Leliana Dress

something borrowed

(dearly beloved part 2: electric boogaloo ! ; tashi duncan x fem!childhood best friend!reader x patrick zweig ((x art donaldson?? a little?)); nonlinear narrative; playing fast and loose with tenses; where do i start; patrick and reader are their own trigger warning; tw pregnancy and childbirth; major major tw for talk of abortion; tw depression and antidepressant talk; cw breeding kink centric smut; more artashi wedding scenes; baby lily !! ; art donaldson #dadding out; grammy donaldson mentioned ! ; tw vomit again i’m so sorry lol; cw more menstrual talk; tw adultery but i mean come on; baby names; lasagna; we all have annie’s reblog to thank ((blame)) for this)

‘ JESUS: Judas—

JUDAS: You forgave Peter and bullshit Thomas—you knocked Paul of Tarsus off a horse—you raised Lazarus from the fuckin’ dead—but me? Me? Your “heart”? . . . What about me??!! What about me, Jesus?! Huh?! You just, you just—I made a mistake! And if that was wrong, then you should have told me! And if a broken heart wasn't sufficient reason to hang, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT, TOO!

JESUS: Don't you think . . . that if I knew that it would have changed your mind . . . that I would have?

Pause. ’

Stephen Adly Guirgis, ‘The Last Days of Judas Iscariot’

“Is it one of those ugly ones?”

You’re not special; you, too, hate hospitals. Not the least because your parents ralphed up all that cash for med school and you tanked like a castiron anchor. But there’s so much else to feel guilty for. You feel guilty for being alive while people are dying. You feel guilty for wanting to die while people are being born. You feel guilty, and nauseated, by this sickly visceral fume of birth and babyflesh, and the fact that you’re so upset.

You’d marked it on your calendar, is the thing.

March eleventh, Doomsday, the purge, the end times.

Tashi Duncan’s Caesarean section.

Timely and clinical, fittingly so. You’d bought a little beanie for the occasion. The beanie is soft and grey and pink. It has a cartoon flower embroidered on the side of it.

But then this is the spawn of Art and Tashi Donaldson. The baby is inherently desperate, and eager, in that order.

It’s February twentyeighth.

It’s probably for the best, you think, while you and Art are on either side of the hospital bed, and he’s grasping Tashi’s hand more tightly than she is holding his, even though she is the one whose innards are being shat out. You don’t believe she could take another scar.

You grimace as she crowns. Art is sobbing and sniffing. He looks at Tashi like he’s getting to watch God populate the world with greenery. It makes your mouth tug sharply to one side, and you close your eyes, briefly, escaping the bright white light.

You watch the papery sheets go redder and redder with every gush from the cavity of her torso.

The baby is not rosy pink so much as she is carmine. Before this, as an idea, she’s existed mostly in black and white. Aminocentesis results on a MacBook screen. The sonogram on their coffee table. The concrete wall of your abject jealousy. The living colour of her, it shocks you more than her glass-shattering screech.

Art holds the baby first, of course, since Tashi is somewhat incapacitated. You soothingly caress her damp hairline.

“What was that like?” you whisper, wincing down at her.

Tashi sheds a few tears and manages a smile that’s part relief and all agony. “Remember…” she croaks, “Remember when Tre fuckin’… like, roundhouse kicked you up the crotch?”

You blink, quirking your brows. Then you snort in surprise, grinning. “Oh my God, yeah,” you giggle. “When Yas and Matteo got that trampoline.”

Tashi nods weakly, her desiccated mouth twitching at the memory, her eyes shivering gently closed.

The baby is tiny against Art’s body, cradled so carefully in his arms. He’s counting all her toes and fingers.

“Hey there,” he murmurs to her, like they’re the only two people on this earth Tashi made. Then he sinks down onto the stool by Tashi’s head, and holds this tiny, beautiful thing out toward her. “Say hi to momma,” he says, his voice soft as gauze.

Tashi reaches out. Her hands are trembling but all of her is trembling; both you and Art tried to get her on the epidural, but fuck if she’s not stubborn. She crooks the tip of her index finger into the fleecy receiving blanket, pulling it down just a little so she can see the baby’s entire pink face.

The baby opens just one bleary eye, only halfway, but it’s enough for her to see you, for you to feel yourself being seen.

Tashi sobs and Art sobs and you wonder, momentarily, if her obstetrician can reach up the cavity of your body, too, and tug out your heart.

So, of course you hate hospitals, and of course you feel guilty. For many reasons. Chief among them being how, the very moment your dear, gutted friend conks out, you’ve stolen to the hall to ring her ex. And he’s asking you, hopeful, if her fucking newborn is one of those ugly ones.

You sigh into the receiver, shaking your head all solemn. You’re sure any passersby think you’re delivering horrific news. “She’s beautiful,” you confess sadly.

“Fuck!” Patrick says forcefully, like he’s just stubbed his toe.

You can hear the hum of the highway on his end of the line, and he’s definitely a bad enough driver that he shouldn’t be calling you right now, because you don’t want to be back here at his bedside when he’s in a fullbody cast after a nearfatal accident—and you would come to visit, actually, if he were in the hospital; maybe that’d just be the guilt again—but this is pretty urgent.

You frown, tucking your hand under your armpit and managing a smile at a passing couple cautiously rolling their precious trolley to the NICU. “They named her Lily.”

Patrick scoffs. “Those fucking assholes.”

“Right?”

You appreciate his company in your deplorable sorrow. There’s a special corner in the firescape for the two of you, but at least it’ll be the two of you.

“That’s a beautiful name for a baby girl,” he says, practically insulted.

You sigh again. “I know,” you pout.

They’d planned the wedding, as they did all other things, a bona fide team. A well oiled unit. Art and Tashi. A&T. Handing off tasks with practiced efficiency, like another one of her hyperintensive drills, wherein he would sooner keel over heaving than drop the ball. The wedding planner was effectively ornamental once they really got into it.

And they really got into it.

Tashi was one of those little girls who stuffed a stream of toilet paper in her ponytail and pictured the vinyl flooring of her home’s warmly lit passage as a ceremonial aisle on the Amalfi Coast at sunset. Here comes the bride, aluminium foil wedding band, ramshackle wildflower bouquet picked from the backyard, et cetera.

Most times, she’d have you play groom.

But you don’t internalise that too much. Because she had you play a lot of things. And sometimes she’d have their senile Mastiff Mutt, Franklin, play groom, too. Really, the most important part was her having you at all.

And, apparently, as a little boy, Art used to page obsessively back and forth through the decrepit scrapbook of his grandparents’ Peoria union, the pictures frayed and hued dandelion. So it’s great that they found each other, and so many dreams were coming true, and everything was fine. Everything was better.

You’d been happy she was happy, really, you had. You hate big endeavours in your name. If she’d married you, you’d have made her elope to Puerto Rico.

And now she was all sprawled three-ring binders, pen behind each ear, Game Face On. And Art was there, talking place settings in full sincerity, so yeah. It’s fine. Better, even.

She let him intercalate all the mawkish, ubercorny bullshit—the Fleetwood Mac, the garter toss, the pictures of his grandmother at the centrepiece of every table. Because they were a team and it was his wedding as much as hers. And you’d told her, too. You’d told her that she’s going to have a mawkish, ubercorny bullshit wedding to a mawkish, ubercorny bullshit guy. But she’d waved you off with a dismissively sentimental smile. I just want to marry him, she’d told you, which had felt like a million and one serrated spurns all over.

A getaway car, really? you’d deadpanned. Then, leaning closer to her phonescreen, eyes narrowing at their shared twodozenpage Pinterest board, incredulous and disgusted, Are the cans really necessary?

Apparently so.

You were standing at the foreshore, toes all grainy, shoes in hand, pistachiorose and Patrick Zweig on your tongue, your ass still seadamp. Art and Tashi pulled up in front of you, cans rattling, like a justmarried Lyft order.

When you climbed into the backseat, they were in the middle of sharing in dulcet laughter over something or the other. Something that did not concern you. Which was fine, and better, and the flower arrangements were spectacular. And, anyway, you’re busy trying not to get sand on this vintage carpet.

“Shouldn’t you two be honeymooning?”

Art looked back at you, his arm outstretched, wrist resting on the bend of the wheel. He gave you this smile you couldn’t discern, which most of his smiles were, and are. He blew a raspberry from his rubicund mouth and tsked.

“What, without you?” he scoffed, wry but playful, and you realised that, though he teased, and wanted you to know as much, his goodnature was sincere.

And your fingers twitched to wrap his seatbelt—because he was wearing the seatbelt—around his rosy throat five or six or seven times and tug hard.

Tashi threw her head back and laughed into the humidity of the night, of their wedding night.

Tashi squirmed in the leather passengerseat of the ivorycoloured 1960 Ford Thunderbird convertible.

You were leaning over in between them from the back, straddling the armrest. And she watched Art turn his head and kiss you. His hand looked huge on the messy, delicate bone of your jaw. It felt cool and clammy, you remember. Tashi sucked in a breath. You two broke apart after a moment, laughing, your palm coming down on his forearm like he’d just made a joke.

“That,” you said, making a puerile face as he absently brushed a thumb over your cheek, “Was too far.”

Your eyes were still shining with tears.

Art nodded, grinning, slipping his hand from your face and running it through his sweaty shoresand hair. “Anything for you, baby, but maybe not that.”

Tashi was flushed and florid and tamping her thighs tighter together and she wanted you both to put your hands on her.

Her arm slunk across the centre console to press her palm into his chest. And she ran her nails along the tender skin of your inner arm. And Art looked back at you like he was asking for permission, which was the first time in a long time he’d done that. And probably the last time since. And you don’t know why you nodded, but you did.

He gave you another strange, cursory kiss on the corner of your mouth, then leaned across the centre console and nipped at Tashi’s earlobe. The whetted burst of pain sent a visible shiver through her bones. She bit her lip and sighed.

“Mrs Donaldson,” he’d murmured, all husky and low. His white buttonup was all sweatrumpled and unfurled. He looked handsome and disheveled like a fallen angel or those illustrations on the covers of erotic paperbacks.

You swallowed, overwhelmed by it all.

You pressed the seam of your lips to the skin where her neck met her shoulder and her lithe fingers encircled your wrist and guided it between her legs.

You and Art are friends—good friends, by now—but sometimes you feel more like business partners. Cofounders of Keeping Tashi Duncan Happy and Okay Inc.

So, when he cannot stomach all the vomit—so, so much fucking vomit—for all his earnest, anguished, tearful trying, he calls you. Because he and his hairtrigger loins can’t help her right now.

And you don’t tease, or berate, or say it should’ve been you.

And he doesn’t protest, or control freak, or remind you it wasn’t you, it was him.

He dips out to stock up on crackers and barley sugar sweets, and you stay with Tashi and stand sentry on emesis duty.

You hadn’t known that any one thing was capable of maiming her this way. Tashi Duncan, your impenetrable infanta. Fast to get up, faster, still, to dry her tears. But this baby is wringing her bone dry. She’s feeble, swollen, and practically debilitated.

You feel her spine shift as she shakes and heaves into the toilet. You hate her like this. At mercy to her bones.

You can’t help the archaic scorn. None of this, none of any of it, would’ve happened, had it been you. But it wasn’t.

You cradle Tashi’s feverish head in the bend of your knee. You thread your knuckles through her sweaty curls. You rub your fingers into her collar, tracing her bones where they have been swallowed by her plummy sallow skin. In college, you used to give each other lymphatic drainage massages.

You’re on Virginia Key Beach with T and her brothers, at the edge of the ocean. You’re, like, fourteen. Tevin’s mouth is a comically fluorescent shade of blue as he topes down a Slurpee. Tre hops over waves. Tre keeps saying the sharks will get you, they’ll smell it, blood in the water, blood in the water and Tevin keeps holding the Slurpee so high that the ultramarine of it obstructs the sun. And Tashi is yelling I’m not even on my fucking period! even though she is red and wet between her thighs, and give it to me, Tev, it’s mine, you took mine! as she reaches and reaches and reaches, unable to grasp what she wants.

There are some women unmoved by such trivialities as their own blood. Eightinch stilettos, eight months in. People will assume Tashi Duncan, pulchritude and powerhouse, to be one of these women.

But you’ll know better.

She’s so good at the tennis, ultimately, because she listens to her blood. She lets it move her. Lets it give her power. She is a mesmerising glass carafe of red.

But when it spills, it pours. When she breaks, she shatters.

Art Donaldson’s child writhes inside her, swills her blood. And you watch.

Patrick takes you home from the hospital. You were planning on sinking into the void of your couch while forking miserably into a whole tray of lasagna by yourself, but you feel bad. You feel guilty and lonely. So you invite him in.

You thunk your stoneware roaster on the granite of your peninsular countertop. He’s sat on a barstool and you’re standing across from him, and he wastes no time tucking in. You nudge at the broiled cheese with your fork.

You’re crying, which he doesn’t mind, but it’s a little distracting while he’s trying to eat, is all. He peers up at you, circumspect, as he chews.

You roll your eyes at him. “Please don’t make me cry alone,” you tell him.

He chews, swallows, licks some pasta from his gums. He rests the fork against the edge of the tray and dusts his hands off.

“I don’t cry,” he says, shrugging like it’s out of his hands. The corner of his mouth quirks up as you fix him with a sullen glare.

“I’ve seen you cry,” you say pointedly, dropping your own silverware.

He shrugs again. “Yeah,” he says, “One time. That was the only time I’ve ever cried. Ever.”

He has this way of saying things like he absolutely means them. This hamfisted sincerity, serrated deadpan. And, when you’re emotional like this, all husked and raw, it’s unfortunately an extremely effective way to make you laugh. His eyes gleam with victory as you duck your head and giggle wetly.

“You feel special?” he smirks.

You roll your eyes again, tears still trickling pools into the tender shadowed skin beneath your eyes. “I feel especially depressed,” you reply thickly.

He flits his eyes back and forth between the both of yours a few times. You’re reminded of the abject tedious torture of sitting through one of Art’s tennis games. “Are you really? Or are you just moping?” he asks you.

You reach into your pocket and pull out your little Effexor prescription vial, rattling it twice, and tossing it his way. It’s a sloppy underhand, but he catches it easily.

“Huh,” he muses, turning it between his fingertips. “That’s why you look so different? I thought you were just putting on sympathy weight.”

Your lips wobble, and your eyes burn and blur again, your throat swelling shut like fucking anaphylactic excoriation, and you catch your face with your hands and cry.

“Don’t be mean right now,” you blubber.

Patrick blinks, sobering with a smart, the humour seeping off his face and replacing itself with an almost comically disturbed frown.

“Okay, okay,” he says, his voice light with a culpable urgency reserved for a triggered, irate straitjacket patient. He reaches over the lasagna, the savoury brume warming his forearms, and he takes your wrists and peels your fingers from your eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry.”

You hiccup breathlessly. Your tears slithering down your cheeks in rills.

“I’m sorry,” says Patrick. He presses his thumbs into your pulsepoints, like he can quash your distress through your radial arteries. “You look hot, okay? Really, you do.”

For his part, he seems genuinely contrite, and utterly concerned, and he probably means it. He is rarely insincere, even when his tongue is in his cheek. But your sulky inner voice says he’s bargaining. How about I quit being an ass and you stop with the ugly crying and I can finish this pasta and hotfoot it out of here? But this is your house. And your pasta. And you think you should get to mourn his exgirlfriend’s womb, if you so choose.

You sob harder, shoulders quavering. His brows raise in quiet alarm when you wrest your arms from his fingers.

You snuffle and swallow. “Please stop,” you moan sadly.

Somewhere between the cake cutting—which walked that revolting, quintessentially Art and Tashi line between sweet and sexy; she daubed some frosting on his nose, he licked it off her finger—and your purloining of a slice or two for your and Patrick’s beachside bitchsesh, the speakers are thumping with ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’.

Everyone is wasted.

You don’t even mean to, but one of Art’s cousins, who is clearly eking out his fraternity days that have long since started mouldering, keeps ordering you shots from the open bar. And you keep downing them, one after the other. He’s wearing a practically lurid red polo that really errs on the ‘optional’ side of Black Tie Optional, but he has a really charming smile, the light glistering off the white of his teeth as you dance.

And—fuck it—he’s hot. And he’s looking at you like he wants to kiss you in the middle of this dance floor, grinding against you like you’re teenagers at a CYO dance.

The lights are scintillating technicolour and the music is so loud you can feel it in your rib cage and it doesn’t take long for the room to start spinning like the world’s trippiest ferris wheel.

Cody—or Connor, maybe—goes to the bathroom to piss, and you track down the newlyweds on the other side of the room. Tashi’s beautiful eyes, already aglow, light up even more when she sees you.

“Hi, baby!” She kind of has to yell over the music. God, it’s been a while since you’ve seen her let loose like this. Either of them, really. They’re having a great fucking time. The Happy Couple. It makes you feel sick. “You good?”

“I’m fucked up,” you smile blearily, because all of a sudden the room’s spinning has increased in velocity.

You fight the urge to grab for her hand for some fleeting sense of stability. Because, if you do, you’ll tackle her to the ground and kiss her until someone hauls you off.

And her husband’s right there.

“Me too,” says said husband. He is flushed in the face, grinning elatedly, his eyes drunkenly disfocused, Tashi’s glossy, nudepink lip-print on his cheek.

Tashi, as ever, seems appreciably more put-together than Art looks and you feel. All silken and nitid. Art’s holding her with the desperate adoration of someone who knows, in the far far end of his bevvied mind, what you’re thinking right now. You narrow your eyes at him. Then,

“Do you wanna dance?” you ask on a whim.

“Sure,” Art shrugs, a sloppy smile curving on his lips. And by now Tashi’s turned to exchange polite smalltalk with some or other extended family member, so he impishly adds, “Let me ask the missus.”

He and Tashi have a short conversation that you can’t quite hear, and then she’s pulling you in by the wrist to whisper in your ear,

“Don’t let him drink anymore, okay?”

She pecks a kiss onto your cheek before you have time to question this rule, but you know her well enough to know she’s also surreptitiously telling you to slow down. You spitefully nab another shot on your and Art’s way to the dance floor.

Art’s a good dancer. You would certainly not have pegged him as one, if asked. But when he’s twisting and moving his feet and putting his hands on your waist in a halfway facetious impression of a slow dance, you realise it’s true.

“Congratulations, by the way,” you shout when you get close enough to his ear. “Happy for you.”

He winces at your volume, raising his fingers to his ear and laughing and looking at you and shaking his head. “No you’re not.”

Patrick watches you sob for a few more moments before smacking his hand against the counter.

“Let’s make one,” he says, declaratively.

You snivel and sweep some tears away, looking up at him. “What?”

“Let’s make one,” he repeats, more urgently now, “If we make one right now, it’ll show up before the end of the year, and we can still weaponise it. Come on.”

He’s sliding off the stool and reaching across the counter to grab your hand and tow you out of the kitchen.

“Patrick,” you whine in demurral, stumbling after him.

But he pulls you along even harder, making a decisive path toward the hallway. “Come on!” he insists, “I’m serious.”

“You’re broke.”

Which is true. He’s been snipped off from the trust fund, which you’d thought was purely the stuff of Murdochian nightmares. But he whipped out his Chase Mobile app and showed you the negative balance to prove it. He’d rather bum it out than suit up and schmooze. So he’s not spoiled for funds right now, nor is he spoiled for wins, and you aren’t equipped with great confidence in a potential future as his baby mama.

“They’re pissed, they’re not cruel,” he tells you, effectively shoving you into your room and kicking off his shoes. “I’ll be back on the payroll with a kid on the docket, I promise. My mom would love it, actually. My sister just had a hysterectomy, this’ll be like a family miracle. You’ll have the child support of a Kardashian.”

He grabs your head and kisses you sloppily—he tastes like tomatoes—clumsily walking you back into the bed.

You think he’s too old to be fingering you the way he is. Rubbing your clit all clumsy, like a faulty button on an old remote. You’re a little sticky, but not enough for what he plans to do here. He sighs and leans back.

“This isn’t working,” he says, all pensive, sitting back on his heels. It’s a little difficult, though, to take him seriously, when his cock is on the front end of halfmast and still rising.

When Tashi first started seeing him, you remember her barrelling into your room all stiff and saucereyed and clamorous. As though a particularly warhankering pigeon had just been elected president, or an alien society had been discovered in the thick of the Amazon. But no. She held your shoulders and shook them wildly and yelled, I’m telling you, it’s fucking huge!

She made a point to you that she’d never be caught dead gushing about his dick to his face. She said it was important to humble him.

So you want to maintain that tradition.

And, anyway, it’s a big dick, not the cure to cancer. You don’t even know what he needs it all for. It’s probably all he has left. You can’t imagine it even gets him very far.

People have frontiers. Parameters. Limits. To their patience, to their bodies. Patrick used to kill the sprinting drills, back in school. He likes going end to end, reaching those limits. But once you start pissing someone off and/or ramming into their cervix, everything else is probably a nonstarter.

You sit up, drawing your knees to your chest. “Uh, yeah. It isn’t.”

“Well, is there something I can do? Should I act like her? Will that get you going?” He asks, but he doesn’t wait for your answer. He huffs and crosses his arms and imitates Tashi’s angry moue.

And his dick is still hard, harder now, so you splutter into laughter. You laugh really, really hard. Then he guides your legs back open and swipes his fingers between them again.

And he grins and says, “Bingo.”

You got really into Pilates for about a month or two mid last year. You’re starting to think you should have kept at it. Your knees are hooked over his shoulders, the undersides of your thighs pressed to his chest. Your hips ache, but it feels, regrettably, really fucking great otherwise.

It’s eminently uncomfortable, sure. For your part, it hasn’t really occurred to you to let a man fuck you raw. Your lingering childishness still recoils a bit at the very idea. And it feels strange, that gauche drag of skin on skin. You’d need to be really wet for this to be working, and that hilarious necessity makes you wetter in response, and then he’s slipping in and out and fucking you raw and he doesn’t even seem to be trying too hard.

He’s a little relieved. You’re letting this happen and taking it like a champ and your pussy’s deep enough to give him room to work.

So he does. Because he knows how. He knows how to work things from here.

He’s had more sex than you’ve attended pilates classes.

The thought of you, splayed and tensile across a reformer, gets him pretty hot. Very hot, actually, and he can tell because the surface of his skin is bloomed pink, and your fingers blench away from his shoulders like he’s caught aflame.

He knows by now how tremendously warm he runs in these moments. He usually asks about a girl’s AC before things get going.

Should he say that aloud, or will it piss you off?

You probably see your appending to the convoluted list of unfortunate holes to sheathe the great penis of Patrick Zweig as a little beneath you.

This is his chance to remind you that Tashi Duncan doesn’t go back on her word for just any heavy pair of balls.

He angles your hips to get deeper, experimenting with ways to evoke a reaction. He’s working you like you’re paying him.

You’re trying really hard not to say anything too nice about his dick. But he’s plunging hard and fast into you, rolling his hips with all the dexterity of fucking Magic Mike, and—well—you wouldn’t be able to, even if you wanted.

The words you’re saying are not in the dictionary. You’re sweating, panting, tugging a little mercilessly at his hair. Patrick bends your legs and hoists your pelvis. He can’t keep a trainer right now, but some adrenalinefueled strength is allowing him to support your body like it’s nothing. He wasn’t bluffing about you looking hot. He’s groping you all over with the ferocious depravity of a necrophile.

There’s some real blasphemous perversion slipping off his tongue. Ersatz porno shit that should be giving you early onset morning sickness, but he’s going all Daniel Day Lewis with it, and you’re kind of buying it.

Fucking come-slut… fuckin’— fuck… gonna breed you… gonna put a baby in you.

You’re audibly wet. The air around you grows practically mephitic. You’re losing your fucking mind. If this shit falls flat, and he can’t get you pregnant tonight, and you dump and block him and never want to speak to him again, he at least hopes you remember this for a long time.

And—you know what—fuck it if that wasn’t memorable enough, he thinks, feeling his cock twitch as he slooshes molten litres into you. Because he’s pulling out, flipping you over, and hiking up your hips. Maybe this’ll be.

He fucks you, he comes in you. A lot. He needs a second to replenish.

You steal to the kitchen. Your inner thighs are chafed and viscid. You cover the lasagna dish and cache it away, and take a second to scoff at some vapidly controversial Twitter thread. You yelp when you feel his arms around you again, lifting you off the tile and carrying you back to the bedroom.

Patrick’s never really thought too hard about his come. It’s an ancillary deluge. A mess to clean most often. Maybe he’s considered meliorating his diet when someone’s gleaned a taste and gagged.

But right now it’s serving a purpose. And he is, among other things, relieved for that, too. He’s not gonna sit around and mourn this while it happens and ask you if you’d really have his child. He’d rather look you in your beautiful, milky pussy than a gift horse in the mouth.

He refuses to waste a drop of himself. He makes sure to coat your insides with it.

He lies sheathed inside you for many minutes after he comes, gripping your hips harshly to him, groaning like this were the real orgasm.

Afterwards, he holds your knees to his chest and lifts your ass and presses his palm to your cunt as if sealing an entrance, making sure nothing escapes. He’s trying to give his guys a fighting chance.

You were, at first—as in, after two or three rounds—a little amused by this stupid, elaborate routine. Something out of an old maid’s pastel mommy blog. You were amused, and frankly weirded out, by what seemed like a laughable lack of dignity on his part.

Now—now you’re feeling aroused by it. Because being aroused disrupts the dumb ritual and kind of annoys him.

When he is holding your knees up and your cunt twitches, he rolls his eyes.

“You already got off,” he chuckles, shaking his head. He sounds a bit spent, too. He’s usually flaked out by now, in his actual customary postcome routine. “Just stay still for a second.”

The fact that he doesn’t want you to come makes you almost desperately want to. He holds his palm over your cunt but he offers no friction.

The simple touch is enough, though. You can find your own internal rhythm.

Your head falls back against the pillow.

“Oh fuck.”

And maybe you’re being particularly loud and lewd in this moment, while he’s trying to be serious, and get something done. Because you’re still doing this longcon in calling his bluff. You don’t think he knows what he wants.

You don’t want to believe that you two are really so bitter as to start a life out of spleen.

You still don’t know if he knows whether or not he actually likes you.

“What the fuck?” he laughs, “I said don’t.” He squeezes your cunt like he wants to tear flesh from bone, trying to render you still again.

But it only makes you moan louder.

“Oh, fuck, that’s so good,” you mewl indecently, smirking a bit, because you’re joking, but you also sort of mean it, “It feels so good having your come inside me, I can already feel your little fuckass kid crawling around in there. He’ll grow up loving bagels, I just know it.”

These taunts are supposed to disgust him or hurt his feelings or simply turn him off, and Patrick does sort of look like wants to throttle you. Because he’s tired and a little grumpy and he knows you’re not letting him stay the night. But a part of him has always found you funny. So he just ends up getting hard again. Your crude, glib moaning brings him to such a pitch of want that he yanks you into his lap and fucks you roughly, gripping your jaw.

And you grin as he brings your head close. You feel it’s some kind of victory.

Even though you’re just prolonging this dumb, bitter, unfulfilling farce. Making sure there’s more of him inside you.

You two should not be parents.

By the eighth or ninth round, he starts getting conversational.

“I was one of those babies that never shut up,” he tells you, fucking up into you in cowgirl. He grunts and makes a thoughtful face. “Colic? Is that what it’s called? Yeah, I think I was a colicky baby.”

You make a face down at him. “I thought you said you’ve never cried,” you pant, rocking your hips back and forth.

He rolls his eyes again.

“Yeah, obviously I was lying. I cry all the fucking time.”

You consider this, your hips stilling, your palms resting against his hairy hotplate chest.

“Over what?” you ask, “Tashi?”

He blinks, scowling a bit, like he thinks you’re making fun. Then his grips your hips and starts to move you on his dick again. He doesn’t answer. Your pussy feels warm and raw.

Geez, how long have you two been at this?

He asks, absently, about baby names.

“I thought every girl had, like, a whole fucking list of them,” he says, pushing his semen back into your used cunt with his long fingers.

You don’t entertain that presumptuous conversation, but you don’t underestimate his commitment, either.

He’s back the next day, and the next, like clocking into a shift. He brings supplies. Sliced pineapple, fresh honey, ground cinnamon, cough syrup, two boxes of ClearBlue.

“I read acupuncture helps too,” he says.

“Absolutely not,” you say, but you let him feed you baby aspirin while you ride him in reverse on your couch watching Selling Sunset.

He feigns disinterest, but keeps tilting to look past your shoulder whenever the arguments start riling up.

“Ugh, Nicole’s a bitch,” he mutters.

Then he grunts and comes inside you, grasping your hips to sink you down and hold you still.

Her name, for the better or worse part of the first and second trimesters, was actually Stella.

Art’s grandma used to love that Philip Sidney poem, and Pam’s favourite film is Streetcar. It’s just that Tashi got sick of the name, and all other things, at a stage. So it didn’t stick.

They were oscillating between Lily and Rooney towards the end, and only made the final call when they saw her.

But, for a while there, she was Stella.

Stella’s craving peanuts, Stella’s the size of a rutabaga, Stella’s a kicker. And, boy, was she.

She’d ram her foetal feet into Tashi’s ribs over and over like she was on a treadmill. Which Tashi was starting to think of as karmic consequence for all the times she’d have Art doing cardio until he fainted.

You crouch down between her knees, resting your head against the amorphous motion of her distended stomach.

“Hey hey, Stella girl,” you whisper, “You wanna stop giving your mom a hard time?”

Tashi chokes out a wounded laugh from above you.

“That’s how Art talks to her.”

“Ugh, don’t ruin it,” you frown, moving to stand up.

But she sticks her leg out to halt you, grabbing your hand and tugging you back down, shifting her hips and spreading her thighs further apart.

You never could resist her sweet face when it was all crumpled up in asking. Because she got all soft and wet, like a flower caught in a gale.

She looks even softer now, over the horizon of her bloated body.

You gently tug her cotton shorts down and put your mouth on her and Stella stills.

“One more,” you say anxiously, eyebrows knitted in concern as Patrick sighs and unboxes a another pregnancy test—the fifth one—and you quaff down another glass of water to get your bladder teeming, because no way.

No way, right?

You’ve been taking him raw at all angles, and swigging shots of cough syrup, and weaning off the antidepressants, but no way.

“I don’t know what you thought was gonna happen,” he calls from beyond the bathroom door as you’re pissing on stick number six.

It’s just that you don’t feel anything.

You think you should be feeling more.

You think of Tashi, writhing and groaning like a bullet victim, miserably clutching her turgid body. You think of newborn Lily, her cottonsoft, tiny eye peeling open and seeing you. Deep steeped coffee, gleaming in the sterile light. Tashi’s eye. Tashi’s hair. Tashi’s baby. That tender absorption, that vivid creation.

If this kid is taking nothing from you, it’s gonna come out all Patrick. And—just—you don’t have the bandwidth to contend with such a prospect right now.

He drives you to the clinic every time. Every single time. One night, you rouse sharply from a morbid dream punctuated by the squall of wailing children. You call him. It’s 2 AM. He answers, and comes over, and drives you to the clinic, and tries not to nod off as you’re filling out the medical paperwork for the dozenth time. He also tries not to express any overt reaction to you changing your mind again.

Is it a kindness, to tease a man with the brutal decimation of his unborn progeny? No, of course not. His mum’s already preemptively enrolled the thing into a fancy German daycare.

But you hate that he’s given you an ultimatum and put it inside you. That’s the worst place, in relation to you, for an ultimatum to be.

If you tell Tashi, either he’s in, or you’re out. And those aren’t really odds you’re keen on rolling.

There are all sorts of ways to be a shitty friend. You opt for evasive gambits via claims of hectic work schedules and immovable errands. Any retching you do is that of guilt. You’re loathe to lie to her, to house this wretched zygote, to stay away. But she used to be able to tell when you’d changed your shampoo. She’d sniff him on you, in you, in a second. She’d just know. And she shouldn’t. She can’t. And if you could just unearth this presentient betrayal and toss it in a petri dish, she doesn’t have to.

You don’t know what matters more.

He drives you to the clinic. Teary teenaged girls, redcapped pickets out front. The receptionist knows you two by name by now.

Patrick slumps beside you. He’s still slogging through the first chapter of Last Child in the Woods. He’s pretty sure he’s never sat and read an actual, physical book to completion before in his life. But he’s too easily abstracted for Audible. So he’s working on it.

You’re groaning frustratedly and thunking the clipboard repeatedly against your skull. He absently slips a hand over your forehead, shielding the next few collisions before you huff and drop the board and turn to face him. He looks at you askance.

“You can change your mind,” he shrugs. Again, he generously omits.

You scoff at him, incredulous and a little irked. “I’m not gonna change my mind,” you grumble.

He shrugs again. “Okay.”

He knows what it’s like to have a mother in sackcloth and ashes. To be less of a son than a sentient thing of regret with little arms and legs. To not know what to do with that, or yourself. He wouldn’t do that to a kid.

You watch him thumb through Richard Louv for a few more moments.

Then, “You’re probably sick of me, aren’t you?”

He smiles a bit before schooling it stoic, slowly lowering the book and fixing you with this wry but incongruously tender look. “Of course I am,” he tells you.

“Get mad at me, then.”

He smiles again.

He knows what that’s like, too. Dad mad at mom. Stilted five course dinner. Dad telling him and Saskia what a goddamn headache mom is on the drive to school. Of course he’s sick of you, he’s always sick of you. But he likes you. And his head feels fine.

He turns back to the book, shrugging.

“Can’t,” he says simply.

You feel for baby Lily. She’ll never be able to get away with anything.

It’s Art who sniffs it on you, in you.

Tashi’s asleep upstairs when, after a fortnight and a bit, you rally up the guts to come over. Art opens the door and looks surprised for mere moments, and there is perhaps a flicker of concern, but then he smiles. And there’s only very mild ire there. The rest is fatigue and goodnature.

“Hello, stranger,” he smirks, turning to filch a set of keys from the marble catchall in the foyer. He is wheeling Lily out in the thirteenhundred dollar stroller he had lost six nights of sleep picking out. “You coming?”

So now you’re on a walk.

Lily lays on her soft belly in the stroller. The walls around her are a breathable mesh, and she fights to hoist her head and gawp at passing trees. This is, apparently, the only way she’ll do tummy time.

“And the only time she gets any sleep,” Art adds, jutting a finger over his shoulder in the general direction of their home down the street.

Lily’s wearing a ruffly lavender romper. Her skin is a healthy shade of linen and her hair is dark. Her fists have tiny moony fingernails that—when you comment how, Her nails are long. Like, sharp—Art explains how he keeps trying to cut them with a pair of tiny silver scissors. But they make Tashi nervous, their sharpness and its proximity to Lily’s fleshy hands.

“She said she wants her to get a grip on the world,” Art chuckles.

You snort, and you have to skip a bit to keep up with his brisk strides. “Oh, that’s definitely what she said,” you confirm.

Lily tosses and turns a bit in the strollerbed. She gurgles an impressive spit bubble, by Art’s standards. Most things she does are probably impressive to him, quite frankly. He tells you how, the other morning, she had thrown up breakfast onto his shoulder with such verve and accuracy that they’re already talking tennis lessons.

“Oh God,” you grimace. Not at the story, but at the memory of his nauseous pallor in the throes of Tashi’s own gravid sickness. “How’s that been for you?”

Art flashes a selfdeprecating simper. “I’m managing.”

When she casts her little coral taglet security blanket curbside, Lily scrunches up her face, grasping, gearing up for the Big Scream. Art sighs and says, “No, please?” as he stops to pick it up and give it back to her, and his arm, when he sticks it in, blooms with little ruddy strings as she claws at him.

He looks more than a little surprised she isn’t crying.

Apparently, in that meantime, you had jutted your fingers into the cot and offered her a pinky as a peace offering. Versailles-style, like you’ll be punished later.

But he seems content with how she’s chewing you and figures you guys can stop here, for a bit, beneath these treemottled springtime sunbeams. In the garden of the home in front of which you’re standing, huge orange bougainvillea loll their petaltongues in the breeze.

“I just…” Art flounders for his words, then scoffs a not unkind, but vaguely embittered, sort of laugh, shutting his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Why him?”

You groan. “Don’t ask.”

“How is he?”

“He’s—” you waver, then shake your head, before finishing, “Ugh.”

“Patrick’s ‘ugh’? Patrick? Wow. Should we call all the outlets? I mean, that’s never happened before. Patrick. Ugh. You’re blowing my mind.”

You snort, and Lily laughs, and Art informs you that that is a very hard reaction to glean. And he rubs his temples, because all the wails sort of tremor at that same migrainous pitch. No matter if they’re amused or rabidly apoplectic. But you can enjoy it, the laughter.

“Can you just tell her for me?” you frown helplessly up at him.

That flicker in his tired eyes that wants to agree is purely paternal, but he sighs and shakes his head. “You know I can’t.”

He’s genuinely sympathetic.

“She’ll forgive you,” he tells you. You roll your eyes and hang your head, kicking piteously at the wheel of the stroller. He intercepts your foot with his, lightly shoving it away before bending to search for your gaze. “Hey,” he says, “She really will.”

You huff. “She’s never had to.”

You instinctively press your fingers into your womb, through your shirt. You feel the strange sensation of something starting to swell beneath the flesh.

“You’ll be a good mom,” says Art.

It’s a small relief, for you, to feel your face screw into its shut-the-fuck-up-Art expression. It’s something you know how to feel, a well trodden path. Maybe, once they drop you like a bad habit, he’ll still send you those furtive pictures he likes to take of Tashi sleeping. And you and Patrick can dualmasturbate to them, pretending your swollen belly isn’t in the way.

What you like about them, all three of them, is that they have all always loved you so simply. Tashi is severe, and Patrick is flippant, and Art is occasionally insincere. But they each care about you, to varying degrees, in their own ways. And they do so without reservation, even when you’ve been an ass.

You think that’s how you’re supposed to love your child.

You should probably figure out how he does it in the next five to ten seconds.

You ask, “What makes you say that?”

And his eyes flick down to where Lily is still gumming your knuckle like a dog with a bone, then back up to you, and he gives you one of those smiles. Your face screws. Shut the fuck up Art. Then, he tells you, “You love harder than you give yourself credit for.”

Lily gags around your pinky.

CC/Mods for Create-A-Sim

CAS room section

Default background (White) Gray UI Sims stand still in cas CAS lightning

CAS mods section

Nraas MasterController Nraas MasterController Integration CAS CC Icons replacements

Skin section

Default skin (Blue Sugar Nectar) Skintone colors replacement (All + Realistic) Specular map skin replacement No glow skin replacement Face Overlay Replacement

Eyes Section

Default eyes Eye mesh replacements : Elder to Teens + Kids to Toddlers Eyelashes : Elders to Teens + Kids to Toddlers + fix

Hair Section

Hair default replacements : ChazzyBazzy Retextures Eyebrows default replacements : SimpleLife Facial hair default replacements : SimpleLife Favorite Hair Creators : ChazzyBazzy + Poisonfireleafs + Pandelabs

Make-Up Section

Make-up default replacements : SimpleLife Favorite Make-up creators : sourlemonsims + smallsimmer + pleaseputnamhere

Sliders Section - [Needed for my sim dumps or face presets]

Ahmad

Lips : Nose tip height Nose : Middle upper lip width

aWT (All the same link)

Eyes : Eyeball iris size (Requires aWT eyeball mesh) Jaw : Jawline soften, jawline rotate Lips : Upper lip outer curve, upper lip tip width Nose : Nostril rotate

centauri

Lips : arched lips

Gruesim

Eyelashes : All sliders

Heriet

Jawline : Chin to neck

Hermi

Lips : Lip shape [F] + [M]

Hiemal

Nose : greek nose v2 [M]

Jonha (All the same link)

Arm : Arm lenght, shoulder size Body : Chest size, waist size, hip size Butt : Butt size Legs : Thigh size, calf size Neck : Neck size

littlecat

Ear : Earlobe slider

NikSim

Nose : Nose Depth

OneEuroMutt - Link here (Will be properly linked later)

Body : Body height (no toddlers), body width, body depth, shoulder levels Brow : Brow thickness Butt : Butt waist height, butt mass Eyes : Eyes width, eyes stretch Glasses : All sliders Head : Chin width (female) Legs : Thigh size, leg height Lips : Upper lip curve, Nose : Lower nose height, nose tip height, nose tweak, nostrils depth, nose tip width, nostril curve

PiTheInfinite

Facial slider pack I Facial slider pack II

Potato-ballad-sims

Upper neck slider

PuChiHouse (without this slider, my sims will look very different from the pictures and the make-up colors will be off)

Head : smoothfacenormals (What does this slider do ? Answer : here)

Sage

Lips : Upper lip shape

Simtanico

Ear : Ear length Eyes : Eye shape 1 Jaw : Wideset jaw, lower jaw enhancer

semller

Eyes : lower eyelid height

TNS3

Body : Breast height

TUDART

Nose : slider for nose

Thorns

Cheeks : Chiseled cheekbones, hollow upper cheek Eyes : Droopy lower outter eyelid Lips : Mouth corner dimples Nose : Lower nose bridge depth, nostril width, pinched lower nose bridge, septum height, upper nose bridge depth, boxy nose tip, fuller nostrils

TumTum Simolino

Chin : Chin clef

Voices

Nose : Nose bridge bump Lips : Upper lip corners shape

YSStudio

Lips : Thin lower lip Nose : Bride of nose width

whiterider

Lips : Overlip curve v2

Created (24/03/17)

Last updated (24/05/20)

I'm Good At Letting You Go (You Were Never the Enemy)

part one

A/N: I didn't expect anyone to read the first part, but a few people did, so here we are. I thought publishing a one-shot might help my hyperfixation, and prevent me from seeing the movie a third time, but...again...here we are.

warnings: explicit language, blood and gore, allusions to violence involving guns

summary: the end and the beginning of your relationship with lo'ak

***

Loose cuffs trapped your wrists. You’d wriggle out of them once the guards turned their backs. And the ship would be easy enough to crawl through undetected. The head injury resulted in nothing but a mild throbbing in your skull. It was the inconvenience of having to escape that irked you, that made your fingers itch to get a hold of the gun pressed to your head so you could inconvenience your captors right back. 

Revenge was not something you thirsted over often, but you became a lot less forgiving after you left the Metkayina clan a year ago. 

(after you left Lo’ak)

The wreckage of your simple plan was not entirely your fault, though. There was another presence on the ship, something more violent than you, that caused an unaccounted-for influx of guards and updated security system that resulted in your capture. 

The cells were on the bottom of the ship, and you sighed to yourself as you saw how much extra work it would take to climb back up undetected. 

“Pretty hair,” one of the guards sneered, wrapping their fists in your strands and yanking. “I wonder how much it’d sell for.” Your steps faltered, neck jerked back, and you gave one last struggle to get away from them, but their grip on your arms was too tight, and you knew it was futile, so you let them drag you along, scalp aching. 

Keeping a mental note of how many left and right turns you took, you were led down a winding hallway, stopped in front of a heavy door. 

Shoved inside, you had a strong sense of déjà vu when you met eyes with the other prisoner in the cell. 

Your steps faltered, something the soldiers behind you mistook for resistance. They shoved you forward, fastening your wrists to the bar next to Lo’ak. 

“Hey, wait,” Lo’ak called after them when they turned to leave. “I’ll take a bullet to the brain, please.” 

Heaving in a stuttering breath, you looked at the floor as the guards urged Lo’ak to be careful what he wished for. Then, the door opened and sealed shut, and the two of you were alone for the first time in months. 

Silence spread between you, stifling you. Lo’ak was never one to keep his thoughts to himself, and you waited for his tongue-lashing, but it never came. 

“It wasn’t easy.” You still weren’t looking at him, instead choosing to burn a hole in the wall. You had risked a few glances, though, comforted by the fact that he wasn’t looking at you, either. You did not want to be the victim of the hatred in his eyes. “Leaving, I mean. It wasn’t—” you cut yourself off with a sigh, frustrated at your lack of words. 

How many times had you dreamed about being reunited with him? Granted, under more favorable circumstances, but you’d spent so long without him, thinking of him, wishing things were different. Wishing you could talk to him just one more time and explain yourself. 

And now he was here, next to you, chained down so he literally had to listen to you, and you couldn’t figure out what to say. 

“Seemed easy enough.” 

The two of you exchanged a long glance. 

You should’ve known that when you saw him again, it would not be full of warm embraces. It would be harsh words and cold shoulders. 

“Leaving, I mean.” He mocked you with a shake of his head. Talking down to you, like he used to when you first met. 

You were being honest. 

When you joined the Sully’s on their journey, you told yourself not to get attached. This is only temporary, you repeated in your head, even as you taught Kirri what you knew about healing and let Tuk fall asleep on you at night. This is only temporary, you reminded yourself as Neteyam taught you hunting tricks and Neytiri put beads in your hair and Jake sharpened your knives for you and laughed when you showed him the records you’d collected. 

I remember this one, he had said, eyes bright, turning the Britney Spears vinyl over in his hands. You should see the music video. 

But somewhere along the way you’d forgotten just how fragile your situation was. Distracted by the feeling of finally having a family, of finally having people who would notice if you fell off the face of the earth, you forgot to repeat your mantra. 

This is only temporary, you neglected to remind yourself as you showed Lo’ak around the little tree house you’d built near his birthplace, explaining your past through little polaroid’s hung on the wall. 

This is only temporary, you forgot to whisper when the two of you laid on the back of Payakan, tracing constellations, spending the night drifting on the calm ocean waves. 

Lulled into a false sense of security, you chipped away at the stone exterior you’d spent so long constructing, and just as you lowered your defenses, you were struck. 

When you left, you told yourself it was only temporary. 

At least, you wanted it to be. 

But in the long year without him, without any of them, you were reminded why you left. You put a target on their back and returning would be cruel. 

Lo’ak didn’t understand that, though, a fact made clear by his tense shoulders and clenched jaw. 

You missed him. 

Suddenly, you started tugging at your cuffs. You thought seeing him again would be easy. Maybe all that time apart made you delusional. 

You slipped out of your restraints, reached into your boot, and gripped the small blade hidden there. Stepping towards him, he leaned back, as if he couldn’t stand you being close to him. 

“Don’t,” he warned. “I don’t want anything from you.” 

Staring at him, standing there like an idiot with the knife limp in your hand, you said, “you’re being ridiculous.” 

He raised his eyebrows, scoffing. “I’m being ridiculous?” Clenching his fists, you were suddenly glad he was restrained. “You’re so fucking—” he cut himself off, and you were thankful, because you don’t think you could handle whatever he was about to call you. “Just get the fuck out. I never want to see you again.” 

“I’m not leaving you here.” 

“Funny. You seem to be really good at that.” 

“Can we just focus on getting off of this ship and then we can—"

“You don’t get to pick and choose when you give a shit about me--” 

“Would you just stop and listen--” You paced, directly in front of him, his face tilted back to look up at you, enraged.

“You left.” 

His words cut through yours, and whatever you were about to say died on your tongue. The raggedness of his voice, the weariness in his eyes as he looked at you, this was not the same Lo’ak you walked away from. 

There was no response from you. You did leave, you couldn’t negate that fact. It had been for his benefit, but you still left. 

At the time, you convinced yourself that it wouldn’t matter. He was fine before you, then you were just a way to pass time and get comfort, and he’d be fine after you. Same with all the others. 

It was a different kind of heartbreak. You’d convinced yourself that you were the only one mourning your loss. Looking at him now, you thought maybe that wasn’t the case.

The cell door swung open. You turned, half expecting a bullet, but instead you were greeted with a familiar face. 

“Kiri,” you said in surprise as she said your name in the same tone, both of your eyes wide. She looked between her brother, the knife in your hand, and your face. She looked pale, as if she’d seen a ghost. 

If Kiri was here, so was Tuk, and Neteyam, which meant their parents were probably also close by. 

You retreated. 

It made you a coward, turning tail and running at the first sign of conflict, but you’d fought against every single impulse to return to them, and facing Lo’ak’s disappointment alone was too much to bear. You couldn’t face all of them. 

“1657 is the security code,” you told her, gesturing to the side of the cell. “Punch it in and the door will open.” 

Kiri was still staring at you, motionless. Your impatience snapped. “Now, Kiri. Please.” 

The doors slid open; a suction of air released. There was no barrier between you now. In your head, your reunion with her was full of smiles and laughter. 

You brushed past her in silence and dropped the knife on the ground in front of her. “In case you need it,” you jerked your head towards Lo’ak. “For him.” 

You didn’t look back, knowing it’d be much harder if you did. You regretted seeing him at all, and wished you never had. 

Before, your last memory of him was on that tiny island. 

Now, the last thing you’ll remember of him will be his harsh words and resentful eyes. 

A long time ago, your first meeting had been under similar circumstances. 

Laying in the darkest corner of the cave, you woke groggily, as if you’d been drugged. You blinked, head aching, your cheek pressed to something wet. Your own blood, you assumed, judging by the metallic smell and taste in your mouth. 

A loose knot restrained your hands in front of you, and although you felt like you’d been put through the ringer, it was easy enough to pick. With weak arms, you pushed yourself up, swaying. You pressed a hand to the cave wall to steady yourself. Whatever happened to you, you must’ve lost a lot of blood as a result. 

You took a few staggering steps, trying your best to keep yourself quiet. 

The sound of arguing around a bend in the cave covered your clumsiness.

“We have to call this in.” 

“Are you kidding? We’ll be slaughtered.” 

“It’ll be worse if we don’t tell him, and then he finds out later.” 

“I’ll be murdered. Violently.” 

“You exaggerate.” 

“And what do you think they’ll do to her? What if they kill her.” 

“They won’t.” 

“We don’t know that.” 

Back pressed to the cold stone, you listened. You only heard two different voices. Two captors were manageable. Two captors you could sneak past and avoid a fight. In your weakened state, you would be no match for even the kindest of creatures. 

Just as you’d lifted your foot to slink through the shadows, a third voice interrupted. You grit your teeth, mood soured, and retreated again. 

“I say we talk to her first.” 

“Who knows if we even speak the same language.” 

“She looked pretty bad when you brought her here. I should go check on her, make sure she’s still alive.” The female voice sounded kind, but at the mention of her coming to look for you, you panicked. 

In a perfect world, you’d have a weapon to defend yourself. But this was Pandora, and whoever dragged you to this cave was smart enough to confiscate anything you could’ve used to hurt them. 

There was more bickering between them as you wrestled with yourself, deciding whether you should make a run for the opening of the cave (which would be more like a very brisk walk, in your state). 

Except you had no idea where you were. It could be more dangerous outside of the cave than inside. 

Before your mind caught up with your actions, you stepped around the bend in the cave, making yourself known to the others. 

The girl saw you first. She paused mid-step, falling back on her heel as her eyes widened and her lips parted in surprise. 

She was Omaticayan, evident by her tail and color. There was another boy with her, too, also belonging to the same clan. The sky person threw you off guard, his shock clear through the mask he wore on his face. 

Even though they had a few inches on you in height, and more muscle, the fact that they seemed to be similar in age leveled the playing field a bit. 

A long stretch of silence followed your appearance as they sized you up, just as you’d been doing to them. You imagined how horrifying you looked. Hair matted to your face with dried blood, cuts and deep bruises along your body and face, voice rasped. “Do I need to worry about you killing me?” 

Your question shocked them out of their stupor. 

“How did you get free from the rope?” 

The avoidance of your question set you on edge, and your shoulders tensed. “The knot was loose.” 

The Na’avi boy punched the human boy in the arm. “I told you to tie that shit tighter.” 

“I didn’t want to cut off her circulation!” 

“Do I have to worry about you trying to kill me?” you reiterated your question, louder this time, though your voice still cracked. 

“No,” the girl spoke, placing a hand over her chest. “We were just—” 

“I saved your life.” 

The girl closed her eyes and sighed when the Omaticayan boy spoke, and you looked over her shoulder at him. 

Wracking your brain, you tried to remember needing to be saved. But you were drawing up blank, and that disadvantage frustrated you. He could be lying, and you’d have no way of knowing. 

“How long have I been here?” 

He scoffed, inching a few steps forward. “You know, usually people say, ‘thank you’ when someone goes out of their way to keep them from dying.” 

“Lo’ak—” the girl hissed, turning her face to give him a warning glance. 

He raised his hands limply in self-defense, giving her a boyish grin and a halfhearted shrug. “I’m just saying.” He looked at you again. “Maybe they do things differently where you’re from.” 

Based on the way you looked, it was evident you were not native to the forest. Your hair a stark white, even underneath the blood stains. Skin a lighter shade of blue, smaller than them. 

The girl turned back to you with an exasperated look. “Ignore him. We’re not going to kill you.” 

Still on edge, you took a step back to put some distance between yourself and the rest of them. She placed a hand on her chest, sensing your discomfort. “My name’s Kiri.” She jerked her head towards the human boy. “That’s Spider.” 

Despite yourself, your lips quirked. “Spider?” 

Cheeks tinted red, he explained the lore behind his name, but you were only half-listening, still trying to hatch an escape plan. 

You didn’t realize he’d stopped speaking until they were all staring at you expectantly. “Oh,” you said, swallowing thickly. You told them your name since it was only fair. 

“Well, it’s nice to meet you.” Kiri smiled, and you could tell she wanted to ask questions. They all did, you could see it in their curious glances. An interrogation was exactly the situation you wanted to avoid. 

Your eyes flicked down to the girl’s arm, where she pressed a white cloth to her forearm. It was dripping, splattering on the cave floor. 

Finally, a way out. 

“I can treat that.” You nodded towards her injury. 

“We’re headed back to our home soon. They can patch me up there.” 

“You should come with us,” Lo’ak interjected, stepping forward again. You eyed him. 

Supposedly, he saved your life. You’ve never even met him before, and doubted it was true. Kiri and Spider seemed a bit more hesitant than he was, aware of the fact that none of you knew each other. Lo’ak seemed at ease, though. Shoulders relaxed, eyes bright and trusting, like he was searching for something within in you. 

Too close, an alarm rang in your head. You made a mental note to keep an eye on him.

“You’ll lose a lot more blood if you wait. I can stitch it up in just a few minutes. Where are we?” 

Their curiosity got the better of them. You followed them outside, blinking in the bright sunlight, eyes sore from sleep and having adjusted to the darkness of the cave. 

You were near some sort of wreckage. A small ship crashed in a clearing a few hundred feet from the opening of the cave. “We found this place after we got caught in a storm one day.” Spider moved just as quickly as his Na’avi friends; you noted as he spoke to you. “Pretty cool, right?” 

Scouring through the rubble, you popped a drawer and found a medic kit inside. Cracking it open, you told Kiri to sit. Her brothers did as well, watching intently. Lo’ak had a hand near his sheath, the handle of a blade glinting in the light. Your eyes flicked from his weapon to his face, and you turned away when you saw him watching you just as intently. 

It was a standard cut. Deeper than most, hence the extreme bleeding, but not fatal. You’d collected plants outside, familiar leaves that would sedate the pain. You talked to her about what you were doing, figuring it would put her more at ease. She talked back, seemingly knowing a few things about healing herself. 

“I’ve never seen anyone use this stitching pattern before.” When you finished, she held her arm up, eyes glistening with unshed tears, observing your technique.

“Since the wound was so deep, I used a tighter stitch. The thread won’t dissolve on its own, so in a few weeks you’ll have to get them removed.” You shut the kit, returning it to the drawer. “Don’t mess with it and you’ll be fine.” 

You were feeling better, stronger, than you were when you woke up. You turned towards the window, suddenly. “I think someone’s coming,” you told them, and they all turned away from you to peer out the window. 

When they turned back, you were gone. 

Lo’ak couldn’t believe they fell for something so stupid. On the trek back home, he kept shaking his head at himself. “I mean, it’s so fucking dumb.” 

“How about we leave that part out when we tell mom and dad. It’s too embarrassing.” Kiri ran her fingers over her new stitches. 

“We’ll just say we let her go. It’s technically not a lie,” Spider added. 

But his parents didn’t buy it for one second. 

The three of them stood in front of thir family, telling their story with sweeping hand movements and talking over each other, only to be met with silence and narrowed eyes. Neteyam biting his lip to keep from grinning, Tuk complaining that she hadn’t been invited along on the adventure. 

“So, what I’m hearing,” his father turned away from where he’d been kindling his fire. “Is that you got caught in the middle of someone else’s fight, endangered your life by entering that fight, got Kiri injured, saved someone’s life, and then, after giving Kiri stitches, they just vanished.” 

“Yes,” Lo’ak said. “That’s exactly what happened.” 

Neteyam couldn’t muffle his laugh, though he went through a dramatic effort to disguise it as a cough. Lo’ak didn’t appreciate it, narrowing his eyes at his older brother. 

“Spider and Kiri were there. They can corroborate my story.” 

“It’s true,” Spider interjected. 

Kiri nodded. He knew his father would be hesitant to believe him or Spider, justifiable on most occasions but a nuisance in this case, so Kiri was their chance at convincing him. “She was running from these people—they had guns, I think they kidnapped her—and she went right over the edge of this cliff. If Lo’ak hadn’t caught her, she would’ve fallen to her death.” 

Lo’ak straightened his shoulders. 

That’s right. He did that.

Good for him. 

“And she knew a lot about healing! We talked for a bit about herbal remedies and different stitching methods. She taught me a different way to close a wound, which will be useful.” Kiri displayed her cut for her parents to see, though it seemed to have a negative reaction. Neytiri’s ears flattened, and his father’s jaw clenched. Kiri kept talking, too caught up in her story to notice. “She had this beautiful white hair—” 

Neytiri’s hands slipped from where she was skinning some fruit, the knife clattering to the dirt. Eyes wide, she looked up at her daughter. “White, like atokirina?” 

Kiri nodded enthusiastically. 

Confused, Lo’ak shared a glance with his father. “Do you recognize her?” he asked, turning away from his precious fire. 

“They’re from the arctic regions in the North,” Neytiri explained. “Natural born healers. The entire tribe is peaceful, a safe haven for the injured. Their hair is white because they’re thought to be like atokirina, seeds from the Tree of Souls.” 

The three kids went silent, considering the new information. 

“So, is she like, a spirit?” Lo’ak asked lamely. 

“A descendent of one.” 

He and Spider leaned across Kiri to punch each other in the shoulders, laughing. “Bro, you saved the life of a spirit.” 

“She should’ve stuck around longer. Maybe she would’ve granted me a wish or something.” 

Kiri rolled her eyes, pressing her hands to their chests and pushing them away from her. “You’re both so stupid.” 

“Hey, Kiri, maybe she healed you with magic.” Lo’ak grabbed her forearm to observe the stitches more closely, but she ripped her arm out of his grip. 

“Don’t touch me, asshole.” 

“Language,” Jake piped. 

“You’re very lucky,” Neytiri went back to skinning her fruit, occasionally cutting off a slice when Tuk tugged at her arm. 

“I’m the one who saved her life, she’s the lucky one.” 

Spider snickered, and Kiri shook her head. “You can be such a dick, Lo’ak.” 

“Language!”

The conversation shifted over dinner, but Lo’ak’s mind strayed to the healer. He had seen you fight, before you went over the edge of the cliff. It was vicious. The snap of a neck, a bullet between the eyes. You didn’t seem like a healer, or a spirit. More like a desperate animal gnawing off their own leg to escape a snare.

Who were those people, and why were they after you?

And the fear in your eyes when you saw them in the cave. He equated spirits with power and calmness. Gentle. You seemed to be anything but as you stood in front of him, dripping in blood. 

His curiosity got the best of him. After the rest of his family dozed off, he slipped away, the silver moonlight filtering through the trees and lighting his path as he returned to the cave. 

It’s not like he was expecting you to still be there, but he let out a long sigh and his shoulders slumped when he saw that the area was empty and untouched. Exactly how they left it. 

“So dumb,” he muttered to himself as he kicked a rock, cursing himself for falling for your stupid trick earlier. 

The cave was a lot scarier at night, a deep void that light from the stars couldn’t penetrate. He slid into the shadows, remembering how fast his heart was pounding as he brought you to where Spider was helping Kiri apply pressure to your wound. 

“Look what I found.” 

You hung limp over his shoulder. You’d already lost consciousness when he caught you on his Ikra, though you’d woken a few times, struggling in his grip. It was easy for him to keep you restrained, and your weak hands pressing against him did little to loosen his grip on you. You fell back under again and didn’t wake up. 

Kiri looked at him like he’d been the one to put you in that state. “What did you do.” 

He hoisted you back over his shoulder, gently putting you back on the ground. “Hey, a little appreciation would be nice. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t be breathing.” 

They debated on what to do with you. Hide you under some leaves, wait for you to come-to on your own. Take you back to his family. After a solid fifteen minutes of arguing, they settled for tying your hands and waiting for you to regain consciousness before making any other decisions regarding you. 

And then you used the easiest trick in the book to get them to look away for one moment, just one millisecond, and you were gone. 

“Where the fuck did she go?” he’d asked, standing up so quickly he nearly knocked himself off his feet. 

“She was just here.” Spider spun in a circle, as if you were hiding in a cabinet. 

Kiri stifled her laugh. “I can’t believe we fell for that.” 

And, yeah. Maybe Lo’ak wanted to talk to you more. It’d been so long since he’d met someone new. Not to mention, your situation seemed exciting. Running from men with guns, able to hold your own in a fight, a healer. Who were you? He wanted to know. 

Pulled out of the memory by something sharp underneath his foot, Lo’ak jumped back. He bent down, scooping the object up in his hands. It was a necklace. 

He’d never seen it before, and he turned it over in his hands as he hoisted himself into a tree and rested on a branch. Holding it up to the light, he squinted at it, trying to discern where it came from. 

Maybe it was yours. 

The thought ignited a flicker of hope. If it was yours, it was probably meaningful to you, and you might come back for it. 

He found a hollowed-out log close enough to the cave and set the jewelry inside. Somewhere easy enough for you to find, but difficult for an animal to get to. 

Days passed. Neteyam didn’t believe him. 

“I’m not calling you a liar,” his older brother said as he pulled his bow string taught, aiming at the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. He let the arrow fly. “But I am saying you’re delusional.” 

“Scared I’m going to take your place as the mighty warrior of the family?” Lo’ak laid back on the rock, tilting his face towards the warm sun. “I mean, how many spirits have you rescued?” 

“She’s not a spirit; she’s the descendant of one.” Neteyam grabbed the fish he hunted, adding it to his collection. “Are you going to help me at all or just scare off all the prey?” 

Lo’ak ignored him. “If she lives all the way up North, how’d she get here?” he shook his head, musing. “I bet it’s a good story.” 

Neteyam sighed, shaking his head and rolling his eyes up towards the sky. “Too bad you’ll never get to hear it.” He threw a dead fish at Lo’ak, laughing when his brother rolled away from it, jumping after him. 

But deep down, it bothered Lo’ak that no one believed him, Kiri, and Spider. He was telling the truth. And he had to prove it. 

“She’s not here,” Spider complained. 

“I just want to see.” 

Always willing to participate in Lo’ak’s antics, he knew Spider was curious about you, too. And when the two of them peered into the hollowed log, they found your necklace was not there. 

His heart kicked in excitement. “See! See!” he did a victory lap, jogging around the small clearing and whooping in victory. He stopped and pointed at the empty place where the necklace used to be. “I’m telling you! You saw the state she was in. She couldn’t have gone far.” 

“An animal could’ve taken it.” 

Lo’ak shook his head. “No. She was here.” 

They both looked up at the trees, as if you’d reveal yourself. They observed every inch of their surroundings, checking for tracks or other lost belongings, but you left no trace behind besides the missing necklace. 

Lo’ak rode that high for several more days. He checked back every afternoon, sometimes alone, other times bringing Kiri or Spider, and Tuk on one occasion. He knew you were still hiding in his forest. Between the leaves, hiding just outside his peripheral. If he could figure out a way to coax you out, get you to show yourself just one more time, he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. 

And then he could rub it in his family’s face. 

See? he’d tell them, brandishing you like a sword. I’m not crazy!

But his best efforts were futile. No matter how much plotting he did, trying to lure you out with food or other bait, you never bit down on his hook. He grew frustrated. 

And then Tuk got sick. 

Like, really sick. 

Even Mo’at looked worried as she cared for his little sister, Neytiri and Jake doing little other than staying at her bedside. 

Lo’ak’s outings to the cave became reprieve from the sick den and the suffocating grief of his family. When he went out alone, he would talk to you. Tell you what was going on in his life. Before, it was mundane things. Like how Spider tried to make an ambitious jump and ate absolute shit in the process. Or how his father taught him how to use a gun and throw a punch. 

But now Tuk knocked at death’s door, and he had no idea if she would be turned away or let inside, and he started talking about that instead. He didn’t know if you were listening. He swore up and down that he could feel you, a second heartbeat assisting his own, but he had nothing to show for it besides that one incident. 

He escaped one afternoon after he saw Kiri crying, unable to take the emotional weight placed on his family. Lo’ak paced around the clearing, breathing heavy, looking up at the trees. “If you’re there,” he started, angry, “just give me a goddamn sign.” 

No response, but a soft breeze through the leaves. 

 “Some fucking healer you are,” he taunted before he left.

That night, he laid awake next to Tuk, and regretted yelling at you. As if you were even there to hear him. 

Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll go back. After that, I’ll let it go. 

It was a bad morning for Tuk. She wouldn’t stop coughing, her blood staining the handkerchief. 

He stomped the whole way back to the site. He was mad again. He ripped back the leaves he used to cover the hollow log, bracing himself for another wave of disappointment. 

His fury dissipated in the air. 

A scratch piece of paper read “For your little sister. Take one each day. Mix with honey to help with the taste.” Next to the note laid a collection of small vials, all filled with a deep green liquid. 

“It could be poison.” Mo’at shook her head, shoving the vial away. “Too risky.” 

“It’s not,” Lo’ak promised, unable to look at where Tuk lay. 

“How can you be sure?” 

He would’ve launched into the whole story, but his grandmother was a tough nut to crack, and telling her it was a mystery vial left in a log might not be the best approach. 

“She’s going to die if we don’t do something.” He set the supposed medicine on the table. “This is our only option.” 

His parents mulled it over. Neytiri eyed the vial, holding it up to the light. Jake rested a comforting hand on Lo’ak’s shoulder. “Are you absolutely sure she’s the one that left this?” 

She, meaning you. Lo’ak nodded. He could feel it, as sure as Eywa’s presence. 

Jake and Neytiri shared a look. His grandmother pursed her lips. 

The first day brought no noticeable improvements. 

By the third day, Tuk could open her eyes again. 

On the tenth day, she spoke for the first time in a month. 

By the last vial, she was herself again. 

“Gross,” she wrinkled her nose at the smell. Even mixed with honey, it tasted bitter, and she’d grown tired of it. 

“Last one,” Neytiri promised, arm wrapped around her youngest.

The weight over his family lifted. 

Throughout Tuk’s healing process, he didn’t have the time to return to the cave. But once all the vials were empty, he collected them and raced with Kiri back to the site. 

He kept one, hoping its absence would be enough to make you reveal yourself. After setting them in the log, he hesitated before leaving. 

“I don’t think we’re ever going to actually see her again,” Kiri told him as they shared lunch in the clearing. 

“We don’t know that.” 

“If she hasn’t shown herself yet, I doubt she wants to.” She peeled an orange, handing him a slice. 

He shrugged. “Who knows.” Spoken with a smile, there was no doubt in his mind that he could find a way to get you to reveal yourself again. He just had to be smart about it, trick you into making a mistake. 

Lo’ak left a note with the vials. “You still owe me for saving your life.” 

The debt was more than repaid, considering you’d brought Tuk back from the brink of death. But you didn’t need to know that. Kiri gave him a flat look when he placed the note inside the log, shaking her head at him. “I think she’s smarter than that.” 

Lo’ak shushed her with a finger to his lips. “She could be listening.” He pointed up towards the trees with a grin. 

Kiri narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t shush me.” 

They bickered the entire way home. 

A weird sort of trading system began. Lo’ak still liked to talk to you when he visited alone, and he found the objects you left for him in the log corresponded with his stories sometimes. 

A tiny knife, useful for skinning fish and picking out their tiny bones when he mentioned he was having trouble with that.  

A thread and needle when he mentioned Kiri wanted practice replicating your stitching patterns. 

A bunch of bright orange leaves when he told you about how one of his friends pierced his own ears and it got infected, accompanied with more instructions. “Chew and place on the piercing. Make sure to disinfect the needle next time.” 

He left things for you, too. It was harder, since you weren’t talking to him, and he knew nothing about you. But he tried.

Tuk liked making jewelry when she wasn’t busy annoying the shit out of Lo’ak. He left bracelets, earrings, anklets, and necklaces in the place of whatever you left for him. 

Hair combs cast aside by others. He picked things off of the sky people’s ship. Stuff that wasn’t interesting to him, but maybe you would like it, and no one would miss it, so there was no harm done. 

But, in typical Lo’ak fashion, he grew impatient. 

He’d more than proved that he wasn’t a threat, he thought. The trading was fun, and it was exciting to have something to constantly think about. He was always on the lookout for things you might like. But it would be a lot more fun if you would just show yourself and return with him to his home. Then you could find things together, and he wouldn’t feel like an idiot, talking to himself all the time. 

With each new trade, his curiosity only intensified. 

“I have to know who she is,” Lo’ak explained one day when he dragged Neteyam and Spider out to the site. 

“I don’t think she feels the same about you, little brother.”

“You don’t get it.” 

Today was the day, he decided that morning. He’d been cooking up a plan. It was his turn to put something in the log, which meant you’d have to come out and get it. Your trades grew more frequent, there was something new every day now. 

It was exciting. And frustrating. You were right there, so close to him, and still so far out of reach. He wouldn’t be able to rest until he saw you again, he decided. Then maybe he could let this weird hyper fixation on you and your life go. But he had to have at least one more conversation with you, first. 

This trade was valuable. At least, he thought so. Medical supplies his father brought back after visiting his military friends. State-of-the-art gauze and disinfectants and tourniquets. 

There’s no way you’d be able to resist coming out to grab it. And when you did, they’d be there, hidden in the foliage. 

“And what are you going to do when she comes out?” Neteyam asked. “Catch her in a net? Spring out at her like a predator?” 

“No,” Lo’ak countered. 

“You haven’t thought that far ahead, have you?” 

Spider laughed at that and Lo’ak gave him a look of betrayal. Spider was supposed to be on his side, not Neteyam’s. 

“Of course, I have,” he lied. “But we’re getting close, and she could be listening, so no more talking about the plan.” 

Neteyam and Spider snickered, though they heeded his request and made a covering of leaves and plants while he grabbed what you’d left for him in the log. A collection of arrows, the nice ones, crafted with care. 

A gift for his mother.

He wondered if you’d made them yourself, or found them, or did someone give them to you. Shaking his head when his imagination drifted again, he focused on the task a hand. 

Joining his coconspirators under their cover, they shed their knives in a pile behind them. “If we’re covered in weapons when she sees us again, she’ll run.” 

“I think she’s going to run anyways.” 

They whispered back and forth, arguing for a few moments, before falling silent. 

Hours passed. 

They each grew restless, dramatically overestimating their ability to be quiet and still for such a long period of time. They gossiped about their family, other members of the Omaticayan tribe, whether a mountain banshee or a hammerhead titanothere would win in a fight. 

The original plot was to stay awake through the night. 

The three of them fell asleep within a few hours of darkness. 

Startled awake by a branch breaking close by, they jerked back into consciousness. Pushing himself up, Lo’ak cursed, abandoning the cover of the leaves, and rushed for the log. 

“Wait,” Neteyam hissed after him. “It could be dangerous.” 

But Lo’ak didn’t care, peering inside. Blowing out a long sigh, he turned back to his friends, who stood on either side of him, also looking in. “It’s still there.” 

Neteyam shook his head and trudged back to the makeshift blind. “This is pointless. We’re not going to catch her.” 

Lo’ak lifted his head, looking through the trees ahead. It was dark, the forest alive with bugs chirping and birds fluttering about overhead. Spider placed a hand on his shoulder. “We can try again some other time.”

“Yeah,” Lo’ak replied, but he didn’t bother to hide the disappointment in his voice. 

Neteyam’s voice cut through the noise of the woods around them. “Spider, did you grab our knives?” 

“No, I just left them where they were, right behind us.” 

Another beat of silence, and then Neteyam was laughing. “Well, I think your friend decided to pay us a visit after all.” 

Lo’ak and Spider joined him by their camp, staring at the place where their knives used to be. 

They were stolen. 

Lo'ak froze. Spider joined in the laughter. 

“It’s not funny!” Lo’ak snapped, which only caused them to laugh harder. “Shut up! It’s not funny!” 

Neteyam nudged him, smiling wide. “She’s smarter than you, bro.” 

“Smarter than you, too,” he countered, shoving Neteyam back with a hiss. 

Lo’ak couldn’t believe it. 

At first, your little game was cute. 

Exciting, even. 

But now Lo’ak clenched his fists at his side, muscles tense, filled with the urge to break something. 

He couldn’t believe this. They turned their backs for one second, again, and you’d struck. He was certain you were watching now, laughing down at him. 

Turning over his shoulder, he stomped back over to the log. “Whatever,” he called back to Neteyam and Spider. “I’m taking this back.” 

Except, when he reached in to grab the medicine kit, that was gone, too. 

“No way,” he drawled, staggering back as if he’d been shocked. When Neteyam and Spider asked him what happened, he was so angry, he didn’t even answer. 

Spider reached inside, eyes light with curiosity. “Well, shit." He pulled out two knives.

“She’s fast,” Neteyam remarked, sliding his knife back into his holder. “Don’t worry, skxawng, I’m sure she’ll return yours soon enough.” He and Spider snickered, and Lo’ak decided he had to fight them both.

Even his dad got a kick out of the story. “Seems like you’ve met your match,” he said with a wink, Neytiri hiding a smile behind a sip of her tea. 

How could you have gotten the best of them two times in one night, in the span of ten minutes? 

His anger fueled him for several days. His sleep was fitful, full of tossing and turning. He ranted about you to everyone who would listen, until even Spider grew tired of him. 

“Just let it go, man,” he told Lo’ak one day. “It’s never going to happen.” 

And to rub salt in the wound, you stopped trading with him entirely. 

For all he knew, the incident with the knives was the last interaction you two would ever have. 

The thought devastated him more than it should’ve. How could he be this dejected over someone he’d only had one conversation with? Who had bruised his ego and gotten the best of him several times now?

Time passed. Instead of the gaping wound you used to be, you became a scab he picked at. He occasionally still visited the site but didn’t have much time for it after the sky people returned with a vengeance. 

Which is how he ended up with his knees shoved into the wet dirt, a gun pressed to the back of his skull. 

“Leave the others here.” Lo’ak guessed this fool was the leader, judging by the way he listed off commands and his spineless cronies followed suit like puppets on a string. He gestured towards Lo’ak with a flippant wave of his hand. “Take that one to the cells.” 

“No, Lo’ak,” Kiri gasped, his siblings struggling against their restraints. He fought the panic of being separated from them but could do little to stop it from happening. His parents and Neteyam were on their way, and knowing his mother, he’d be free in an hour.  

Lo’ak kept a steady stream of insults flowing as they guided him through the ship, calling the soldiers every name in the book. It didn’t help him, though it did make him feel better, and the guards only grew more violent as they opened the cell and shoved him inside. 

He whirled on them, as if he could run out before the door sealed shut, but it was too late. He kicked at the clear door, his hands still restrained in front of him, cursing. 

“That’s not going to help.” 

The interruption shocked him. He hadn’t noticed anyone else in the cell, distracted by the soldiers that imprisoned him. 

But he’d recognize your voice anywhere. 

Mercedes Vang’s Halloween Lookbook

♡ Look ONE: Hair | Costume | Shoes | Necklace | Earrings | Nails

♡ Look TWO: Hair | Tutu | Flats | Tights | Crown | Necklace | Nails

♡ Look THREE: Hair | Dress | Wings | Shoes | Necklace | Garters | Nails

♡ Look FOUR: Hair | Costume | Tights | Wings | Horns | Boots | Necklace | Earrings | Nails

Thank you to all of the talented CC Creators! ♡

@ts4eve @ikari-sims @shoestopia @twisted-cat @sentate @magic-bot @plazasims @christopher067 @greenllamas @nolan-sims @daylifesims @sclub-privee @bluecravingcc @dream-girl @aladdin-the-simmer

house of balloons, elliot x reader

synopsis: at a frat party, you fall right into elliot's mysterious and enticing web, and both of you share two desires: sex, and drugs—a recipe for disaster. warning(s): smut (minors dni!!!), college!au, frat boy!elliot, canon ages (over 18), mentions of drug use (c*caine), sexual acts, intoxication, masturbation (fem receiving), praise kink author's note: i think this is one of my favorite imagines... and if the smut sucks i'm sorry x. it's my first time writing it, give me a break. not proofread. wc: 1.6k

Partying was the only way you knew how to take your mind off of the series of woeful ordeals that seemed to always happen to you. Your other remedies? Drugs and sex. To be frank, you couldn’t have one without the other. 

When Maddy extended her invitation to tag along with her and her friends to a frat party, you couldn’t help but enthusiastically accept. You partied with them before and enjoyed yourself, so you figured it wouldn’t hurt to join them once again. 

Now here you were, occupying a spot on the wall, sipping your drink and scoping the scene. The house was packed with intoxicated college students in their twenty-somethings, dancing the night away knowing that the following morning they have classes to attend. 

That was the beauty of university. The fact that if you needed to let loose, you could garner the right connections and ditch your sorrows for the night then bury them. 

Maddy and Cassie were singing their hearts to the song blasting on the speakers on top of the table, catching everyone’s attention. The crowd surrounding them was singing along. Until the DJ abruptly switched the song. It was then you realized quickly what you didn’t like about frat parties, you loathed the music they played. 

The song was so bad that you quickly pushed yourself off the wall and tried to find the nearest empty bedroom. Clutching your cup, you squeeze you past the living room and snuck into the foyer. A DO NOT ENTER sign was plastered on the glass door that separated the rooms, bolded and in red ink. 

Ignoring the sign and quickly glancing around you, you slowly opened the door, and tip-toed through and into the foyer. It was much quieter now that you moved away from the speakers. Your curiosity peaked once you noticed the spiral stairwell, so you walked near the steps and went up to explore the rest of the house. 

There were so many rooms in one hallway, you couldn’t pick, but you settled on the third to the right. You didn’t hear any noise when you pressed your ear against the door, and you assumed it’d be safe to go in.

It was a typical college boy’s bedroom, nothing really out of the ordinary. Cartoon posters, and basketball jerseys on plaques hanging above the king-size bed. The desk was piled with textbooks and loose pieces of paper, as well as other miscellaneous office supplies. And although the desk was messy, the floor of the room was surprisingly clean, almost as if the owner regularly cleaned it.

A clean frat boy is, without a doubt, a rare occurrence.

You became so entranced with examining this random person’s bedroom that you hardly noticed the toilet in the connecting bathroom flush. You jump as a figure emerges from the bathroom, and you are met with his slightly startled brown eyes and dirty-blonde outgrown hair.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked

“Who the fuck are you?” you quickly rebuttal. You realized it was a stupid question to ask, considering that he may or may not be the owner of this room and you invaded it, but you were drunk and high off of two whole blunts. Everything from when you finished your last cup to now was hazy, but not enough to lead you completely incoherent.

“You’re in my room, you’re not even supposed to go past the sign on the door.”

“I’m aware,” you reply, trekking towards his bed and plopping on the edge, “The music sucked so I wanted to get away.”

“You could've gone outside,” he furrowed his brows at you while you ran your hands on the bed.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t…” your voice trailed off as your gaze diverted from the little doodles you were drawing on his blanket and up at his. It didn’t take long for you to notice how dilated his pupils were.

You shot up off the bed and walked closer to him, “You happen to know anybody that can hook me up?”

His eyes stayed on yours as you approached them, and his face went from confused to perplexed at the drop of a hat. A slight smirk ticked at the corner of your lip and you knew you had hit the jackpot.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, looking off to the side with a small grin.

You playfully rolled your eyes, “Oh come on, you can’t fool me. I know a plug when I see one.”

His eyes widened shockingly and chuckled at your comment, “Wow, now I’m being profiled by the random girl who snuck into my room asking for drugs?”

“Wow, now I’m being judged by the boy pretending not to be a drug dealer?” you playfully shot back at him, with a tilt in your head and crossing your arms.

Another laugh escaped both his and your lips and you spun on your feet and went back to glancing around the room, “Your room is nice… typical… but nice. And your blanket is fun to draw on.”

“Thanks, random girl who snuck into my room.” you could hear his shoes tapping against the wood floor as he followed you, supposedly making sure you didn’t find what you were looking for.

But apparently, this man could read minds, because when you turned back around he was staring at you with a tight-lipped smile on his face and waving a baggy of white powder in the air, “Is this what you’re looking for.”

You narrowed your brows at him and hummed, “Perhaps… perhaps it is.”

He inched closer to you, a little too close, and toyed with the baggie near your face, “You’re cute.” Was all he said after running the bag across your lips and then walking back toward the bathroom.

“Just cute? Not hot, sexy, beautiful, gorgeous, stunning,” you trailed off.

“Hot? Nobody says that anymore.”

You furrowed your eyebrows, “I do,” You looked around for the bathroom and went inside, watching as he swiftly snorted a line off of the counter, “That was hot.”

He skimmed up at you with a smirk, “Want some?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” you said, entering the bathroom, not breaking the contact that you made with his eyes. They were seductive. Enticing, even. Just the mere glance was enough to send you over the edge. But you kept your composure, breaking the contact when you peeked down at the line that he cut just for you.

A smile etched your face as you plugged your right nostril with your freshly manicured nails, leaned lower toward the countertop, and snorted the contents through your other nostril.

The rush hit your body almost instantly, sending eclectic waves up and down your spine. The feeling was entirely too euphoric to explain, but you knew that you had snorted quality cocaine.

You turned around and glanced at yourself in the mirror, disregarding him leaning in the doorway, just watching you, “You’re creeping me out, boy with no name.”

“Elliot.” He muttered, still watching you. 

You spun around and leaned against the counter, “Thanks for the coke, Elliot.”

The room fell silent, all that could be heard was the slight thumping against the floor from the loud music playing downstairs. You were enjoying this quiet, yet awkward sexual tension that filled the air. 

It was confusing because the silence normally wouldn't weird you out enough to leave, but for some reason, this silence was reeling you in a different direction. A direction that made your body hot and steamy, waiting for him to touch you with his ring-stacked fingers.

That was put to a halt when your vision started drifting elsewhere and you felt his body moving closer to yours, “I guess we’re skipping the formalities,” you mumbled as he cupped your behind and placed you on top of the counter.

His lips softly connected with the flesh on your neck, “I guess so.” He placed kisses along your jawline and then met your lips. You threw your arms on his shoulders and allowed his hands to roam free along the lower half of your body.

He kissed you with so much passion, that you would've thought you were the love of his life and not a random girl in search of drugs like he had said before.

His hand abruptly latched on the hem of your skirt and slowly pulled it down, but his lips never met yours. You noticed that he was a really good kisser. Good enough to make you mewl when he nibbled on your bottom lip.

His fingers danced along your sides, then between your thighs. He took his thumb and began rubbing on your bud through your panties, causing your breathing to hitch. You leaned your body back against the mirror and watched as he began picking up the pace.

He continued to rub circles on your clit and lifted his free hand to your chin, “Look at me, okay?”

You responded with a nod and a pleasurable moan. You tried to keep your eyes on his but as he continued to go faster and faster, you could feel your legs start to quiver.

“Damn, your moans are cute too,” He said with a smile on his face, “And the face you make when you’re about to cum.”

You felt it coming. You knew it was coming. The closer it was the more your head started to loll backwards. 

“I’m about to–”

“I know, baby,” he cut you off and sped up the circular motions his fingers were making on your sensitive bud, “You can cum. Go ahead, be a good girl, and cum for me.”

And just like that, you became undone against his ringed fingers and breathing heavily. Elliot licked his fingers clean and then pulled you off the counter and engulfed you in a tongue-filled kiss.

“I don’t even know your name,” he said when you broke the kiss.

“You don’t have to.”

---

Friday Nights

pairing: riff (wss) x reader

warnings: 18+, minors dni, oral (m receiving), exhibitionism

summary: After having Riff’s hands all over you at the dance, you can’t help but pull him away into the shadows.

a/n: mike faist world domination ‼️ I’m hyperfixating so bad rn. He’s just so gorgeous.

“Where the fuck is Riff?”

The Jets without dates shrugged from their places on the outskirts of the dance floor. Ice clenched his jaw, his date securely tucked underneath his arm.

“He’s dancing with… Y/N…” Baby John scanned the crowd of dancing couples, failing to see either one of you.

“Numbers and Action left with their girls so if anything happens without Riff here, we’re outnumbered,” Ice said pointedly to the Jets within earshot.

Mouthpiece and A-Rab nodded, as Ice and his date rejoined the dance floor.

Unbeknownst to them, you had taken Riff’s hand halfway through a number and weaved him out of the crowd underneath the bleachers.

You found privacy there and, after the past few hours of being so close to him, you couldn’t deny yourself any longer.

As soon as you were in the shadows of the bleachers, you crowded him against the wall of steps.

“We should go,” Riff panted with pink kiss-bitten lips as your hungry mouth moved to his neck, licking and sucking his sweat-salted skin.

You shook your head with a mischievous grin, “I wanna keep dancing… Just need you to myself for a couple minutes.”

“Oh yeah?” A wide smirk plastered across Riff’s lips and his eyebrows lifted, looking down at you. His strong hands gripped your hips tighter and held you close to him.

You and Riff had been going steady for a few weeks. He treated you to milkshakes at the diner, he took you dancing every Friday night without fail and you two even went to the drive-in movie theatre once.

He was certainly charming.

But you weren’t sure you were quite there yet. Riff has a special way of making your stomach swirl but the Jets had a reputation amongst your friends for being… town bikes.

“Yeah, I like seeing you like this,” You smiled, letting that hang in the silence for a moment before taking a step back, “Wanna head back?”

Riff watched you with half-hooded eyes as you straightened your appearance. His hair was mused and his cheeks were rosy pink.

Looking through the gaps between the stairs, Riff assessed the dance hall. Lonely singles sat above you, waiting to be asked to dance, their shoes tapping to the beat of the music against the bleachers.

Did he want to go back..? Riff would rather spend the rest of the night hidden away with you, but you wanted to dance so he’ll dance.

He turned back to you and stood up straight, “Let me cool off for a minute.”

The bulge in his trousers was evident as he stepped further out of the shadows. It looked sizeable and you couldn’t tear your eyes away from it.

Riff adjusted himself and the front of his trousers, straightening out his shirt and collar.

“You need a hand?”

The words escaped your mouth before you could think and Riff almost snapped his neck turning to look at you.

Silence hung between you for what felt like eternity but was in actuality a few seconds.

“I mean… if you want,” You shrugged, only now realising that you were ready to give yourself to Riff in that way.

“Sweetheart of course I want that,” Riff took your face between his hands, “Are you sure? We can just go back to dancing.”

Wordlessly, you wrapped your fingers around his belt and pulled him closer, your hips flushed to his. His unfastened belt buckle caught against your hand as you tugged down his zipper and lowered to your knees.

Riff helped you pull his boxer briefs low enough to free his aching cock. You gasped at his size and he groaned at your reaction to him, tucking a lock of hair behind your ear.

He was being so gentle with you. It was hard not to give him your all right away.

You started with kitten licks and soft kisses to his shaft, running your fingers through his happy trail and settling your hand on his thigh.

The other held the base of him as your tongue traced the vein across the underside of his cock.

Riff groaned from deep in his chest, gripping a metal bar from the bleachers framework above him. His other hand flailed in the air as he struggled to decide whether to hold onto you or not.

The hand on Riff’s cock ran along his toned stomach and took his free hand in yours, interlocking your fingers, as you wrapped your lips around him and took him into your throat.

“You can take it sweetheart,” Riff encouraged, his voice thick with lust.

Bobbing your head up and down, you worked up a rhythm that had Riff tipping his head back and biting his bottom lip.

He managed to muffle most of his moans and heaving breaths but the slick sounds coming from your mouth around him were hard for him to ignore.

Luckily the lively Jazz music of the dance hall bounced around the room, concealing your noise.

“Fuck baby, you’re so good at this,” Riff praised, low and rumbling. A smile graced your face despite your mouth stretching around Riff’s thick cock.

You moaned in appreciation, the vibrations making Riff moan and buck his hips, pushing his cock deeper down your throat.

Saliva dripped down his cock onto his balls. You pulled back to catch your breath, kissing his hand before untangling your fingers from his and stroking him.

Gripping him at the base, you took him in your mouth again and worked up another rhythm to prolong his pleasure.

Sweat beaded at his temples and his chest heaved. Riff wrapped his hand around the side of your neck, his thumb tilting your head back to meet your eyes.

The sight of him above you, ruined by pleasure, made you moan. The vibrations made Riff shiver. You met his eyes and his muscles trembled, pleasure shooting through him.

“Oh baby I’m gonna cum,” Riff groaned, biting his lip. His grip on the bleachers framework tightened, his bicep bulged and the veins in his forearm protruded.

You smiled giddily around his cock and reached up to massage his balls. A sinful moan sprung from his throat and his head fell back, ropes of warm salty cum coating the back of your throat.

Swallowing everything he gave you, you couldn’t help but laugh. Riff tried to catch his breath, a sheen of sweat coated his skin.

You rose to your feet, refastening his trousers and belt before tucking his shirt in and straightening it out.

Riff wrapped his arms around you and pulled you flushed against him. His face buried in the crook of your neck and pressed soft kisses to your skin.

You stood like that for a moment before pulling away. Riff looked you over before crouching and brushing his fingers against your slightly scuffed knees.

“Worth it,” You giggled as Riff stood to his full height, towering over you. He adjusted your dress and ran a thumb under your bottom lip, tidying your smudged lipstick.

“Beautiful,” Riff whispered with adoration in his eyes.

An arm wrapped around your waist and held you close, “Ready to dance, girly girl?”

“Just one more kiss and then we dance,” You rose onto your tiptoes, meeting him halfway and kissing him with raw passion.

Riff pulled away, barely an inch, “Just so you know, I’m returning the favour as soon as you let me.”

“You’ll have no complaints from me,” You kissed him quickly and nipped at his lip before taking his hand and heading back to the dance floor.

The eagle-eyed Jets whooped as you and Riff reappeared, less put-together than when they last saw you.

“Enough’a that,” Riff was stern but in good spirits, pulling you under his arm as you giggled.

The Jets fell silent, despite mischievous smirks and knowing looks.

None of the Jet boys would ever say anything to you. Riff was their leader and he’d have their necks if so much as one bad word went against you.

You were his girly girl, his sweetheart, his.

“C’mon doll, let’s dance,” Riff grinned down at you, swerving you between other dancing couples to the centre of the room, “Wanna show you off… and then you’re coming home with me.”

At that, your mouth went dry. Riff bit his lip as he watched you swallow thickly.

After a moment to recover, a smirk twitched at your lips and you wrapped your arms around his neck, “One more song then we go.”

Riff dipped his head to capture your lips with his before twirling and dipping you in time with the music.

You couldn’t wait for what was to follow, and every Friday night to come.

come into my bedroom

description. you and JOAQUÍN TORRES take a week long vacation to the beach together. just a week on the coast, spending time in each other's bubble, without falling for each other ... probably. visuals

includes. coworkers to friends to lovers, SMUT 18+ MDNI, reader has been kept as ambiguous as possible (hair type, skin color, body type, place of birth, etc), reader is able to tan, the location is ambiguous, slight spoilers for brave new world, takes place after bnw, protected p n v sex, oral (f receiving), soft dom! joaquín, reader is called "baby" a couple of times

wc. 12.3k+

a/n: title from champagne coast by blood orange. i tried to keep where they vacationed as ambiguous as possible, but it's definitely at least a little bit obvious. for my bsf who recently got back from miami. thanks to @luckypunklemonade for beta reading :D

You’re drunk. 

No, you’re not drunk. You’re too drunk, inching towards shitfaced. You’re still here, at least here enough to walk beside Joaquín down the street towards your hotel, but you’re not really here. You know you’re not exactly walking in a straight line, and you know where you’re heading, but you don’t know how long you’ve been walking. You could’ve left the club five minutes or 50 minutes ago. 

You weren’t going to get this drunk. Honest. You and Joaquín were just going to go out, have a few drinks, and go back to your separate rooms. 

But the music was good, and the drinks were good, and the people were good, and suddenly you and Joaquín are drunk and navigating your way down the street. Well, he’s navigating your way. You’re just trying to keep up with his long strides. 

He walks a little in front of you the entire time, slightly more rigid, and a little less drunk than you are. You’ll probably be at his level in another half hour, that is if you get something in your stomach by then. Every so often, he looks over his shoulder to make sure you’re still there. You thought about hooking a hand around his elbow to keep him close, but the thought entered your mind and left before you could act on it. 

There’s not much small talk happening, but you don’t mind it that way. You’re focused on making your feet pick up and land one (mostly) in front of the other. Actually, you’re focused on walking and finding an open food spot on the way. 

One part is going fine, the walking part, but you’re still blearily searching for something to eat. You pass bars and closed businesses, restaurants that require reservations weeks in advance, one of them you think you and Joaquín actually have a table at later this week, but nothing quick and greasy. Which is exactly what you need before calling it a night. 

Joaquín calls your name and you hum. 

“You up for stopping in right here?” He points to the side and you look around his wide shoulders to find your saving grace. It’s like he read your mind, or maybe you’d been audible harping on about wanting something to eat the entire time. Right now, either seems plausible. 

Either way, you nod and let Joaquín hold the door open for you. 

You and Joaquín end up sitting across from each other at a tiny outdoor metal table. With the wind blowing against your skin as you’re sipping freezing cold water from a to-go cup, you finally realize how hot you’ve been this entire time. You lift your skirt up a bit to press your thigh against the cool metal and a sigh pushes out front your lips. Your eyes fall shut as you just sit in the moment. 

“You still drunk?” Joaquín speaks from across the table. 

You open your eyes and destroy your brief peace to glare at him as you wrap your lips around your straw. “What do you think?” you ask him only when the cool liquid has slid down your throat. 

He laughs. “First night here and you’ve already gotten shitfaced.” He shakes his head as if he’s ashamed of you, but the playful glint in his eyes keeps you at ease. 

“It’s your fault!” you accuse. “You’re the one who made friends with that couple. They kept buying us drinks.” 

Joaquín throws his hands out to the side in a surrender. “I’m not going to say no to free drinks. Don’t blame me!”

He’s right. Even if he wasn’t, you aren’t in the arguing mood anymore. You would rather finish the greasy taco sitting limp in your hands. And you do.  

You’re not being very attractive about it, though, you can tell from the way the juice slides down your fingers and around your mouth, but that’s not really the point to all of this. 

Besides, you and Joaquín are just coworkers and friends. Just two coworkers/friends on vacation together. Sitting across from each other in front of a taco spot, fighting for sobriety as you occasionally lock eyes between large bites. There’s no reason for you to be attractively drunk eating when you’re only with your coworker/friend. 

You finish the last bite, wipe around your mouth with a crumpled napkin and throw it onto your empty tray, looking up to find Joaquín already looking at you. He has this look on his face, nothing different from the one he usually wears—soft eyes and a softer smile—but it feels different this time. Maybe it’s the city lighting and your drunkenness that’s skewing the meaning. You’re going to blame both factors for the flutter in your heart, too.

Neither of you say anything for a moment and in that moment, a thought flashes across your mind. It’s quick and fleeting, but still strong enough to evoke a reaction. Just a thought of you leaning over this small table and pressing your lips to Joaquín’s. And the thought was truly fleeting, but you bring it back and sit in it to imagine how he would reciprocate with his hands on your lower back, big palms resting on the strip of skin between your top and skirt, and he would taste like lime and alcohol and when you pulled away he would have a look almost identical to this one on his face. 

Joaquín’s eyebrows push together, skewing the soft look he wore before and knocking you out of your drunken trance. 

“What’s that look?” he asks. 

You shrug, feigning nonchalance. “What look?”

His gaze lingers for a moment, but then he licks his lips and cleans up his area. “You think you’re sober enough to walk back now?” 

You scoff and attempt to make a point by quickly standing to your feet. When you wobble, it’s because your shoe didn’t land right on the concrete. Honest!

You have a crush on Joaquín. 

You don’t know why you’re realizing it here and now—laying in a hotel bed on vacation first thing in the morning. You don’t even know how long this crush has been here, but you know for sure you have a crush on Joaquín Torres, your partner/coworker/friend. 

You thought your little image from last night was fleeting, nothing but a drunken thought that you let yourself imagine for less than a minute, but it proved to be way more than that because when you got back to your room, you couldn’t stop thinking about him. 

As you took your makeup off, you thought about Joaquín waiting in your room for you to finish, snuggled under the blankets and scrolling through the channels on the TV until you came out of the bathroom in his shirt. As you climbed in the shower you imagined him standing at the sink brushing his teeth and humming that song he’s always singing but you never ask the name of. As you finally climbed into bed and clicked the lights off, you imagined fighting for covers with him and sleepily talking about your plans for the next day. 

It was so domestic and loving and absolutely sickening and unexpected. 

Well, maybe you should have expected it. At least a little. 

Joaquín is kind of the perfect guy. Everyone in your life made sure you were aware of it. He was funny, attractive, hard working, and easy to get along with. Even his flaws—his incessant nature and occasional annoyance for one—was quickly reworked as lovable in your head. 

You struggled with falling asleep for at least a half hour last night, and as soon as you knocked out, you were out. You might not have remembered your dreams but you knew deep in your mind and body that he was there. 

Just as he is here now, standing in front of you early  in the morning, wearing a bright smile and an athletic set. 

“No,” you sternly shut him down before he can even say anything. 

Joaquín’s jaw drops and he wears a mixture of shock and humor. “C’mon, you didn’t even let me say anything.”

“I know what you’re gonna say, Torres. I’m not going to some ‘sick workout class’ when we’re supposed to be on vacation.” 

“Oh, so we’re on last name basis again?” He crosses his arms over his chests and widens his stance. “I thought we moved past that.” 

“If you ask me to come with you then we’re back to last name basis, yeah.” 

He pouts and it’s so stupidly cute that you want to slam the door in his face. “Don’t let the hangover speak for you. I know you secretly wanna come workout with me.” 

You squint at him accusingly, leaning into the doorframe. “‘m not hungover.” 

“Uh-huh. How’s the headache?” He’s obviously not buying your shit.

“I don’t have a headache.” Bullshit and you both know it. 

“How’d you sleep?” He asks you instead, this time lacking any suspense. For a moment, he seems like he’s actually wondering how you slept. 

“Like a baby.”

“Then that means you should be energized enough to go for a workout. It won’t be bad. It’s only an hour.” 

You shake your head. “That’s an hour that I could be sleeping.” 

“And basically waste the whole day away? That doesn’t sound like the partner I know and love.”

You don’t let your mind linger on that word, especially when you know he doesn’t mean it like that. But still, knowing that Joaquín has some sort of love for you makes your chest feel all airy and glittery. 

“Yeah because that partner isn’t here right now. We’re on vacation.” 

Joaquín doesn’t respond. Not verbally at least. Instead, he tilts his head and fully pouts, lips pushed out and eyes big. He’s not backing down and truthfully, it might be better for you just to say yes and halfass the entire session. 

Finally, he reasons with you. “I’ll buy you a smoothie afterwards. Whatever overpriced shit you want. Fair?” 

Fair enough. 

Compared to what you’re used to, the workout is quick, but it’s certainly not painless. The instructor, some woman with much more energy than you’re willing to exert on vacation, seemed to find pleasure in kicking your asses. For a brief moment there when you were catching your breath and wiping your forehead on a towel, you wondered if she could be some big and bad super villain hiding in plain sight. That would explain the inhuman stamina, and the almost eerie cheery personality, but other than that your theory didn’t make much sense. And even if it did, you were on vacation. Now wasn’t the time to seek out trouble that wasn’t presenting itself. 

The only thing that pushed you through the entire thing was looking over at Joaquín, one because of how attractive he looked with sweat glistening along his tanned skin, and two because you refused to let him show you up, even if the workout was his idea. 

You will admit, though, that every time he lifted his shirt to wipe his forehead, your knees did feel just a little weaker and your last rep in a set was not nearly as strong as it could’ve been when you heard him grunting beside you. 

You couldn’t understand it. You and Joaquín workout together all the time. You train together, sometimes with Isaiah and Sam, sometimes with friends of friends, sometimes with just each other. You’re used to seeing him sweat, you’re used to hearing his grunts and breaths, you’re used to all of it. But something about all of this happening now is making you lose your mind. 

As soon as the class ended, relief entered your entire body. 

The relief certainly didn’t last for long, though. 

Since you did what Joaquín wanted to do that morning, he did what you wanted to do right after. Before you could even really think about it, you happily suggested sunbathing on the beach until you were too hot or hungry to continue, whichever came first. 

It wasn’t until Joaquín slyly grinned and sang your name that you realized what you signed up for. 

“You tryna see me shirtless?” he teased at the time. And you rolled your eyes and called him a freak and continued walking down the hall towards your rooms, but as soon as you were behind the closed door you were digging into your suitcase to find the cutest swimsuit you brought. 

Not that you were trying to impress Joaquín or anything. 

As soon as your bare toes are sinking into warm sand, you slowly feel yourself relax. Slowly. 

Laying on your back in a swimsuit that was a nice mix between cute and attractive, your eyes closed, your ears full of a playlist you made just for this occasion, the sun radiating down on your skin. It’s easy to forget everything laying just like that. The breeze cools your skin as soon as you get too warm, the sun heats you back up as soon as you get too cold. Absolutely nothing to worry about except how long you’ve been laying on one side and when you should flip over. 

Absolutely no stressors. 

Until Joaquín speaks. 

“Do me a favor and get my back?” 

You peek an eye open and lift your sunglasses up to see Joaquín standing next to you, holding out a bottle of sunscreen. 

You don’t mean to hesitate, but you still do. It takes a moment to process his question, and it takes another moment to find an answer, even though the clear one is yes. If he wasn’t standing there without a shirt, wearing forest green trunks that hung low on his hips, and his skin wasn’t glistening in the daylight, it wouldn’t have taken nearly half the time to help him out. 

“What would you do without me?” You try not to let your voice falter while you watch him massage sunscreen onto his chest, but you’re sure the little dip at the end of your sentence was noticeable. 

Joaquín just tilts his head and tosses the bottle into your lap.  

It’s not awkward. At least you don’t think it’s awkward. You rub the sunscreen on Joaquín’s skin as quickly as possible, trying to ignore the sturdiness of his muscles beneath your hand. You know how fit he is, it’s impossible for you not to know since you’ve been working with him for a while now. But knowing and knowing are two different things. 

Seeing is not the same as feeling. 

Feeling his muscles as you work them beneath your fingers, feeling the warmth of his skin under your fingertips, grazing your hand lightly over the scars littering his skin, only lingering for a second on the life altering scar that trails down from the side of his neck to his shoulder. You try not to touch it too much. He hasn’t talked to you much about the accident, not since you visited the hospital with high quality food instead of flowers for him. Even then, he joked around it, even if you saw sorrow in his eyes like you’d never seen Joaquín wear before. 

You rubbed the sunscreen down his back and finished above the waistband of his trunks. Not even a second later did he look over his shoulder and down at you through a squint. “Now let me do you,” he urged without leaving much room for argument. 

Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t make room. 

You shook your head. “‘m okay, I already got it.” 

Joaquín turns around to face you completely. He laughs through a quick puff of air, his lips pulled up at the corners. “Barely. I saw you struggling over there. C’mon, let me top it off for you.” 

His hands take the sunscreen bottle from you, but he doesn’t put any in his palm. Not yet. For now, he stares at you, eyebrows lifted, waiting for you to give him the final answer. 

You turn around, moving whatever needs to be moved to give him basically full reign over your back. 

The first touch makes you jump, even if you were expecting it. You hear him quietly apologize under his breath, and you quietly brush it off, but you aren’t sure if your response was heard or if it was carried off with the wind. 

He continues in silence. 

You’ve had Joaquín’s hands on you before. A hand clasped in yours to pull you up, a touch fixing your posture when he was showing you a new trick Isaiah taught him before, a finger jabbed into your side when he walked past you. But again, this is much different. 

Having Joaquín’s bare hands on your bare back makes you tense up, and you hope he doesn’t notice it. He rubs with a lot more attention to detail than you did; he reaches beneath the straps of your top with curt permission, and even asks if he can get the backs of your arms too. 

By the time he finishes, you’ve started to relax just a bit, to the point where the expected disappearance of his hand on your back feels unwanted. Joaquín’s hands are big and soothing, you could do with them on your skin for the rest of your life. 

Of course, you don’t tell him that. Not just because it would be completely inappropriate, but because he would never let you live it down. He would go the lengths to change his phone contact to Joaquín “best hands there ever were” Torres. 

Which is just a step below Joaquín “best co-worker there ever was” Torres. 

Somehow, you manage to make it through the rest of the beach day without much trouble. You tan until you don’t think you could tan anymore. Joaquín lays next to you most of the time, besides when he began to feel fidgety and he ran to grab both of you drinks, and pre-cut fruit for you, as an excuse to stretch his legs. You used the few minutes of solitude to text your group chat about the agony you accidentally put yourself into. Agony that was only made worse by Joaquín coming back with two drinks in one hand, fruit still in its rind in the other, and his newly tanned skin glistening from sweat in the sunlight. 

Shortly after, you had to leave and take a cold shower to get your head on straight. 

You think you’re doing pretty good at ignoring your feelings. You know you have a crush on him, but acting on it would change nearly too much, and a lot in your lives—his especially—has already changed. It’s not a leap you think you’re ready to make yet, so you’ve been ignoring your feelings. 

Over the course of the past couple of days, you and Joaquín have been spending your time doing every relaxing thing you could think of. Decompressing at that same club from the first night, but leaving as soon as the crowd proved to be very different from before—more rowdy for the hell of it and less generous in general. Eating at trendy, overrated lunch spots, or underrated hole-in-the-wall dinner spots. Spending a little too much money on new clothes but enabling each other anyway, because the shirt might look similar to another one that you already have but that shirt back home wasn’t that shirt there in your hands, so you needed it. 

There were just two nights left and then you would have to pack all your stuff, somehow fit in more new clothes than you anticipated, and return to the real world. One that entailed mission debriefs and learning how to work new tech. The only thing you were looking forward to about the real world was Sam, since he happened to be a natural barrier between you and Joaquín. It’ll be hard to focus on how badly you wanted to be underneath the Falcon whenever Captain America was in the vicinity providing tasks that required your full attention. 

But that is days away. For now, you’re going to try and enjoy the remainder of your all too quick vacation as much as possible. Even though you’re becoming more and more tense as you go on, a tension that your fingers beneath your panties hasn’t been able to fix yet. 

You didn’t think your behavior was noticeable, but Joaquín notices more than you thought. 

The two of you are walking side by side down the boardwalk. You’ve been fairly silent throughout, but not for any particular reason. Silence made sense to you, there wasn’t much to talk about right now. 

Apparently, Joaquín felt different. 

“What’s up with you?”

You furrow your eyebrows, quickly trying to figure out if you did something wrong between the walk from your hotel to the walk at the start of the boardwalk. Coming up short, you ask for clarification. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean why’re you so tense? Isn’t this relaxing for you?”

Yeah, this is relaxing for you. Walking side by side, letting the beach breeze blow your dress in the wind. Showered, fed, at the end of your vacation, this moment you exist in is like heaven. It’s a little too much like heaven, a perfect plane where the guy you’ve been crushing on is wearing a button up with the first two buttons undone so you can see the fresh tan he has and the gold glint of the chain he wears instead of his dog tags. 

It’s hard to relax when right beside you is someone you’ve wanted so badly, and he looks like everything you’ve ever wanted. 

“I’m not tense,” you finally respond. Although it’s a lie. 

“You so are,” Joaquín counters, “let me show you what you look like walking around here.” He takes a few quick strides ahead of you, and then pulls his shoulders up to his ears, straightens his spine, and walks with a little too much purpose. He looks odd and menacing. And definitely not like you. 

You tell him as such. 

He turns around to face you, grinning and walking backwards. “Okay I did take some creative liberties there, but you do look tense.” He turns back around and slows until he returns to a stride right beside you again. “What’s wrong? Do you wanna do something else?”

You shake your head. “No. This is fine. I like doing this.” 

Joaquín takes a moment and you see him look down at you from the corner of your eye. “Then what’s up? Anything you wanna get off your chest?” 

God, you should just tell him the truth. Well, not the full truth. 

Joaquín is chill personified. If you told him that you’re wound up sexually, he would likely make a joke about it, then brush it off and avoid asking you about it again. Friend to friend, you could just let off some steam—verbally!, although the other option is much more preferable—and then hopefully feel better. 

But just imagining yourself saying those words makes you tense even more and you have nothing to do but shake the thought out of your mind completely. 

“No. ‘m okay. I was just … thinking. But not anymore.”

He doesn’t say anything for a second and you don’t know if he believes your lie. But he moves past it. He points to an ice cream shop to your right, and you swerve for the window. 

You and Joaquín end up sitting side by side on the beach, willingly letting sand press into your nice clothes but neither of you care much. You have a dinner reservation soon, and you’ve just been killing time—and also your appetite, but you and Joaquín both swore to eat dinner. Even if you’re devouring ice cream cones. Truthfully, this is a perfect way to end your night, sitting by your partner's side, letting the world exist around you both. 

The breeze blows against your skin. You and Joaquín sit with your bare toes digging into the sand, shoes having been discarded to the side, your shoulders close enough to brush against the other if either of you move. You’re looking off at the ocean, watching people enjoy the evening air around you both as you sit in a moment of stillness. There’s paragliders, a few jet skis, some boats, and a large cruise ship sailing into the port. 

Joaquín points off at the ship with the hand not holding his waffle cone.

“We should cruise for our next vacation.”

You turn to face him, tilting your head to the side. “Our next vacation?”

Joaquín nods. “Yeah. We should make this a regular thing. You know we work well together.” 

That you do. You grin and knock your shoulder into his.  “Let’s hope Sam doesn’t start feeling left out.”

Joaquín laughs with a quick exhale through his nose. “He’s definitely having the time of his life back home.” 

You’re unable to stop yourself from grinning as you imagine it—Sam working back home, likely enjoying the rare lull in the terror that the three of you have been fighting and will continue fighting. “He’s probably blasting Marvin Gaye over the speakers in the office.” 

This gets a real laugh from Joaquín, likely because he, too, can see it perfectly. 

Your laughter dies down and for a few moments, you and Joaquín sit in comfortable silence. 

Then, “You been having fun?” 

You hum. “Yeah. It’s nice not having to deal with—” you gesture vaguely in the air and Joaquín nods beside you. “Especially after everything.” You don’t say it exactly, but you know Joaquín still understands you. He knows you’re talking about his accident. 

You weren’t even the one in danger, having stayed grounded on the ship, but the horrors still settle deep in your heart some nights. Things are repaired, or currently being repaired in the case of D.C, but everything still feels so fragile to you sometimes. 

Which is why you’re so glad to be here with him at your side, reminding you that he’s okay. Everything’s okay. 

Joaquín takes a breath as if he’s about to speak. You turn to look at him. He’s staring off at the sunset, his face mostly stoic except for a slight twitch in his eyes, a flare of his nostrils, and his jaw clenching. “For a moment there when I was falling out of the sky, and when I could barely move my body on my own in the hospital I was worried that I wouldn’t get the chance to see places like this again. To … you know…” he hesitates and you’re about to tell him that he doesn’t have to keep going if he doesn’t want to. You and Joaquín have avoided talking about the day his heart stopped, and you don’t have to start now. But then he inhales through his teeth and continues. “To see home.” 

Your breath hitches and your eyes sting. Without thinking too much about it, you scoot closer into Joaquín’s side, tilting your head and resting it on his shoulder. Immediately upon contact, Joaquín wraps his arm around your waist, pulling you fully into his side. 

“I’m glad you’re here with me, Joaquín.” 

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” he says your name at the end, echoing you but somehow sounding more earnest. More meaningful. 

He places a kiss on the top of your head and in that moment you decide you could stay here just like this for the rest of your life. It all settles in your body at one time, the realization that you want Joaquín, you’ve known that for a while, but you want more than his body. 

You want Joaquín Torres in his entirety. 

“Is that what you’ve been thinking about?” he continues, “Is that why you’ve been tense? Because I promise I’m okay. It was scary for a bit but my heart’s fine and I feel fine physically—”

“No. It’s not that, Joaquín. I promise I was just a little tense but I’m good now, too.”

He nods once. “Okay.” He pulls his phone out and checks the time. He doesn’t say anything for a while as if he doesn’t want to disrupt the energy, but he speaks eventually. “If we wanna make our reservation we gotta leave now.” 

He stands to his feet and puts a hand out for you to grab. You take a moment to look at the sun setting and to finish the rest of your ice cream in one bite, then you take another moment to look at him. With resolution, you place your hand in Joaquín’s and let him pull you to your feet. 

Yeah, ignoring your feelings isn’t working anymore. 

It’s not like you’re exactly able to ignore how bad you want Joaquín when you’re at dinner with him, sitting in such an intimate setting—sat at a small table tucked in the corner of the restaurant next to a window looking out on the street, his tan skin lit by candlelight and ambient low lighting around the both of you. 

Having just come from the beach, the two of you are still wearing the same outfits (now without as many grains of sand as possible), meaning you have an even better view of Joaquín’s chest and the chain sitting right below his collarbones. He looks so nice and put together—his curls out more than you’ve ever seen them before, his face a little unshaven and adding an older look to him. 

God, he’s so pretty, it’s impossible for you not to think so. Not when you’re faced with him like this. 

Joaquín’s looking at the menu, acting like he didn’t look at it on his phone two hours ago. You’re holding the menu open, acting like you’re still deciding between two options, when really you’re just trying to decide if you should make a move or not. 

When Joaquín looks up, you quickly look down, furrowing your eyebrows and pouting as you stare at words that aren’t processing.  

Joaquín calls your name and you hum without lifting your eyes. When he doesn’t say anything immediately, you glance up. Not only is he already looking at you, but he’s looking at you with a certain look in his eyes. Infatuation, admiration, something else that you don’t wanna name, for it feels like too much of a jump.

“What?” you ask, a shy grin splitting your face open as your skin starts to warm. 

Joaquín shrugs like he’s going to say the most casual thing ever. Instead, he tells you, “Nothing. I just wanted to tell you how pretty you look.”

Oh my godddd. 

What are you supposed to say to that? Everything thus far on this vacation has been widely platonic, and anything crossing that barrier has been nothing but a hopeful figment of your imagination. But his words, paired with the way they were delivered, feels like a step towards a future you want to live in. 

But maybe you’re overthinking it. Joaquín is honest and earnest when he wants to be and maybe now is one of those moments. 

You wrap your hand around your glass of ice water and bring it to your lips, pausing just long enough to respond. “What is it? The tan?”

Joaquín nods but that look in his eyes is still there. Chocolate brown dances across your figure before settling back on your own eyes. “Yeah … among other things. The tan and the color of your dress,” a bright colored fabric that hung loosely over your body and dipped around your back, you chose it especially because you knew it would look good on your skin, “and just you.” 

You gulp down water, trying to contain yourself. 

“Thanks, Joaquín,” you finally respond, trying to remain as casual as possible. “You look good, too.” 

Joaquín grins and you can see the man you’re used to coming back to himself. He tugs at the collar of his shirt and dusts off invisible particles. “I clean up well don’t I?”

You halfheartedly roll your eyes and return back to the menu. That interaction has already been catalogued for you to hyper analyze in the shower later. 

You thought that interaction was mind boggling, but the one you find yourself in later is ten times worse. 

You’ve both steadily worked through your plates, giggling and laughing about any and everything you could think of. The waiter mentioned the option of drinks at one point, and you looked to Joaquín for his reaction, wanting to see if that’s how the night was going to go. Not exactly as drunk as you were the first night, but at least a little buzz. When Joaquín politely shook his head, you did the same, and continued to sip your water instead. 

You do, however, decide to split two desserts. 

“Can I say something?” Joaquín speaks whenever he scrapes his fork across the decadent chocolate dessert sitting in the center of the table. 

You hum, grabbing a forkful of the fresher, citrus dessert instead. “Depends. How stupid is it gonna be?”

“Um … let me say it and then we can decide.”

You sit back in your seat, thereby giving him the floor. 

He takes his time chewing and swallowing before he goes to respond. “I’m shocked that we’ve been together every day and night of this trip.”

Your eyebrows furrow. “What d’you mean?”

“Like we haven’t … been with other people.”

His words shock you. “Is that what you think of me, Joaquín?” 

You don’t feel upset, or particularly offended. You’re just a little confused on why Joaquín has been thinking about your sex life while the two of you have been on vacation together. Sure, you’ve been thinking of the same thing, but his sex life hasn’t exactly crossed your mind. Besides whenever you pictured the two of your sex lives merging into one. 

But now that he’s presented the idea, you, too, are shocked that things have been contained to just the two of you this entire week. It’s not that you expected Joaquín to sleep around, you actually didn’t know what to expect when it came to his dating life. You did know that Joaquín was attractive and people other than yourself thought so, and he obviously knew it as well, but it’s unexpected that you didn’t see him intentionally ogling at least one other person on your nights out. 

You don’t know why he would think the same of you, though. 

“No!” he’s quick to defend himself, “But I wouldn’t judge you if that’s how you wanted to spend your vacation. I mean I wouldn’t blame you.”

“You’re digging yourself further and further into a hole, Torres.” 

He laughs. “Yeah, I can tell.”

A moment goes by and you sip your water. The air here feels open, but certainly not casual. You feel like you can tell the truth in this intimate atmosphere, and your words would hold intentional weight. 

You take the jump. “I didn’t wanna be with anyone else. I liked being with you.”

Joaquín looks surprised. “Really? So you preferred beach trips and coffee shops and working out over a hot hookup?”

You shrug. “I haven’t been interested in hooking up with anyone else.” 

His eyebrows lift in the center. “Anyone else?”

Fuck. 

It seems you have joined Joaquín in that hole, but you don’t mind being here. It’s about time you did something, right? You don’t bother responding, at least not verbally. Instead, you just look at Joaquín over the rim of your glass, sincerely hoping that he’s starting to understand. 

Before any more progress can be made the waiter comes back with the check and you’re already reaching into your bag for your wallet, verbally chastising Joaquín before he can even reach for the bill. 

Quiet returns to you both during the walk back to your hotel. It feels natural this time, likely because you’re not speaking, but it isn’t silent. Cars against asphalt as they drive down the street beside you, music spilling out of establishments that line the way, the automated voice of the pedestrian crossing pole when Joaquín presses the button for the both of you. There’s not anything being said, but there doesn’t need to be; much is being communicated through the energy radiating off of your body. 

Walking closer to each other than you had ever before, elbows grazing, a lightness to your bodies even if you both indulged a little too much over dinner. Everything just feels so right, even if there’s still an emptiness inside of you. Even if you leave this trip without getting laid, you’ll still feel fulfilled because you and your partner are closer than you’ve ever been before. Though, after existing in this bubble with only him, it’s going to be hard to return to your normal life and let other people in. 

A car honks and skirts to a stop. Before you can even realize what just happened, Joaquín’s already throwing an arm over the front of your torso, his face turned to the car that almost (wrongfully) hit the two of you. He yells something at them and blindly grabs your hand, pulling you in front of him and pushing you to the sidewalk and out of the street. 

He mutters something under his breath, but you don’t hear it. “You good?” he asks at full volume. He stands next to you but still holds onto your hand. 

“Yeah. We’ve been through worse than almost getting floored by a Benz, right?”

He laughs and continues leading the way back to the hotel. 

Your hand stays in his the entire time.

You and Joaquín make it all the way inside of the hotel with your hands still clasped together. They don’t part until an unattended child runs between your bodies, forcing you to separate. 

You end up standing in front of the elevator with the up button pushed. It dings every few seconds, an indicator of its steady descent, but it makes a few stops along the way. While you wait, you lean your shoulder into the wall next to it, crossing your arms over your chest and your legs at the ankle as you look at Joaquín standing across from you. 

He speaks first. “You wanna go out again tonight?  End the week with a bang?”

You shake your head. Your eyes are big, your lips are pulled into a soft smile, your entire expression is soft. Fuck hiding it, you’re done pretending. 

“Nah. I’d rather stay in tonight.”

Joaquín nods and tucks his hands in his front pockets. “Alright. Together or separate?”

“Together.”

His eyebrows lift as if he’s shocked, but there’s a little glint in his eyes. You think he’s starting to catch on. 

“Okay,” he drags the last syllable out and shifts his stance. He clears his throat before he speaks again. “What d’you wanna do?”

The elevator door opens and you and Joaquín stand out of the way to let people come out. As soon as everyone has cleared out, the two of you enter the elevator alone and you push the button to shut the door before anyone else can come around the corner. With the doors closing you turn to face Joaquín to see him already looking at you. 

You smile up at him and he smiles down at you. 

You take a step closer to him and he takes a step closer to you. 

You reach a hand out to his face, hesitating, and then he nods just before he reaches a hand out and places it on your waist. 

And then finally, your lips press against his. 

The first kiss is tentative. It’s testing. Your lips press together, you stay like that for a moment, and then you pull away. The two of you stare at each other, Joaquín’s expression as soft and docile as it always is. You think you’re mirroring him in this moment. 

Then, without any words exchanged, you both move towards each other again. Your heads are tilted and without much trouble at all, your faces slot together nearly perfectly. This kiss is more exploratory. It’s open mouthed, teetering towards a messiness that you’re sure you’ll both fully succumb to by the end of the night. At least, you hope so. 

You don’t have much time, you’ve realized that as soon as the elevator dings the first time to indicate its ascent, therefore you’re trying to get what you can while you can. You throw your arms over Joaquín’s shoulders and hook them around his neck, pulling him down towards you as you tilt yourself up into him. His body curves to engulf yours in his warmth, but he kisses you like he has all the time in the world. 

He kisses you like he means it, like there’s more than one mutually shared goal at the end of this motivating him. 

It’s hard not to give in to the slow and longing way Joaquín kisses you. You don’t even try resisting it at a certain point. Instead, you press your chest up into his and lean up on your toes to get more of him, yet not initiating a change in the pace at all. You like the slow way Joaquín’s lips move against yours. You feel much more this way. 

Your fingers lay across the back of his neck and just as they start to inch up into the faded part of his haircut, the elevator dings and announces your floor. 

You and Joaquín separate with clear hesitance in the movement. The two of you stare at each other, unmoving, just looking in each other’s eyes. His eyes look darker than you’ve ever seen them before. If you got closer, you think you would see his pupils blown out. From here, though, you see his desire in other ways—the flush on his cheeks, the prominence of his chest rising and falling, the hint of your lip products that have rubbed off on his lips. 

The elevator door starts to shut and Joaquín is forced into making the first move. He slots his arm between the doors just before they close and he stays there when they open. He turns to look at you, tilts his head in a beckon, and holds his hand out for you to grab.

The walk to your rooms feels much longer than it usually does. You try to make it go as fast as possible, skittering ahead of Joaquín as fast as your impractical sandals would allow, but you’re trying not to look too eager all the while. Still, when you reach the number you’ve memorized for the week and turn around to look at him, he has a slight smile of amusement on his face. 

You’re already searching into your bag for your key when you ask, “Yours or mine?”

Joaquín reaches around you for the handle to the door without speaking. You watch him press the key card to the sensor and push the door handle down just as you feel your fingers find the piece of plastic. 

“We gave each other one of each when we checked in, remember? Just in case.” comes his unprompted explanation. And now that you’ve been reminded, you do remember. Your key to Joaquín’s room has been sitting on the dresser forgotten the entire week. You know he wouldn’t have done it, not without your explicit consent, but you wish Joaquín had used the key to his advantage once this week. You wish he would have acted on the tension between you both, the tension that you’re finally realizing has been reciprocated this entire time. 

But now it’s happening. There’s no reason to complain when you’re getting what you wanted. 

His hands are on your hips as he leads you into the room, your bag is thrown to the floor and your shoes are kicked off of your feet. Your body is turned at his will, your eyes meet his as he lazily grins  down at you. His tongue flicks out over his lips in a quick and smooth movement, and at a much slower pace, you lean back in to press your lips back to his. 

Joaquín’s hands automatically latch onto your lower back, one warm palm pressed into the thin fabric of your dress and the other settling right on your bare skin in the opening. Meanwhile, you start working on his shirt, popping button after button through the holes. You stop when you’re halfway down, not on your own accord. 

You’re forced to stop when Joaquín slots his hands behind your thighs and he easily lifts you up. You squeal into the kiss on instinct. 

There’s a moment where both of you are grinning against each other’s lips and it just feels so right. It feels incredibly natural to be doing this, to be smiling when you’re kissing Joaquín, even though nearly everything else about this situation isn’t natural for the two of you (your erect nipples rubbing against his chest, your panties stuck to your cunt, the very faint brush of his cock stiff in his pants that you get on the journey up). 

“You’re just showing off,” you half-heartedly chide. 

Joaquín shrugs and walks you back to the bed. “Maybe just a little.” He places you down, kneeling between your legs and finishing off the remaining buttons on his shirt. “You love it, though.”

You don’t admit it verbally, but the way you shamelessly ogle his chest when he pulls the shirt off says everything. 

As soon as his shirt is gone, he places a hand on your ankle, slowly inching your dress up a few inches before he stops and looks at you. His expression is open, you can tell what he’s asking without words. But for good measure, he includes them. 

“Can I keep going?”

You nod, eager and unashamed. “Yeah. Keep going.”

He starts to push the bright fabric further and further up your legs, speaking to you as he continues. “You gotta let me know if …” his words taper off when he sees the first hint of your panties, and you don’t know exactly what he’s seeing, but it makes him speechless for a moment and your ego inflates. 

“I’ll let you know if …?” Cockiness is audible in your words but he doesn’t comment on it. 

Joaquín blinks and comes back to himself. “If you wanna stop, or if you want something changed. We gotta communicate.” 

“M’kay.” 

And with that, Joaquín pushes the fabric completely over your hips and he’s met with your panties. They’re a bright color that compliments the color of your dress, and, consequently, your tanned skin. He swears under his breath and although you don’t hear him clearly at all, you’re pretty sure it wasn’t in English. 

You sit up fully and slip your dress over your torso with Joaquín’s help. He lets the fabric drop to the floor without looking, his eyes are focused solely on your chest. 

You’re laying back on your elbows, elevated just enough to look at him. You stare at his eyes, even if you aren’t making eye contact, while he leans up to hover over you. His head dips and he presses a single kiss in the center of your chest and repeats the action right over each side of your ribcage. The tip of his nose grazes your breast and instinctively you arch up towards him. When he pulls away just enough to look up at you, you see him smiling.

You could beg, but the night has only begun. You decide to save that for later. For now, you huff and stick your spine back to the mattress. 

Joaquín places a hand around your side and dips his head back down, this time higher than before. When he latches his lips around your nipple, a little gasp breaks from between your lips. He lets his teeth scrape against the bud, alternating between giving you pressure and giving you wet heat from his tongue. By the time he switches to your other nipple, you’re already desperate for a true relief focused on your cunt. His lips travel upwards, brushing against your skin throughout the journey, until he’s pressing them into the side of your neck and under your jaw. You let him continue upwards, you let him kiss you a bit more, but you can only go so long without real, fruitful stimulation. And maybe another time after this (circumstances willing) you would love to prolong everything. 

But right now you need to get fucked, whatever that could entail. 

You buck your hips up and end up catching the bulge in Joaquín’s pants where his zipper lies. You think he’ll catch on that way, and maybe he does, but he just chooses to ignore it. Either way, you send him a hint and Joaquín doesn’t do anything about it. He continues kissing you, he tweaks your nipples and slots a knee between your legs, all of which you’re grateful for since it is a stepping stone in the right direction. But you need stimulation, you need to get off, and the slow crawl is slowly driving you crazy. 

You pull away from Joaquín to call his name. He responds with a gruff yeah that immediately settles deep in your gut. 

“I need more. Please.” 

He grins right in your face. The expression almost looks wicked on him for the first time ever. He has the power here right now and he’s obviously letting it go to his head. 

“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks while his hand slides down between your bodies until his thick fingers can slip between your clothed folds. 

His question was rhetorical (and smug but that’s besides the point), yet you still find yourself going to respond. Your lips part, you can feel the corners turning down as you prepare to say something just as smug back to him, but then he presses down and quickly finds your clit after a moment of fumbling. As far as words go, you’re silent. Nothing but sounds slip from your mouth from that point onwards. 

Joaquín toys with your clit. He starts with one finger, just the pad of what you think might be his middle finger, and when that has you forcing your hips up into his touch, he adds a second finger. With two fingers, he has more space to work with, resulting in larger circles right over the most sensitive part of you. He speeds up, too. 

Your back arches and you dig your nails into the sheets. You know what you want to ask for, it's simple and you’d already said the word in this space, but it gets trapped in your throat this time. You’re close already. Yeah, you’d been getting yourself off throughout the week, but finally having Joaquín do it for you has made you so much more responsive. 

You get the first syllable out, the ‘M’ vibrating in your throat before you open your mouth to round it out in an ‘O’. 

Joaquín picks up where you left off. 

“More?” he asks, eyebrows lifting as he holds your heavy gaze. Before you even respond with a nod, he’s already sitting back far enough to slip his hand in your panties and repeat his emotions. 

The first real touch dizzies you for a moment. You pinch your eyes shut with the pure intention of orienting yourself, but then Joaquín chastises you in a soft, but firm voice. 

“Look at me. I wanna see you.” 

You do as told, of course. 

He nods. “There we go.” His fingers get just a little faster, the circles tighter. You’re so wet that there isn’t any uncomfortable friction at all, his skin easily glides against yours. 

“You close?” he asks after a moment. When you nod, he continues, “If I give you this one, you’ll be able to give me another, right? You can give me more?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I can.” You’re breathless when you speak, and it certainly doesn’t help that it’s then when Joaquín decides to pull his fingers away completely, pull your panties to the side, and sink down completely until his face is level with your cunt. 

Just the image below you is enough to twist that section deep into your stomach into a knot. He’s barely able to give you anything before your back is arching off of the bed and everything in you mounts to a peak. 

When you come, it’s from the controlled and effective licks Joaquín delivers to your cunt. You don’t know when your hand moves on its own, but you feel silk-like strands between your fingers. It helps anchor you, gripping his hair helps keep you sane, especially when Joaquín keeps going. 

He broadens his reach this time. His mouth opens wide enough to slide his tongue down from your entrance and back up towards your clit. And he doesn’t just lick this time, you hear the audible suck from him. He’s slurping that shit, and you can already feel the introduction of another orgasm. 

If you were with anyone else, you’d be shocked at how soon another is on the precipice. But it’s Joaquín, and aside from the fact that you’ve wanted him for a while, you’re not exactly shocked that he knows what he’s doing. 

He slowly sinks one finger into you, pumping the digit in and out of you with meticulous ease. It’s a stark contrast from the almost sloppy way he’s eating you out. But it works. 

One finger is nice, it’s thicker than your own, rougher, too. You could get off just like that. And then, he adds a second. 

“Fuck,” you swear without any conscious intention. 

Joaquín comes up for air, releasing you with an audible smack. “Yeah?” he asks, the word coming from right in his throat. 

You nod as you take in the way he looks—cheeks flushed, hair tousled and hanging over his forehead, pink lips shining, his eyes wide and nearly doe-like. 

“Yeah,” you confirm. You see a look flash in Joaquín’s eyes then. It’s a look similar to the one he has whenever Sam affirms his work with a clap on the back—self-satisfied, delighted, proud. It occurs to you then that he doesn’t know what he’s doing to you. He can read your body language, sure. It’s obvious from your cunt, along how good he’s making you feel, but you know verbal affirmation is different. It’s better, especially for Joaquín. 

As he goes back in to finish you off, you speak to him.

“Just like that,” you tell him. Just this little bit encourages him, you can feel it in his movements.  “Keep going. ‘M close, so close, Joaquín. Please, don’t stop. You’re so … you’re so—” Before you can even get it out, all noise dies completely from you. Your mouth uselessly hangs open, not even air comes out as your entire body stiffens. Nothing happens for a moment, Joaquín continues, you’re stuck, and then a nanosecond later everything knocks into you. 

Sound emits from you, moans and groans and breaths. You’re digging into whatever you can find—the heel of your foot into Joaquín’s back, your hands in his hair, the rest of your body into the twisted sheets beneath you. You’re simultaneously trying to escape and trying to keep Joaquín from parting with you for even a moment. It’s hard to decide which you prefer, you don’t even think your mind has any say in the dilemma, your body is in control at this point. 

Ultimately, your body decides to let go, releasing both of you at the same time. Still, Joaquín takes a moment to pull from you. He continues licking and sucking, but his fingers slowing down indicates his intent to free you. It comes after a few drawn out moments where you’re stuck twitching beneath him until finally, he pulls his fingers out of you and presses one final kiss right onto your clit. 

His head lifts and the evidence is more obvious than you expected. It’s gathered all over his chin, stuck along the beginnings of facial hair that will likely be gone first thing Monday morning. It’s gathered on his lips and along his tongue when he uses the muscle to pull the remnants of your arousal into his mouth. 

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and only then does he realize how much of a mess you’ve made of him. He pulls his hand back, brown eyes big as he stares at the evidence. 

“Shit,” he laughs. 

All you can do is agree through labored breaths. 

He tries to clean you off of his mouth, but not much is done. He leans in tentatively after that, as if you’re going to shy away from him. You don’t. 

You kiss him back eagerly, although a bit lethargically. You’re trying to hide it from fear that Joaquín could think that you’re done. But your body needs a moment to recover from that. 

When Joaquín pulls away from you with a small smile on his face, you know he’s onto you. 

“You need a minute?” The way he says it isn’t much different from the way he asks you those same words when he’s kicking your ass in the gym. 

And just like when you’re in the gym, you shamefully nod. 

Joaquín chuckles and leans in to kiss your forehead. “That’s okay. You want anything? Water maybe?” 

“Water sounds good.” 

You watch him leave and then your eyes are focused solely on the ceiling. You can’t even let what’s happening sink in when you’re still a little spacey. But you can handle more. You want more from him. 

Joaquín comes back with a glass of water. He stands next to the bed and passes the full glass to you. You don’t question the source, you just drink until there’s half left. You offer it to him and he gladly takes it from you. 

“Are you … do you wanna stop?” He speaks when the glass has been emptied and placed on the nightstand. For the most part he looks like he would be unaffected by whatever answer you gave, but you think you can detect some premature dejection in his features. Quickly, he adds, “Because it’s fine if you do. I’m okay with that.” And he’s being honest. You don’t feel any pressure coming from Joaquín at all. 

It’s what you truly mean and want when you immediately shake your head. “No. Let’s keep going.” 

He nods once to himself. “Alright. Cool. Yeah.” 

Excitement leaks from his pores but you don’t comment on it. You felt just as he did not long ago. You still feel like that, but you’re under a haze right now and that’s what your emotions are being led with. 

Joaquín hooks his thumbs into his already-loosened jeans and goes to pull them down. First, though, he pats at his pockets. When he doesn’t feel what he’s looking for, he swears. 

“One second.”

You watch his form retreat until the door of your room is pulled open. Not even a minute later he comes back in with a foil pocket brandished between his fingers, the same fingers that were in you not long ago. 

“You came prepared?” The question comes out more judgemental than you meant it to. 

Joaquín shrugs. “I keep an emergency bag full of … stuff. You know, in case of an emergency.” 

“Freak.” You don’t mean it. 

“You’re about to get fucked by a freak so, wouldn’t that make you a freak by association?” He seems to mean it. 

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

He holds the packet between his teeth while he slides his jeans off of his legs, stepping out of them and leaving them at the foot of the bed. He comes back around to the side, pulling the packet out from his teeth and staring down at you. Like this he looks more imposing than he ever has before. 

When he’s been out in the field, when he’s training, when he yelled at the car earlier tonight, he didn’t look as imposing as he does now—staring down at you over the bridge of his nose, hair tousled, cock tenting in his black briefs. 

“That’s definitely how that works,” he claims as he leans down. He presses his hands into the bed beneath you to leverage himself as he kisses you, slow and passionate. You wonder if he’ll fuck you like that too. 

You reach a hand up and pull the elastic away from his waist. When he doesn’t react, you tug the fabric down. You feel it get stuck around his cock just before you feel his cock spring free. It brushes against your wrist and you make a little noise into the kiss. 

As soon as Joaquín’s briefs are laying at his feet he assumes his previous position, this time sitting right on his haunches. You avoid looking at his cock for a moment, but when you watch him tear the condom packet open, you get the first glimpse at him. 

Even this part of him is attractive. He’s thick, that’s the first thing you notice. Thick and heavy, if the way he hangs to the side is any indicator. There’s a vein leading from his taut stomach down towards the dark and trimmed thatch of hair at the base of his cock. You hadn’t noticed the vein ever before, not when you had been too busy ogling the v-line chiseled into his torso instead. 

Now that you’ve seen all of Joaquín, you can easily conclude that he’s perfect. Just as you have that thought, Joaquín takes an inhale as he prepares to speak. 

“You’re so perfect,” he says. 

The warmth instantly floods your body. 

“I was just thinking the same thing about you,” you tell him. 

He dips his head almost shyly and doesn’t say anything. Instead, Joaquín pulls the condom out of the packet. 

“Wait. Lemme do it. Can I do it?” 

He looks momentarily surprised at your request, but he passes you the condom and politely places his hands on top of his thighs. 

It’s truly an excuse to feel him beneath your palm as you glide the latex barrier down his length. You revel in the warmth beneath your hand, because as soon as you’ve secured the barrier around the base of his shaft, Joaquín's leading you back without even having to touch you. He leans forward and in response, you lean all the way back until you’re nestled amongst the pillows at the head of the bed. 

“Ready?” 

You nod, letting your legs fall open for him. 

One warm hand falls to the inside of your thigh while the other disappears between your legs to line up his dick. Then, slowly, Joaquín pushes forward. The stretch is instant, you can feel yourself opening up wider and wider to fully fit him in. If you weren’t as soaked and prepped as you were, you’re sure the burn would’ve been way worse. 

For a few moments it’s like the length of him keeps going and going, but then you feel his thighs press up against the back of yours and there’s the faint feeling of his balls resting against your ass and you know he’s bottomed out. He looks at you, gauging your reaction, and your response comes in the form of linking a leg around his back.

Joaquín smiles through nothing but the twitch of the corner of his mouth upwards, and then he wastes no more time. He rests his weight on his hands at either side of your head, and pulls his hips back just to roll them forward and slide his cock back into you. 

And for a bit, Joaquín does fuck you slow and passionate. He fucks you in full strokes, a nice tempo that doesn’t overwhelm you too quickly. There’s punctuation at the end of each thrust, followed by a nearly agonizing pull back out. Whether intentional or not, Joaquín’s introducing you to the feeling of his cock filling you up, just as he’s introducing the concept of another release to you. 

But you’ve had your fill, it’s his turn now. 

You press your hands into his shoulders. They glide back, one hand grazing over the raised skin of the scar that leads down his back, the other following a smooth path, but they meet in the same place—back around the front to where his chain hangs. You hook one finger into the gold link, the other going behind his head. You pull him closer until you can nudge your noses together. 

His eyes flutter shut and his eyebrows pinch together in the center. You kiss him once and pull back to tell him, “You can use me, Joaquín. Take what you want.”

His eyes open to stare at you with confusion written on his face, bordering on hope, as if he already has an idea formed in his head of what he really wants to do to you. 

You nod assuredly. “It’s what I want.” Just as you’re about to add a quiet plea to seal the deal, Joaquín adjusts his position and then he pulls nearly all the way out of you, only to forcefully drive back into you. 

The switch is immediate. He still fucks you in complete motions, but they’re shorter, no longer the tip to the shaft each time. These are faster, much faster. It feels like he’s reaching up into your guts each time, just to pull back and do it again and again and again. 

You’re forced to find purchase again, hands digging into whatever you can find. One hand attaches to his hair and the other holds onto his chain, your legs have linked around Joaquín’s hips, your head has craned backwards, leaving the area between the base of your neck and your chest open for Joaquín to rest his forehead on. 

You can’t hear his sounds over yours, but you feel them—quick breaths let out onto the sweat coated area of your chest. You would try and silence yourself to better hear him, but you couldn’t even if you tried. 

Luckily, though, Joaquín lifts his head and notches his nose against the side of your neck instead. He kisses you right beneath your earlobe, but when he can no longer complete that action, his jaw goes slack and every single noise he makes travels directly to your ear. 

You swear and it comes out as a whimper, not even a second later Joaquín swears and it’s a deep groan all the way from the back of his throat. You call his name and he calls yours. He’s affecting you, and you’re affecting him, even just by laying back and urging him to get himself off by using your body.

“Are you close?” you eventually gather the strength, and will, to ask. 

You feel Joaquín nod against your neck. “Yeah,” he confirms, “yeah, baby, ‘m almost there.” 

Your reaction is instant. You groan, a sound that could be interpreted as frustration if you weren’t having your guts completely rearranged right now. 

He chuckles deeply against your skin. “What? What’s up?”

“C…Call me that again.”

“What? ‘Baby’? You like when I call you baby?” 

You hum affirmatively. 

Joaquín lifts his head and slots one hand against your cheek. His pace slows as he stares at you. “You’re my baby? Hm? Are you?” 

You nod, whining out an “uh-huh”. 

“Yeah?” he grins as he says it, as if he’s shocked that you agreed. You don’t know if he’s serious, if he knows that his words are holding weight even if you’re a little dumb right now, but you do mean it. 

He licks his lips and you see an idea coming to his head. “You gonna be good for me, too?” When you nod, he continues. “Be good for me, baby, and touch yourself, alright?”

He gives you the space needed and watches your hand slide down your stomach. When you use two fingers to tweak your already overstimulated clit, Joaquín nods. 

“That’s right. Just like that.” 

He resumes his original pace, this time with his eyes fully locked on your cunt. He pulls one of your legs up and throws it over his shoulder, leaning forward to get even deeper into you. 

You’re close, you’re almost there, and the erratic way Joaquín practically jackhammers into you as he chases his own release is what pushes you over. You finish just after Joaquín buries himself into you and curls his body over yours. This orgasm truly feels like a release. Everything in you melts into the world around you, just as Joaquín’s body melts on top of yours. 

He kisses the skin closest to him, first in small almost discrete pecks, and then they gradually get bigger and more audible until he’s clearly making them ridiculous on purpose. 

His cock is still nestled in you and his head is still resting on your chest when he speaks. “You think you’ll be up for a shower?”

You hum, letting the question run through your head for a minute before responding. “In about ten minutes, yeah.” 

“Take your time.”

In the meantime, Joaquín slowly slides out of you. The emptiness is immediate, but after all you’ve been through since getting back to your room, you don’t exactly hate it. Your eyes start to feel heavy but you let them close for a little while. You rely on your other senses throughout. 

The feeling of Joaquín kissing over where you think your bikini tan lines are, the rim of the glass that he brings to your lips, the sound of his voice as he gently urges you to drink, the feeling of cool water sliding down your throat. He holds you steady as you drink with a hand behind your head. Your lips turn up tiredly, and you feel his thumb at the corner of your lip catching a stray drop of water. You don’t have to open your eyes to know he’s wearing that same soft look on his features.

You’re so pampered there that you don’t force yourself to get up until you hear the shower running. 

Joaquín’s already there waiting for you at the door. He smiles when he sees you as if he’s shocked that you came, even though this is your room and your bathroom. Still, he reaches out and grabs your hand, pulling you into the bathroom and in front of him. His hands push at your back, guiding you towards the shower. He pulls the door open for you and lets you step inside before he follows after you. 

You reach for the towel and soap, but stop when he tuts behind you. 

“I got it,” is all he says. So you let yourself completely relax with the feeling of Joaquín dragging the cloth up and down your limbs. He talks to you throughout, mostly asking you to lift an arm or turn around, sometimes bringing up small bits of conversation, every now and then singing bits of songs—some that you recognize, some that you don’t. There’s a familiarity now that you’ve gained since his hands had massaged sunscreen into your shoulders. 

Eventually, though, he finishes with you, leaving you to lean against the wall and watch him shower.

“You know what I realized like a few minutes ago?” he says when he’s rinsing the soap off of his body. 

“What?”

“Remember the couple from the club that first night? The one who kept buying us drinks?”

“Yeah, how could I forget?”

“Yeah well I’m pretty sure they thought we were like … swingers or some shit.”

You’re startled awake. “Huh? Why do you think that?”

“Oh I don’t think, I know. The guy gave me his number and everything. Plus you saw the way they were looking at us, and the woman kept cozying up to you.”

You frown. “I thought she was just drunk or friendly.”

“She definitely was drunk and friendly. And she also wanted you.” 

You blink. “I thought she wanted you.”

Joaquín shrugs and rinses the last of the soap from his back before he shuts the water off. “She probably did. That’s sort of part of the whole swingers gig, isn’t it?”

You laugh through a quick exhale of air. “Come on, Joaquín, let’s go to bed.” 

You step out of the shower and wrap a towel around your body. Joaquín follows after you. 

“Oh, I get to sleep with you tonight?” He sounds giddy when he says it, as if he wasn’t just fucking you so good that your legs are still getting used to walking again. When you tell him that, you see the unintended compliment go straight to his head. 

You end up getting exactly what you wanted. Joaquín leans into the bathroom counter with the towel hung low around his waist and his eyes watching you do your skincare routine. As soon as you’re finished, he’s trekking off to his room for a change of clothes and to do whatever he needs to do, and he comes back in nothing but boxers with a big shirt in his hand. He lays it on the counter for you casually, but you see the tips of his ears tinted just a tiny bit red when he retreats back to your room. 

You come out in his shirt to see him lying on your side of the bed, the remote in his hand and pointed at the TV. As if the entire trip had been going like this the entire time, he instantly scoots over when you come to the side of the bed and lifts the sheets for you to climb under. You lay curled into his side, telling him to click a channel playing a movie that you know he likes. 

The remote is placed on the nightstand, the lights are clicked off and you’re snuggled up next to Joaquín, wearing his shirt and talking about how the two of you are going to spend your last day of vacation. 

Not everything goes how you thought it would, though. Joaquín ends up being pretty mindful with his blanket usage. 

INTENTIONS, pope heyward

summary: y/n makes pope relax after seeing how stressed he is while he has other intentions

notes: idk how i feel about this but it’s short & sweet so here it is

warnings: sexual intentions, kissing and a light description of nudity.

“POPE baby you’re going to pass” y/n sighed as she watched him peace holes on his rooms floor.

“what if I don’t? then i fail and that goes on my-“

“pope”

Keep reading

---

First Steps

Pairing: Elliot x Reader

Word Count: 429

Warnings: Sexual Undertones and Discussions of Last Night's Activities,

A/N: Hey guys! I hope you enjoy this fic. I definitely see Elliot as the type to push someone's buttons, but in a cute way like in this.

Love you darlings, xx Lilac.

Our night's previous events definitely weren’t already forgotten. Elliot and I had spent the evening playing truth or dare and smoking a shit ton of weed. Eventually, we started making out and the last thing I remember was him nudging my thighs open and breathy moans leaving the both of us.

He was definitely a little higher than me but he still made me feel so good. Who knew?

The morning after was when I could finally feel my legs again. I thought for a second about how I could get up without waking Elliot. But as I tried to walk over to the bathroom, the sore feeling became all too apparent and he was already up.

“I fucked you that good?” Elliot chuckled, laughing as he watched me try to walk over to the bathroom.

“I can’t fucking walk, Elly,” I groaned, heading back to the warm sheets as I accepted the ache in my core.

He just played with my hair as I watched the grin on his face get even bigger.

“It’s not funny,” I groaned, as I heard him soon explode into laughter, trying to form words as to what was so funny.

“It’s just that you looked like you were just learning to walk back there,” he said, as he continued to giggle.

“You know what, Elliot? Karma’s a bitch,” I deadpanned as I smacked his chest.

“Hey! You know you liked it so much, that’s why you can’t walk right now,” he said, continuing to giggle at my unamused face,

“You know what, Elliot? I can walk,” I said, getting out of bed to walk over to the bathroom.

“Okay, go on then, princess,” he said as he propped himself watching me walk as I tried so hard to prove it to him.

“You know what, fine. You win,” I said, giving up after five steps.

“Nah, you win. Come back here so I can make you feel even better.”

“Hmm,” I hummed, watching the way he licked his lips, “what do you have in mind, Elly?”

“I know how much you love it when I go down on you, let’s give your pussy a bit of a break.”

I laughed at his dirty word and the continuing ache between my legs.

“You’re gonna have to come and pick me up then,” I grinned as I watched him come and pick me into his arms as he laid me back on the bed.

“Ready for my fun?”

“Yes,” I grinned, reaching for his blonde curls as his head lowered down between my thighs.

BABY CUPID; rafe cameron

summary: your little sister decides to play cupid for you and the boy you’re seated with.

warnings: mentions of panic attacks || gif credits to @whumpypepsigal

word count: 1644

author’s note: this has been in my idea outlines for months now since i’ve read this certain twitter thread.

rafe would pay to be anywhere but here.

if it wasn’t for his stupid father, and his stupid business, and his stupid people-pleasing complex, then he wouldn’t be stuck in this stupid economy flight to the bahamas.

there was still at least a few minutes before the plane takes off and rafe tries to compose himself as he counts his deep breaths.

“what’s our number?” your little sister asked as you tighten your grip around her legs. you were carrying her and your bags as you tried to look for your seats. “25f, millie.”

“oh, there!” she pointed at the row a few meters away. “there’s a boy in my seat.” millie frowned as she eyed the guy by the window seat.

“a very cute boy,” you mumbled, walking towards your booked seats.

millie snapped her head towards you, her face scrunched up in a scowl.

rafe only looked up from the window when he saw you mount your bags on top of the compartment above you. the little girl you were with had a frown on her face when she saw where he was seated. you offered him a small smile as you lowered her in between your seats.

he watched as you sat down with a relieved sigh. the little girl kneeled down on her seat and cupped her hands around your ear, promptly whispering something to you.

you carefully say her back down properly and placed on her seatbelt as the pilot announced that you were ready for take-off. “well, i did tell you that we shouldn’t have waited in line for your waffle if you wanted the window seat.”

rafe pretended that he wasn’t listening when the girl looked at him. instead, he busied himself with his seatbelt as the plane started moving.

as soon as the plane was in the air, you grabbed your earphones and plugged them into your phone. you turned to face your sister, giving her the stuffed bunny in her bag. “i’m gonna take a nap, okay? be good for me.”

“okay.” she nodded her head, fiddling with the bunny’s ear as you placed the sleeping mask over your eyes.

rafe let out a shaky breath as he gripped on the armrests. he wasn’t about to have a panic attack with a literal kid beside him. that would seem pathetic as he watched her play with her toy.

he was quite sure that he was about to burst into tears when she suddenly spoke up. “i’m going to talk to you randomly so you need to be prepared, okay?”

rafe snapped his head towards the kid looking up at him, letting out a confused hum. “what?”

“my name is millie, and this is da vinci,” she introduced herself and her stuffed bunny. “what’s your name?”

“i- uh, rafe,” he hesitated, looking over at you then at millie before turning to look back out the window, when she started talking again. she wasn’t lying when she said she would talk to him randomly.

“oh, that’s a nice name.” millie smiled up at him. “my sister thinks you’re cute, mr. rafe.”

“i- wha-?” rafe furrowed his eyebrows. he wasn’t even able to get his question out when she opened her mouth again.

“hey, rafe, do you know what everyone should do when they get on the plane?” millie asked, trying to get a peek through the window.

“what?” rafe finally asked, wanting to humor her.

“thank the wright brothers.” she shrugged. rafe watched in amusement as the little girl clasped her tiny hands together and whispered, “thank you, wright brothers.”

“uhm, yeah,” rafe chuckled, feeling the tightness of his chest ease up. “thank you, wright brothers.”

“ooohh! this is a very nice ring,” she grabbed his left hand before dropping it suddenly. “oopsies, boundaries. i’m sorry,”

“nah, it’s okay.” he smiled, offering her his hand. millie hesitantly took it in her small ones and fiddled with the ring on his finger.

“i think it’s really pretty, but you should draw a smiley face in the middle,” she suggested, tracing the gold ring with her tiny finger.

“that’s a good idea, i might just do that.” rafe nodded in agreement. the both of them got into meaningless conversations, varying from different topics in the span of a few minutes.

rafe felt himself calm down completely in the presence of the little girl. he forgot all about his existent fear as she chattered his ear off with random facts and stories.

as soon as she heard the wheels of the cart, she immediately perked up. “oh, good timing, i was getting hungry.”

the flight attendant chuckled. “what can i get for you, sweetheart?”

“uhm,” she tapped her chin in thought. “oh! can i have those free cookies and chocolate milk, please? and uhm, i think my sister would also like that once she wakes up.” she said, before turning to look at rafe. “what about you, mr. rafe?”

“i’ll take the cookies and a cup of coffee, thanks.” he smiled.

“mr. rafe would take the cookies and the cup of coffee.” she repeated, grinning up at the lady as she handed her the cookies and drinks. “thank you!”

rafe sighed in relief as he took a sip of the warm beverage. he placed his own snacks on the tray table and helped mille pull down hers.

“we should watch a movie.” she suggested, grabbing her ipad from her bag.

“sure,” rafe agreed, watching as she scrolled through the number of choices in her downloads. she paused at one point, letting the princess and the frog load as she offered rafe the other bud of her earphones.

another hour later, you slowly stirred from your mini siesta, groaning at the feeling of your stiff neck as you stretched a bit.

“oh, good, you’re awake,” millie looked at you before returning her gaze at rafe, who was taking photos of the sunrise from above. “rafe and i took a lot of goofy pictures while you were asleep, we’re taking pretty sun pictures now.”

“keep the camera there, rafe, that way i can see out the window better.” she requested.

“who’s rafe?” you asked amidst a yawn.

“i’m rafe,” you immediately closed your mouth shut, forcing the yawn back as rafe offered you his hand to shake.

“oh, hi,” you ran a hand through your hair to make sure it was decent-looking as the other shook his. “i’m y/n.”

rafe smiled softly as he gave you a once over. despite the messy hair and wrinkled clothes, he thinks that you’re the most beautiful stranger he’s ever laid eyes on.

the both of you only snapped out of your gazing when the plane shifted and millie spoke up. “they’re tilting us so we can see better! how nice.”

you and rafe exchanged amused chuckles because the plane definitely wasn’t turning, only giving you a better view.

the captain spoke up, informing all of you that the plane was about to land in a few minutes. you buckled in your sister’s before yours as she tries to keep herself from practically bouncing on her seat.

rafe kept his eyes on you and your sister when he slowly felt his chest tighten. he placed a harsh grip on both of the armrests, trying to direct his attention on the two girls who made his flight bearable.

“we’re going down!” millie exclaimed, and you had to slap your hand on her mouth when the lady in front of you jolted out of her sleep at the sudden cry of your sister. rafe had a soft smile on his face when he felt her tiny hand unconsciously grab onto his, watching as you profusely apologized to the poor spooked lady.

“i feel so lucky that i got to sit by you, rafe,” millie smiled up at him.

rafe felt his heart warm up at the words of the little girl. he gave her hand a small squeeze as he replied, “me, too,”

you and millie were accompanied by rafe up until the baggage claim after your sister begged you to let him come with you, her quick attachment to the boy making it hard for you to compromise on your current situation.

“why can’t he come with us, y/n/n?” she pouted, staying over at rafe’s side instead of yours.

“i think mr rafe has some business he needs to attend to, love,” you smiled sadly, crouching down to look at her. “maybe you’ll get to see him again next time.”

“i mean, i can always fit you guys into my schedule during my visit.” rafe offered. “millie’s a sweet girl, and quite frankly, she, uh, helped me today with my issues with planes.”

“plus, a little birdie told me that you found her seatmate incredibly handsome.” he added, a smirk tugging at his lips.

“i didn’t- i never said-“ you huffed, throwing your arms lightly in the air.

“it’s fine, s’alright.” he assured you, as he grabbed his phone from his pocket. “i best believe that her seatmate found you really cute, too. especially when you were sleeping.”

“creep!” you laughed, grabbing the phone from him and punched in your number.

“what’s happening, i don’t understand what’s happening.” millie whined, switching her attention from you and rafe.

“i guess you and rafe could have another playdate.” you told her, fastening her backpack properly.

“how about you? will you and rafe have a date?” she wiggled her eyebrows at you mischievously.

“oh i-“

“well we-“

you and rafe looked at each other. he raised an eyebrow at you inquisitively. “i mean, i’d love to take you out on a date… if you want?”

“i’d like that.” you smiled at him.

“yes!” millie cheered, pumping her arm in the air. “i don’t know about you guys but i think i’d do a great job as cupid.”

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