capable of. You’re both just biding your time until you cross the same line you’ve been crossing and you fall back into bed again.

“A phase,” you add, considering. It intrigues you, anyway - the casualness, the connotation. “So - I’m not special, then. That’s the moral of this story.”

Karina’s fingers sift gently through your hair. “You wanna be special?”

“I mean, yeah.” Your palm falls to her neck, presses down. She doesn’t seem to mind. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Her eyebrows rise in vague, unconvinced amusement. It makes sense: she’s the most special of all, a cosmic glitch, an angelic fluke. Someone like Karina wouldn’t understand the aching, clawing, consuming desire to be extraordinary. She’s already there.

Your hand on her throat looks even bigger now, tendons straining from underneath skin.

“I think we all want to feel important,” you mumble, thumb grazing gently across her jaw. “Don’t you?”

You’re pretty sure the wry, glittering smile that sits at Karina’s mouth is an answer in itself.

Alright, forget your television metaphors - you’re not sure there’s any sitcom out there that goes quite like this.

“By the way,” you say, grinning against her hair as you pull her to the bedroom. “Did you say you don’t like being tied down?”

Karina turns in your arms and doesn’t even flinch when you force her too hard against the doorframe and its edge smacks into her shoulder blade, digging in hard. You should apologize but you don’t; the possibility of her in pain seems laughable, a distant fantasy. This is how it goes, fucking a girl who looks like a god - your brain is convinced she’s wholly immune to hurt. The universe wouldn’t actually let someone so pretty bleed.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, voice raspy with insinuation. “Let me rephrase.”

“Karina,” you say, not really like a warning - more like you’ve got something to prove. This is real. You’re really here. You’re really this perfect, gorgeous, greedy thing. You’re really made for me.

Karina only lets her lips tilt in a smirk, devilish and knowing.

“I meant that I don’t like commitment,” she says. “I love being tied down.”

She’s still smiling when you shove her through the doorway, across the threshold - across that same old fucking line.

Not that it makes a difference now, but one of the reasons you and your most recent ex-girlfriend broke up was because of what you’d both referred to as sexual incompatibility. Actually, there were about fourteen other things, too - she was a trainwreck and a textbook attention whore; you spent all your time writing and she took offense to the fact that you found your scripts more interesting than her - but the crux of the sex problem between the two of you was that she thought you wanted too much power over her. She seemed to assume that was the point of potentially tying her up and shit like that: to exert power. To put you and only you in control. To make her into this helpless little toy - and I hate that, she’d said, working herself into a fit, I hate feeling helpless.

You hadn’t pushed her. You’d also tried to justify it in a number of ways. It isn’t about that. It’s not about control. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But it hadn’t made a difference and she hadn’t believed you and you’d come to the reluctant, inevitable conclusion that that particular dream would never actually get fulfilled.

Until-

“Look at you, baby.”

Until now, when you’ve got Karina stripped bare and tied to your bed, thighs parted as you kneel over her, pretty little cunt glistening wet and tits heaving with every breath as she waits, and waits, and waits.

Eyes half-lidded. Utterly fuckable. A curated collection of every salacious desire you’ve ever had.

“You’ve been looking at me forever,” murmurs Karina, her tone still humorous, like the reason her voice is run so ragged is because she’s holding back a fit of giggles. “You gonna fuck me anytime soon?”

To Karina’s credit, the idea of tying her up didn’t seem to bother her one bit. She’d let you knot her wrists to your bedframe and only grinned sharply when you asked her if it was too much. She didn’t seem to care about feeling helpless or feeling bad. Actually - judging from the wetness that collects on your fingers as you rub two of them over her cunt - it all seemed to turn her on either way.

“You’re so fucking mouthy.” You lift your hand only to ghost it over her stomach, leaving a lewd shiny streak across her skin. “It’s like you want to be punished.”

“Well, you put in all this work.” Karina yanks at the ropes tethering her wrists to the bedframe until they bite so severely into her skin that it turns white. “I’d hate to see it go to waste.”

“Not a waste.”

“No?” She’s got that seductive little smirk on, legs spread shamelessly, head back and throat bared.

“Nope.” Your eyes rove down her body. “It’s a great view, actually.”

You’re shocked by the sound Karina makes, then: harsh and derisive, scratchy and painful, like she’s choking badly around some injury in her throat. You’re half-expecting her to turn her face and spit blood onto your sheets - all murder-scene evidence, horrifically vibrant gore. Coughing up her own vocal chords.

It’s so awful it actually takes you a minute to realize that she’s laughing.

“Karina?” you say, perturbed.

“Oh, please.” Karina hacks out one more horrid laugh. “Cut the shit.”

You draw your hand back uncertainly. “What are you-”

“Come on, man.” There’s a glint to Karina’s gaze as she looks up at you: bored, mocking, infuriating. Irises flashing like the darkest corners of haunted houses, set-ups for a summoning; lashes like cobwebs, self-spun and delicate. “Fuck me or leave me alone.”

For a second you just stare at her, unmoving, something caustic and furious threading up your spine.

And then-

Look, none of this next part is on you. You can’t blame yourself. It’s her - her tiny hands in tight clenched fists, tummy so flat it seems caved-in, hollowed-out; her own glimmer of slick smeared on her belly, physical proof of how desperately slutty she really is. The bruise on her chest; the one on her throat. Her goddamn eyes. Her lazy, lilting drawl, the exact matter-of-fact casualness she’d had last night when she’d told you to hurt her - fuck me or leave me alone.

It’s so obvious what she’s trying to do - provoke a reaction out of you. It’s gotta be the only reason she’s talking to you like that. Like, what else are we here for? Like, what else could I possibly want from you?

So - no, God, it’s not your fault.

But-

It’s over before you can even think about it. Before you’ve even rationalized doing it, before you recognize the sound ricocheting through the room as the perfect violent land of a blow, the hot whiplash of skin on skin, your palm connecting with its target. Before you blink, and recalibrate, and you take in the rapid reddening of her cheek, and her angled jaw, and her hair falling starkly past her chin - it’s too late. It’s already done.

Because you’ve just slapped Karina clean across the face - hard.

“Oh.” You’re babbling as if on autopilot, all your nerves on shutdown. “Oh. Oh, God. Karina-”

Karina licks the corner of her lip, like she can taste the impact.

“Jesus Christ,” you’re saying, panicking; you can’t shut up. You don’t know what to do with your hands; you find yourself kneeling carefully in front of her, cupping her face, stroking her temples with your thumbs like it’ll soothe the sting. You can’t believe you hit her. All the things you could do to a girl like that, and you - “I’m sorry. I didn’t - fuck, baby. I’m sorry.”

Karina blinks up at you, expression placid and blank, porcelain-doll cool.

“For what?” she asks.

You freeze, her face still between your palms. “For-”

But the serene tilt of her mouth makes the words die in your throat.

“Seriously.” Karina’s voice is softer now, a kind twist of mirth. “Isn’t that what you wanted to do with me this whole time?”

Her features seem to fall out of alignment, occurring to you in cut, edited fragments - the baby-animal eyes, the bone-white glint of teeth, the pretty blooming flush of her cheek, blood rising underneath skin but never breaking through. No evidence of a limit breached; she doesn’t wince or wail or cry. She wears the hit so well. She’s smiling. A you-don’t-need-to-be-sorry smile, a you’re-forgiven smile: I’m strong, I’m good, I can take it. Whatever you need. Whatever you have to give.

You blink and Karina reassembles, stitched up at the seams, beautiful and uninjured and intact.

“You want this,” you exhale, a wondrous revelation.

“Of course.” Karina’s shoulders rise as much as they can with her arms so tightly tied back. “You do, don’t you?”

The panic recedes, and something else - something electric and brutal, visceral, intoxicating - takes its place instead.

It’s the way she says it: rhetorical, all-knowing. As if she’s seen exactly what’s in your mind - what repulsive daydreams have settled right behind your ribcage, clawing to be set free - and she’s offering her own body in sacrifice. Saying here, put them here.

So you do.

She doesn’t even look surprised when you slap her again.

“See?” Karina’s chin tips upwards in delicious, submissive invitation: eyes darkly pleased, pale skin a burning wildfire, curled mouth a beckoning. Like it’s been what she’s waiting for, all along. “There you are.”

And when you’re finally able to catch your breath:

Oh, you think, in some exhilarating epiphany. Here I am.

Every single reservation falls out the window. Karina’s smirk slants viciously and then you’ve got your hands all over her, on her shoulders and her tits and her hips and her throat and her face, thumb digging hard into her cheekbone. Any sort of gentle caution is gone when you’re getting on top of her and burying your cock deep inside the suffocating vice of her aching little cunt, half-drunk on the high mewling moans you’re forcing out of her, head swimming at the drenched audible sound of her pussy every time you fuck into her - at how tight she clenches down around your cock. Fuck it all, then, it’s not like it means anything - hurt me, she’d said, running through your head on loop; I want it so bad, I need it, hurt me - and so you do, wrapping a hand around her delicate neck and pressing down, slapping hard against her heaving tits, salivating over the marks that you leave. She doesn’t even struggle. Takes it like a good girl, an obedient girl: something meant to be hit and torn up and pulled apart. A hands-on art piece. A disassembling, made purely for audience consumption; a sign hung around her neck that says leave your mark, that’s the point. You’d been so naïve, thinking of being careful with her - like she’d ever even fucking want that-

“You like it like this.” Your voice sounds raw, almost unrecognizable; your fingers press into the base of her throat. “This is all you needed, huh? You just needed to be roughed up real hard.” Your hand trails up to grip a fistful of her hair, merciless. Karina shuts her eyes. “Like you’re just a slutty fucktoy-”

Karina chokes out a small, wet gasp.

“Oh, baby.” You yank harder at her hair. “It’s okay to admit it.”

But in a way, she already is. Doesn’t fight against the restraints tying her wrists, doesn’t flinch at how rough you’re fucking her, doesn’t whine or blink back tears at the harsh graze of your thumbnail against her nipple. Like she’s a plaything, here in your bed for your pleasure alone. Like-

“Like you were just fucking made for this, yeah?” She comes undone so easily: cunt a wet sticky mess when you reach down to rub her clit, teeth pearly-white where they’re caught on her bottom lip - though nothing can hold back the anguished noise Karina lets out at your pace, the thick stretch of your cock, your palm smacking at her tits over and over. “Look at you. That face, these tits, this little fucking cunt-”

Like it’s her one and only purpose - to have all her fair skin turned searing red and bruised under someone else’s hands. Her cunt just begging to be split open and stuffed full, railed so hard she could break. It’s gotta be what she was created for. She’s more than mortal, so above the concept of imperfection; a nasty little fuckdoll of a girl, meant to be used hard and licked clean. She looks too irresistible all fucked-out and ruined. It has to be in her nature. Made for this, you keep telling her: to be fucked until she can’t walk. To be treated forever how you’re treating her now.

Your ex-girlfriend couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s not about power or control at all.

“You’d really just let me do anything to you, huh?” you murmur, awed, but you’re holding her throat too hard for her to reply.

You fuck her, and fuck her, and fuck her. Rub at her clit until she clamps down and cums around you, until you can really get on top of her, force her to hold those huge tits together so you can fuck them. You can’t handle how tiny she is underneath you, her face and her mouth slack with lust, eyes glazed over entirely. She squeezes her tits around your cock. She’s hardly even human. It’s the best thing about her.

“That’s how I know you’re a fucking whore.” Your grin feels wide and manic on your face. You’re gonna cum all over her - again. “None of this even matters.”

And it’s only after - after you’ve painted her collarbone and chest creamy white and let up on her throat so she can fight for air; after you’ve groped her tits and grabbed her face after just to see your cum glistening all over her perfect slap-marred cheeks; after you’ve rolled off of her and you finally leave her alone - that Karina gives you a response.

“No,” she says, hoarsely, staring up at the ceiling. “It really, really doesn’t.”

Power just isn’t the right word for it. It’s something much more beautiful than that.

Desire. You’re dozing off, halfway in a sleepy fantasy. You imagine rolling the word around in your mouth, using it in speeches, citing it as an obvious central theme. It’s about desire, you’d say, in interviews, at film festivals, patiently explaining your motivations to the masses. That irrational animal instinct. That innate human greediness. You’ll maybe even throw in some fun anecdote about how people in past relationships never agreed with you. It’s never been about power, though, you’d explain: how foolish, how crude. It’s about the ache of truly wanting something. Isn’t that so much more romantic?

So you’ll make a movie about this one day. So you tied Karina to the bed and slapped her hard and fucked her senseless. Actually, you picture yourself explaining, foggy and on verge of falling asleep: actually, it’s about hunger. Irrepressible, all-consuming hunger. That’s why I did this. That’s why I’ll keep doing it. You’re all like me; you get it. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

And it will, to raucous, riotous applause.

Good. You’ll laugh so hard. You’re dreaming, now; you can’t tell if you’re talking about the sex or the hypothetical future movie. I’m glad you understand. Anyone would’ve done what I did.

Because - honestly - what’s the point of starving yourself of something that’s right in front of you?

(Let’s pull back from your script for a second. Here’s a real story:

A few months back you were visiting a museum with one of your friends when you got into this conversation about performance art. He’d told you about a woman back in the seventies who walked into a gallery and laid out various objects and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her for six whole hours. Her as the artist, in title only; herself as the art. A free, untethered canvas.

And what happened? you asked, morbidly curious.

Your friend grimaced. What do you think happened?

It was a rhetorical question. The performance had been a test of what the general public was capable of - a reflection of their moral compass, of what they’d do if left unchecked. The setup spoke for itself. You didn’t have to get all the gory details in order to understand.

Seriously, though, your friend said, about the artist: I don’t know what’d compel someone to do something like that to themselves. He’d shaken his head, baffled. Like - I think it takes a deeply fucked up person to just give up their body like that. Like it doesn’t even matter to them.

It’s strange. It’s an almost universally accepted fact that, at least on some level, artists are inclined to put pieces of themselves into the things they create. A memory; a feeling. Condensing twenty different emotions into a single acrylic painting, or a lyrical reenactment of heartbreak into a song - something personal and unique and lovely. Often inspired, sure, but yours.

I think that’s what’s funny about it, you told your friend, before you realized that funny was a fucked up word to use here. There’s nothing personal about that. It’s so detached. It’s about the rest of the world, whatever they might make of her - it’s not about her at all.

You were both quiet, thinking. Visualizing what it might’ve been like. To be there, one of many in the audience, watching this woman who had thrown herself to the wolves and asked to be ripped apart.

She’s just - material for them to use, I guess, you said, after a moment. A blank page.

Removing her own identity; becoming nothing, no one. A ghost. An empty vessel. A slab of clay, taking on the impression of everyone who’s ever touched her: the ridges of fingerprints, the half-moon cuts of nails, molding her into something new. Even if it took some force. Even if it hurt.

Still, it’s what she’d asked for.

You can’t imagine she’d ever expected anything else.)

There’s this fascinating complaint people have about films these days, you’ve found. It’s actually quite the phenomenon. You talk to your colleagues and scroll through social media and read comments on movie trailers trying to get a grasp on it all: market research. This isn’t realistic, people gripe. It’d never sound like that. She’d never look like that. This would never, ever happen - God, are you kidding? Who are they trying to fool? As if they’ve somehow missed the point of fiction - of a sweet, escapist fantasy. As if they’ve convinced themselves that the real world is better.

Which is moronic, obviously.

“So what’s the solution?” Karina asks.

Well, you’re no expert; it’s been a while since you’d finished your last movie.

“But you have an idea,” Karina interpets. She’s perched on the edge of your coffee table, nursing a new glass of ice. She’s watching you with her head at an angle, eyes shrewd. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be telling me this.”

As with most of her guesses about you, she’s right.

“It’s all about the details,” you say, after a moment. “It humanizes a person. Having little bits and pieces about who they are - it makes them alive. Their likes, their dislikes. Embarrassing stories. Things that make them laugh. Diary entries, favorite foods - first loves, first heartbreaks. So on and so forth.” You’ve got one of Karina’s ankles between your hands; your thumb brushes against the bulbous protrusion of bone. “It’s what makes people real.”

Karina’s mouth twists, sharp and strange; it takes a second for you to realize that she’s grinning.

“Oh, right,” she says. “You want me to spill my guts to you.” She pushes her ankle further into your grip. Her legs are just like the rest of her: thin and pale, waifish. Like a nineties catwalk model. “That’s how you’re gonna make me real. In your movie.”

You pull a face, letting her ankle slip from your hands. Spill her guts; what an ugly figure of speech. As if you’re doing something much more invasive and violent than just writing about her.

“Basically,” you agree, anyway. “I mean, it helps that you’re already, you know - a real, whole, living person.”

“Ugh,” says Karina, dry and amused. “Barely.”

You wonder if she’s also thinking about this morning; you, stunned and staring at her cum-streaked hair, calling her unreal.

She’s got a point, in a way. There’s something slightly uncanny about her sitting in front of you, as if she’s been taken straight out of some wildly different scene - some spotlit stage, some movie set, some glossy high-budget existence - and haphazardly edited into your life. You reach out and press two fingers to the side of her neck, like they do on television if they think someone’s bleeding out.

Karina tips her head to allow you access. Her pulse throbs hotly under your touch.

“I don’t know,” you say, smiling at the swanlike line of her throat. “You seem pretty alive to me.”

“Sure.” Her hair tickles your wrist. “But you want more.”

She says it like it’s this given - as if she’s always faced with people wanting more from her. You wouldn’t doubt it, little tease she is. You can picture her in motion so easily. Always running. Letting people pine and plead for more.

“Yeah,” you say. It seems pointless to lie to her. “I want more.”

Karina leans in closer. She reaches up and touches one of your knuckles with the pad of her thumb. Without makeup, you can see the shadows of dark circles underneath her eyes, but even those look painted-on, pre-planned; a study on the aesthetic allure of bruises. She lets her gaze drop to your mouth, then bites down on her bottom lip. Impish.

“Karina,” you say, grinning wider now.

It’s one of those unspoken things: the translation of body language, the transcription of the tilt of her mouth. Then have me, she’s saying, almost certainly - like a swooning melodramatic heroine, throwing herself into your lap, wanting to be saved. You want more? You want me? I’m right here. I’m yours.

“Fine,” Karina purrs, and kisses you again, like sealing a contract. “Take it all.”

You don’t fuck her again - not at first. There’s more than one way to take someone apart.

Karina says she’s got a story for you and then she pulls out her phone.

“This was back in high school,” she explains, scrolling back through her photo gallery. There don’t seem to be a lot of recent additions to it; you’d expected selfies, pictures of her with friends. There are more photos of food than anything: plates of pasta and donuts and burgers and pastries piled with whipped cream. It’s cute. It makes you laugh. “When I won prom queen.”

You splutter. “When you what?”

“What?” Karina gives you a bemused, sideways look. “Does that surprise you?”

It floors you, actually. At first you can’t quite put your finger on why, but then you look at Karina again - at her intense dark eyes and pouty fuckdoll lips and the exaggerated pinup proportions of her body - and you realize you’re making that mistake writers often do: buying into archetypes. It just makes sense that she’d be some kind of brooding bad girl. Mysterious, promiscuous; in your creative vision she’s probably cutting classes and chainsmoking in the girls’ bathroom. A favorite of the rumor mill. A pretty little delinquent.

“Wow.” Karina makes a funny noise in the back of her throat when you tell her this. “No. I was - I did fine in school. Perfect attendance, almost. And I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes.” But she doesn’t look offended, either; you imagine people make these assumptions about her all the time. “The prom queen thing - it wasn’t my idea, though. My best friend did all the campaigning for me.”

“That’s sweet.” You watch as she reaches the year she’s looking for. Flashes of her in a sparkly dress with her arms thrown around another girl - a tiny doe-eyed brunette - slide by. In one of them, Karina’s got her head tipped back, clearly mid-laugh; in another, she and the girl have their heads bent close together as if they’re trading secrets, unaware that they’re being photographed. “Well - I think it’s sweet.”

Karina’s fingers stall. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I’m just saying-” You shrug. “It’s a nice gesture if it’s something you wanted, I guess. Seems like a lot of attention, otherwise.”

“Oh.” There’s a pause. “Yeah. It was - I didn’t get to go to junior prom, so it was kind of - this was - senior year. Senior prom.” Another pause. “Yeah. She did it to make me happy.”

“And did it?” She passes by pictures that fill up with more people: friends with big grins who stick close to her side, wrapping her up in an embrace. “Make you happy?”

“Of course.” Karina’s thumb pauses on a video, the preview dark and unfocused. She says it like she doesn’t even have to think about it. “She was my best friend. She always knew what I wanted. Hey, look at this.”

The video’s of her in the back of someone’s car, prom queen tiara askew on her head, satiny sash falling off one shoulder. She’s yelling, laughing; the sound isn’t on, but her mouth’s wide open and her dark eyes are crinkled to half-moons, creased underneath heavy false lashes and glittery makeup that’s begun to smudge and fade. It makes her whole face look very soft. Young, too - cheeks full and flushed pink with excitement, hair blown-out and everywhere, glossed black. As if she’s having the time of her life.

“How old were you here?” you ask, in awe.

“Eighteen. Just turned, I think.”

“You look-” Like a baby, you almost want to say. It’s true, though. Big brown eyes, scrunched little nose - grinning like the rest of the world hasn’t quite dug its claws into her yet. Skin unmarred and infant-smooth. “You look pretty.”

Karina doesn’t look at you, but you can see the slight, entertained upturn of her lips. All the nasty things you’ve called her - all the irredeemable ways you’ve touched her - and now, inexplicably, you’re going for pretty.

“Thanks,” she says, and clicks the volume up.

“Shut the fuck up,” baby Karina is saying, delightedly. Her voice sounds high, childish and carefree. “You’re so dumb. It wasn’t - it wasn’t even like that, I swear!” She flaps one hand in the air, her nails all short and painted the same rich deep maroon as her dress. “No - you’re just saying that because you’re jealous, you idiot, I know you - you just-”

The person behind the camera says something that you can’t quite make out.

Baby Karina presses one hand to her sternum, pearl-clutching, and gasps.

“I would never,” she admonishes - over-the-top like an actress from a movie - before she throws her head back and laughs.

It’s a startling, wonderful laugh. A little-kid laugh. A mess of wild, unabashed giggles, hiccupy and sweet, so loud and infectious you can hear the other people in the car start cracking up with her; out of frame, someone reaches out to interlace their fingers with Karina’s, waving their joined hands until they smack against the car window and Karina only laughs harder. With her whole body, shoulders shaking and all. Streetlights flashing across her face, making her look sort of blurry and surreal, like something out of a painting.

“Your laugh,” you find yourself saying, stunned.

Karina’s touching the back of her neck, completely engrossed in the video. “My what?”

You don’t laugh like that anymore. That’s what you mean to say. That scratchy, almost painful laugh that she’s been gracing you with since the moment you met her - there’s no trace of that in how baby Karina wriggles with laughter in the backseat of the car until her happy, breathless blush spreads to her neck and her chest. Head tipping back against the seat, like she’s all tuckered out.

“Um,” you say, voice caught in your throat.

On the screen, her eyes fall shut, lashes fluttering so delicately.

You can’t do anything but stare. Brilliant, past-life, prom-queen Karina - grinning at nothing, and sleepy from a perfect night, and laughing as if she’ll exist as this version of herself forever. As if she just doesn’t know any better, yet.

“You,” you start to say, again-

Karina shuts her phone off, and turns.

And you’re about to say something - something about the gnawing, uncertain feeling you get when you watch this former self of hers. It’s on the tip of your tongue. You don’t laugh like that. Something happened to you. For a moment the whole image just seems off - like the way people make posthumous holograms of pop stars, superimpose faces of long-dead actors on stunt doubles. A kind of intense wrongness. A murmured, uncomfortable: that’s not really you, is it? It can’t be. I barely recognize her.

“What?” Karina asks. Her smile reveals her teeth. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Then reality hits you, all at once.

“Sorry.” Your hand finds her thigh. You laugh because you’re being ridiculous - how would you know who she really is, anyway? “I was just thinking - I don’t know. Never mind.”

She seems to take that at face value. You like that about her. How she seems to trust so easily - going home with you, winding up in your bed, staying when you ask her to stay. Giving you whatever you want: her body, her story.

“So,” you say, eventually. “I can put in my movie that you totally peaked in high school, huh?”

Karina snorts. “Yeah,” she says, playing along, and taps her dark phone screen with a clawed nail. “Say it was the last time I was happy.” She pulls a face, like the thought of it is just unspeakably pathetic. “That’s a tragedy if I’ve ever heard one.”

“Shakespearean,” you agree, and let her clamber into your lap. “It’s perfect.”

But you know she’s kidding. You’d like to think that you understand girls like her. They live in a different world than the rest of you - the kind of world where every person on earth looks at them and falls to their feet, falls madly in love. You’ll write about it one day; you’ll feel out the narrative for her, a curious exploration. That rose-tinted life she must flourish in, closed-off and flawless like a snow globe, her spinning and protected in the glass.

“Perfect,” echoes Karina, and kisses you - like she’s proving she really means it.

That’s the reality, here. That’s it. This is all there is.

Well, almost.

Karina lets you scroll through the rest of her photo gallery, front to back. You take the opportunity, because you’re greedy for as much as you can get.

There’s a lot of photos that are just her, funnily enough - selfies posed in front of the same full-length mirror, over and over again, clad in unholy outfits. Swimsuits, sports bras and little running shorts, lingerie: shit that makes your mouth water, eyes lingering, groaning out loud as she laughs at you. But it’s also her in faded old t-shirts, holding the hem up to expose her stomach. Body angled to the side in girlish sundresses. Hair pulled up, showing off her neck, her gorgeously sharp collarbone - in makeup or out of it, stare intensely focused and sultry.

“That’s hot,” you comment. “Self-obsessed as fuck, but hot.”

Karina smiles - her tiny private-joke smile - and doesn’t say anything at all.

There’s one video in particular that catches your eye. It’s recent, relatively - the date reads late December, last year. Less than a month ago. Christmastime. You click on it, curious.

Karina’s immediately recognizable in it, black hair winding past her shoulders, drowning in a large black sweatshirt. She’s smiling, but it looks sort of tense and tired - bags under her eyes, like she hasn’t slept in a while. She’s got both hands balled up into fists, held close and protective to her chest; her sharp chin rests on her pale knuckles. There’s a tiny smear of red across her mouth, lower lip bitten bloody.

“You just got here,” she says. She’s looking at something behind the camera. “The first thing you wanna do is hear me sing?” She laughs once, scratchy and hoarse. “Why are you even filming this?”

The answering strum of guitar strings, a pretty, perfect chord. An invitation, or a demand.

“You’re kidding.” Karina’s voice is flat.

Another chord - evidently not.

“Wow,” says Karina. Her smile, out of nowhere, goes very soft at the edges. “You just do this because you know I can’t say no to you.”

“What?” you ask Karina now, laughing. “Is this - what is this? Do you - are you really going to sing?”

And then - crazily enough - she does.

“Oh,” you say out loud, adoring, and Karina turns her face into your shoulder.

Her voice in the video is breathy, sweet. Shyly unpracticed, raspy from disuse, completely and utterly gorgeous; lids slipping shut and open again, laugh leaking into her melody line in lyrics about black eyes and kisses and wanting someone who’s just so, so bad for you. But what surprises you more than anything is the look that dawns on her blurry on-screen face - irises sparkling and smile bashful, hiding her mouth behind the sleeve of her sweatshirt, curled up with her knees to her chest. You see now that she’s wearing pajama pants, fuzzy and patterned with snowflakes.

She looks radiantly pretty. She looks vulnerable. And not even in a sweaty, satiated, filthy post-fuck kind of way - actually, genuinely vulnerable. Soft and wide-eyed and tender.

Suddenly, you just can’t tear your gaze away.

“Stop.”

The song’s over. On-screen Karina’s fully grinning now. Porcelain-fragile, but undeniably happy, too.

“I hate you,” she says. “Baby, I really do.”

“You love me,” says the person behind the camera. “You’ll love me for the rest of your life and you know it.”

And in the video - in vivid, fluid motion - Karina laughs.

Whole-hearted, lovely. Familiar. For a moment, you swear she’s still that girl sitting in the backseat of a car with her prom queen tiara on, giggling free and uninhibited, unhurt, untouched. A month ago - less than that, even - looking like she’s coming back to life.

That’s where the clip ends.

It doesn’t change anything, if you actually think about it. It’s just another version of reality. A Karina from a whole other universe, laughing like a child, and so, so far away from whoever she is now.

(Back between the lines of your script-

The stranger and the girl drink to get drunk and that’s about it. She reads the label of his wine; he makes fun of her for being a snob. She doesn’t really drink, she says at first, but he laughs like this is a challenge, and pours her a glass anyway. She flushes pink and fidgets around. She seems to shed hair like a cat and he thinks this is the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen, picking up thin black strands off of the arm of his couch, teasing her about girls and how they really like to leave their mark, huh?

Leave their mark, she repeats. There’s some trick of the lens here, some sort of strategic camera work - he’s in the forefront and she’s in the background, and she looks so much smaller than him. Why do you say that?

He still had his ex-girlfriend’s perfume in his cabinet. He probably still has some of her clothes in his closet. Not out of any particular emotional attachment, but sometimes this is just the way things are: when you spend years intertwining your whole existence with someone else’s, it’s hard to rid yourself of that connection. You’ve grown into each other’s spaces, tangling limbs and heart lines, putting down roots. It’s gonna take a little force to get them out.

They’re just so much, he says, gesticulating with his hands. And they affect everything in your life, like a fucking infection. And then it doesn’t work out, and you - he makes a wide, sweeping motion here, attempting to encompass the wreckage. You have to fix everything they broke. Purge them from your system and all that. It’s so fucked up.

It’s like this, he means to say - you love someone and then they leave you behind and you’re left staring at the blown-up decimated crater that used to be your life together. You love someone and they don’t love you back and all you have now is the debris.

They’re both drunk. There should be music here and there isn’t. It’s only eerie, too-still silence, suffocating the both of them with every passing second.

Well, she says, laughing, and takes another sip. You and I can agree on that, at least.)

It happens like this:

There’s a monologue you want to write.

You tell Karina this after you’re finally fucking her again, when she’s balanced on the edge of your glass coffee table with her legs spread and your mouth slick with her cum. Well - not after, technically. She’s between orgasms and you have your thumb on her clit, tracking the expression on her face, the split-second moment where she comes apart. It’s then when you realize so badly that you want to write some great speech for your heroine - something about the sweat beading on Karina’s midriff and her tits that you can’t stop touching and the jerky movements of her hips, trying to get your tongue back on her clit, panting and delightfully desperate. Something about desire.

“Desire,” repeats Karina, voice halfway into a raspy, worked-up moan.

“Yeah.” You’ve replaced your mouth with your fingers, fucking up into the obscene tight heat of her cunt. She’s trembling, dripping everywhere; she’s the very picture of what it means to want, probably. “But I just can’t figure it out.”

Karina laughs roughly, and then she cums.

“Is that funny?” you ask her, after, when you’re wiping your wet mouth with your wrist and she’s sucking on your glistening fingers, licking the taste of her own cunt off your skin. Her eyes big, lips all full and pink - slutty angel on her pedestal, perched above you. “Me writing about desire?”

Karina lets your fingers free with a loud pop. She’s still clutching your hand close to her mouth, thumb dragging through the sticky gleam of her spit. “No,” she says, eyes distant. “It just reminded me of something. There’s this Anne Carson quote, about men and desire…” She shakes her head. Presses her lips once to your fingertips in a small, startlingly sweet kiss. “It doesn’t matter. Tell me more.”

There isn’t much to tell, truthfully. Except that you’ve got this love for movie lines that are just so utterly quotable - things that make their way into the pop culture consciousness. That’s the kind of work you want to be doing: creating something that has an impact, something that’ll exist long after you’re gone. Everlasting. If you had to pull for an example, you’d say-

“You ever seen Closer?”

“Yeah.” Karina drops your elbow into her lap. “Oh, I get it. He tastes like you but sweeter. Lying’s the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off - et cetera.” She hums the melody line. “So you want an early 2000s pop-punk band to make a song about your movie? Ambitious.”

“More or less,” you say as she shimmies her shirt back down, hem falling back over her midriff. “But like I said, I’m kind of stuck.”

Karina rolls her neck. Her hair is everywhere, sweet-smelling; snapped-off strands decorate your table, looking like cracks in the glass.

“Any suggestions?” you ask, thumb skimming along the pale bruised inside of her thigh.

She smiles, mischievous. “Maybe.”

That’s how you both end up curled on your couch together with your laptop in front of you, Karina’s eyes glued to the movie playing on the screen, watching as the four main characters fuck and flirt and cheat on each other and scream at the top of their lungs. Melodramatic dialogue. How do you feel about him using your life? You’re lying; I’ve been you. This will hurt, which Karina laughs at - as if announcing the pain will make it better, playacting at exoneration.

It’s also - predictably - how you end up fucking again. You barely make it an hour in, and then-

“Hey.” Karina’s breath tickles your ear. She’s already seconds from climbing in your lap already; her thigh is hooked over yours, bare and inviting. “Are you inspired?”

You’re swallowing back a grin. “Sure.”

“Oh. Great.” She’s no actress herself, clearly. She couldn’t be subtle if she tried. “Do you wanna be more inspired?”

And - whatever. It’s a movie about sex. If anything, at least you’re sticking to the theme.

The dialogue plays in the background as Karina rocks her hips down on your lap - you can feel how wet she is again, like she never stops wanting to be fucked. You’re telling her something about how she’s the most insatiable girl you’ve ever met; the sound of the film saturates the room, setting the tone like it knows its purpose. How? How does it work? How do you do this to someone? This big, infidelity-ridden confrontation. Did you phone her? Beg her to come back? Asking him why he falls for another girl, getting this ridiculous answer - it’s because she doesn’t need me.

“Huh.” You smile into the curve of Karina’s neck, already palming her ass. “That one’s funny.”

“Is it funny?” Karina’s sharp jaw brushes against your cheekbone. Her eyes are so dark, shadowed by her long lashes. “I think it’s pretty realistic. People don’t like needy girls. It’s a burden to be loved so hard.” Her tongue darts across her teeth; her smile’s somewhat caustic. “Too much to handle, I guess.”

“What are you talking about?” This strikes you as fairly fucking ridiculous, too. “What men have you met who don’t like needy girls?”

Karina just laughs and leans in for another kiss.

It’s easy to let the rest of the film float away in the background, the lines coming disjointed, unconnected. A spoken-word soundtrack, tone perfuming the air: the angst and pain and eroticism seeping into your clothing. Once in a while you’ll pull back from kissing Karina’s neck or tits or mouth and see a thoughtful little quirk to her mouth. Like she’s genuinely listening, even as you’re taking off her shirt, slipping a hand back between her legs. Where will you go? Disappear. I can’t still see you - if I see you, I’ll never leave you. I amuse you, but I bore you.

“I bet you’ve never felt that,” you say, half into the silk of her hair.

Karina pauses. Her shirt’s on the floor; she’s gloriously naked on top of you. “Felt what?”

“I amuse you, but I bore you,” you recite. You already sound sort of fuck-drunk, far gone. “You’re the farthest thing from boring.”

Back in the movie, the female lead sobs into her fists. Karina studies you, fingertips grazing the nape of your neck. You try to imagine it - her as one of those heartsick heroines, crying herself to pieces, begging a man not to leave her - but you draw an utter blank. Some people just aren’t breakable in that way.

“You’d be surprised,” Karina says, after a moment. “People get bored of me all the time.”

“Oh, please.” Even when she’s the one top of you, you can’t help feeling so completely in control. It’s gotta be the look in her eyes, dying to be obedient. “I bet you have lots of ways of keeping guys interested in you.” You smack her ass hard just to make a mark. “I bet you let them fuck you however they want.”

“Exactly,” Karina agrees, without missing a beat. She moves in close until your noses bump together. Lets her voice go all smoky and suggestive. “Wherever they want, too.”

You open your mouth - probably about to say something very rude about what a dirty whore she is and how you should’ve realized it the second you saw her; I knew it, I know you - but then your hands slip lower and Karina presses her lips to yours and licks into your mouth, over your teeth, making you swallow your words. Filling you up until there’s nothing but her and the movie, playing on.

I think I’ll be happier with her.

You won’t. You’ll miss me. No one will ever love you as much as I do. Why isn’t love enough?

“Romantic, right?” murmurs Karina, sweet against your tongue.

“Shut up,” you say, and grab her by the hair, tugging her off your lap as you stand. “Bedroom. Now.”

Later, you’ll take the time to consider the different ways filmmakers illustrate a power dynamic - it’s playing on your laptop screen right now. The heroine’s sitting on the arm of the couch, clutching desperately at the hero’s jacket. Gorgeously emotional and pleading for another chance, her tiny chin tilted up, eyes so large and watery. Made fragile and fearful by everyone: the protagonist, the narrative, the director, the audience beyond. By herself, even. It’s a stylistic choice - she wants to look that pathetic.

And you-

Well, you’ve got Karina’s long hair wrapped up in your fist, tits bouncing as she stumbles to her feet, ankle knocking hard and horribly loud against the leg of your table. Cute little ass all red from your hand. Thighs shimmering from how drenched she is, cunt dripping from how you’ve treated her. She hasn’t managed to work her mouth into a trademark smirk fast enough: when she looks at you over her shoulder, her eyes are abyss-dark and bottomless, crease between her brows, lips parted in pained surprise.

The definition of pathetic, too - but that’s exactly the point. She’s just so much more fuckable like that.

“Ouch,” you say, touching her hurt ankle with the side of your foot.

“It’s fine.” Karina’s skin feels clammy and cold. Her smirk’s intact now, camera-ready. “I’ve been through worse.”

Her ankle throbs under the pressure of your touch; you still haven’t let up on her hair. You’ll go through worse, too, you think of telling her: a sly comment about how rough you’re about to fuck her, what vicious marks you’re about to leave. How you’re gonna hurt her exactly like she asked you to.

You don’t say a thing.

She must already know all of that, anyway.

So, Karina’s not breakable like the helpless, weepy, soft-hearted girls in the movies - but that’s alright. She’s breakable in much more enticing ways.

Case in point:

“Oh, get real, baby. Don’t pretend you don’t love it.”

Well, breaking someone down doesn’t really get better than this.

It’s all a scene of your own making, a perfect pre-arrangement. You on your bed, Karina limp and bent belly-down over your lap - you in control and Karina as the most impressive toy you’ve ever gotten your hands on, creamy ass and needy cunt and skin that turns bruises to artwork. You’re goading her and failing - trying to get her to just admit to what she is, what a filthy slut, what a nasty eager fuckdoll - but it’s hard to get a response when even breathing seems to be a chore for her right now. Every noise out of her mouth is nothing but a gasping, choked-out whimper. Her face is buried in her forearm, hidden. And through the shine of lube dribbling down your hand and her ass and into the sticky wetness of her cunt, you’ve got two fingers stretching out her little asshole - and you’re just getting started.

“I know you fucking need this.” Your other hand slides up her back, slips to tangle in her hair. “You’re just too good at it.” You pull hard, wrenching her head from the crook of her elbow. “Too good at being an obedient fucking whore for me, huh?”

Karina’s whole body stiffens when you fuck your fingers deeper, as if tugged taut on a string: the flex of her feet in the air, shoulder blades straining, neck craned back almost painfully. You pull harder. It’s a buzz at the base of your skull, live-wire thrilling: the knowledge that you can yank her into whatever position you want - fuck her anywhere, work her ass open with your cock, fill her up with cum - and she’s just going to have to take it. Like she’s this pliant, powerless thing. Like she’s yours.

Your self-satisfaction seeps right into your voice. “Answer me.”

You hear Karina gulp down a breath. “I,” Karina mumbles, but she can’t do anything but babble. “I - fuck-” All teeth-clenching nonsense; she shoots a baleful glance over her shoulder, desperation clawing its way into every word. “Please-”

Your fingers pause. “You want more?”

Her cheeks are splotchy and pink; you swear there are tears wobbling in those big dark eyes. The heavy arousal in your stomach turns to violent hunger, as though your mouth could start watering at any second. You can’t help it. The thought of seeing her cry is fucking exhilirating. “You - oh-”

“Answer me. You want my cock?” You’re waiting for the breaking point. “You want me to really fuck your ass?”

“Fuck-”

But that’s not a proper reply and Karina knows it, so she doesn’t protest when you pull your glistening fingers out of her and smack your palm hard across her ass. Once, then twice, and then you just don’t stop. She yelps like a hurt animal - trembles uncontrollably, her thighs and her shoulders and her quivering bottom lip - and makes a sound in the back of her throat that might be a sob, but she still lets you hit her: gives into the harsh crack of skin on skin, over and over again. Listens as you tell her that she deserves this, that she wanted this, that you’re making her into a good girl and this is what good girls get when they’re too cock-hungry to follow orders or answer a fucking question, you know that - you know I’m this rough for a reason. It should hurt. It’s so much more fun that way.

“I’ve been too fucking nice to you,” you mutter, teeth gritted in an effort to hide your grin - as if you even need to. It’s obvious how much you enjoy this. It’s the point. “That’s the problem with girls like you - you never learned your fucking place, huh? Never really been punished for anything?”

Karina mumbles out something unintelligible, slurring from her drooling mouth to the sheets.

“Yeah.” Your hand comes down again - she flinches just before her body goes slack. “That’s what I thought.”

And after you’ve spanked her so hard that her fair skin is ravaged and raised with goosebumps along the slope of her back - her whole body in revolt - you finally, finally stop.

Karina doesn’t budge except to breathe, and even that releases shallow, unsteady. You read it all in the shaky lift and fall of her thin shoulders, her hands in white-knuckled fists, her face pressed to your sheets and hidden - her hair coats everything, all ink, all words written but left unsaid. She shivers beneath your fingers. Her cunt’s dripping all over your lap. She’s a masterpiece. She’s a wreck.

You’re filled up with thick, swollen pride. “Karina.”

Karina. Your own personal creation, transformed under your touch. Might as well have your name carved into her, too. A brand right across her back, slicing through tissue, scarring to seal her fate - this is who you fucking belong to.

“Poor baby.” You follow the sharp ridges of her spine, tracking notches, keeping a tally: counting how many times you’ll hit her, how many days she’ll stay in your bed. How many movies she’ll let you make out of her, being your brilliant muse for decades. “It’s painful when you don’t listen to me, huh?”

But then - inexplicably - you think of her bruising ankle. Her twist of a smirk, detached and humorless. I’ve been through worse.

You’re abruptly glad you can’t see the look on her face.

“Come on, sweet girl.” You dig the heel of your palm into her lower back, half a warning. “Pull it together.”

Between the strands of glossy hair tumbling over Karina’s skin and your sheets, you spot a reddish mark on the back of her neck. Like the impression of a thumbprint, small and round. Blurry enough in the dim light that your brain starts conjuring up strange theories; an old wound, maybe. A birthmark or a burn, a childhood injury.

You graze her shoulder blades with your fingertips, exploratory. She feels so small draped over you like this, a tiny wet wisp of a girl. A doll.

She still hasn’t moved.

“Karina.”

Nothing.

“Karina,” you say again, suddenly uneasy. Your hand stops. “Are you-”

For a few terrible seconds, you can’t even hear her breathing.

But then Karina shifts. Slow, sensual, deliberate. Pushing herself up off your lap, arching her back, the slick pucker of her asshole obscene from where you fucked it open with your fingers. Her bruised knees dig into your mattress as she straightens up, and her gorgeous pale face seems to glow in the midday light - heavy dark eyes, bitten-pink mouth, black hair curtaining her cheeks like a frame to a portrait.

“You,” you start to say, feeling suddenly like you’re looking at her for the first time.

“I’m really sorry,” Karina murmurs.

She doesn’t look close to tears at all. She’s so unfazed, as if having her ass spanked punishingly raw is something that happens to a girl like her on the daily. A run-of-the-mill occurrence - a consequence of having a body like that, made to be brutalized. She’s already reaching towards the nightstand for the lube.

“I just wanted it so bad I couldn’t think straight,” Karina tells you, with erotic-film certainty - reciting all the lines that’ll make her seem the most insatiably slutty. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her lips form a pout; she leans down to press them to the tip of your cock, all sweet and demure, like she thinks she needs to convince you. Eyes flicking up at you through her thick lashes, molten-hot. “I should’ve listened.” It’s only a breath, warm and torturous. “I deserved that, I know.”

Your hand winds tight in her hair. You want to force your cock down her pretty throat, make her gag and choke over her simpering apologies, spitting up your cum until it trickles down her chin, her tits, her tummy. Both a game and a power play: prove how sorry you are.

Karina pulls back before you can, and holds up the lube.

“Babe,” she says, the term of endearment almost a singsong - a lilting reminder. “I thought you wanted to really fuck me now.”

“Uh-huh.” Her tits heave as she moves, crawling closer, offering herself up. “And I always get what I want, right?”

You feel drunk with power. You forget that this isn’t supposed to be about power. You watch as Karina coats her palm with lube and pumps your cock, her fingers slick and hot, her veins starkly blue at her delicate wrists. Expression delighted at how hard you are, pink little tongue poking out between her teeth - seduction down to an art form, meticulously calculated.

“With me?” Her smile burns. “Obviously.”

You pull her in by the neck to kiss the smirk off her mouth.

It’s interesting. There’s this other thing regular critics and moviegoers have been saying about films these days: sex scenes need to have a purpose. Some sort of coherent motivation. Strip your lead actress down to nothing and get her keening and moaning and you’ve got to explain it away somehow. It forwards the plot, you could insist, pitching it to producers and directors. It does something for the character dynamics. It’ll draw in just the right audience, the ones dying to see their favorite celebrity debauched and getting dirty on-screen - they’ll see it over and over just to get a taste. Isn’t that enough? To satisfy the masses? Isn’t that why we’re all here?

Because otherwise all people are staring at is a play at pornography: useless half-convincing make-believe. The heroine can writhe and whine and arch her back all she wants. Everyone knows she doesn’t feel anything.

“Tell me the truth.”

Oh, if you two were a movie - you don’t know how anyone could justify a sex scene quite like this.

It doesn’t matter what artsy angle you take. It all comes down to the same unforgivable details: Karina face-down ass-up on your bed, the perfect bowed curve of her spine, the depraved wide stretch of her asshole around your cock - the sweat shining along her shoulder blades, the hard smack of your palm against the red raw skin of her ass, your other hand at the crown of her skull with your fingers wrapped entirely in her tangled hair - her cunt fucking ruining your sheets, wet all the way down her thighs, each brutal shift of your hips sending her little body into full-blown shudders-

“Tell me that you fucking love it.” Your hand slips lower until you’ve got her pinned down by the back of the neck, fingers pushing down: a grip she couldn’t escape even if she wanted to. “Whoring out your slutty little ass like this for a stranger. Getting on your hands and knees for me just because you’re so fucking needy for cock, baby - don’t even try to deny it, you’re so wet, nasty fucking girl-”

You just can’t stop yourself. It’s so easy. She really is so fucking pathetic. Too fragile to get free - too easily manipulated and manhandled. Trembling and drenched and giving way as you make room inside her, forcing space. She’s just so tight - it’s godless, how you make your cock fit in her lube-slicked asshole, how she moans like a bona fide bitch in heat over it: needing faster, needing harder, needing more. Cheek pink and pressed hard to your mattress, sharp nails digging into the sheets rough enough to tear through the fabric. Giving herself up to be fucked cruelly and stupid and senseless.

Like she’s a real-

“Natural fucking cockslut, huh?”

Look, seriously - you can’t be held accountable for the things you say to her here.

Because when you say shit like you’d just let me do anything - like you’d let me fucking tie you up and keep you here forever, be an eager fucking cumdump for me whenever I want you, I know it, I know you - that’s just the moment talking. The circumstances. The pretty arch of her back and the drooling wetness of her cunt and the indecent tightness of her ass, conspiring to make you lose your mind mid-fuck - that’s the whole reason you even tell her any of it. You think you’re good for anything else? Right at her ear, your body covering hers, your cock buried deep. You’re not. Just made to get this slutty ass fucked open, and your mouth, and your cunt - this is all anyone’s ever gonna want from you and you know it - better get used to it now, baby. This is all you got. This is all you are.

It’s Karina’s fault, really. She just takes it - all of it. She doesn’t even try to fight it.

“But that’s okay,” you murmur, as she gasps and squirms and cries out like you’re killing her. “I’m still gonna make you cum.”

And with your cock filling her ass and your hand between her legs, slapping hard at her sopping cunt until she can’t do anything but collapse - shaking, shattered - her whimpers fucked-out and drool-soaked and bleeding into one big nonsensical mess, everything about her used and ruined-

“You’re mine,” you tell her, laughing as she falls apart. “You get that? You’re mine.”

-then, you do.

When it’s all over, Karina rolls over to face the wall, breathing hard. She’s slick everywhere, sweat and saliva and lube, your creamy cum dripping out of her well-fucked asshole and trickling down her thigh. You trace her lower back and grin at the way her skin seems to give into you, turning pink with a press of your fingertips. You’ve come to realize you adore her like this, the fugue state after you fuck her: utterly dead to the world.

Like she could become a permanent fixture in your bed. Too tired to move. Too tired to ever leave.

“Mine,” you say again, softer.

Karina doesn’t argue.

It’s basically all the confirmation you need.

So, really, if you two were a movie-

It goes like this: life can imitate art, too. It happens all the time. The line between fiction and reality blurs together until it’s indistinguishable - until you can’t tell where the fantasy ends, or if it ever did at all.

(It goes like this: the heroine smiles sleepily and tells the hero he’s the best she’s ever had. You’ve seen this film before. The movie stars with their fake on-screen fucks might not feel a damn thing, but at least it’s still fun to pretend.)

Also, the mark you saw on the back of her neck isn’t actually what you thought it was.

“It’s a tattoo,” you realize out loud, drowsily awed, brushing her hair away so you can get a better look. You’re both tuckered out, an inevitability when you fuck like you do; you’re seconds from dozing off. Karina’s looking away from you, on her side to escape the soreness of her ass, sheets loose across her chest. She lets you touch her wherever. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before.”

“You don’t know me,” mumbles Karina, half into your pillow. “It’s not your job to notice anything about me.”

The tattoo’s crimson-red, all delicate linework. It really does look like it hurts: like someone painstakingly cut the shape into her skin. It’s of a heart, rendered in anatomical detail - valves and ventricles and arteries. It’s beautiful, you realize belatedly. Bright instead of faded, and obviously cared for. Lovely.

The only permanent stain on her perfect body. You press your thumb against the ink, fascinated.

“What does it mean?” you ask, but Karina’s already fallen asleep.

(In your script, the girl and the stranger watch some gory crime show, except they don’t pay very close attention and he tugs her into his lap and makes her ride his thigh. The episode they’ve got on is about a serial killer who murders so-called sinners - liars, adulterers, the like. Slaughters them like sacrifices, cutting their throats with vicious efficiency. Fake blood drenches the screen with every crime scene: a form of fucked-up baptism, a psuedo-religious cleansing.

The girl’s putting on an equally decent show on top of the stranger: head thrown back, eyelids fluttering, high-pitched little moans. He sinks his teeth into her shoulder and keeps watching the TV.

Hey, he says, a murmur against her skin, a close-up on his mouth. You’re a sinner, right?

She’s got her hands on his shoulders, hips rolling. Sure am.

How do you think this guy would kill you?

He thinks this’ll shock her, but she doesn’t even pause. Like he kills all the rest, she says. Like an animal.

I think he’d be more careful with you, the stranger muses. You’re too gorgeous. He’d have to use, like - a scalpel, or something. Something cleaner. Something that’d keep you intact.

It’s no use. Nothing he says seems to scare her. Her eyes are far-off, almost glazed in recollection. Like she’s thought about it too - her own untimely end. Her own vivisection, skin flayed and organs visible, viscera and bone. There, hold the shot: now the audience can consider it with her, ponder all the ways she could be torn apart, all the repulsive things they could do with her desiccated body. All the ways flesh can warp under a human touch: the blue-black yellow-green purpling of bruises, a whole palette on one tiny girl. There’s value in that, isn’t there? There’s something intimately, incomparably beautiful in suffering. There’s art.

Isn’t that why everyone’s watching?

I get it, the girl says, still soaking his thigh, smiling as if it’s an inside joke between them. You want me dead. That’s been obvious since the moment you met me.

I don’t want you dead, he says, and grabs her by the jaw. I just want to fuck you.

Okay, she says, uncaring, like there’s barely a difference. Fine. Whatever you want.

They don’t turn the TV off. They let the characters scream and bleed out in the background; he fucks her like she’s got a death wish. It’s funny - he expects her to get louder the harder he fucks her, ruthlessly working over the tight clench of her cunt - but she keeps getting less and less responsive, as if he’s pushing her little body into some sort of trance: expression vacant and blank, body limp and lifeless, mouth open and speechless. It makes him angry. Give me something, he’s saying, frustrated, clawing at her hair: baby, it’s not fair, it’s no fun like this. The on-screen shrieks aren’t enough - he wants it from her. Actually, he keeps saying he needs it - as if fulfilling desire is on the same level as food or air, as if he’ll drop dead in seconds if he doesn’t get her sobbing. He gets his overlarge hands on her face and starts contorting it, pushing her mouth open, her eyes wider, his fingers down her throat until she spits and gags and chokes. Oh, the audience will love this one: it’s reminiscent of those filthy exploitation films with their cult followings, so cleverly referential. Look at her pathetic and pinned down. Look at her helpless and struggling. Think of your favorite on-screen murder scenes, and then think of this.

Anything I want, the stranger reminds her, yanking back her hair as she drools down his wrist. You asked for this, didn’t you? You said anything I want.

Except now the girl can’t say anything at all.

This moment will start rumors, invite horrified scandal the same way some purposefully marketed horror movies are passed off as snuff films - that really went down, they really died like that. This scene’ll get a similar response. Did he actually fuck her? Did he actually hurt her? Did everyone - the writer, the director, the crew, the captive audience - actually just stand by and let that happen?

Sure. Or she might just be a really, really good actress.

There. The stranger’s murmuring to her now, watching her manufactured expression, watching the tears fill her eyes. There you go. There’s my girl. And she is his, she really is - transformed into something all beautiful and new under his clumsy fingertips, molded right into art. The camera will zoom in close on her gorgeous, cadaverous face, a perverse little gift for the audience: here, have this, take a look. She’s all yours now.

There’s something to be said here about the manmade link between sex and violence - inescapable, brutal, primeval; bodies in all shades of red - but he forgets it the second he touches her, and she’s being fucked too hard to remember.

Maybe they’ll get to it next time.)

AND WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!!!!! <33333

all my luv ever to @capslocked @worldsover @passingnotions @braaan for beta reading my dumbass shenanigans and also for being the best ever I LOVE U!!!!!! AND ANYONE WHO IS READING THIS I LOVE YALL TOO.................. PART 2 COMING SOON!!!!!!!!!!!

#kpop smut #kpop fanfiction #kpop fanfic #idol x reader #idol x male reader #reader insert #karina smut #karina fanfic #aespa karina smut

2K notes · View notes

screeching-bunny · 1 year

Note

Part 2 on the Yandere supernatural heram please.

Yandere! Supernatural Harem pt.2

Warnings: Obsessive Behavior, Yandere Thoughts, Bad Writing, Stalking, Possessive Behavior, Reader is Referred as ‘You’

Pt.1

Your first ever viable memory was of a supernatural creature. At the young age of three, you encountered an extremely tall woman with long black hair dressed in a white dress. Looking back at the memory, she ended up turning out to be an urban legend called Hachishakusama. The eight feet tall women loomed down over you and followed you wherever you went. Everytime she was nearby you could hear her utter the sound “po” over and over again. Anytime you brought this up to your parents they would just brush it off as you being imaginative and thought that you made an imaginary friend. “Would your friend like to join us for dinner tonight?” Never, would they actually take your comments.

It wasn’t until you got tired of her appearance did you actually start to confront her. With your limited variety of vocabulary and baby voice, you spring out the sentence of “Why you follow me?” Only to be met with silence as you stomp your little feet on the ground. Geez how rude of her didn’t she hear that you asked a question?

Suddenly, the woman reaches her arms out to grab you. The grip of her hug was strong and firm. You were barely able to move around that much. Your tiny little brain panicked as you struggled to get free. It was the first time that you’ve ever experienced real fear. Soon, the woman opened her mouth and said, “Won’t you come home with me child. I’ll make sure to take care of you and treat you better than your biological parents.” You didn’t get a chance to respond before your mother burst into your room and screamed.

After that incident your parents took you to a Buddhist temple so that you could be dispelled from evil spirits or entities. This however, never really worked because some form of shape or another they just kept on crawling back. When your parents thought that you were safe you were finally able to leave the temple. Your parents wanted you to be extra safe so they decided to move out of the house and buy a new one. Thankfully, due to this incident they were more aware and took your concerns about others very seriously from then on.

Another vivid memory that you could recall was when you were at the age of eight. It was at the time when your new neighbors moved into the house next to yours. Your father wanted to greet your new neighbors and took you along with him. You remember waiting on their doorstep as your father knocks on the door. A few minutes pass and he knocks again. “Maybe they're not home, let’s come back later.” Just then the door swings open and out comes a tall blonde man. “Hi, we’re your new neighbors. We just came by to greet you and welcome you to our neighborhood.” The blonde man stared for a second before saying, “Thanks so much for that and your formalities. You have such a cute kid. I have two twin boys about their age, do you think they could play together?”

Just like that you were in the neighbor’s yard with his two twin sons. They were definitely an odd bunch with long bangs covering your eyes. Even though you couldn’t see them, you could feel their eyes following your form. As time went on hanging around them wasn’t that bad; they were very nice to be around and listen to basically everything you said. The only problem was that they were overly clingy, everywhere you were they just had to be as well. Another red flag was that they would never allow you to see their eyes no matter how much you pleaded and pestered, they would never allow you to see their eyes.

By the time that you were in the fifth grade, you three were inseparable best friends. During your time with them however, students at your elementary school started to go missing more frequently. An incident that you could remember was when you told the twins that you liked some kid and were planning to confess soon. A few weeks later your crush was missing and a community search was sent out. No matter how hard everyone looked no one could find them, it was almost as if they had disappeared out of thin air.

As the years went on more creatures showed up to you but they seemed to be intercepted by some weird force. You made sure to keep this a secret from everyone but your parents. It wasn’t until your senior year of high school that you found out the truth about your two best friends. One day, you just got so curious about what their eyes looked like that you peaked at one of the twin’s eyes when he was his face. His eyes were pitch black and darker than charcoal. Even though you didn’t know it at the time, they were called black eyed children.

Safe to say, you were extremely creeped out by this discovery but were even more creeped out that they were planning on kidnapping you to some faraway place. Yeah heck no, so on the day of graduation, you decided to run away from home to get away from them. You then wrote a letter to your family basically saying, “Yeah, so my childhood friends aren't actually human and it’s best I leave before anything happens to you or me peace out, xoxo your child.”

Leaving home was pretty rough for you. You’ve never felt so alone before in your entire life and to top it all off you were a newly fresh adult. Making it into an adult transition was difficult and confusing but you somehow managed with that.

Blasting into the future now, you were in quite a predicament. Waking up with your limbs tied to a bedpost was not your ideal way of starting your morning but hey at least your kidnapper didn’t you hard rope. Instead, it was a really thick ribbon and lace that bonded your arms. Your eyes start to adjust to the light as your vision starts to get clearer you notice that most of the furniture is Victorian styled. Soon you hear footsteps reach to the and it starts to open.

“My love, it seems that you're finally awake. Oh how I’ve dreamed of this moment, I can’t believe that this is real.” Wow this was totally not creepy whatsoever. Taking in his appearance you notice his sharp fangs and long glistening hair. Yeah he is definitely a vampire, this is so annoying you really did not feel like being a blood bag right now.

“Can you please untie me? I promise not to run away.” Before you could get a response from him, the ground suddenly started to shake, and you could feel your arms being freed. As you get up to run from your captor, you feel the arms of someone grabbing your waist. In a blink of an eye, you feel someone lift you up and fly you away from the vampire. “GOD DAMN IT, NOT THIS AGAIN.”

#yandere #yandere headcanons #yandere imagines #yandere x y/n #yandere x you #yandere scenarios #yandere harem #yandere x darling #yandere x reader #gn reader

3K notes · View notes

norrizzandpia · 8 months

Note

can we get pt 2 of 34+35 where yn releases nonsense or positions, everyone is more confused because are we talking about the same guy?? in response all yn does is mention his thighs 💀💀

YES MAAM OFC I LOVE THIS STORYLINE

WHO IS OSCAR PIASTRI? (OP81)

Summary: Oscar and Y/n always loved to mess with the fans. Fortunately, the best way to do that is spill their sex life.

Warnings: sexual conversations, language

Note: THE THIGHS 😫😫😫😫😫 SO MANY WORDS NOT ENOUGH TIME 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

ynnn Nonsense out now! 💋

Comments:

osc81fan I- WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

piaosc ARE WE SURE ALL OF US ARE TALKING ABT THE CORRECT MAN?

- mclarenpiaandlan YEAH WTF HOW IS THIS OSCAR

mclarensgirlll SHE DID THIS LAST TIME AND WE NEVER RECOVERED

- landonorris ILL NEVER RECOVER.

oscarpiastri ITS ABOUT MEEEEEEEE 🤭🤭

- danielricciardo we are aware.

- maxverstappen i think youve said that enough

- charlesleclerc YOURE SUPPOSED TO BE LITTLE OSCAR 😰😰😰

- ynnn definitely not LITTLE oscar 😏

- alexalbon STOP.

——

ynnn maybe i lied? Lookin’ at him doesn’t have me thinkin’ nonsense, it has me thinkin…

Comments:

oscarpiastri my girlfriend everyone 😀

- mclarensgirlll hes probably giggling at his phone at this very moment

- landonorris and youd be right!

maxverstappen IM SO SCARED FOR MY LIFE

- danielricciardo WE CANT ESCAPE IT

- alexalbon HE PLAYS THE SONGS EVERYWHERE

- landonorris IT NEVER ENDS.

ln4andop81 anyone else curious abt what shes going to say on that podcast next week where theyre infamous for asking abt sex????

- oscpastry i bet you oscar will forever be changed for us

- mclarensgirlll he already is 🥲

——

TWITTER

ln4andop81 IN HONOR OF 24 HOURS BEFORE Y/NS PODCAST EPISODE, DROP THE MOST SHOCKING LYRICS FROM NONSENSE DOWN BELOW

- oscpastry “you said you like my eyes and you like the make em roll” SOOOO BASICALLY WHEN WERE THOSE WORDS FALLING FROM OUR BABY’S LIPS????

- mclarenpiaandlan REAL BECAUSE HOW DOES HE EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS 😭😭

- mclarensgirlll I THINK THE LYRIC “opposite of soft” LET US KNOW HE IS WAYYYY MORE EXPERIENCED THAN WE THOUGHT

- piaosc DOM OSCAR????? FUCKING HOW. IN. WHAT. WORLD.

- ynnn this world! 💋

- piaosc IS THIS SOME SORT OF GAME???

- mclarenpiaandlan THE PATTERN IS PATTERNING

- mclarensgirlll ITS SO ICONIC MY BRAIN CANT HANDLE IT

——

TWITTER

ln4andop81 hows everyone doing after that podcast….

- mclarensgirlll “WHO IS OSCAR PIASTRI?” trending on twitter makes me feel less alone after listening to Y/n’s tell all

- mclarenpiaandlan host: “whats your favorite body part of oscar’s?” Y/n: “his thighs” BY THEN I ALREADY KNEW WHAT WAS COMING BUT THE HOST HAD TO KEEP GOING host: *giggling* “why?” Y/n: “10 out of 10 for riding” I THINK MY BRAIN WENT DEAD FOR A SEC

- piaosc GIRLY KEPT GOING TOO host: “did you ask or, like, how did that come about?” Y/n: “well, he was just kind of sitting there, manspread ya know, and he caught on the minute he saw the way i was looking at him. Ive never see him so excited before.” *laughing* “i think he enjoys it more than me!”

- ln4andop81 no words. Host: “so he knows you like his thighs?” Y/n: “Oh my god, yeah! I hate him for it but he purposefully wears his shortest pair of shorts around the house so when he sits, that’s all I see. I’m telling you, Oscar knows how much I love his body and he knows EXACTLY how to use it.” Host: “what do you mean?” Y/n: “just that the shirtless photo i posted of him is one of many and the rest of them could not be up on the internet for longer than 5 seconds before being taken down because they’re borderline all pornographic” OSCAR???? BABY BOY??? WHO ARE YOU.

- mclarensgirlll BRO AND THEN host: “your new song, Nonsense, mentions things being more rough than soft. Is that really true with him?” Y/n: “Are you kidding?! The fans who think he’s super innocent and pure are in for some serious whiplash when i say that he is anything but that. He’s not Oscar when we’re in bed. He’s some alter ego who has no problem fucking against a random wall.” UHHHHHHHHHHH RUE WHEN WAS THIS????

- oscarpiastri now THAT is one thing i wont be answering 😊

- ynnn knowing myself ill probably reveal it in some song in the future 🤦🏼‍♀️

- mclaren maybe try and hold off on that one plz bestie 😙

- landonorris ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^🙏🏻

- danielricciardo ^^

- alexalbon ^^^

- maxverstappen ^

- charlesleclerc ^^^^

3K notes · View notes

cherryc1nnam0n · 6 months

Text

She can't know | Ethan Landry x FEM!Reader

Summary: You had a crush on Ethan for the longest time but when he gets a "girlfriend" you can't help but lose faith, but, what if you didn't have to?

Cw: Cheating, mentions of masturbation, spit, breeding kink, unprotected sex, rough sex, p in v, oral (FEM receiving), doggy style, missionary, creampie

It had been a few weeks since you saw Ethan and his new girlfriend hanging around, being all lovey dovey and dripping honey everywhere they were

It made you a bit jealous since you liked Ethan for the longest time and he decided to go for your friend who was new at school and not you, or so that's what you thought

He was still your friend, so you would hug him and hold his hand, well, he would hold your hand and lock eyes with you, those beautiful eyes that could basically read your mind

His touches would always linger, soft, almost like they were not there, his hugs would come with his hands holding your waist or lower back and him looking into your eyes was always a thing

You were tired of it, because everytime he touched you like this you went home to masturbate to him and his touches and his beautiful eyes

You had enough of it, but didn't know how to confront him so you just let it go, it was until he came over to your house to study together and he finally said what you never thought you'd hear

"I wanna fuck you so bad"

So know you were getting eaten out by him, his mouth sucking on your clit and your opening, almost sucking the life out of you

"Ethan! Fuck!" You grabbed his curls and pulled making him moan into your cunt "Oh fuck I'm gonna cum!"

He shook his head while sucking your clit, making you see stars as you came all over his face

"Oh fuck Ethan" he came up to kiss you while he took off his boxers, rubbing his tip all along your folds

"We fucked, and it was so good I swear to God" you remembered your friend telling you about when she had sex with Ethan for the first time "He literally made me cum so hard it was insane!" You also remembered you got off to that description

His dick breaching you was what pulled you out of your thoughts, making you moan into his mouth, his eyes rolling back into his skull

"Fuck so tight, you ever been fucked baby?" You nodded, totally cock drunk already "Not as good as I will"

He started to thrust roughly into you, holding your right left onto his shoulder licking your ankle as he did so

"Oh fuck Ethan!" You moaned, arching your back as he touched your g spot with every thrust, boobs jiggling with his movements "Please, harder, please" your begging made him almost cum

"Fuck baby, as you wish" he said starting to pound you harder into the mattress

"She can't know about this, okay?" He said before taking your clothes off and kissing you and then your neck "She's a good girlfriend, but gosh you're so sexy I need to have you, I might leave her for you"

You were so close to cumming when he suddenly pulled out and manhandled you into your knees, you arched your back like a cat for him, showing your abused pussy to him

"Fuck" he spread you ass cheeks spitting onto your pussy, then he thrusted back into you "Gonna fucking breed you baby" he said going back to his rough fucking "Gonna make you mine, make everyone know I fucked you while I have a girlfriend, fuck- Yeah you'd like that wouldn't you? Being all round and pregnant for me? Huh?"

You could only moan and look back to him to catch a glance of the faces he was pulling off while enjoying your warmth and wetness

"Gonna cum Ethan, fuck I'm cumming!" You said before your cunt clenched around him so hard he lost air

With some final sloppy and rough thrusts he came inside you with a loud moan, stilling so he could paint your walls with his cum, it spilling out from how much it was

"Fuck..." He said out of breath, both of you coming down from your highs "I meant what I said by the way" he said kissing your shoulder "Your pussy is tighter"

#ethan landry smut #ethan landry #ethan landry x reader #ethan landry x you #ethan landry x y/n #ethan landry x female reader #ethan Landry ghostface #scream 6 #scream vi

1K notes · View notes

ecrivainsolitaire · 3 months

Text

Humans have the capability of perceiving when they're being stared at, even if they can't see it.

Dr. T'Chem was staring at Lieutenant /θkɡɾɑːˈŋæ/ (or as his current fling affectionately nicknamed her, "Tucker-Annie"), whose dorsal spikes were still rattling after the incident at the holodeck. It was his first time at the witness stand, and he didn't want to ruin a young star sailor's life.

Lieutenant Tucker-Annie was the combat specialist in charge of the training dojo of Federation Vessel TSN457, named after the Terra-Saturn-Ceres coalition where Dr. T'Chem currently served as the xenoanthropologist charged with facilitating human integration to the local Federation of Fraternal Planets and Satellites. The FFPS had the goal of finding planets with intelligent life to trade resources and technology, and due to their recent incorporation, local research vessels were fitted with diverse crews to acclimate everyone to each other's cultures and biological needs. Dr. T'Chem was the human expert in the ship, and was tasked with helping smooth over interpersonal relations among the crew.

The relations were, at that moment, as bumpy as Lt. Tucker-Annie's dorsal spike line.

An incident had occurred during a training exercise. The squad consisted of a Venusian, two Saturnians, three Ceresians, two monks from the Transcorporeal Temple of Robotic Ascension, and five Terrans (two humans, two dogs and a cybernetically enhanced cat). The exercise consisted of getting through a generic jungle scenario and, unbeknownst to the squad, avoiding a team of ninjas lead by Lt. Tucker-Annie trying to take them out one by one. It was supposed to test the way they would react to a surprise attack.

It was not supposed to reveal that humans could sense when they were being stalked.

Of course, any trained sailor would have an ingrained knowledge of potential threats and how to spot them. Look for the shadows that are too dark, listen for the spot air isn't blowing from, things like that. Basic things most people don't think about but that can be identified if you think about them.

This was not that.

"Something's watching us," said Crew Johnson, in that sloppy way only creatures with lips spoke.

"What do you mean? There's cameras everywhere, of course they're watching us," responded Crew Hessikh, slithering over the vines on a tree branch to cross a river. She grabbed the axe in Crew Johnson's belt with her telekinesis and took down a small tree to serve as a bridge.

"Crew Flufflepaws, could you please take a look?" Asked Crew Johnson, nervously looking around. Crew Flufflepaws got on the tree as well and scanned the terrain from above.

"I can't see anything, or smell anything. And my hearing isn't what it used to be. I'll stay on the lookout for—" a horrendous hiss interrupted the automatic translator's feed. Crew Flufflepaws' comm line cut off.

Hessikh and Johnson looked at each other. That was the strongest fighter of their team, gone. They knew it was a simulation, but it still gave them chills.

The rest of their crew mates were split into two different teams further along the path. Crew Fanning's voice came from the comm line.

"Johnson, Hessikh, are you okay? What happened to Flufflepaws?"

"We don't know, Johnson said something was watching us and it went to check, then we lost comms."

"I felt it too. I know this isn't that kind of exercise but I think— AAAHHH!"

Two blaster shots were heard, then a thud.

Lieutenant Tucker-Annie, who was watching Hessikh and Johnson from the mud pit behind the latter, had her tranquilizer dart ready. She got ready to shoot down Hessikh, but then heard a voice over the comm line.

"Code Lithium, we have a Code Lithium, we have to end the simulation, I just took down- I can't-" the breathing was sounding heavier and faster, too fast for a human.

"Fanning, calm down, remember your sutras. We need you focused, what happened?"

"I felt like I was being watched, so I turned around and saw this thing and it scared me and I jumped and I thought it was on stun mode and-"

"It's alright, we're calling it off. Captain, we have a Code Lithium! End the simulation now or- fuck, there it is again. Hessikh, do you see any heat sources?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary- why haven't they shot it down alre-"

The next thing Lieutenant Tucker-Annie remembered was the sound of a heel turn over the mud, followed by darkness.

Lt. Tucker-Annie woke up in the hospital bay, getting her tail regenerated by a robot nurse. She looked over and found her underling on the next bed, with a huge bandage on the side of his neck and a wing in a cast. Thankfully, he would be alright as soon as the stem cell bank was reprogrammed after her treatment.

The disciplinary board was called, an investigation was open, and both Crew Fanning and their captain were put on paid leave while the investigation was ongoing. Dr. T'Chem was called in as an expert after a review of the holodeck footage revealed there was no way Crew Fanning could have heard, seen or smelled the hidden sailor.

It was the first time in a while he hadn't helped himself to a glass of Venusian whiskey for breakfast. He really didn't want to mess this up.

"And would you care to explain how this is possible, Doctor?" Asked the prosecution, staring him down with an unnerving amount of eyes.

"I am as astounded as this court; our firm has been looking into Terran medical literature and we're still trying to figure out how it works; they don't even know, but they know it does happen, it's been documented for thousands of years. I have a hypothesis, but I don't know if it's even testable."

There was a murmur in the court. The judge asked him to elaborate.

"The way eyesight works is the light bounces off of opaque bodies and in its way it collides with the lenses in our corneas, which send it to the brain as electrical signals to be interpreted. The light that doesn't go into our eyes just bounces off our bodies and other opaque objects as well, the photons go everywhere and anywhere. This is the same for most species in this constellation, including humans. But even other Terran species don't have these abilities, as Crew Flufflepaws has testified."

A begrudging meow was heard from the audience.

"Order in the court, please. Dr. T'Chem, what do you suggest is the origin of this mysterious sense?"

The camera drones all hoovered around him. Dr. T'Chem straightened his fins and got close to the microphone.

"I believe it's possible that humans have a sense of touch so sensitive that they can feel the photons that don't bounce back. The ones that go into an eye instead of an opaque body. I think humans can actually feel in their skin when they are being watched."

There was an uproar in the crowd. His paramour, a dark skinned young human from the human settlement known as "Colombia", grabbed the religious symbol on her necklace and made a gesture with it he hadn't quite figured out yet.

The trial had to go on recess.

The implications were incalculable. Three dozen biologists from six different planets, including Terra, had emailed him before the end of the day to ask him to justify himself. Multiple human religious leaders took the chance to link it to demonic possession or moral evils. By the end of the week, four different labs were trying to figure out a way to double blind test shooting a photon cannon on a human's back and trying to get them to sense it.

But most importantly, the news made it outside of the Federation. The rumours about this new species that couldn't be stalked got so far, it ended up affecting the outcome of a border conflict with the Betelgeuse Libertarian Army on the Federation's favour.

Humans were terrifying.

If this is what they evolved to be, what was their planet like?

#Dr. T'Chem's Office #humans are space orcs #humanity fuck yeah #humans are space oddities #humans are deathworlders #open art guild

872 notes · View notes

harunovella · 3 days

Text

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ every thought I'm thinking of is you; t.f.

synopsis: you never knew your parents had this much worry when it came to your college life, hiring a bodyguard for you, you just never expected to fall in love this quickly… let alone, let him be your first... content: fem!reader, bodyguard!toji, age gap, older man/younger woman, one sided love, slight obsession, reader is a little bit dramatic but she wants what she wants and what she wants is toji, love confessions, guilt, loss of virginity, pwp, oral (f receiving), unprotected sex, aftercare (he is the king of after care ok), toji is a boob man, ambiguous/open ending, not beta read! note: okay but the concept of bodyguard!toji came to me a as a dream way before I wrote my leon fic where he basically becomes reader's guard... anyway, pls enjoy! I love dramatic endings, oops- title inspo (pls listen!)

Being a professional bodyguard meant being hired to protect those important, those who were wealthy. The array of politicians, actors, musicians—you name it—that hired him made his resume endless. However, this was a first. You were a first. Hired by a pair of rich folks to watch over their daughter who enjoyed her college years a little... too much.

Being careless was quite the understatement. Sure, you were doing fine academically, excelling in your classes to get one step closer to your degree... but that didn't stop you from having a full college life. Even if you weren't in a dorm. What, with the success of your parents, you lived in a neighborhood near one of the country's most finest universities. There was no need to live on campus, you could stay home.

Which is why you were always out at the wee hours of the night, not returning home until the sun rose. That was dramatic, but that was how your parents felt. You stayed up late, partied, got home at an ungodly hour and yet managed to be booked and busy the following day. No one knew how you did it, you just said it was you enjoying your youth. You thanked the universe for being blessed with beauty and brains, you weren't sure how you'd survive the life you were living.

You just never expected your habits to be this concerning that you had to have someone watch over you like the others watched over your home and parents. You were used to bodyguards... but never one who almost always showed up everywhere you went.

Toji felt like a glorified babysitter, and if it wasn't for how much your parents paid him, he would've never taken the job. He took his role seriously, he was a bodyguard and that's exactly what he did, especially when his salary was high, he had no questions. Just to protect. Even if the job was anything but easy.

He had been through a lot in his career, the many death threats, nearly taking god knows how many bullets... the scars he's earned. Yet, nothing seemed harder than watching a young woman who wanted to live her life freely and carelessly. Especially a young woman who was nothing but a flirt and a tease. Wanting nothing more than to have his attention rather than ignore his existence.

You, of course, never expected your personal body guard to be the sexiest man alive. Through and through. From head to toe. The dark, fringed hair. Those piercing green eyes that looked as if god got the exact colors of spring grass and replicated them in his irises. The build of his body, bigger than any man you had ever seen... so burly and strong. Arms so thick, muscles so wide. He was so broad, it made you salivate. You never liked men that were overly large. However, Toji? He was on another level. You wanted him. You needed him. No man ever made your mouth water or your body tingle the way this man did. All he did was watch after you, drag you home, and literally put you in your place. With the most indifferent expressions ever, almost never showing emotion even if there was a hint of annoyance in his tone when he scolded you.

Yet, you looked up at him with hearts in your eyes, his words entering one ear and exiting the other as you gazed up at him. Your focus would settle on the scar that decorated his lips, you licking your own as you itched to kiss him. He had no clue the power he had on you. You were love drunk, completely smitten, he was the man of your dreams. As pathetic as it sounded, you wanted to even marry him. He could yell at you all he wanted, saying how you worry your parents and that he isn't your babysitter, but you'd still gaze up at him with the most loving eyes.

Toji didn't know what he was going to do with you.

It's probably what got him in this situation in the first place.

He had stepped out to get some fresh air, processing the events that unraveled before him moments prior. Gathering his thoughts, trying to understand his feelings... trying to manage through all that had been going on that lead to this. He wasn't gone for long, just took a walk around the neighborhood to ease himself... he didn't expect to come back to your home with you completely missing.

He called your name several times, searching every inch of the house once he found your window open in hopes it was all a ploy. You were an actress, quite the attention seeker when it came to him. You lived to make his heart race and play with his head. You enjoyed the cat and mouse chase, but something told him this wasn't that. This wasn't a joke. This was serious. And he hated it.

"Cmon, answer me..." he grumbled, calling your cell phone, only to hear ringing coming from your bed. Shoving some of your pillows and plushies around, he growled. You left your phone behind. Did you actually leave out the window? It wasn't the first time... but you never left your phone behind.

Rubbing his forehead, pinching the bridge of his nose and huffing, Toji recalled the events that lead to this very moment.

Your parents had been out of town for the weekend and you invited some of your friends over, sneakily stealing from their stash of liquor that wasn't so hidden. It was meant for gatherings or when either of them needed to lay back and relax. Your mother's best wine stacked up, your father's favorite whiskeys shelved. You couldn't recall how much you had consumed when Toji found you, kicking your friends out before handling you.

You were a bit of a klutz while tipsy, a clingy mess who couldn't seem to let go of Toji. Like a leach, latching onto him and giggling. Hiccuping as you slurred your words. You were quite the lightweight—or at least drank a little too much. Toji had dealt with a drunken you before, always handling you to make sure you didn't go home like this. He was your savior, quite the massive angel when he sobered you up enough to avoid your parent's disappointment and wrath. Another reason why you fell so hard for him.

Personal space wasn't a thing for you, you were all over him, hugging his arm, squeezing his bicep. Batting your lashes up to him, pressing your breasts against his side while dressed in that cute outfit that you'd sleep in. You had hoped to have your friends sleep over, but that didn't work out when Toji dismissed them. They were all used to him and never questioned him. Slightly annoyed, but they'd never cross a man like him. He was big and terrifying (and they knew you were head over heels for him).

It took everything in his power to keep things civil, asking you how much you had, trying to keep you from doing something you'd regret. However, that didn't stop you from pushing. You were persistent. You wanted what you wanted, and when you zeroed in on something, you'd stop at nothing.

Settling you down and giving you water, making sure you chugged it all as he went through his usual routine to get you sober, you just sat there, happily. Gazing up at him and beaming with the brightest smile, you thanked him for caring for you. Going as far as calling him a true gentleman. He knew what you were doing, it was nothing new. Sighing and running his hand through his hair, he took your hand and pulled you up to your feet, leading you to your bedroom to get some rest.

"Get some sleep, you need it," he said but you only whined.

"I'm not tired," you frowned, shaking your head stubbornly and crossing your arms like a child.

"You need to," he said sternly.

"Nuh uh! Not unless you join me," you grinned but Toji shook his head.

"No," he said your name in an almost warning tone.

"Why not?" You pouted once again. "Why are you so dismissive of my advancements, huh?"

"Because I'm a gentleman," he said, using your own words against you. This making your pout deepen as you huffed.

"I want you, Toji," you confessed, still frowning but looking away now.

"You're just a kid, you don't know what you want," he dismissed as you rolled your eyes. You've heard that plenty.

"I am not a kid, Toji. I know what I want and what I want is you." Without a second thought as Toji watched you stand on your bed, you grabbed the collar of his button down and tugged him in to you. Your lips slammed against his, not lasting any longer than a couple of seconds before Toji pushed you back.

He was in shock, heart racing and eyes wide with confusion. Not that he never saw it coming, but a part of him almost nearly didn't want you to stop. And that was dangerous. He couldn't even have an inkling of desire for you. You were his assignment. Nothing more, nothing less. You were a child compared to him. A young woman with her whole life ahead of her, barely in her 20s and kissing a man in his mid 30s. "Don't ever do that again," he warned as you blinked a few times, frowning and eyes watering. "Get some sleep, you're not thinking straight," he said before storming out, shutting your door a bit roughly behind him. Leaving you there hurt, confused, angry and heartbroken.

Snapping out of his thoughts at the not too distant memory that happened less than an hour prior, Toji cursed under his breath. He shouldn't have done any of that, shouldn't have handled the situation the way he had. Truth be told, he enjoyed your presence. He enjoyed your infatuation towards him. He liked that you were clingy and needy of his attention. It filled the void within him that he had struggled with for so long, using other women and gambling to cover it up. Who was he to have a girl like you by his side when he wasn't man enough? He wasn't the man for you. You deserved better. So much better. He wished you put the energy and effort you put into him, on to someone else. Someone more deserving. Someone more age appropriate. Not your bodyguard who was just a tamed assassin. A man who could kill and not feel an inkling of remorse.

Yet, here he was, blaming himself and chasing after you. He couldn't let anything happen to you. Couldn't let you get hurt. Not only would he lose his job and possibly his head, but he'd never forgive himself if something were to happen and he never saw you again. Wouldn't forgive himself if he never had the opportunity to clear the air. God, what were you doing to him? Never did he care this much about a client! Let alone, a woman!

You couldn't be too far, he came back right when it began to rain. If you were smart enough, you were hiding out somewhere to avoid him.

At least, he hoped.

Of course, you, in all your dramatic wisdom, were walking in the rain. Arms clutching to yourself, trembling at the cold and the lack of layers on. In nothing but your pajamas and slippers. You were being over the top, but your mind was so clouded. Not only by the alcohol, but the fact that the man you were madly in love with rejected you. Sees you as nothing more than a child when you weren't. Just because you liked to have fun in your youth. Why did you have to fall for him?

Crying as your head throbbed, barely able to focus on your surroundings, especially at a late hour like this one. You should've stayed home and just cried yourself to sleep. You were just so angry! You just wanted to leave and never see him again!

Suddenly, the sound of a booming voice shouting your name caught your attention. Looking over to see Toji exit his car and run after you, you quickened your pace. You wanted nothing to do with him, you didn't want to see his stupidly handsome face. You just wanted to be left alone, why couldn't he understand that?!

Yet, here you were, being chased by him. You knew you wouldn't get far, he was too skilled and you may have ran from him a few times in the past only to be snatched up each time. Of course, even with that lingering in your head, you still hoped maybe this time you could escape him. Even if all those other times you ran with the desire of him catching you. This time? You wanted to be as far away from him as possible.

Only to trip over uneven pavement. Lovely.

Grunting and whimpering from the sudden impact, you were ready to force yourself up and keep going, only for him to snatch you up.

"Are you crazy?!" He shouted in your face, hands gripping your upper arms as he shook you. "Do you know what time it is?! Do you know what could've happened to you?! You could've been kidnapped or killed!"

Feeling your blood boil as you panted, you pressed your small palms against him, shoving him off of you. "Get away from me! Don't touch me!" Continuously trying to push him away, Toji wouldn't budge. Growing frustrated and antsy, you acted before you even thought, your palm meeting his cheek as you slapped him.

With a low snarl, Toji glared down at you, grinding his teeth. He couldn't understand why you were behaving this way, his denial towards you shouldn't have been such a big of a deal. It was a stupid crush, he was sure. Something shallow. So why did you continue to fight him?

Capturing your wrists and pinning your hands down as he pressed you against the light pole behind you, Toji hissed, "you need to start acting like a damn adult, not this childish bullshit—"

"Make me," you spoke through clenched teeth. You were shaking from both anger and the coldness of the late night showers. You looked deep into his eyes with, what could've been read as, deep hatred. He knew you didn't hate him, but you were furious.

Feeling his heart race from the adrenaline, skipping a sudden beat from your threat, hating how they suddenly triggered something within, Toji snarled. He felt pathetic knowing he was feeling something he shouldn't towards you, fighting everything in him to suppress whatever it was, being why he reacted so roughly. Like he always did. "Stop behaving like a fucking brat. Grow up. You're a 20 year old college student. Not a 15 year old girl with a crush on her teacher. Act your age and stop thinking the world revolves around you, like you're invincible, when there are those who care and worry about you—"

"Fuck you!" You snapped. "You don't care about me!"

"Who says I don't?! I'm literally right here!" He shouted.

"You're here because it's your job and so you can get paid!" You snapped back. "You don't care about me, not one bit! You never did! I was always just a paycheck! I hate that I fell in love with you!" Instantly regretting your words, realizing what you just said, you panicked. Looking absolutely mortified, you felt Toji's grip tighten around your wrists. You wanted to melt, puddle up and evaporate. Disappear from this universe. How could you let that slip?! Sure, you had an obvious crush but never love! At least, you wouldn't dare admit that!

Suddenly, you tried slipping from his grip, thrashing around to escape, punching his chest and telling him to let you go. Practically begging him to. Instead, he loosened his grip on one of your wrists and grabbed a fistful of your hair, angling your head as his lips collided with your own.

It was far more intense than any other kiss you've ever had, the way he was practically eating your face. Tongue nearly down your throat, stealing every breath you had, saliva spreading in a sloppy manner. You didn't even think, your body acting before you could as your hands reached into his hair. Gripping and tugging at the dark locks roughly. Biting his lip hard enough until he bled, Toji hissed and landed a harsh smack against your ass, earning a yelp from you.

"Is this what you wanted?" He asked in what was possibly the lowest voice he could muster. As if it was filled with anger, annoyance, worry and... lust.

You couldn't even look at him, ashamed in yourself as you shook your head, speaking in the saddest voice, "I just want you to love me back..."

For once, Toji felt off guard, his eyes widening as his grip on you instantly loosened. His chest heaved as his heart thudded against his ribcage. It wasn't even pathetic the way you spoke, far from it. If anything, he felt bad that you wanted someone like from him. And he hated that a piece of him—a big one at that—wanted to give that to you. You did a number on him and you didn't even know it yet. Even in the rain his body felt like it was on fire, as if his skin would melt off. His mind was a mess, thinking about your confession and desires. How attached he's grown to you without truly realizing it. The interactions you've shared and the small advancements made. He hated that... a part of him knew he's fallen for you, too. Quite possibly since the first interaction when he told himself you were nothing more than a spoiled brat and to suppress those feelings... when, in reality, you were nothing but kind. A little wild and youthful, but you never did anything to make him hate you. Never did anything to make his job boring. You were a lot to handle but, he liked it. He enjoyed the thrill of the chase. He enjoyed you. But, god, did it feel so wrong for you to want a man like him with such a troubled past. With almost nothing to offer.

"Fuck..." he cursed under his breath as you suddenly looked at him with pure confusion. Blinking in bewilderment. "I'm taking you to my place." Without a second thought, he lifted you up and took you to his car, driving you to his place and knowing very well this could end terribly for the both of you.

But, he couldn't stop now, not with his hand on your thigh as he drove and not when he pulled you into his place when you two arrived. And definitely not when he stood before you, towering your figure as you looked up at him with those doe eyes that made him want to fucking melt.

"Do you really want me?" He asked. "If you're not sure you can take it I rather you just shower and take my bed before I do something I'd regret."

"Toji, I want you so badly, it hurts," you nearly whispered in desperation, not wanting to lose any chances of having him. He had no idea how fast he made your heart race (or made your inner thighs ache) in deep need for him.

Stalking towards you and cornering you as your back collided with a wall, Toji asked you once again, "are you sure?"

Nodding, you looked up at him with a shaky body, desperate to feel his touch. "Yes, please..."

Toji's hand instantly wrapped around your neck, thumb and pointer finger pressing against your jaw as he pulled you in. He lips smashed against yours, shoving his tongue past them with no hesitation. It felt like he was trying to consume you, exploring every inch your mouth had to offer, moans slipping past your part lips every time he'd sloppily kiss the corners of your mouth. The shared salvia smeared as you felt yourself becoming lightheaded. Your knees were just about to give out, your heart pounding in your chest and humming in your ears. Toji's grip tightened as his free hand slipped under your now soaked camisole. Groping and squeezing at your left breast, thumb brush against your hardened nipple before he pinched it. You moaned slightly into his mouth, panting against him as his tongue intertwined with your own.

Easily lifting you up with one arm, he brought you to his bed, dropping you on it and wasting no time with undressing. He unbuttoned the dress shirt he wore, nearly tearing it off and doing the same with the shirt underneath. His shoes long gone as he tossed your slippers to a side. You sat up on your elbows, trying to catch your breath as you watched the god of a man strip before you. Sure, the suits he wore while on duty hugged his body painfully so, you knew this man was ripped. It was obvious with his towering size and broad shoulders... but to see him shirtless before you? Every line and curve, the shapes of his muscles bulging, the deep v cut and trail of hair that lead to what you needed most. You swore you were going to pass out. This was the man of your dreams, your soulmate, you knew it to be true. And now... you had him, nearly bare before you as he slipped off his pants and wore nothing but his black boxers.

Toji gripped your ankles and tugged you close as you looked up at him, wide eyed and lips parted. Your chest heaved as he crawled over you, hand pressing against the back of your head, pulling you into a slightly gentler kiss. He still chased after your lips, still desired to taste you, but he wasn't trying to swallow you whole this time. Not that you would mind. You'd give him everything if you could.

His large hands gripped your waist as he adjusted himself, straddling you and leaning on his heels before reaching for the hem of your top. Eyeing you and the haze that fogged your eyes, he took in a sharp breath. "Are you sure about this?" Hearing you hum, he shook his head. "No, I need to hear you say it."

"Yes, Toji... Please..." you begged, voice nearly cracking in desperation and need of him.

Taking in a deep breath, eyeing you once more, he lifted your top a bit to reveal your body, stopping midway before he could expose your breasts. "I won't stop until you tell me to."

"I won't," you shook your head stubbornly. "I need you."

Letting out a small huff as his head dropped, grip tightening around your top, itching to just rip it off and tear you apart, Toji bit down. You weren't like the other women, never would be, he wasn't going to just fuck you without a care. He had some decency. At least, when it came to you. He'd never admit to himself why.

Lifting your top off and dropping it to a side, Toji took your body in, your curves and every little mark that were unique to you—whether it was a scar or freckle—it was as if he was mapping your skin. You were squirming, whether it'd be desperation, anxiety, or insecurity, Toji dove in. He gave your breasts the attention they deserved, taking one in his mouth and the other occupied in his bear paw of a hand. He licked at the skin as his fingers teased your other nipple, biting and breathing against the wet skin, making you tremble beneath him.

He switched positions, moaning into your mounds in a sound you've never heard before. If you had to guess, by the way he gave your chest so much focus, how he sucked at them as if they were his life force, and the way he was basically humping you... you'd say Toji was a boob guy. Through and through, no matter the size, he just loved the feeling of the supple flesh in his hands, in his mouth... his aching dick between them, even. If you knew any better, and if Toji lost all self control, he definitely would've fucked them.

But not now, not this time. It was his first time with you, he needed to learn your body. Explore every inch of it. What turns you on, what makes your eyes roll back, what has you seeing stars.

Toji gripped at your shorts, tugging them down and tossing it onto your matching top. Kissing down your belly, nibbling along the way and leaving marks in his wake, Toji found himself nestled between your thighs. God, if there was something he loved more than boobs were a woman's thighs. Thick or not, he loved them, loved having them wrapped around his neck, suffocating him. If he had a way to go, it would be by them.

Kissing your inner thighs, making it to the apex of them, the scent of your arousal was driving him insane. It felt as if he couldn't control himself, grip tightening around your waist as his finger tips dug into your flesh. Not seeming to care of you had a barrier blocking him, Toji buried his face further into you, nose nudging your clothed clit as you shuddered. The shock that was sent throughout your body made your heart race faster as you watched him. It was like he was in a trance, even with your panties still on.

Burying his nose further into you as you trembled, Toji couldn't help but lick against the cloth, tongue nudging your bundle of nerves as your legs shook. "You better not muffle your sounds, I wanna hear it all," he warned as he looked at you, you instantly nodding. Grinning, he yanked your panties off before he pulled your thighs over his shoulders. Your pussy, in all its glory, bare before him. He couldn't help but grin at the sight, the scent driving him mad as he found himself rutting against the mattress. Truly, a woman's body was his ultimate weakness.

Purposefully tossing your panties in a different direction to keep for himself (for future—personal—use, of course), Toji dove in. He didn't even bother to give a single warning. Open mouthed, practically making out with your pussy, your head fell back as you began to squirm. Your moans grew louder the further Toji teased you. With every lick and every suck of your clit, to the prodding of your hole with his tongue, you felt as if you forgot to breathe.

Your thighs were clenching against his head, Toji's grip tightening to prevent you from suffocating him (even if he wanted to welcome it). The sounds were disgusting in a way that turned you. It was almost painful, how good it felt. The way he worked you open with just his tongue, slurping every bit of your essence that leaked. It didn't take Toji long to figure out how to make you come. It wasn't going to be the only time, anyway.

You felt completely spent, lying almost limp before him. You should've known this man was an expert, but a part of you... that was rather innocent, had believed it was going to happen once when he was in you. Of course, you should've know once wasn't enough. No. Not when he introduced his thick fingers, spreading you open, pumping deeply into you as he watched you squirm. He was nearly getting off to it, the way you panted and moaned his name, smaller hands gripping at his sheets as your toes curled. He grinned to himself, licking his scar as he pushed your legs further apart, pumping his fingers faster into you, proud of himself for making you come a second time.

"Look at me," he demanded as your eyes fluttered open. Hooded and exhausted. You watched as he slipped his two fingers out of you, soaked in your release. He watched them in awe as you squirmed in embarrassment. Toji only made it worse when he brought them into his mouth, sucking with an obnoxious groan. It was then you noticed the painful bulge tenting in his underwear, an obvious wet spot that had formed. Did he get off... to you getting off?

"Fuck... 'm not gonna get used to that. Best I've ever had. So fucking good," he breathed as you took in deep breaths. "I think you're ready f'r me."

Gulping as he stood up to strip his underwear, an audible gasp left your lips as you eyed his cock. The tip red and leaking. Oh, you definitely weren't going to handle that. It was monster sized, there was no way no amount of prep would prepare you for the girth of his size.

"Don't worry, I'll make it fit," he smirked, the twitch of his scarred lip making you let out an uncontrollable moan. He was hot and he knew it... and somehow that made it all the better.

Kneeling before you and gripping your thighs, parting them and aligning himself with you, he reached in between and coated his length with your juices, pumping a few times before pushing into you. A gasp got caught in your throat as you nearly choked. Just barely in and you were squirming. "It's— Too big!"

"Too big? You were so desperate earlier," he nearly whispered, voice low and sending a chill down your spine. He pulled back and pushed further in, the stretch stinging and bringing tears to your eyes as you bit your bottom lip. "You can take it."

"Too much— 's too much," you breathed, hand gripping his forearms as if it would stop him.

Instead, Toji laughed, pulling back and pushing in. Thrusting in and out at a steady peace to let you adjust to his size—until he began to reach deeper. Feeling as if you couldn't breathe, Toji leaned into you. Fucking you slowly and deeply, he left open mouth kisses along your neck and shoulders, biting the skin and leaving his mark behind. He couldn't help but lick at you, the sweat that was beading on your skin. You were intoxicating, he couldn't seem to have enough. All the little sounds, how you moaned his name. The way you begged. How your legs wrapped around him, keeping him in deep even if you cried that he was too much.

He lifted his head enough to kiss you, tongue meeting tongue as he moaned into your mouth. God, it was all so much, yet... not enough. You wanted more, your body craved him. Your nails clawed at his back as your heels dug into him. He bit and sucked your bottom lip, lifting himself to look at your fucked out face. Swollen lips, teary cheeks, sprawled out hair soaked from the rain. You were an angel straight from heaven sent to him. He couldn't get enough. He needed more. More more more.

Licking your tears away, deepening his thrusts as he grunted in your ear, your eyes rolled back, seeing galaxies the way his cock reached so deeply into you. You were sure he was going to mold himself against you. "Toji— I— I'm—" you were at a loss for words, mind going blank as you felt that chord within you snap. You came so hard, body trembling and overstimulated that you cried out while pulling at his hair. Toji rode it out, caressing your head and praising you as he continued to thrust in and out of you.

"You did so good, so good. My good girl. You did so good," he praised as you trembled beneath him. Feeling his own orgasm building up, Toji eyed you and nearly came at the sight of your fucked out face. He fucked you dumb, he was sure there was no thoughts in that little head of yours. "In or out?"

"In— In..." you breathed, eyes barely able to stay open as your hands fell limp against his back, lost in his locks as you tried catching your breath.

"Look at me," he said as you gulped, eyes fluttering open. He kept his focus locked on you, thrusting a few more times before stilling, coming deeply within your womb without looking away. It was almost the most beautiful thing you had ever seen. You weren't sure how he did it, so enthralled by those emerald eyes, you were afraid that you'd do whatever he said with how hypnotized you were.

Staying in you for a moments worth as his forehead pressed against your own, breathing each other in, Toji pulled out, earning a whine from you. Nearly flopping on his back, catching his breath as his heart raced, he rolled to his side and snuck a hand in between your legs, feeling the way his come was leaking from you before he gathered it and plugged his finger into you. You let out a small cry, turning your face to hide into his chest.

"Can't let any of it go to waste, can we?" He asked as you shook your head. Toji moved to leave kisses down your thigh as he pulled his hand away, lifting your legs enough to eye the way his seed pooled beneath you. All the guilt was out the window with how clouded his mind was. Having you this way, you giving yourself to him even if it was all so very wrong.

He hated to admit, he doesn't remember the last time he had sex like this that wasn't a way just to fulfill himself and only himself. Instead, he was getting off to you. Getting off to the way he made you feel. Especially that blissed out expression on your face... If only he could fuck you again and again and again until—

Toji stopped himself there before the thoughts got worse. You were spent, exhausted and probably unable to move a single limb. He had to clean the both of you up. "C'mon, can't stay like this, as much as I'd love to." Patting your thigh as you groaned, he leaned in and left a few more kisses against your lips, you lazily reciprocating them.

Toji lifted you in his arms and brought you to his shower. Your body was shaking and legs were surely weak. He made sure the water was warm enough for the two of you, helping clean one another in sluggish movements (more from you and your exhaustion). Toji dried you up after, wrapping a towel around his waist as he helped ruffle your hair with the towel and dress you in one of his shirts. He sat you on his couch with a cup of water as he changed his bedsheets. Bringing you back to the bed, cuddling up against one another as you tried to morph into him, desperate for his warmth, you nuzzled his bare chest. His scent was intoxicating, your eyes falling heavy as you felt your body being carried away into your world of dreams.

"I'm so thankful you're my first," you mumbled sleepily. Toji's once droopy eyes shot open.

"I was... your first?" He asked with all sorts of hesitation. You were a virgin... and he took your virginity?

"Mhm... I was saving myself for someone special enough. Guess that was you," you said before falling asleep, deep enough to not have an inkling that your words would be the reason why Toji hardly slept that night.

Toji took you home the following day bright and early before your parents returned from their business trip. You freshened up and felt a sense of ease and happiness that you've never felt before. Ready to return back to Toji to say your goodbyes as he spoke to your parents, you found yourself hiding behind a wall as your heart skipped a beat and smile dropped at his words.

"I apologize for the late notice but I'll need to take a leave of absence. I already have a few people lined up that can take over my position," Toji said. "I'll give you their contacts."

"What happened? Is everything alright?" Your father asked.

"It's personal reasons I rather not disclose, but I assure you these people can watch over your daughter at a level almost nearing mine."

"I hope all is well, thank you for all you've done for us. Will we be seeing you again?" Your mother asked.

It was what felt like hours before Toji spoke up again, leaving you with a heavy heart that dropped to your feet at his last words, "I am unsure," he admitted. "I wish nothing but the best for you."

Those last words weren't directed towards your parents, it was almost as if Toji knew you were listening. Was he really abandoning you after last night? Did your confession mean nothing to him? Did he... use you? Your bottom lip began to quiver as your eyes pooled up at his last words:

"Take care."

#haruno writes;#jjk toji #toji fushiguro #toji zenin #toji x reader #toji x you #toji smut #toji x y/n #fushiguro toji x you #fushiguro toji x reader #toji fushiguro x you #toji fushiguro x y/n #jjk smut #jjk x reader #toji fushiguro x reader

426 notes · View notes