The Bigger The Hoop (Terushima X Reader)

Sober Thoughts (Ushijima x Reader) (Partly NSFW)

(Contains a skippable NSFW scene)

*GIF not mine*

Summary: Drunk and full of bad decisions, you decide to walk to Tendou’s apartment to wallow in hopelessness over your feelings for Ushijima. But wait… why is Tendou taller and bulkier than usual?

A/N: (Oh wow, um so this turned into a smut?? I honestly don’t know wtf happened) Umm, umm, umm. What. 600 followers?? How? When? Whyyyy? ASkfadshkf whatever, thank you guys so much for your support!! I’m just gonna grin ecstatically in my corner over here. No, I don’t look like a maniac, be quiet. Anyways, I hope y’all enjoy this lil’ drunk confession oneshot to celebrate!

Warnings: SMUT!!!, cunnilingus, first-time squirting, & slight praise kink maybe??

Word count: 3636

        Tendou was a little taller than usual. And a little more… brown-haired. But you didn’t mind. You just needed to talk to someone.  

       You’ve loved Ushijima for years, ever since you first managed for his team in high school. He was so kind and sweet to you, always offering to help carry water bottles and encouraging you to be honest about the boys’ performance in a game. He loved to hear your insight, and you loved to hear his guttural voice ask for your insight. You stayed in contact ever since, all of you third years, and often went out on the weekends together. But your feelings for him eventually became too much.

       Tendou was the only one who knew how you felt, so you knew you could trust him with your drunk ramblings tonight. Seriously, you were hammered. Smashed. Absolutely shit-faced. Which explained why the wild redhead you had been friends with for a decade now looked so weird. And had a clone. Or three. 

       “YN?” Tendou opened the door to his apartment and looked down at you curiously. Did his voice get deeper too?

       “TENDOUUUUUU!” you screeched with drooping eyes. You held your arms open for a hug, but when he didn’t move a muscle you awkwardly slumped forward against his chest. “Hehe, have you been working out? You feel bigger than usual. Hehe.” Your voice held a drunken slur as you giggled into his shirt, poking the solid pec your forehead currently snuggled against. 

       “YN, it is almost one in the morning, try to lower your voice.” Ugh, he got stricter too. 

       “Jessussss, Tendouuuu, you sound like Wakajima now…” you trailed off, growing tired. He was really, really, really warm. 

       “‘Wakajima’? YN, I believe you are drunk. Shall I take you home?” You snorted at his chivalrous tone. 

       “No. You. Shall. Not,” you mumbled, poking his stomach with each word before stumbling past him and into his apartment. “Bingo,” you squinted when you spotted his sofa and trudged towards it, barely avoiding tripping over your own feet. 

       “DAMN HEELS!” You plop onto the leather furniture and hastily rip your five-inch heels off, sighing in relief as they release their satanic grip on your toes. “Ahhh, freedom.” You hiccup while throwing them in a forgotten corner of his living room, missing his lamp by just a hair. 

       “YN, please keep your voice down.” Tendou laments, trailing his bulkier form into his kitchen and grabbing a glass of water. 

       “Ohhh,” your eyes widen in surprise and tsk to yourself. “You’re right, you’re right, shhhhhhhh!” you loudly hush, throwing a finger against your lips while sagging back into his cold cushions. The TV is on, and you snatch the remote from under your dress-covered butt, giggling at the mishap while flicking through channels. 

       Tendou exhales slowly while lowering down to sit beside you, his heavier build causing the couch to dip and you to slip towards him. You allow gravity to take your head all the way to his thighs, chuckling when you land on his lap with a “flump.”

       “OH MY GOD, SESAME STREET?!” 

       “YN, please.” 

       “Right, sorry,” you nod before whisper-yelling, “Oh my God, Sesame Street!” You set the remote down on his coffee table and he places a glass of water and a bottle of pills alongside it. 

       “Aww, is that for me?” you coo, flipping your body so your back rests against the sofa and your head faces his chin. “You’re so sweet, Tendou!” 

       “YN, I’m not-”

       “Anyways,” you interrupt, kicking your bare against the slick arm of the sofa. The movement causes your little black dress to slink up your thighs just the tiniest bit, and Tendou clears his throat, desperately gluing his, hmm, dark green eyes (weird…) to your face. “I really want to talk to you about him.”

       “YN, I’m not-”

       “I know, I know,” you cut him off once again, crossing your arms against his chest. “You’ve been telling me to confess since high school, but I’m still scared!” With your nose scrunched up in frustration, you shake your head. Your hair must tickle his thighs below his basketball shorts, because he lets out a small snort that’s quickly disguised with a cough. 

       “Tendou, I just,” you purse your lips and avoid his burning gaze, “God, I like him so much. I think I might even love him.” Your voice still has a small slur, but your tone has grown serious. “He’s just… amazing. He makes me feel things I never have before, and I can’t get him out of my head at this point.”

       “Who?” Tendou asks, his recently-husky tone tinged with… sadness maybe?

       “Don’t be a jackass, Tendou,” you groan, jabbing him in the cheek as he peers down at you. “You know who.”

       “Remind me.” Even though he still has five or so twins, Tendou’s shape is slowly becoming clearer by the second. You can almost see a muscle twitching in his jaw. 

       “Wakatoshi.” Your cheeks burn, and you accidentally try to hide your face in his chest. You missed by a long shot.

       “YN!” he squeaks, turning your head back to face him while his ears tinge pink. Oopsies. Your face had almost turned to meet what was a few square inches south of his v-line. Wo-ah, guess who’s shirt lifted up?

       “Sorry, sorry!” you cry out, hiding your embarrassment behind your hands. Elmo chatters in the background about how to count to ten, which was the number of seconds it took for Tendou to respond. 

       “It’s um… it’s okay.” You can hear him gulp from your spot on his lap, and slowly uncover your face at his words. “So,” he continues hesitantly, “you like Wakatoshi?” He sounded so uncomfortable, but the mention of your crush makes your head start to swim again. 

       “Yes, I do!” Pressing your head harder into his bulky thighs, you sigh exasperatedly and fold your hands along your stomach. “What am I supposed to tell him, Tendou? It’s been years, I highly doubt he likes me back.” 

       “I’m sure he does.”

       “No he doesn’t,” you laugh bitterly. “Fuck! What do I do?”

       “Just tell him how you feel.” Tendou’s fingers start to comb through your hair, making your scalp itch every time he hits a tangle.

       “Ohh yeah, sureeee. Just go over to his apartment, knock on his door and scream, ‘I'M IN LOVE WITH YOU AND I HAVE BEEN EVER SINCE WE FIRST TALKED!’”

       “I’m sure he would like that.”

       “Pshh, sure, and then- hiccup!-and then tell him about how I can’t stop thinking about when he first touched my hand while helping me pick up the water bottles. And that time when I wrapped his finger after spiking too much. And that time when I accidentally hugged him after you guys won that game, and that… that other time… when you- hiccup!- guys lost to… that one team-” You pass out in his lap, your rant finally coming to an end as you give in to your foggy mind and aching body. 

                               ~~~

       “Ughhh.” 

       All you can do is groan. The lights out your window are so bright, and increase the burn of the already-present headache. Birds tweet melodically outside, just loud enough that you can hear it through the pounding in your brain. 

       God, what happened?

       The last thing you remember from last night is walking out of the club and down the street, then your memories abruptly cut off directly after. 

       Then you realize something. 

       THIS ISN’T MY BED!

       “Oh fuck,” you rasp, your throat still rubbed raw from the alcohol. Hesitantly, you try to feel under the sheets for your clothes, and sigh in relief when you find them still intact. The mattress you lay on is larger than your own at home, and it’s warmth begs to be reveled in for just a second, a minute, maybe an hour longer. But the fear that you’re in some stranger’s apartment reigns supreme, and you know you need to escape. Fast. 

       Scrambling out of the hefty sheets, you sniff the air instinctively while creeping over to the door. Is that… bacon? 

       Drool begins to gather in your mouth, and you creep through the cracked doorway to track down the heavenly scent. 

       Sizzles echo from down the hall, and you start to realize that the apartment appears familiar. Why am I at Wakatoshi’s? 

       Tip-toeing around the corner, you peer into the kitchen and drop your jaw at the sight. 

       Well hello there, back muscles.

       “Toshi?” you gulp, stepping onto the hardwood floor hesitantly. 

       “YN, you’re awake. I left a glass of water and some pills out for you.” He nods his head towards the kitchen counter, and you gratefully take a seat at a stool and down the pain-relievers in one gulp, choking down the cold water like a man stranded in a desert. 

       “Thanks,” you mumble, licking your lips while rubbing your temples to relieve the ache. “Hey, do you know why I’m here?”

       “Yes,” he chuckles deeply. His voice is still thick with sleep, causing a shiver to jolt down your spine. “You came here last night thinking I was Tendou.”

       You join him in giggling at the thought, shaking your head at your own stupidity. “Why in the world was I- OH FUCK!” 

       The memories clash all at once in your brain as events from last night hit you like a dump truck. “Oh my God!” you whisper, scandalized. Running a hand through your hair, you stare into Ushijima’s humored eyes while your own widen in horror. “Oh my God! You didn’t even care to tell me you weren’t Tendou?!”

       The intimidating volleyball player only hums in confirmation, setting down a plate of bacon in front of you before leaning his palms against the counter. You catch an eyeful of six pack and bite your lip at the sight, almost drawing blood when it flexes with a quiet laugh. 

       “No, but to be fair, you talked a lot last night,” he nods, throwing the kitchen cloth he had been using over his shoulder while eyeing you up and down. 

       “Could- umm, could you put a shirt on before we discuss this?” The temptation to stare is calling out your name, and you try so desperately to remember that it’s the inside that matters, YN!

       All muscles are actually interior, though, right? So you’re technically fine!

       “I think we should talk about it now, YN.” His face grows darker as he watches you swallow nervously. The seriousness in his tone leaves you to snatch up a strip of bacon and hastily chew on it.

       “Do we have to?” you ask with a mouthful of food. “Because I think if we gave it a little time, we would both forget it ever happened.” You nod self-assuredly and shrug at the proposition, but go rigid when Ushijima leans his face closer to yours. 

       “I don’t want to forget. I want to remember that forever, and I want you to tell me that you meant it.”

       “...I was just drunkenly rambling-”

       “Don’t lie to me, YN.” He snags your hand just as it reaches for its fifth bacon strip. “Tell me honestly, and you can decide where to go from there. Did. You. Mean. It.” Ushijima has only ever looked serious during volleyball. That’s just the kind of person he was. But right now was different, in a whole new, wonderful way. Because right now he’s watching you like you could place the sun in the sky. Like you could change the tides and shift the wind. 

       “Yes.” You clench your eyes shut and draw in on yourself, clammy hands trembling against the marble counter. “I’ve been in love with you ever since high school, Toshi.” 

       For a solid minute, you sit tensely and the only audible sound in the room is his hitched breaths. Then rough fingertips trace against your cheek, begging you to open your eyes as another hand encompasses yours on the kitchen surface. Ushijima’s eyes, so dark, so endless, are swirling rivers of olive green, tainted with the occasional black speck as he stares lovingly into your gaze. His sharp jaw clenches, his thin, pink lips press together and his brow furrows into a hardened line as he watches you, and you wait with baited breath for his reaction.

       “God, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to hear those words.” His fingers tilt up your jaw so your lips can meet his perfectly. He’s surprisingly gentle as he caresses your cheeks, your chin, your jaw. Everything. He’s so careful with you as his fingers intertwine with your own. You can feel the years of hard practice on his hands, but he handles you like a china doll. Like you would break, if he pressed too harshly, but also that you would slip away if he lessened his hold in the slightest. 

       You release a soft moan against his lips, and his chest rumbles in return as he makes his way around the counter, not separating from you for even a second. 

       Everything is slow and unhurried, from when he picks you up bridal style to when he places you down against his mattress, pressing your hips into the sheets to keep you from slipping away. A strong knee settles between your thighs, trailing closer and closer to where you need him most. 

                               *SMUT AHEAD*

       A mewl tears its way out of your throat at the feeling of him rubbing against your warmth, holding you in place as you writhe from the feeling. It’s too much so suddenly, but it’s also not enough, and you need more.

       “More,” you whimper against his lips, “I need more, Toshi.”

       “Patience, princess.” His husky whisper sends sparks down to the center of your stomach and heat gathers in your core. You clench your thighs tightly around his thigh at the feeling and he smiles against your lips. One of his hands slips under your back, unzipping your dress while the other glides down to the inside of your thigh, petting the sensitive skin and leaving your core throbbing. 

       “Hng, Toshi,” you whine desperately. He attempts to slide the tight dress off you, but you’ve grown too hot and bothered. A loud “rip” sounds through the air along with a grunt under Ushijima’s breath. Your little black dress is tossed to the side, but your mind is too hazy to care, or rather to notice. You had no need for a bra with the dress, and Ushijima curses quietly at the discovery. 

       “Fuck, princess, you went out like this?” His pupils flare at the sight of your bare chest, and he doesn’t hesitate to run the pads of his thumbs over your peaked nipples. You gnaw on your lip, trying to stay silent to not disturb his neighbors, but the ace towering over you doesn’t seem to appreciate that idea. One hand slides down your stomach, past your navel and snaps your panties against your skin while the other massages the swell of your breast. 

       “Aah, Toshi!” A slight quirk of his lips tells you he’s enjoying every move you make, and every sound you have to offer him. Your hands snap up to his hair, yanking him down into a deep kiss that implies just how much you need him. His teeth clash against yours and his tongue fights you for dominance, sharing and giving each other tastes as his hand slips into your soaked panties. 

       “God, princess, you’re so wet already. So good for me.” He smiles into the kiss before separating and pecking the tender skin of your chin and throat. A long finger glides over your slick folds for just a second, leaving you breathless and shivering in his hold. Your hands tug his brown tufts tighter when he repeats the motion, gathering your wetness and dragging it up to your aching bud, just barely brushing it. 

       “What do you want?” he whispers, biting your neck while he hovers his touch over where you desperately crave him. 

       “You,” you choke out, swallowing dryly while trying to catch your breath. 

       “Be more specific, princess. What do you want me to do?” A bruise is formed from where he nibbles just below your ear, and the sting of its formation causes your eyes to roll back into your head. Two fingertips harshly tweak your nipple, leaving you to cry out.

       “Oh God, touch me Toshi! Please touch me!” 

       “Of course, love.” His hand leaves your breast and skims your body all the way down to under your thigh, pulling it away from his knee and pressing it against the bed to open you to his sight. The other presses against your dripping sex, leaving his thumb to rub quick circles around your clit. Your body jolts and twitches from the stimulation while you scream out his name. 

       “Toshi!” 

       He nods encouragingly against your neck, urging you on while your nails dig into his shoulder blades. At last, his head moves lower and lower down your body, pressing open-mouthed kisses down your chest and against your belly button before he slides your ruined panties down your quivering legs, instantly placing himself between your thighs as soon as they are tossed and forgotten over his shoulder. Your reach isn’t long enough, so you settle for dipping your fingers into his scalp once more, scratching and tugging at every movement his thumb makes against your swollen bud. 

       Cool breaths blow against your womanhood, causing it to clench desperately around nothing. Both his hands move for a split second to draw your legs up and over his shoulders, leaving you to cross your ankles against his back while his face dips closer to your core. 

       “Toshi, please!”

       “So needy, princess,” he rumbles with a smirk, “but don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you. I’ll be the only one who touches you this way from now on.” His eyes flicker up and watch yours, swirling with desire and longing before he plunges a finger deep inside your soaked heat. The abrupt ability to clench around something leaves you crying out in relief.

       “Oh fuck, oh God yes!” 

       His lips wrap around your bud, sucking and running his tongue over it in deliciously quick intervals. Every switch is accompanied with a stronger thrust of his finger, and he adds another before curling them up against the spot deep inside of you that has you gushing more against his chin. You can no longer think straight, and the only word falling from your lips is his name at this point. 

       “Toshi! Toshi!” 

       The moans spur him on, and his fingers thrust even faster inside you, hitting your g-spot every time with a spontaneous precision that you can only thank his years of perfect spike-aiming for. Suddenly, just as his teeth nip your clit causing your whole body to twitch and scream, his fingers leave your clenching core and both his arms wrap around your trembling thighs, peeling you even more open to him. His nose digs into your clit as his tongue laps at your glistening folds like a man starved. You can’t breathe, you can barely speak as the pleasure coils tightly in your chest, choking you up in your throat. 

       “Yes, Toshi!” you sputter out, not ever wanting him to stop. “Harder! Oh fuck!” His hands dig brutally into your hips, holding you in place to prevent you from bucking against his face. The inevitable bruises are long forgotten when he groans at your taste. The vibration leaves you squealing just as his muscle delves into your aching sex. After his nose accidentally presses into your pulsing nub just a tad too harshly, the coil snaps. 

       “Toshi!” you scream, clenching your eyes closed as your whole body wracks in pleasure. Muscles in your legs flutter and tremble as you release with jumbled nonsense streaming from between your lips. Ushijima grunts in surprise at your sudden orgasm, and pulls back with burning eyes at your twitching form. 

       “Damn, princess, I didn’t know you could squirt.” His raspy words cause your eyes to rip open and you hastily get up on your elbows to see what he was talking about. 

       “Oh my God!” you whine in embarrassment, observing your wetness as it drenched his chin and bare chest. Droplets fell from his chin and dribbled into divots of his six pack while he watched you wolfishly. “I didn’t know I could do that! I’m so sorry!”

       You drop your head back to the bed behind you and cover your flushed face with embarrassment. Every muscle in your body ached from the position it was previously held in, and you screech in surprise and scramble away from a sudden brush against your overstimulated clit. You watch in shock as Ushijima’s mouth forms an abnormal lopsided grin. He observes the wetness he had collected on his index finger with darkened eyes.

       “God, I love you,” he mutters, his ravenous gaze suddenly flickering up to yours as he kneels onto the bed, slowly making his way towards you. His hands trail up from your ankles to your calves to the undersides of your knees while he encourages them apart once more, no matter how tightly you press them together. 

       “Let me make you do it again.”

What's in a Virtue (Kyle "Gaz" Garrick x Reader)---Part 2

*GIF not mine*

Summary:

Gaz wants you, but the hotel bar you work at has rules; when a bartender calls dibs, all others have to back off. It’s how the peace is kept, and as the new girl just trying to rack up some savings, you’re not willing to rock the boat.

But Gaz doesn’t take kindly to you avoiding him, and he’s never been one to beat around the bush. From confessing his love on the first night you met to shouting your name seven times from across the bar, he’s not letting you off the hook that easy. Not when he’s seen the proof that you’ve fallen just as hard for him.

A/N: umm so good news is second part is out as promised. Bad news is....this is not the end. I totally plan on making another part, but I don't know how soon that can be done considering life just began again. Guess we'll see. Enjoy!

Word count: 8193

Part 1

In hindsight, you’re not quite sure when you started falling so hard for the handsome guy from the bar. 

Yes, okay, there was initial attraction. Kyle was one in a million when it came to that. 

Then it was the way he looked at you. Like you saying his name and pouring him more scotch made his world spin. 

Kyle just made it so easy. Too easy. 

So dang easy that you felt guilty Jeanne was attracted to him too. You tried to convince yourself for a long, long time that he looked at her the same way. At every girl the same way. 

But that first night turned into the first week, which then turned into the first month. 

Your poor heart ached each time he slipped through the glass doors, grinned at you in relief. 

“Thank fuck you’re ’ere, love. Nobody in this bar knows how to pour a scotch better than you.”

And after that first touch, his warm fingers grappling after yours around the glass, you couldn’t fight it that easily anymore. Sure, you preferred people sober, but each time Kyle imbibed, he wanted a brush of your fingertips, and you did to. 

Everything about him screamed hard yet warm. He was big—special-forces big, apparently. And he had these little scars on his cheeks that you dreamt of at night. 

Where did they come from? Where else was he scarred? Why did a guy like him ever choose war over modeling?

Confounding. 

Even more confounding was that he liked teasing you, and only you. It was a little trampling over your feelings at first, all that fresh hope and nervousness each time he showered you with attention. But then it was steamrolling, too much all at once that you couldn’t think of him without your entire body slipping into a nervous tremble. 

Worst part was that you didn’t even know why he liked you so much. You were just as shitty a bartender as you were a failed medicine-or-anything student. You had nothing too offer him, not your too-big body nor your underwhelming lifestyle. 

But Jeanne… Jeanne was perfect for him. Loved all the stuff he did, hiking and swimming and everything you couldn’t do for five minutes without sweating up a storm. 

And just when it’s been a month and you think you’re so far in the hole for this hot tease of a customer who can’t seem to leave you alone—hot British tease, by the way, because how dare you forget him calling you “darling” with that accent—that you can’t even sleep at night without tossing and turning…

He’s gone. 

Kyle just disappears.

The same Kyle who leaves a perfect, Kyle’s-butt shaped butt-print on the dusty corner seat he loved so much. 

The same Kyle who, on the first night you met, was so damn snockered after seven scotches that he wouldn’t stop professing his love for you. (Not that he seemed to remember that the next day, or any day following, but you still hold the memory near and dear to your heart like the masochist you are.)

The same Kyle who stopped smelling like cigarettes after a while. Who once leaned over the bar just to push a little strand of hair behind your ear, rough fingertips pausing at your temple and brushing the skin in a small circle. “Just makin’ sure you’re safe ’nd sound” was the short mumble from his lips. 

Gone. 

Gave you his phone number before he left, and then hasn’t shown up to the bar for the last two weeks. 

He could’ve—well, he could’ve told you he was leaving. Warned you. Instead of this cold-turkey bullshit, you could have actually prepared. 

God. You wished you’d had time to prepare for this guy you’ve basically just met leaving you?

He’s made a mess of you.

Kyle, though… he’s Kyle. 

And two weeks without him has left you with a Kyle-hangover. You’re all achey and sad and bored—fucking bored. What happened to you being able to occupy yourself with thoughts twenty-four seven and treating men like a distant daydream?

Ironically enough, you miss not missing men just as much as you miss that man. 

Not for the first time in the last two weeks, you clock off after what has become some of the most miserable shifts of your life, and go home, curl up on your couch, and think about Kyle. 

You think about that moment where he’d demanded you for your phone, long fingers curling in a “give it here” gesture, so stern you barely recognized him. You huddle deeper into the leather cushions, feeling in your pocket for your phone. 

Timezones are tricky. Couple that with the fact that you have no idea where he even wound up, and you’re blindly searching through your phone for his contact with both eyes pinched closed, as though you’d be incriminated for the act if you saw yourself do it.

A ringing hums through the air, and you peek just to make sure you’re not being a fool for the second time tonight. Kyle (Hot Guy from the Bar) Garrick slides along your screen, bouncing back and forth so you can catch the entirety of what he’d typed. 

You can hear him saying it, like it’s tainted with his soft, playful tone. 

It’s the same voice telling you to leave a message now, and you’re so stunted by the familiarity of the sound that you don’t speak for another few seconds, having to reassure yourself that, no, that wasn’t actually him. 

A voicemail. You could leave that. 

Like all social interactions, you prefer them with a bit of distance and disconnect anyway, whether that be through phone or several glasses of alcohol. 

“Umm” is all you say for a while, staring down at the ticking seconds in your lap. 

Then “Hey” and “it’s me.”

After another pause, you realize he probably doesn’t know who “me” is, really, so you tag on your name. 

And another “umm.”

“I’m calling because…”

You don’t know. Honest to God. 

You don’t know why you’re sitting here on your couch, back straight as a pin, anxiously tearing your fingers through your hair and watching your phone screen with eyes so wide someone’d think it’s going to eat you. 

“You know, I—I don’t really know why I’m calling. I mean, you asked me to, and now that I’m sitting here, doing it, it kinda feels like a mind game or something. You could still pick up, you know. Put me out of my misery.” 

You pause. 

Wait a few seconds. 

“...But I guess you won’t be doing that. That’s great. Um.” You poke your tongue into your cheek, practically seizing up at this point. “I hope your mission’s going well. You know, stopping the… the bad guys and all that. And I hope that you’re—” safe. You don’t know if anything’s happened to him. It’s been two weeks, maybe that’s why he hasn’t called. 

You think you’re gonna be sick. 

“You know, it’d be really shitty if you gave me your phone number just to up and die on some top secret mission to save the world. I think that’d be pretty rude of you.”

Quiet, again. Still. You’re not even sure why you’d thought maybe you could hear his response. 

But he’s the superhero guy, the special soldier on a secret mission that involves killing bad, bad men and even worse organizations. 

So maybe it’s a little selfish of you to miss him. 

“Be safe. I mean, I’m sure you already know to do that, but, you know. Try harder at it, I guess. For me.”

You end the call and fight the urge to throw your phone as far away as possible, and go about your night like Kyle doesn’t even exist. 

This distance thing’ll be… easy. Maybe. 

~~~~~~

You call him the next morning. Can’t help it. 

Hearing his voice, even if it’s from the damn voicemail thingy, is soothing. Like a balm over your twinging chest. 

Leave him a message at the beep. Oh, you plan to. 

“It’s been,” you glance at your phone, “six hours since I last called you. I can’t sleep, so that’s gonna be your problem too. I had this dream where I was riding a unicorn—and I know you think this is gonna be cute or something, but just give me a second—and so we’re just galloping along in the forest, all magical like, and then suddenly I’m surrounded by these guys in SWAT gear and those helmet-binocular deals that you guys wear.”

You’re picking at your blanket, morning gunk still grimey over your teeth, wondering why your first thought of the new day—five a.m., by the way, and you have work until one a.m. tonight—was to call Kyle (Hot Guy from the Bar) Garrick.

“It was a bloodbath. My poor unicorn had to stab military men, so I’m blaming you for giving me a horrific dream like that, Mr. Military Man. Awful rude of you to drag me into the horrors of war like that. And no, you will not be forgiven until you call me back. Goodbye.”

You can’t go back to sleep. Not after that. You’ve scarred yourself sending something so mindlessly ridiculous to a man who has legitimate work to do—might even have one of the most valid jobs on the planet, and you were whining to him about your weeny nightmare. 

So you spend the rest of your day meaninglessly-choring your way to the beginning of your bartending shift. 

Jeanne hasn’t asked where Kyle’s been. She’s got a new target, a rich businessman who mainly operates in the field of pool floaties. Luckily for him, it’s almost July, which means business is lively, and so too is her interest in him. 

It’s around that time that you realize Kyle was valid in denying her at every turn, but your guilt is still slow to fade. 

Then your phone buzzes in your pocket.  

Kyle.

You whip your finger across the screen, almost dropping the phone in your haste, and read the text. 

Reread it a couple more times, because you kind of don’t understand it.

It’s not heartfelt by any means. Not Earth-shattering. And you ponder over it for the rest of your shift, glancing at it every few minutes instead of responding, because it’s so short and succinct that you get the sense it’s all he could manage during his mission. 

All it says is “More.”

~~~~~~

Calling Kyle becomes a comfort. During breaks, after bad days, sometimes early in the morning when you were too exhausted the night before. 

You feel like a fool after some time. He never once sends another text or calls back, and this time you really think he’s gone. 

But there’s a hole your apartment’s silence can’t quite fill anymore, a quiet where Kyle’s lively chatter used to be at the bar. 

So you fill it like he’s still there with you. 

The third voicemail that you leave him begins with “You never told me your favorite drink.” You spend a half hour rambling about the different drinks you could have made him, how you’re getting better at it in his absence—you’ll even make him another Mai Tai to prove it, if he promised to come back—and how scotch is horrible. You’ve tried it for the first time, and you don’t believe for a second that it’s his preference, even if he’s a hardened soldier trying to wash the pain away. 

You don’t buy it. He’s an umbrella-drink kind of guy. 

The fourth is about how you’re rethinking things. So many things, while he’s gone. You’re rethinking what you want from life, considering going back and giving school the old college try one more time. You’d had these big dreams before you’d been cowed into submission by doubts and debt. Doctor of… well, something. Anything, really. You’d just always thought doctor looked good in front of your last name. 

It looks good in front of Garrick, too. Doctor Garrick, that actually sounds pretty cool, and—oh shit, you don’t mean it like that. Not like you’d be his… 

Anyway. 

The fifth through twenty-seventh voicemails follow the same pattern. Random thoughts you’ve come up with throughout the day combined with ponderings cranky customers have drawn out of you. 

None of it, you’re certain, is interesting to Kyle at all. 

Not when he’s on a mission, taking down the evil guys and saving lives. Risking his own in the process. 

But you can’t bring yourself to stop, too caught up in the text he sent you and how blatant he’d been about his interest before he left. 

No funny business. Just you. 

That’s what he’d wanted. 

And he’d wanted “more,” too. 

Good thing you’re willing to give it to him, highly concentrated and in a large number of doses. 

You’re a giver, after all. Maybe he hasn’t noticed it yet, but if he needs these calls from you, obnoxious little chats about the mundane side of life, you’ll do that for him. Because Kyle is a good guy, and you want that chance, however slim it may be, to prove that he passed on his number for good reason. 

So you keep calling, let the voicemails stack up and up as weeks go on, continue working behind the scenes of his life, hoping it’s not all in vain. 

~~~~~~

Gaz lets the phone drop back down to his side on the barracks bunk, smiling like an idiot at the ceiling. 

He’d been a tad nervous that you’d stop after a while, sometimes considered breaking Price’s no phone rule—he never would, of course; AQ can track the IPs of outgoing signals, and the last chance he’d had to send you a message was just before moving hideouts. 

But they’ve been in too deep the past few weeks to let his wants trump the importance of the mission. 

Plus, you’d obviously understood what “More” had meant. You certainly hadn’t given him less, at any point. There was only one three-day hiatus that made him strangle the shoulder straps of his chest gear so hard the fabric cinched and remained wrought. 

And then you’d called, all apologetic and sniffly because you’d gotten some kind of bug despite it being the middle of summer—which was so fucked, in your opinion. 

They’re flying back tomorrow. Through pure luck alone, it was a shorter mission than most, a two-month intel grab that ended with only enemies KIA, but Gaz knew what was coming. 

Short missions like this meant something big was on the horizon. 

Which meant that he had to make a decision soon to lock you down or let you go. 

Not getting to hear your voice during a mission like he did now? It sounds fucking devastating. But asking you to stick around for his flighty lifestyle, spend months mucking about on your own, worrying about him and his lack of contact—it was a lot. Ultimately it’d be your choice, and Gaz is terrified that he can’t predict what you’d choose; it feels like defusing a bomb with sweaty fingers, or running out of mags in the middle of the field. 

Things were out of his hands the second he put his phone number into yours and begged you to stick around. 

He’ll have to get on his knees this time.

He’s already asked a fellow soldier, one of the American Marines who’d been recruited for a building sweep, for a ride to the hotel. By his count, he’ll be there around eight in the morning, just early enough to catch you and only you. 

Gaz isn’t quite sure what he plans on doing. Something horribly twee, if past experience is anything to go by. Can’t quite get a conscious hold of himself when he sees you. 

And it’d be bloody fuckin’ embarrassing, the way his nerves buzz just under his skin, if he was this excited for anyone but you. 

But it’s eleven pm where he’s at and you just left a message bellyaching about his radio silence again. You’ve found a way to make scotch even worse and you’re going to torture him with it next time you see his face—you promise. Unless and only unless he messages you in the next five minutes with his favorite drink so you can practice. 

It’s terrible and a bit rude, the way you can toy with his feelings through kindness. His little puppet master twisting his heartstrings so tight he can never truly unravel, all with the tenderness of a damn saint. 

Gaz stares at your name in his phone. He works out the hours, then the minutes and eventually seconds until he gets to see you, and can finally stop fawning over the photo he’d found from your public high school’s online yearbook. He’s pretty sure you don’t have that zit anymore, at least, but it’s been too damn long and he’s due a verifiable fact-check. 

His return can’t be too big. You’re not a pomp-and-circumstance kind of gal, too uncertain of your own worth to ever happily accept flowers and fanfare, even if it was just the two of you. 

He’ll work you up to things like that. Over months. Years, hopefully. A lifetime, if the universe ever acknowledges the debt it owes him for the shit he puts up with. 

But for now, he plans for small. Modest and tame. 

Something to soothe that little prey heart that itches to run each time he flirts too loud and smiles too widely (because for some reason you can’t believe you draw it out of him, which, admittedly, preserves his pride a bit). 

Suddenly, he’s got just the thing. 

~~~~~~

Eight-fucking-thirty a.m. 

Who on God’s green Earth opens a bar at eight-thirty a.m.?

Surely not the hotel director, who you’ve only seen once and with pinot staining his white mustache, of all things. 

Couldn’t be one of the many, many bar managers who, thank God for them, only work at night. They couldn’t imagine working a bar in the morning, only serving those depressing early birds and the real addicts, haha. 

Real. Fucking. Funny. 

You’re not a morning person. Never have been, never will be. 

But when Jeanne says these are the hours that nobody else wants, during which almost no customers show up, and implies that you’ll pretty much be paid to sit on your ass and do nothing, well… by God, you will be there at eight-thirty sharp, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. 

Except the only thing that’s bright is the goddamned sun outside the windows—too bright—and your bushy tail is more of a bushy mane, as you woke up about thirty minutes ago, almost late to serve fucking no one, and didn’t bother to tame it with any manner of spray or hairbrush. 

To be frank, you’re a disaster. You look like you were caught in the Tasmanian Devil’s warpath, and you have the attitude to match. 

You thunk your bag down on one of the few empty shelves in the bar’s storage room and groan, wiping a hand over your face. The only thing that could make you feel better right now would be…

God, you just love to torture yourself, don’t you?

It’s been two months. Kyle’s not going to answer. He hasn’t responded to your texts. You don’t even know if he’s alive. 

But you miss him like he is. You miss him like you know he’s on the cusp of returning any second now, and you’re standing at the door, waiting to tear it open and pull him in so close you can smell that cheeky cologne he barely deserves to wear. 

Woodsy musk and cinnamon. Shameful that you remember it so distinctly. That you’d once wandered into the men’s shampoo aisle in a Walmart to try and figure out the word for the dark, elusive scent that clung to him like a second skin. 

It wasn’t there, which means he’s fancier than your budget can comprehend. 

Or that’s just him, and he exuded it so robustly when he’d been here that you can smell it now, drawing you out of the backroom with your phone in hand, thumb hovering over his name. 

Music is playing, which is confusing because you haven’t touched the radio yet. It’s the slow croon of your guilty pleasure song, the one you love ‘ironically.’ The song you’d confided in only one other soul about. 

“Careless Whisper” plays with a slow cadence in the furthest reaches of the bar.

It comes from the same place where two brown eyes are sliding over you at a debilitating pace. 

“Fuck me” falls from those lips, that wicked British accent, as he takes in your hips for a while, then your chest, where your heart pounds so damn hard you think he can see it. Then he watches the little jump in your throat as you swallow, and he wets over his lips before glancing up to yours. Stays there, for a long, long time. 

Then he meets your eyes, and the stutter in his breath is so damn loud.

Kyle. 

Your soldier. 

The man you’ve been calling for months, with no response. 

His face is littered with an array of new wounds, like little scrapes on the apples of his cheeks you get the most bizarre urge to run your tongue over. A split in the smooth skin of his forehead, a paling scar seated in his unshaven jaw. 

His hair’s a little more clean-cut. Perks of heading out for a mission, maybe. 

And his long lashes shadow over the yearning look he’s got locked on you, sharpening and honing it like they’re fibrous whetstone. 

You’re a bit breathless as you round the bar, even more so when Kyle jolts toward you. Out of his devilishly tight black tee peeks a strip of white wrapped around his bicep, and one of his thighs is thicker than the other, suffering the same treatment under his jeans. But he makes his way closer—too slowly—and tries to stave off a wince when he gets too excited, takes a step a bit too fast. 

“Been waitin’ out here for hours, love,” he murmurs, voice breathy but rough. He holds out a hand, curls his longer fingers over yours so tight they can barely tremble. “You still got that scotch ready f’me?”

Your mind floats over the joke completely, instead filling you with worries and urges you can’t fulfill all at once. 

Because, God, it’s Kyle. Your Kyle. And he’s looking at you like that’s all he’s wanted to be. 

And he’s injured. 

He tries shrugging off your hand the second you reach for his face, fingertips hovering over the stiffness under his right eye as he mutters a “Love, don’t worry about it. ’S’better than it looks.”

“Kyle,” you whisper. His other hand falls to your hip, constricting iron-stiff around the soft flesh. 

“M’not broken, darling. Promise.”

And, because you’ve always wanted to, you cup his cheek, a puff of air bouncing off your lips when he leans into it. Turns towards the pliable skin of your palm, like he’s going to run his lips over it, but pauses when he feels you tense up. 

Something in his eyes darkens, makes you feel almost ashamed at the nervous reaction, but it’s just so much. You’ve missed him. You’re not accustomed to this, and it’s starting to dawn on you that this moment, however right and perfect and perfect perfect perfect it feels is still so fast. 

Two months. You haven’t seen him for two months. 

And now that he’s back, it feels like the two of you have been greeting each other like this forever. 

How can he make you fall so fast and still have you feeling like you’re pacing yourself?

This can’t be right, it can’t be—

“Dance with me. C’mon, before that horrible brain of yours blows a fuse about all this.”

“Careless Whisper” and that dashing smile of his, and all of his touch and proximity gets your mind all fuzzy. A good fuzzy. A quieting fuzzy. 

He’s getting too good at this is a thought that tries to stick, but recedes back into the murkiness when Kyle starts to sway. 

He urges your hips and feet to follow his lead. It’s far too easy to give in and let him have control, especially as he pulls you in a little closer, rearranges your hands and bodies until the noticeable space becomes the noticeable lack thereof. 

You’re tucked into his broad chest, warm and sturdy against you. 

He’d placed your hand right over his heart with a meaningful look in his eyes, waited until you felt the frantic thumpthumpthumpthump that leaves your face hot. 

Kyle was always confident around you. He always seemed to know what he was doing, because he was always obvious about what he’d wanted. 

But you didn’t know that you, of all people, could have this effect on him. 

That flutter of pulsations under your fingertips.

His head ducking low until his face is nestled into your collarbone.

The arm that swings around behind you until the crook of his elbow is caught in the dip of your waist and his broad palm is flattened against your opposite hip. 

It’s a little hard to face this moment, being how you are. It feels beautiful. Too beautiful for someone like you. You’re chest is so full, heart so quick, head so wondrously empty. 

You can’t think past the back-and-forth scrape of Kyle’s fingers underneath your shirt’s hem. 

But you feel like apologizing for something. Maybe you’d say sorry for how you feel in his arms, too big surely, despite the way he’s wrangled around you and holding so tight it’d take a solid minute for him to let go. Maybe you should apologize for the stupid song that’s playing, the one that everybody hates, you guess, even though you love it. Maybe you’re sorry about—

Wait. 

“You listened to all those messages?”

Kyle doesn’t make a sound. At first, at least. 

Then…

“They were the only things that kept me hangin’ on, love.” Where his lips brush these words into your skin, the nerves underneath throb. 

A sorry feels cruel on your tongue after that. 

Kyle hums into the silence, singing along a bit when the song repeats for a third time, then a forth, and your hair sticks to his face as he draws away. 

He looks like a fool, but a lovesick one more than anything. It’s dumb and stupid and ridiculous that he has to brush your hair off his face, and even more dumb that he looks like he’s enjoying it so damn much his face is split in two, top and bottom with only pearly whites in between. 

 A fool for doing all this for you, for wanting you so bad when he could replicate this with anyone, someone much prettier, and have them forever. 

“I don’t even wanna know what that dreadful mind of yours is concocting right now, darling. Don’t wanna hear a lick of it, because I know it’d make me so mad, too mad for a moment like this.”

“I don’t want to hear it either,” you whisper, letting your gaze fall to where your hand lay, to where Kyle’s heart gives off an indignant thud. 

The knuckle of his index finger knocks against your chin. “Let me silence it then, yeah?” His head tilts in an innocent way, almost distracting from how quick his heartbeats are now, agitated into a frenzy.

You nod, only partly because you’re a little worried he’ll go into cardiac arrest if you don’t. Mostly because you’ve heard about half of what he’s said by now, the rest of your brain designated to determining what he’s drawing into the curve of your hip. The hard press of his fingers is ruinous to your mental stability. 

That—right there—has to be a G. That’s the first symbol you’ve managed to decode so far. 

Kyle’s lips are so close when you tilt your head up again, and the intensity of his attention has increased tenfold. You wonder if you’d ever considered this to be the end result of all your phone calls, those nonsensical anecdotes every other twelve hours that you’d felt so guilty about sending. It felt like you’d been wasting his precious time. 

But his fervid grip on your body has you thinking the complete opposite way—that instead, you’ve been feeding this needy man before you far too much, a gratuitous enough amount that you’ve tracked him back to your house like a wild wolf you’re not really sure how to treat in the confines of your own home. 

You meant it when you said the distance made it easy. 

A is the second letter.

You wonder distantly if its shape is now bruised into the fleshy tissue of your side. 

And you wonder if he’s ever going to kiss you, leaning in so close like that.

~~~~~~

Gaz has to draw the line soon. He’s gotta find it first, but he’s so damn scared he’s gotten too close without even realizing it. 

The skin at that little sloping line between your neck and collarbone is all hot and smooth. He almost sunk his teeth into it, wanted to bite you a little and hear that little rabbit squeak of yours before you tore away, flustered. 

He can barely fight off the urge of giving the same treatment to that trembling lower lip, the fatty one you’ve ran your tongue over deliciously quick, like you thought he wouldn’t notice. 

Would it be so bad if you let him worry at it with his own teeth? Let your lips get all puffy and red from his touch, and only his?

But he’s pushing the boundaries too much all over again, and you’re back to shaking. It’s a good tremble, one he can feel through the muscles of his forearm, the one that’s flush with your spine. You’re all excited, and it’s because of him. 

All good things. 

But he knows you, knows the martyr that you are. Knows that if he feeds you now, you’ll think that’s the only meal you need and deserve, and you’ll tear away from his hold all over again, because you haven’t been giving enough. You’ve received too much already; he can see it in your eyes. 

Gaz walked in here a little too generous after all those phone calls. He thought you’d expect a reward for your diligence, and instead you’re acting like it was a burden. Undue torture for him to draw away like that, in his humble opinion. 

But fine. He won’t kiss you. Not yet. 

He pulls back a bit, unraveling his arm around your waist and settling for spelling Garrick into your other hip with a bruising pressure. It’s high time the other side of your body received the same treatment, anyway. 

If he’s tasked with quieting your mind, he’ll have to do it the less fun way. 

“So,” he mumbles, a bit ticked at how the words disturb the air, “come here often?”

A surprised laugh tears out of your throat, and you tip your head back until the delectable line of your jaw is all he can see. 

Foul play. 

Patience. Fuckin’—God, patience. He almost forgot.

Almost slipped that fucking leash. 

“You’re horrible,” you admonish with a grin, fingers curling up at his left pectoral. 

“You love it,” he whispers back. If there’s any shred of him that’s lost faith in how you feel for him, it’s the same hand that forces his last name into your hip. It wanders, for a second, up your back, behind your ribs, until he can feel that off-kilter thrumming that matches his own. 

Feels that stutter at his words.

“Love, huh?”

He tries not to freeze up. If you felt that from him, you’d have a little spike of doubt pierce right into that ever-working brain of yours. 

Gaz is so pissed he let that word slip, even casually, and scans over your face, trying to read how it landed. You were casual about it, too, but he knows that’s a touchy subject to push on. He’s toppling into bad territory. If you pulled away from him now…

“Cheesy shit like that is all I hear at my job.” Garrick Garrick Garrick. He’s pressing the letters into your spine now. “Honest. Dad jokes every morning. I’m the last one you have to worry about. It’s like going on a mission with a comedy club, that crew.”

Your smile eases up a bit, and you relax into the moment again. 

“You barely talk about your job.” You look away, seemingly finding the wooden-paneled walls far more interesting. “I didn’t know that topic was on the table.”

“The good parts are. That’s all I’ll ever want you to hear about.”

“I didn’t know you were so protective.”

Gaz is nipping at the bits to respond to that exactly the way he knows how. Of fucking course I am. It’s you. But he can’t rephrase it in any way that would soothe and not scare you off. 

So he lets your comment hang in the silence as you sway.

~~~~~~

When Kyle leaves the bar, at first it feels an awful lot like when he left that very first time. A bit disappointing that the hot, crazy drunk guy won’t be entertaining you for the rest of the night. Won’t be screaming I love you sooooo much, miss bartender gal until you clock off. 

The feeling makes you wistful.

Then—

Oh fuck—

It starts to feel like when he left for his mission. When you didn’t know if he’d ever come back, and you just missed him so damn much you couldn’t think straight, wanted to hear his voice one more time and not just saying “Leave a message at the beep.”

When you drove yourself crazy thinking about the little touches. When you dreamed about him far too much than was normal. When, more than anything, you wanted him to give in to all those little urges he seemed to hold back from you, that little grimace winding his lips when you swept to close or said something even remotely suggestive. 

And you know you don’t deserve it. You’re not fit to be the girl of his affections, the one he comes home to each time he returns from a mission and greets with a kiss. 

But it doesn’t stop you from imagining that you could be. 

You’d try to repay him for his love each time he comes home by greeting him with his favorite meal and drink. You’d massage the corded muscles of his arms and back, lead him with a shy smile into the bath set for two, and he’d have that same hungry look as you stripped to join him, splashing water everywhere in effort to tug you over to his end of the tub. 

You’d sit on his couch each day, scratching his scalp as you read a book, listening to the soft snores as he napped. You’d dance with him in the kitchen like you did today, slow sways to a song he liked this time, and then you’d play your favorite again, just to listen to those soft hums of his crooning along…

Oh God. 

You want Kyle. So damn bad.

You want his body. You want his hands all over you, eyes raking over your face, legs twisting against yours. 

You want every little thought running through his mind. You want his attention. You want his laughs, his cries, his silence when he’s protecting you from his memories. 

You want him shamelessly. Constantly. Perpetually. 

You want him so bad that you could give two shits whether you deserved him or not. 

You’d do everything in your power to earn it. Pour in your love and heart and soul into building something with him. 

And best of all, you can’t bring yourself to regret it. 

You don’t regret the way you call him that night, pleading for him to come over. It’s three a.m., and his voice is groggy and exhausted over the phone, accent thick as he grumbles, “Love, what’s wrong? What’s happened? Oh, you’re cryin’, darling, tell me where you are. I’ll be there sooner than possible.”

You relapse so hard that night. The second you saw his face all over again, you knew you couldn’t go without him. A Kyle-addict, and you didn’t even notice until it was too late. 

He’s shouting, yelling at your door like a mad drunk, but you didn’t give him any scotch that morning. None of that whiskey sour either, the one he revealed was his favorite, but knew Americans wouldn’t get right. 

You tear open the door. His clothes are in disarray, buttons all wonky. His eyes are wild and wandering over you. His hands are curled tight around your doorway, blood sapping away from his knuckles because he’s holding himself back so hard. 

You don’t care. He shouldn’t bother anymore. 

You make the first jolt toward him, and his face melts into awe.

Kyle’s lips, they taste like….

Fuck, you whine a little into his mouth. 

Like fucking rain. Like a dream. Like clouds and floating untethered.

But also corporeal, grounding. Like plain chapstick and a bit of toothpaste. They taste like fingers winding so deep into your hair and hips pushing at yours until you stumble into your living room. They taste like Kyle blindly kicking the door shut, like him pulling back with a gasp and being aglow with ardent moonlight, like him reading every little emotion on your face and shaking his head, mumbling a “fucking finally.” He tilts your head up a bit higher, swivels your face to the side so your moans bounce off the walls as he drags his tongue along your jawline, down the warm column of your throat. And then you lurch, eyes flying open as he bites into the crux of your neck and shoulder. 

“Kyle!” Your nails dig into his back, drag down and dig in again at the same tempo as his bite-pull-back-bite-again. And he does the same to the rest of your body, every little inch that gradually presents itself when the clothes come off. His lips and teeth wander without bias, but each time you try to speak he drags himself back up to your ear and shushes, soothes your concerns with mindless mutterings along the lines of “Just lemme—gimme a bit to—fuck, love” and “Need a bit of patience, darling. I’m tryin’ to play here.”

He controls every second of it. All of it. 

Like he wouldn’t stand for a single mistake. Like he needs you to know it’s worth it. 

The sun showers over him when he’s trembling, sweating, hovering over you, hands intertwined with yours, peppering your face with kisses despite his rapid chest rising and falling, when he finally collapses against you, around and inside and generally being everything he can to you in this moment. He’s bigger than the bed, bigger than the apartment, bigger than that bar and your world. 

Kyle’s smile, still charming and exhausted, is the last thing you see as he coos you to sleep. 

~~~~~~

Gaz has to bat your hand away from your phone for the seventh time. “Jus’ fuckin’ ignore it,” he hisses into your stomach. “Bloody fuckin’ thing ruinin’ this beautiful mornin’ we’re having.”

“It’s two in the afternoon.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

Despite your phone—Jeanne calling, apparently, because you’re three hours late to work, and you could’ve at least warned her you were going to be honeymooning off with the newly returned soldier boy (she’ll give you a sick day)—ruining the moment, it was still the best awakening he’s had in his adult life.

Maybe even better than birthday chocolate chip pancakes when he was a kid. 

No. Wait.

Definitely better.

He woke up to a soft caress against his cheek, found himself buried into your chest. Your breasts, as it turns out, are even more beautiful to begin his day with watching than any sunrise. 

He tore his gaze up higher and found you staring down at him, gentle smile on your lips. Your fingertips were tracing over his scars, thumbing at his lips every now and then. 

It’s not right that he hasn’t woken up like this before. Part of it makes him think he hasn’t really been living until right now, when he can’t think past your hot skin and plush thighs nuzzled close to his stomach. 

“Don’t mind this one bit, darling,” he’d said, dropping his head to feather his mouth over your belly button. “Can we stay like this forever?”

It’s genuine, and he can tell you know he means it because your cheeks turn pink. Surely it’s a lot for you in this moment. Your split-second decision last night was just that, and on his taxi ride over he’d worried himself over how you’d react the next morning. 

Your brows furrow, and your lips purse real tight while you think. 

Gaz’s trained himself to fear your thinking, but he holds off on distracting you from it now. Plays fair, even though he could be kissing his way down further and further until he could force a promise out of you; a gaspy, whiney one. 

But that wouldn’t do. He needs that rabbit brain of yours that likes to kick out and scurry away to agree with him for once, that yes, you want him to stay. You always will. 

And before he knows it, you’re cupping both sides of his face, drawing him up onto his forearms, making him crawl up your body until you press one long, hard kiss to his lips before muttering, “Yes. Let’s do it.”

Your thumbs swipe under his eyes, no doubt bothered by the dark circles, but the rumble of his voice as he praises you for giving in must tell you he’s gotten plenty of sleep. He made sure he did all of the work last night, had you follow each and every one of his commands to sit, stay, and let him take care of you, for fuck’s sake, or it’ll kill him.

All his energy, all that stamina was worked to the bone, and he feels like a puddle of goo against your form. He presses another kiss to your lips before trailing his way back down, nestling into your stomach while informing you that you’d make a damn good pillow every morning. 

~~~~~~

You’re certain nothing could ruin this moment. 

Kyle’s already back to snoring softly, little grumbles against the skin between your breasts, hands starfished at your thigh and lower back. He looks ten years younger curled up against you, the wrinkles of his face smoothed out through thorough exhaustion. 

Just seven hours ago he’d smiled at you, somehow more doting than the last, his skin dewed with sweat, and collapsed into your hold. He’d been content to run himself ragged, and now that he’s got you thoroughly trapped underneath his muscled, form, he seems intent on not moving an inch. 

His wounds still unnerve you. The bandages from yesterday could use a change, damp and wrinkled around his bare thigh and biceps. But from your position, your head leveraged on a pillow, you can see pale, ravaged skin from botched stitches and bullet holes. Uneven gouges and linear scrapes, wounds whose origins would surely pain you to listen to—most of all because he’d say it with such nonchalance. 

It’s hard to turn the sweet Kyle from the bar into this war-broken soldier before you, hard to combine them into one person and have it make complete sense. Like water and oil, the pair of them refuse to mix into one. 

You’re running the tip of your middle finger along one particularly horrifying line running diagonally down his nape when he wakes up again. His head lifts, and you let your hand slide with the movement until you’re cupping his cheek and he’s leaning into your hold. A wet kiss cools on the inside of your wrist when Kyle gets close enough. 

His limbs wrangle even tighter with yours. “What time is it now?”

“Two-thirty.”

His pretty brown eyes are locked on your face, a gentle roaming back and forth in rhythm with the slow strokes of his index finger against your knee. 

“Good. A few more hours and I’ll have kept you here all day. A personal record, one I’ll flaunt with honor.”

“We’ll have to get up at some point.”

“Maybe I’ll trap you here all week,” he ignores you, all serious consideration now. “I’ll have to check my rope supply.”

“You know, there are easier, less illegal ways to entice me into staying.”

“Don’t like riskin’ it with you.” He draws himself up and leans in, and you tilt closer to accept his peppering of kisses over your forehead, across your cheeks, down your jawline. “Each time I try to do it the nice way, you manage to slip away from me. Have to start playin’ for keeps now.”

You’re not sure if you love Kyle. 

You know you’re not quite in the same place as he is emotionally. But he certainly knows how to put you on the fast track to get there, and it starts with the way he cradles you closer—always a little bit closer—and nudges his nose just underneath your ear, releasing a sigh like touching you can make all the horrors, worries, fears slip away. Like you’re a magical woman. 

You feel like you’re made of magic, anyway. 

And you don’t regret any of the decisions you’ve made since calling him last night. Hell, since calling him that first time, when he was thousands of miles away, and all he wanted was more. 

~~~~~~

Gaz has a bad urge. A terrible one. Bloody fuckin’ day ruiner of an urge that has him peeling away and hiding out in your bathroom for too long after relieving himself. 

He’s staring at himself in the mirror while he dries off clean hands, investigating that dark mark you’d sucked into the side of his neck before he could untangle from you. 

Bad, bad, bad Gaz. 

It’s too soon. 

You don’t take “too soons” very well. Can’t handle them. 

But, well, biased as he is, Gaz thinks he looks more alive than he has in months. 

And all it was was you, injected into his veins and flowing back to his heart before being properly dispersed throughout the rest of his body, even distribution of needing you every hour of every day until he can’t even curl his toes without thoughts of you. 

No. He really, really shouldn’t.

He won’t.

Gaz steps out of your bathroom and fumbles his way through your apartment, following the sounds of humming and beeping. 

Almost blacks out at what he finds. 

You, bent over and retrieving a frying pan from your cupboards, rising up until your standing tall, wearing his goddamned shirt. The black cotton hugs your thick figure tight, but it’s too long, caps off somewhere near the tops of your thighs, lace panties barely twinkling at him just underneath

Fuckin’ Christ, bloody Jesus, Hell on a—

“Love,” he chokes on the word. “Darling. You’re killin’ me here, bunny.”

Fuck it. 

Seriously—fuck it. 

He’s gonna ask. It’s not too soon. Not for him. Not when it comes to you. 

You laugh a little. “Sorry. I know, I know, it’s too tight. But I was too lazy to find something else, so if you really want it back—”

“No.”

You pause, smile locked on your face. “Okay then. Good. Glad that’s settled. I’ll just keep making breakfast then.”

You’re on your tippy toes now, reaching high to the small pantry above your stove, fingertipping at a box of pancake mix. 

“Could you…?”

“Yeah.” He’s behind you in a matter of blinks, broad chest brushing your back before you can dart out of the way, even grasping your hip with one hand and passing you the box with the other. 

You take it from him with a fumbled thank you, the words stuttering their way out of your mouth as he swipes your hair back and behind your ear. “What’s on the menu, then, love?”

He can practically feel the current of chills slinking down your spine. He follows you, chest still against your back, step for step as you putter around, finding a whisk, a carton of milk, and… a bag of chocolate chips. 

Fuckin’ hell, don’t tell me.

“Pancakes. I’m adding chocolate chips because they’re my favorite, so don’t you dare bitch about—what, what is it?”

You palm at his forehead in confusion when he buries his face into your shoulder and groans. 

Fool. Bloody fuckin’ fool, dumbass bastard ruining everything after one goddamn night. It’s too damn soon. It’ll ruin everything.

“Love, I hafta—”

A cacophony of beeps cut through the air, and your attention slips to the microwave, where a cup sits aglow in the yellow light. 

“Sorry, that’s for my tea—”

He’s really doing this. 

Fuck it. 

Fuck. 

It.

“Move in with me.”

~~~~~~

Part 3

We’re not gonna talk about how I wrote this instead of finishing part two of what’s in a virtue. We’re not even gonna talk about what this is. I’m just gonna… yeah, here ya go.

!Trigger warnings: dubcon

Body swap au with soap who just wakes up one day and says, “no fuckin’ way.”

Soap who thinks it’s the best fuckin’ dream he’s ever had.

Soap who solemnly agrees with you in the mornings that yes, the two of you do need to work together to fix this as soon as possible, but who spends his nights in front of a mirror stripped down to nothing, masturbating because it’s fucking you, and you’re so pretty when you’re panting. Soap who was always convinced that making you come would feel just as good as coming himself, and now he doesn’t have to figure that out anymore.

Soap who, fuck, has his cake and eats it, too.

Soap who grins so proud at the awkward way you stumble around in his body, too big for you. Soap who, after discovering you’d had to——ahem——relieve yourself for the first time, feels his skin fucking buzz at the fact that you can’t meet his eyes, your eyes, anymore without a schoolboy blush spreading across his own damn face.

Soap who knows you liked what you saw.

Soap who makes your body come again that night, not even thinking of your body anymore, but of your mind fumbling around in his body, experimenting with touches and caresses. Soap who imagines you knowing how to pleasure him inside and out when this is all over.

Soap who records the sound of your voice saying his name, because the lines are getting so damn blurry, and emails the video to himself. Takes pictures, too.

Would never blackmail you with them, no, no, no.

But he deletes them from your phone after sending them all to his drive.

Soap who, after everything is over, after you’ve both found your ways into your own bodies, trots after you like the dog he is wherever you go.

Soap who, after you check the deleted folder of your photos app, gets a good and proper scolding.

Soap who managed to record the entire reprimand, listening to the anger in your voice, the how dare you do that to me——to my body?! That’s so fucked up, Soap!

Soap who rewards himself yet again that night, teeth gnawing at the hem of his shirt that he hadn’t bothered taking off, just pulling up high enough to jack himself off with his back against his front door. Panting at the dash he’d made up his flat’s stairs, then panting your name, whimpering disingenuous apologies to your chiding voice.

Soap who doesn’t stop, who won’t stop until he’s got the real you screaming his name.

Hey! Could I request a yandere garou scenario where Reader who does not know who garou is and never met him before, is kidnapped by the monster association and he goes on a rampage to get them back?Sorry if it's too specific.

Please Don’t Save Me (Yandere Garou x Reader) 

*GIF not mine* 

Summary: (TW: gore) After the Monster Association kidnaps you under the claim that you’re bait for a friend, the man that comes to save you is unfamiliar, but he seems to know you quite well. He’s your savior… but who is he?

A/N: I don’t think I’ve ever written something so… disgusting. Seriously, trust the trigger warning. Anyways, sorry this was so late, but I hope it’s what you wanted! Enjoy! (Side note: a lil late, but thanks for 1.6k y’all!)

Word count: 2548

        Sewage, decaying rats, and other putrid scents infiltrated your nose the second the blindfold was ripped away from your face. The sight that greeted you was even worse. 

        “So this is what drives him.” A monster. Pink, round, and multi-limbed, it had one eye that stared you down while it spoke in a complacent tone. “I suppose now all we have to do is wait. He’ll be along shortly.”

        You didn’t have a clue what it was talking about, nor the brainpower to consider it. Instead, you focused on the heart-stopping sights around you. With your hands and feet tied behind your back, you sat on your knees in two-inch thick sewer sludge that soaked through the fabric of your jeans. 

        Creatures of all kinds flooded the large opening of the brick underground of City Z. Their base looked like a colosseum, several floors stacked on one another with balconies holding types of monsters you couldn’t even imagine. Some appeared human, standing on two legs but containing a wicked look in their eyes, while the others didn’t even have eyes or limbs at all. Even in the dark lighting, you could see all their gazes were locked on you like the star of a show. 

        Heart racing, you struggled to breath. Your throat closed up in fear, leaving you heaving gasps of air that choked you every once in a while. Instinctively, you wanted to scream for help, cry, or sob at the complete helplessness that overcame you, but soon it was all too much for even that.

        How do I get out of this? You flinched away when the pink, lumpy monster slithered closer to inspect you, one of the many two-fingered “arms” on its head reaching down to brush a hair from your face. It left a trail of clear slime in its wake. Oh God, please help me. Someone please!

        Swallowing a gag, you purse your lips and let out a small whimper, loud enough to have the crowd before you laughing. A tear, just one, slipped from your eye, trailing down your cheek and dripping into the rancid puddle below you. 

        You wanted to hug yourself, shove the hood of your sweatshirt over your head and curl in on yourself until you disappeared from the Earth, but that wouldn’t happen. No; sadly, this was reality. Human-sized cockroaches, five-headed serpents, and gorillas loaded with the horns of wild boars and young bucks all chattered loudly enough around you to slap you in the face with the truth. 

        Hopeless, alone, and afraid. Were they going to kill you? Was this really how you were going to die? Surrounded by these beasts, drooling with what must have been an eagerness to swallow you whole? Your entire body trembled at the thought. 

        “Help,” you whispered, head dropping far enough that your chin met your chest. “Dear God, someone help me, please.” You sounded broken, so broken. The dark layout combined with the stench of human feces burned your eyes. You’d never been so willing to just pass out in your life. 

        “Gyoro Gyoro, did you find the girl?” The question sounded more like a command, but the baritone it was delivered in made your blood freeze. Stomps thunderous enough to tremor the concrete digging into your skin left you gasping for air, hyperventilating at the owner of it all. 

        Oh fuck, oh God, oh shit. Please! Why me?!

        Tears fell at a faster rate as you danced around the edges of a panic attack, seizing up at the giant that entered the room. The flickering lights of the sewer were immediately blocked out by the colossus that entered, instead leaving it black with shadows. Its skin appeared maroon and thick, rough like a crocodile with hands and feet that ended in sharp talons. You were barely half the size of the claw on its pinkie toe, like the monstrosity could snort you up a nostril and not even choke. 

        Fear clamped onto your stomach, seizing your heart and setting your entire body into a cold sweat. Liquid fell down your brow and soaked into the collar of your hoodie with ease, making your entire body slick and unbearably hot. What. The. Hell.

        How could such a creature have been made? 

        “I do, sir.” The pink slug still standing in front of you turned to the monster, which, judging by how the others instantly stood to attention, was the leader of some sorts. 

        You understood why. 

        “So where is he, then? That human you so desperately wanted?” 

        “He should be here soon, my lord. No doubt, he will notice her absence and understand we are serious.” 

        Head still reeling with the shock of seeing such a herculean-sized titan, you could barely understand their words. “Him”? Who were they talking about?

        Your palms began to clam behind your back, and your fingers and toes began to go numb with little blood. You were used to the horrid odors by now, but every time your mouth opened a bit too wide with a panicked gasp, you gagged on the thick smoke wafting in the room. 

        You were shivering, not only from your sweat drying but also from how truly alone you felt. This was not how you wanted to die. You wanted to be surrounded by family and friends, maybe with the aroma of farewell flowers at your bedside. Instead, you were almost positive this was how it would all end, human feces soaked into your clothing while surrounded by Earth’s living mistakes. 

        Please, you clench your eyes shut and shudder out a sob, I don’t want to die.

        A flexible surface, slick with ooze and mushy like old jello, forces your chin up to meet the eye of “Gyoro Gyoro.”

        “Humans like you are so weak. They cry so easily, even at the slightest touch.”

        “Please don’t hurt me.” You’d never heard your voice crack like that, like it had crawled its own way out of your throat.

        The monster lets out a humored chuckle, releasing your chin and instead dragging its appendages down your face once more. 

        “Hurt you?” it mocks teasingly, “No, no, no. We wouldn’t do that. If anything, I could call you ‘insurance.’ You see, little human, we only brought you here to lure in a friend of ours. No doubt he’s dying to see you.” 

        A scream echoes from within one of the many forking paths of the sewer system, pained and tortured. It cuts off with a loud crack. 

        “Ooh, sounds like he’s here. Sit tight, my dear weakling!”

        As if you could go anywhere else. The scream was not even the slightest bit reassuring, and neither was being called “insurance.” Obviously, the person (or thing) just down that tunnel was the reason you were brought here in the first place, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were your savior. Please, please want to save me. I don’t want to be here anymore. 

        That first scream led to a second, then a third, then a fourth, all the way until you gave up counting, which was right around when the new arrival to the party shouted. “WHERE IS SHE?!”

        Gyoro Gyoro glanced to the side lazily, slumping his way towards where the voice was coming. But just before he could speak, you piped up without warning. 

        “HELP ME!” 

        A slime-coated limb slapped you across the face hard enough to stun you into silence. Pain lit up your right cheek and made your eyes water. Evidently, calling out to the person, audibly a man, coming to save you was not permitted. 

        But the damage had already been done. 

        It’s silent for a breath. You can hear the sharp inhale of the man searching for you from deep within the faraway tunnel as he listens to your call. Then the real horror begins. 

        From where you knelt, you could only see shadows that must have been a hundred or so feet away battling it out. The monsters versus whomever your new hope was. You were perched just that far away from the entryway of the tunnel, like a trophy on display, but that made you just that much more vulnerable to the brutal sounds of a massacre. 

        The sounds were less than pleasant, leaving you wishing you could cover your ears. Blood splattered, mixing together with sewage water as bones cracked and dead monsters squealed their last breaths. If your eyes were open, you were sure to see nothing all too pretty. 

        Howls of pain combined with animalistic growls of “how dare you touch her” and “nobody takes what’s mine.” And finally, your champion surfaced from the hall. 

        Where you thought monsters in their original form were bad, their guts hanging off the human before you was worse. 

        The man who had come for you had broad, muscular shoulders, the right torn open with a bloody gash while the left had an enemy’s dripping intestines draped over it. He might’ve been a ginger originally, or maybe he had blond hair, or white. Right now, you sure as hell couldn’t tell. Hot blood seeped down from the orange-tinted strands into his own eye, coloring the sclera a bright red. Veins ran and popped over every muscle of his bare upper body, while the simple, white sweatpants he wore were also soaked maroon. 

        His eyes locked on you the instant he emerged. He took in how you shivered, the tear stains on your face, the red mark on your cheek, the utter terror in your eyes. The sight of it all you were sure wasn’t a treat. But for the man before you? Well… 

        He went berserk. 

        After every movement he made trailed a shimmering line of cyan, but that’s all you could follow. Like a bullet, he moved too fast for the naked eye, pouncing back and forth around the open colosseum of monsters. In his wake, he left a gory mass of carnage. Limbs from every animal and bug you could think of still twitched with life, freshly detached from their owners, who didn’t even get a chance to scream. Roars of anger from the man flooded the room as he latched onto one mutated beast after another, tearing them entrails from raw entrails. 

        You wouldn’t be able to get those cries out of your head for months, and for once in your life, you pitied monsters. After all, who would want to be ripped to shreds like a rat in a cat’s paws? For once in your life, you finally saw monsters as prey. 

        Gyoro Gyoro and his lord had obviously gone barking up the wrong tree.

        “You touched her.” Tear. “You laid your disgusting hands on her.” Rip. “You made her cry.” Splat.

        Liquid spattered onto your face, oozing it’s way down your temples and along your jaw. You didn’t need a mirror to know it was red. 

        “Is this what you wanted?” Finally, all of the butchery was silenced, not even a groan slicing through the air. “When you stole her. Is this what you expected?” 

        “Garou-” Gyoro Gyoro’s voice broke off in a sputtered cough. “-look how strong you’ve become. We thought-” cough “-we knew you had the potential. And look how much you’ve grown, just by having her.”

        A bitter snicker, obviously from the true beast. The true monster. “You were right. You were right about one thing only. She does make me stronger.” Crack. “But you didn’t need to steal her from me to figure that out.” Slump.

        A quiet that somehow felt more suffocating than the previous screams filled the hot room. Through it, you could hear monsters still gurgling on their own guts. Wheezes of last breaths. Death surrounded you, and it’s cause? 

        He wrapped you up in a hug. 

        Little chunks of innards stuck from his body onto your sweatshirt, clinging to the fabric like glue had placed them there. His face was warm and slick against the crook of your neck while his hands wound around your waist, forcing your chest flush against his. 

        “Are you okay?” Even after all that bloodshed, his voice now sounded… loving. Adoring, cherishing, caring, kind. Right now, he sounded like a worried boyfriend after his girlfriend tripped. This situation wasn’t even close, and had no reason for him to sound so calm. 

        “Who…” you raised your chin from his shoulder, but with your arms still trapped behind your back, you couldn’t push him away. “Who are you?”

        His face buried deeper into your shoulder, and his grip on your body grew firmer. “YN, I’ve… I’ve liked you for a long time. It’s not creepy, I swear! I just- I just liked watching you and making sure you were okay. Somewhere along the way, I think I fell in love.”

        The man before you, hugging you with all the strength in his body, kissing your skin like he’d done it before, confessing his love like it’s been long enough, you didn’t know him. Not even the face, nor the body, nor the hungry eyes seemed even the slightest bit familiar. 

        Minutes passed, feeling like hours. When Garou finally got enough of holding you close, he untied your restraints and lifted your sore body into his arms. Your muscles whined with every movement, and yet you still tried to shove him off you. 

        “Please, please just let me go,” you pleaded, hands pressing against his chest while you stared into his eyes. 

        Nothing. No nod, no “okay,” nothing. 

        Instead, he shook his head and shifted your entire weight to be cradled in one powerful arm. Then his free hand shifted up to your face, where he brushed a long thumb over your cheek. “YN, I know you barely know me. I know that. But Angel, you will come to love me just as much as I love you. It’ll just take some time.”

        The tone, so confident yet hopeful. You knew he wouldn’t budge.

        So maybe that’s why you cried. 

        “Please, just take me home.” 

        “I am, Angel.” He pressed a soft kiss to your forehead, then to your cheeks. A couple on your jaw, one on your nose, then finally he planted his lips on yours. 

        No. You didn’t want this. Whoever this guy was, capable of massacring a giant the size of a skyscraper and more, you didn’t want him. You didn’t ask for him, or his love, or his unyielding loyalty. You didn’t want his murderous possessiveness, or even his passionate kiss. 

        You didn’t ask for this. A man obsessed with you, and almost just as obsessed with making you love him. 

        “I’m taking you to our home now. There, you will grow to love me just as much as I love you.”

       But you got him anyway. Or he got you.

I'm so sorry it took me so long to finally read the second part. Again, I'm on my knees for desperate and in love Gaz. To have a man half as devoted as Gaz is would be a DREAM

ahhhh you're all good I just posted the final part and am mentally and emotionally exhausted...

...which means he is wonderfully whiny and needy all over again. I'm actually considering posting the blurbs i have left over from my idea doc for this fic but we'll see how this last part gets received first😬

but I'm so glad you enjoyed the second part!!🥹

Can you please do a part 2 of Pumpkin Eater? With a fluffy ending please, this fic broke my heart 😅

Pumpkin Eater (Kuroo x Reader) ~Part 2~ Second Chance

*GIF not mine*

Summary: Last night, your friend sent you pictures of Kuroo with some girl at a random club. Not only was he a liar, but he was also a cheater, and you couldn’t stand to be with him after this.

Part 1

Part 2 (Never Again)

A/N: Hehe, people can’t handle the angst. I get it, I’m the same way. All righty, as per request, here’s part two of Pumpkin Eater! Enjoy!

Word count: 2478

        “We were on a break-”

        Click.

        “Identity theft is not a joke, J-”

        Click.

        “I broke it. It burnt my hand so I punched it. I predict in ten-”

        Click.

        The remote was taken from your loose grip and the television turned black. 

        “YN.”

        “Hmm?”

        “This needs to stop.”

        “What does?”

        Your friend sighed at the sight of you huddled deeply in a mountain of blankets. Dark circles hung like bags under your eyes, contrasting wildy with your ghostly pale face. Every muscle in your body ached with the slightest movement, too stiff from staying in one position for… three days? Four?

        “You’ve been sitting on my couch and moping for a week.”

        Oh, a week. 

        “You need to get up and move, or at least do something,” Christie groaned, throwing the blankets out of your reach and grabbing your hand. She gave it a gentle squeeze and softened her gaze. “I know it hurts, and it sucks.” Squeeze. “But maybe you should talk to him-”

        “I am not talking to him!” you cry out, ripping your hand away and standing on numb legs. “Christie, he cheated on me. There’s no excuse for that!” 

        Her eyes widened in surprise and she nodded solemnly. “Okay, but let me show you something first.” Before you could ask, she stood and left the living room, disappearing into the hallway leading to the bedrooms. 

        To a certain degree, she was right. You needed to get back to it. For the past week, it felt like your life had been set on pause. Every restless hour of sleep you got was filled with memories and nightmares mingling in the most stomach-churning way. Each dream was just about identical. It was always Kuroo and some faceless woman, laughing at you and leaving you behind in a mess of tears and shame as they walked away. 

        You always woke up with a whimper and forced yourself to stay awake after, too afraid to feel that pain again. 

        Some days… you wondered if he felt the same ache as you. If he felt just as empty and lost. Like a piece of his own body, his own heart was missing. Did he… did he feel the same way?

        Suddenly, Christie storms back into the room and drops an object on your lap. A phone. And with closer observation, you realize it’s your phone. 

        “Now, I am going out tonight and looking for a man at the club. If you want to join me, great. If you don’t…” she sighs and licks her red-shaded lips, “I guess that’s fine too.”

        It’s only then you notice she is completely decked out. In a signature little black dress and ruby pumps, she looks ready to knock men out dead. Bronzer sparkles in the brightness of her apartment’s light fixture and mascara makes her eyes bulge in the most baiting way. 

        You, on the other hand, are a complete mess. You’re wearing a week-old sweatshirt (Kuroo’s), and very loose, tightly cinched sweatpants (also Kuroo’s). Each piece of clothing has an emphasis on the sweat, and the only thing glittering on your face is the sugar from your cinnamon donut, aka yesterday’s breakfast. You felt like a trash can, and you certainly had the appearance to match. 

        Christie smooths the skin-tight skirt of her dress down as much as possible before taking a seat beside you on the sofa and grabbing your shoulder. After she turns you to face her, she gives you a tight smile and pulls a Cheeto out of your hair, tossing it to the floor with a heavily disguised sneer. “YN, all I ask is that you don’t let this hold you back forever. Just,” she grabs the phone in your lap and presses it into your hand, “read and listen to the messages. Please. For me.”

        She waits for your nod before standing up and grabbing her purse. With a flip of her straightened hair, she throws it over her shoulder and gives you a small smirk. “Now I might be coming back home later tonight, or I might not, we’ll see,” she winks. “But if I do, don’t expect us to be silent.” With one last giggle at your disgusted face, she disappears into the hall of her apartment building, slamming and locking the door behind her.

        You watch the exit for a couple more seconds before glancing down at your phone. While heaving a sigh, you press the power button and clench your jaw in anticipation. 

        Shit.

                                ~~~

        99+ texts was the symbol on your message app, along with 65 missed calls. 58 of those were from Kuroo, and almost every single one held a voicemail. It was like he was trying to crank up your phone bill just to spite you. 

        After a much-needed shower, you were working your way through every one of them, listening and deleting in an incessant pattern. You rubbed the towel through your damp locks, drying them before trying to run a brush through it in a failed attempt at looking tamed. In the meantime, a message played in the background. Kuroo’s voice crackled through the speakers in a broken tone. 

        “YN… Kitten… I need you back-”

        “Voicemail deleted.” 

        “Hey, it’s me again. Look, please call me back-”

        “Voicemail deleted.” 

        “YN, I don’t care if I have to call you a million times, I’m going to win you back. I love you so much more than you realize. And I’m not gonna stop until you’re in my arms again Kitten. We’re meant to be-”

        “Voicemail deleted.” You pulled your trembling finger away from the screen and choked back a sob. The brush clattered to the floor as you snapped up the phone and hugged it to your chest. 

        You shouldn’t have- Goddamnit!- you should not have let the message run on for that long. But it was just so nice to hear his voice claim that he loved you again. Loved you still.

        But that’s all it was. A claim. 

        “Goddamnit,” you hiss under your breath, clenching your eyes closed as tears trickled down your cheeks. At a slow pace, you mosey your way out of the bathroom, dropping back onto the sofa and crying out the pain. 

        You wish it was as easy to get over some as they say, but the fact is that it’s not. You loved him, and-

        Knock knock.

        Shit, she’s back already?! You scrambled to your feet and tightened your robe around your bare form, approaching the door swiftly. You definitely did not want to stick around if Christie had brought home a male companion. That would just be… ick. 

        Knock knock. The person slammed their fist against the door harder this round, and you yelled back, “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

        Whipping it open, you instantly slammed it shut once more at the sight. 

        Kuroo.

        “YN!”

        “Nope,” you shook your head, “fuck that.” 

        His fist bangs against the door once again, almost knocking it off its hinges. 

        “YN! Please let me see you!” 

        His voice sounded raw, like it was scraping past his throat with every syllable. You assumed yours sounded the same. 

        “Just open the door!” 

        “No!” you screamed back, evidently shocking Kuroo into silence. You stood in anticipation, waiting with your arms crossed for another retort, another plea. But nothing came. 

        Noises shifted outside in the hall, and you saw shadows moving under the door before the light was snuffed out completely. Kuroo’s back and skull made contact with the wood, echoing a dull thud as he settled into a seat on the floor directly outside the apartment. 

        “YN, please,” he muttered, quieter this time. As much as you hated him, you hated the sound of him sad even more. Seeing his presence today just reminded you that love doesn’t fade away after a relationship ends. At least not instantly. 

        You slumped to the carpeted floor too, sniffling and hugging your knees to your chest as you watched the entrance. Distractedly, you petted the fluffy fabric of your pure white robe as you waited. For what, you weren’t exactly sure. 

        Minutes passed, and all you could hear was the occasional snivel out in the hall. Your heart panged at how close he was. All your pain, all your suffering could be cured by a simple embrace of Kuroo’s. Your body and mind knew this, but your emotions refused to falter. 

        “Kuroo-”

        “Tetsurou,” he corrected tightly. 

        You sighed deeply and continued, ignoring the swift beating of your heart. “Why did you do it?” 

        A long pause left you dropping your chin down to your knees, and Kuroo cleared his throat before responding in a croaky voice. “I… I don’t really know. I was wasted, and I should’ve never drank that much. And she looked like you. And I- God, I was an idiot. But she was nothing to me, meant nothing to me.” His head banged against the barrier before he kept going. 

        “YN, you need to know you’re the love of my life. You’re,” he huffed out a breath, and you could hear him adjust his position on the floor. “You’re it for me. I can’t function without you. For the last week, I haven’t slept more than an hour, or eaten or anything. I just… please, I need you by my side.” 

        Not in a million years would you ever admit it, but you felt the same. Like you needed him to think straight, to help you focus, to keep you grounded. He was the one for you too. You just didn’t understand why he did what he did. 

        “I don’t know if I can trust you again.” You struggled to keep your words steady, and dug your fingernails into your knees when they cracked up at the end. 

        “I’ll work to gain back your trust, YN, God I swear I will. I just need you to give me another chance. I’ll never hurt you again, ever.”

        Tears streamed down your cheeks, but you pushed yourself up to your feet and approached the door anyway. It was the only wall you had left between you and him. He had broken down every other, and this was your last layer of protection. 

        With your hand on the doorknob, you hesitated to open it. You didn’t want to be hurt again. Never. You never thought he would betray you like that. You thought he loved you just as much as you loved him. You couldn’t even think about being with another man.

        So that’s why you pulled your hand away. 

                                ~~~

        Four hours had gone by. You figured Kuroo had gone home a while ago, and you had settled onto the couch, forcing yourself to laugh at a comedian’s stand up just to feel better. A hot chocolate steamed in your hand as you curled up in a blanket, trying to erase the pain in your heart.

        Footsteps clicked outside. Stilettos. Then whispers occurred. You sighed at the inevitability of getting kicked out so Christie could get it on with her new friend, but then she knocked.

        “Hey YN, you mind getting the door for me?” Her voice didn’t slur in the slightest. In fact, she didn’t even sound buzzed. Shaking away your suspicion, you rose and opened it for her, keeping your gaze locked on the television to wait for the comedian’s punchline. 

        “Christie, did you even drink while-” You were cut off by the feeling of someone’s long, strong arms embracing you. 

        The sensation was too familiar to be her. It was tight and warm and loving and comforting. It sprung tears in your eyes and washed a wave of uncontrolled contentment over you. 

        “Kuroo,” you choked out. Said man’s arms tightened around you. 

        “Don’t,” he whispered, his low volume muffled against your neck. “Please don’t call me that.”

        “Tetsurou,” you breathe out, “you were out there that whole time?”

        He chuckled bitterly and brushed his lips over your bare shoulder. “I love you. Fuck, I love you so much. I would do anything for you.”

        You snorted lightly into his own shoulder, running your hands up and down his back comfortingly. You enjoyed the feeling of him. You missed it. “I love you too.” Lips curling into a grin, Kuroo leaned back and began to pepper your face in kisses at the words. Then his hands crept up to the back of your head and tugged you closer, slamming you against him in a passionate kiss. 

        You both moaned at the feeling. It had been too long, way too long since you had been with each other. 

        When a loud clearing of a throat sounded, you pulled away, giggling when Kuroo tried to follow you. Your forehead pressed against his and you both stared deeply into each other’s eyes, watching with adoring gazes. 

        “I missed you.”

        “I missed you too.”

        “Yeah, that’s great and all,” Christie chimed in, “but can y’all move in together again? YN, I don’t know if you noticed, but you made my place look like a rat’s nest.” You snapped away from Kuroo in a split second and glanced around the room. You finally had enough clarity to take in your surroundings and- shit- she was right. 

        Blankets and wrappers and clothing were thrown haphazardly around the room. With a nervous giggle, you shrugged and gestured to the sight. “Umm, sorry?”

        “Yeah, yeah,” Christie scoffs with a smile before tossing you your backpack. “Just get outta my sight, lovebirds.” 

        Kuroo unraveled himself from you and intertwined his hand with yours. “She’s right,” he mutters, nuzzling his nose against your ear. “Let’s go home.”

        You nodded and gave Christie a grateful nod before waving goodbye. 

        In minutes, you were downstairs and outside, walking home in the chilly, midnight air.

        “Shit, it’s cold out,” you whined, huddling closer to Kuroo’s side.

        “Maybe it’s cause you’re only in a robe,” he snickers. Your eyes widen in realization before you glance down and shriek. 

        “Shit,” you swivel around and lock your eyes on the apartment building, “we gotta go back to Christie’s!”

       An arm winds around your waist and halts you mid-journey, tugging you closer to a nice source of heat. “Oh hell no,” Kuroo shakes his head before throwing a hand under your knees. In one swift movement, you’re up off the ground, being carried bridal style in the opposite direction. “We’re going home. I finally have you back, and I’m not gonna spend another second without you in my arms.”

Look Me in the Eyes (Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Reader)

*GIF not mine*

Summary: During naval training, your jet crashed and burned, taking your memories with it. But the lieutenant who saved you seems to know you better than he lets on. The only issue is that he refuses to tell you his name.

A/N: pfft half yall don’t read this anyway so imma just say rooster’s hot, oreosmama out *drops mic*

Word count: 3345

It’s not the pervading scent of antiseptic and boredom that has carved its way into your skin, nestling deep into the creases of your brow and your sneering upper lip—

It’s his unflinching gaze.

The lieutenant hovering over you, with a spoonful of green, gelatinous “dinner” posed over your lips, mumbles, “Open the hatch, the F-18 needs to land.” 

He’s a staunchly built man ornamented in the same naval jacket he’d been wearing when you first came-to in the hospital room, his lofty shoulders embellished in unfamiliar patches. Over the last two days, most of which have consisted of him lording himself over you or sitting back in the chair beside your bed, his five o’clock shadow has thickened, and the wrinkles underneath his teasing eyes darkened a shade.

The F-18 bumps against your sneer, and he chortles to himself. 

You know why you’re here. 

Well, sort of.

You know that it must’ve hurt. Like a falling-unconscious-due-to-pain kind of hurt. Black and blue splotches paint your temple and upper left cheek, and each time you force a smile, it aches. The rest of your body looks the same. In the first shower you’d been allowed, you twisted and turned as much as your burning abdomen could handle and had come to the conclusion that you were glad you didn’t remember much of what had happened.

The only real issue was that you didn’t remember much of anything. 

The story you had been told was haphazardly crafted, not unlike if a toddler had drawn a house with crayons and passed it to you, insisting it looked exactly like the one you lived in. 

It goes something like this: you were flying your jet when the engine stalled, and when you ejected, your head smacked against the windshield. You were lucky—you were unconscious when you had crumpled in on yourself, snapping five of your ribs like pencils, and when you’d landed on the ground, face in the dirt—you were so, so lucky. 

But the lieutenant says differently. 

When he found you, you were awake. You were echoing his name into the stagnant desert air, screaming and sobbing in ways that still keep him up at night. 

You know because he sleeps with folded arms on the edge of your mattress, and he rattles the metal skeleton each time he flinches. And the times when he thinks you’re too buried in exhaustion and slumber, his hand finds yours, fingertips light as air against your skin.

These are the only times the lieutenant bares that part of himself to you. 

In the mornings, when you can look him in the eyes and see the guilt buried underneath, he winces a smile onto his lips and asks if you remember anything yet. 

You don't.

And he winces again. “Back to the drawing board, huh?”

The lieutenant is a nice-enough man when he wants to be. The only issue is that he doesn’t seem to want to be. 

“Tell me your name,” you snipe, dangling over the precipice of flinging Jell-O across the room. 

This is a game he never wants to play, despite how often he wins. He has the whole naval base’s hospital staff refer to him as Sir or Lieutenant-no-last-name, and each time you ask, he’ll give you the same response.

“You know my name.” 

You don't. He’s a complete stranger. He can hold you hand and feed you Jell-O and help you hobble to the bathroom; he can brush the hair from your sweat-crusted face in the mornings and, on some rare occasions where he thinks he’s woken up before you, he’ll graze a feather-soft kiss on your bruised temple.

And you still haven't got a clue. 

Because whoever the lieutenant is, the tight grip he has on your heart is completely foreign to you. It’s a grip that says you and him aren’t just something definable—you were a we in this life; the pair of you have formed a way of living in tandem, your own intrinsic tango to which nobody else knows the steps. It’s not just like or a passing fancy. It’s not just hot static running through veins. 

This is fully fledged; this is oxygen now. The rise and fall of your chest is the rise and fall of his. The absence of it must be suffocating. 

So you don't know why he doesn’t like this game. He makes a question-answer into a back-and-forth, and then he winds and winds you up until you’re ready to snap. 

It’s not fair. God, it’s not fair. You deserve to know his name. Doesn’t he know it’s not just a tickle in the back of your mind anymore? If he was the one whose name you were screaming, didn’t you deserve to know what it was?

“Why do you keep doing this?” 

You watch his lips purse, the color bleeding out of them and into pink patches on his neck and cheeks. The spoon rattles against the tray, and the glob of green wavers in its curve. He refuses to hold your gaze like always. Self-inflicted torment disguises itself as burnt-sienna irises. The life you’ve forgotten is bowing his shoulders, and your crash, no matter the fact that he saved you, is eating away at him. 

Then the lieutenant smiles, in the fractured way—the way someone might laugh at a funeral. 

“Because knowing my name wouldn’t help you. You never called me by it, anyway.”

This, oh God—this is the closest you’ve ever gotten, and you’re still wading in the darkness. A name you’d never even call him by, what a wonder that does to your psyche. 

A name was a start; it was a first impression. There was a lot in a name. 

So you’d never called him by his name… so what?

So what, only lovers knew each other by more than a name? So what, he never called you by yours? So what, you didn’t want to ever call him by his name, never felt the urge, but felt it was rather proper considering you didn’t know what to call him at all?

He keeps you doggy-paddling for it.

The hospital room is polluted with silence for the rest of the night. Slowly, you finish the Jell-O as he sits back in his chair, watching, yet not quite seeing you. You missed when his staring felt like a buzzing fly. Now it’s a thunderstorm hanging over you, foggy and dampened, and you’re struck every few seconds with a shiver. 

He doesn’t reach out for your hand when you pretend you’ve fallen asleep. Twenty minutes past lights out, he stands and heads into the bathroom, slowly creaking the door closed and locking it before the shower faucet turns on and stays on for a long, long time. 

Where his hand should be is where he laid his jacket, one sewn patch erroneously rough against your palm. With another glance at the light underneath the bathroom door, you haul the leather jacket up into your lap, tracing the ridges and folds. You trails your fingertips along the jacket, searching for… something. Anything. 

Cold metal, a zipper slips underneath your fingers, and you sit up straighter despite the outcry of pain in your ribs. 

A pocket, and inside is a small plastic card—his ID. 

That, and a small, velvet box. 

No…

No, you won’t open it. 

No, no, because he shouldn’t even have that here. 

Why—dear God—why did he have that here?

It’s not for you. That’s for sure. You don’t even want to open it. No.

It’s not yours. It’s not yours to have, especially since he hasn’t offered it to you, and it’s not yours to wear, and it’s not yours to look at, to watch, iridescent, crystal devotion reflecting the moonlight from the room’s lone window. 

But when you lift the cover and curse the stars that the man whose name you don’t even know knows you so well, knows how beautiful it is in your eyes, and even worse, how well it fits on your finger, you know it’s yours. 

Well, not yours. 

It’s hers. The one before the crash’s. 

That’s her ring on your finger, and that’s her lieutenant grieving in the bathroom. 

This is her life, not yours. All you own anymore is the absence pulsing in your chest. 

You own the spasms in your veins, the brief and lasting panic of who am I, really?, the deficiency of life and past and love; the frail hold on this reality, on that man, on this ring. 

The rest is not yours, so you should let it go. 

Then, ideally, you should be able to float away, free from these junctions to a girl you don’t know. The man who loves her loves your face. He loves your body, and your voice, and each of the words falling from your lips, perhaps in the wrong order, yes, but he’ll rearrange them in his mind so that it matches hers.

Ideally. 

Ideally, it’s not this drowning feeling, a weight like a hand pressing hard against your chest, shoving you deeper and deeper under the current. She’s the one who breathes, not you. You don’t need to breathe. You’re an accident in this world. 

The I.D. slips from your grasp and falls to the floor. 

You’ve read it. You saw the name, the rank, the naval symbol. In the dim moonlight and the single glowing strip underneath the bathroom door, his not-really-a-smile smiles up at you from the vinyl floor. 

And now you see it, chrome duct tape peeling off the jagged stitches of a patch, the one over his heart. Another of his games: his missing call sign. 

It… fits him. Strangely enough. 

Is this what you called him?

The hospital room floods with a subdued yellow light carried out by the steam of the lieutenant’s shower. He emerges with a towel wrapped around his lower body, a sheen of wet on his cheeks you’re not certain was caused by the shower. 

Like you, this is his third shower in this room, but unlike him, he’s not wearing a smirk when he exits, bare feet padding along the cold tiles. He doesn’t spare you a glance while he pilfers through his black duffle bag, the one seated on the only other guest chair in the room—the one that never moves. 

Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t look, because you hadn’t thought to take off the ring. It was a plan as half-baked as when you’d first decided to put it on. Some barbaric, frenzied part of you, the same one that had slipped it on and hugged it close to your heart, refused to yank it off. It was another you—not her nor you, but a new one that had fallen in love with him, Rooster, without memory or qualms, the one that had no issue with him lingering in every corner of your mind; no, in fact, she preferred it.

You don’t listen to her when the lieutenant pivots back to face you, a fresh pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and the rest sourced from the duffel bag in tow, one fist curled into his towel at his waist. His eyes land on yours, and your fingers slicken with the sweat of your palms, tremble like the thumps beneath your ribcage. 

At the worst moment possible, you notice, in the hazy yellow light of 10:07 PM, that Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw’s eyes are achingly akin to whiskey. It’s the dark, thick kind that coats your tongue and hits you five seconds after you sip it like a freight train; heady, terribly intoxicating, and in large doses, coaxes out the worst side of yourself at an even worse moment. 

The ring clinks against the bed’s metal framework before shuddering against the tile floor, and his eyes leave yours to watch it rattle. The skin of your left ring finger burns from the swift twisting and tugging you’d employed in a state of tipsy panic—your plan had been to slip the ring unnoticed beneath his leather jacket, the same place you’d stuffed the velvet box. 

A breath tears itself out of the lieutenant’s chest. Tan skin rises and falls once, and his grip goes white-knuckle on his towel. 

Then he pads back toward the bathroom without a word and disappears behind the slammed door. Somehow, in some terrible way, it is even harder to breathe with him not in the room after that. 

But he bursts through the door a second later, completely negligent of the violent pacing of your heart, donned in clothes wrinkled and stretched in odd places from frantic dressing. He covers the distance with three long strides and slackens back into the plastic hospital chair, the heavy creases under his eyes never having looked so deep-seated. 

You see it now. The damage this whole experience has done to him. He’s been hollowed out, rigorously gutted to the point that one last revelation might finally crack him in half and let the despair pour out. 

You’re afraid to tell him all that you don’t know. That even though you had slid that ring on and off your finger, you still don’t know him. But, God, you want to tell him that you love him, despite knowing it won’t be enough. It’s not even enough to you, and it’s all that you have. 

Usually, he wears this sheen layer of tenderness over his face; it slips off every night when you close your eyes, and he smooths it back on in the mornings in the mirror. Some days he layers it on so thick you never even notice the grief hidden underneath. 

It must have gotten too heavy to bear. 

The silence hangs just as heavy. He runs both hands down his face, pressing hard enough that his skin emerges pink, and folds his hands, knocking them against his lips. Veins in his eyes grow redder by the second, and your heart begins a slow crawl up your throat at the watery levels of his eyelines, waiting to spill. The ring sits on the floor untouched. 

“Do you,” he faltered, clearing his throat. “Do you… remember anything?”

He’s looking at you so intensely that your skin is searing. Shame washes over you, grasping your shoulders and burying you deeply into its chest. You want to cry. 

“Nothing.”

The lieutenant stares at you a second longer, stretching it out until you’re trembling. Then he looks away, down, before reaching and retrieving the ring from the ground. He observes it for just a second, the way it glimmers in night’s imperfect lighting, and his eyes squeeze shut.

Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, you’ve learned, will draw things out until the perfect moment has come. He will wait until the ache swells and culminates, with a tolerance so inexhaustible you wonder if, in all your time loving him, you ever bothered to wait up. He’s noticed how the darkness has swallowed both of you wholly, and only now does he offer reprieve. 

Bradley tells you your name.

And he tells you that he’s been in love with you since the first second he saw you. 

He tells you that he can’t bear the thought of losing all that you’d had, and that his world had been crumbling apart before his own goddamned eyes ever since your jet’s engine had sputtered and died. He tells you that he’s so, so fucking sorry he couldn’t save you, sorry that your life ever got entangled so messily with his in the first place, and even more sorry that he’s so useless to help you find your way back, that you can’t seem to find your way back to him. 

And when you began to cry, he bolted up from his seat and held you, whispering apologies into your hair, and you cried a little harder, because you had found your way back to him, but he wouldn’t ever care, because it wasn’t the same path you’d taken before. 

You cry because it hurts to hold him, and even more because it hurts him to hold you. You want all of the I-love-yous he’s ever said to be for you, and you want that damned ring too. 

You want that goddamn ring on your finger right now because he’d promised you that it would be yours. That first moment he’d ever seen you, stumbling drunk in a crowded Hard Deck and spilling his beer half on his Hawaiian shirt, half on yours, that he’d make up for it by putting a spendy ring on your little finger right there, despite not actually knowing where right there was. The only one I’ll ever buy, he’d hiccuped, it’ll be yours, darlin’. 

“Rooster,” you croaked into his chest. “Roo.”

A provoked sob tore from your throat, your arms and ribs aching from how tightly you clung to him, even after he froze. You surfaced from the curve of his shoulder, hands sliding past his sides, over his thrumming chest, and up to cradle his damp jawline before drawing his face down to yours. He mumbled your name, whiskey eyes potent as ever, and you smothered the rest of his question against your lips. 

You couldn’t tell who was crying anymore. Your cheeks’ dampness was his, just the same as his lips pressed against yours so harshly, so numbingly you couldn’t quite tell where yours ended and his began. It must have been somewhere close to where his tongue met yours, making up for lost time as he fought hard and fiercely for everything he’d been starved of for three, going on four, unbearable days. His hands left their leverage against the bed and latched onto your hips, rough fingertips familiarly caressing the soft slopes of your sides, and when you offered an airy moan to him, he accepted eagerly with a tightening grip. 

You separated from him with a small cry, ribs twinging. Bradley pulled away in horror, and his dilated pupils struggled to sober up to join. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, larger hands now grappling at yours and trying to remove your grasp. “You need—ice, I’ll go get you some ice–”

“Roo, no,” you mumbled, refusing to let go of him. 

He paused, and his body shivered under your touch. The familiarity of his name from your mouth seemed as comforting to him as it was to you. His lips twitched and curled, and he breathed a small sigh. The hard lines of his face grew tender as he slid his hands down to your wrists, turning and pressing a kiss to each palm. 

His heart jumped and throbbed against your fingertips, and you had no doubt he could feel the same from yours. The heat of his damp cheeks had grown infinitely warmer under your touch, and for all the nights you’d spent with just a grasp on his hand, the change was more and more welcome. 

“Don’t leave me again,” he pleaded against the skin of your palm, voice thick and bittersweet, like honey seeping through your ears. “I don’t think I can handle that again.”

He steeled himself against your mattress with one hand when you tugged his forehead down against yours, lips just whispering against one another. You smiled. 

“Was it all the Jell-O that did you in, or…?”

“Yeah, actually,” he nodded, tongue pressed against his cheek. “It was. I hope you know we’re never having Jell-O in our house ever again.”

“Not even lime?”

“Especially lime.”

You huffed, “Fine.” You pulled away, despite how desperate Bradley was to follow you. He let you fall back against the pillows with your hand still in his grasp, and he settled onto the edge of the mattress, letting his spare hand find home in the pliant skin of your thigh. Your eyes rose to the ceiling. “But it’ll cost you.”

Soft lips brushed the back of your left hand before cold metal slipped around your finger. “One of these?”

“Exactly.”

Bradley hummed. “Gladly.”

Hiya can you do Tsukishima crushing on Sugawara younger sister who is in the same year and class as him and Sugawara is super protective of his younger sister? ❤❤❤❤❤ five hearts for the best rating of an awesome writer

This is like three years old but I'm trying to clean out my inbox and I came up with ideas for this years ago so here they are:

“Awww, you loveeee me,” yn coos. 

“No,” he rolls his eyes and turns away, “I don’t.”

“Tsukki fell in love with meeee,” she sang, rocking from side to side with a teasing grin. 

I feel like Suga is mostly resistant to letting Tsukishima date his sister bc he knows how mean and rash Tsukki can be. 

Tsukishima one time just walks up behind yn and drops his forehead onto her shoulder. A muffled groan escapes from him while she pats his cheek and snorts. “Why is everyone so stupid?”

In the distance, Sugawara sees this and malfunctions. This is the first time he’s seen them together. 

For the first time in tsukishima’s life, he actually wanted human contact. He wanted to hold someone, maybe their hand. Or hug someone, even for just a second. He wanted to run his hands down their sides and brush the stray hairs from their face.

It was you. That “someone” was you.

yn sugawara. 

Listen, I was not a Tendou fan until I read his part in "moaning another man's name". BAM. SUDDENLY I'M A SIMP FOR THE GUY. I CONSUMED ALL HIS CONTENT IN TWO DAYS. I'M PARCHED. You started this and I can only thank you for it. I LOVE your portrayal of Tendou. <3

YO I LOVE IT WHEN AUTHORS HAVE THAT POWER!! That’s how I got into Garou ngl

I’m so happy you like my stuff for him🥰🥰 and that I even have that ability like damn🤧honestly Tendou really is a babe isn’t he🥵

April Showers (Benny Watts x Reader)

*GIF not mine*

Summary: All dolled up and ready to confess, you await a certain chess champion’s visit as a thunderstorm rages outside. But the longer your phone call stretches on, the closer you realize he may be to feeling the same about you.

A/N: long time no see y’all. So as it turns out, life is a disaster. funny how that works. anyways, here’s some benny watts bc he’s hot. hope you enjoy!

Word count: 2075

Outside, the rain poured enough to drown the city life. People fled indoors, hair and clothing drenched, umbrellas shivering with droplets. Few taxis were roaming the streets, save for those catching the poor, wandering souls whose homes were nowhere near the concrete jungle in which they trudged.

You curled your finger tighter around the cord of your telephone. A small grin began to tease at your lips, pestering at the corners and daring to smudge upon your front teeth the pale pink lipstick you wore. 

Had you gone anywhere today? You couldn’t quite remember. And yet, there you were, sitting in your third-floor apartment, draped in your nicest day dress, a little black number that flashed your décolleté, and nothing more. 

You hated the dress—despised it, in fact. The broadcloth fabric tickled at every seam, the skirt, even on a day with a light breeze, always wanted to leave little to the imagination, and you didn’t own a single pair of flats that complemented well, despite its impartial color. 

But he liked it. 

You’d been wearing it when you both first met.

Your eyes gleam as you murmur into the telephone, still watching the road in front of your apartment. Your window has grown fogged, streaks of raindrops smearing here and there, and you lean further against the sill. The bruised clouds show no signs of stopping.

Like it was yesterday, you remembered every second of it; the scent of musk, of leather and aftershave and—was that cinnamon?—flooding your senses after colliding with a solid figure. Two hands had grasped your shoulders in effort to steady you, and—God—how you couldn’t forget the feeling of his fingertips against your bare skin.

Soft. That’s what you admired most about him. Despite his rough exterior and deliberate personality, he was unpredictably, endearingly soft. You curled your head closer to the phone, cupping it against your face as though his words were a caress upon your cheek. A breathless laugh escaped you. “Is that right?”

‘Are you all right?’ That day, he’d dipped his head to meet your gaze after you stumbled from the impact, and shaded eyes scanned yours beneath the wide brim of a cowboy hat. Your breath hitched.

Brown, but not one of those plain browns that was easily forgettable; these were one of those browns that would haunt you for days, the ones you could imagine wandering all over you, making you feel that jittery, hot anxiousness that simultaneously makes you want to tighten your clothes around yourself or strip them off altogether. You had let yourself get lost in them for longer than what was socially acceptable, especially with a stranger. 

But for that time, all you could imagine was diving into them a little longer, getting a little closer to see if they were really that dark, deep umber they seemed to be, or if it was just the shadow of his hat. 

‘I’m fine,’ you’d reassured with a tight smile, though it was the growing flush to your cheeks that made you so tense rather than frustration with the collision. It was warm, too warm, and, even worse, it was embarrassing to become so flustered so easily. 

A corner of his mouth had lifted, and his hands retreated from your shoulders. ‘Sorry about that. I should’ve paid more attention.’

The more you pored over the interaction, and every interaction following that, the more you noticed it at every fleck of his words—the hint of a Southern accent. During the day, it slipped past the ears without notice, but when it came to later hours and earlier mornings, it was thick and heavy off his tongue. Often, his voice would lower an octave. A dangerous gruffness would hang on his every word, and a tightness in his jaw kept his words drawled. 

‘Ah, uh, me too.’ You’d shrugged casually, hoping that in some way it might disguise the terrible tremble of your hands. ‘Just been looking for the mirror.’ You gestured down at the black dress your friend had forced you to try on, silently cursing at the way it wrinkled in all the wrong places and hung loose in others. Of course, you remembered thinking to yourself that day, of all the times you were to run into an attractive boy—no, attractive man, it had to be this moment, donned in the most uncomfortable frock imaginable. 

Slowly, his gaze followed the gesture. A careful, brown scan trailed from the bare skin at your collar bone, following the buttoned path down to the fabric pinched at your waist, and finished at the rippling skirt at your knees. His lips twitched, and for one unbearable moment, he was utterly silent. 

All you could think about was how stupid it had been for you to draw more attention to yourself, as if he couldn’t already see the sweating beading at your forehead, or the heartbeat in your throat. This man was sucking the air from your lungs, leaving you breathless and fidgety and nervous and hyper and taut all at the same time. A terrible mixture. And the one thing you had left to do was damn every haphazard, insubstantial interaction you’d ever had with handsome males that had left you so inadequate for this situation. 

Then his gaze flicked up to you, somewhat darker as he tipped his hat towards you and smirked, a gentle curl of his lips, before clearing his throat. ‘I like it. It looks beautiful on you, Miss…?’

His question had hung in the air, marinating until you could bring yourself back down to reality with a harsh bite on your tongue. ‘YN. YLN,’ you mumbled. ‘A-and you are?’

‘Benny. Watts.’

“Benny Watts, don’t you dare tell me that you’re only in this city for a chess tournament.” You shook your head, an unabashed grin overwhelming your face when he chuckled from the other end. “I did my research, you know.”

“Oh yeah, princess? What’d you find?” There was shuffling from his end, and you heard what must have been jangling coins, but dismissed it.

“The only tournament here is for the state title.”

“Yeah?”

“So you’re telling me that the US Champion wants to play chess against forty-year-olds with nothing better to do, and university students?”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m strapped for cash.”

You curled further into the sofa, hugging the telephone base closer to your chest and fiddling with the rotary dial. “Bullshit.”

He’d told you he was a chess player that day, and a good one at that. Said he’d travel all over the country to play, sometimes the world. You almost didn’t believe it, until he’d led you over to the magazine rack and pulled the latest edition of Chess Review. 

‘Here,’ he probed the front pocket of his trench coat, revealing a wallet. ‘You should keep it.’ Wordlessly, he passed a few bills to the cashier near the door. ‘And the dress.’

‘No, you shouldn’t just-’

He flashed you a smile and tipped his hat, already halfway out the door. ‘I already did, princess.’ Then he winked. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll meet again.’

“Well, princess, I do so love to be the best in your eyes, but I have to say there are some strong up-and-comers nowadays.”

“Same excuse you used last time.”

“Damn,” he whistled, letting out a sigh. “Can’t slip anything past you, can I?”

But he had, once. Just once.

‘Well,’ your friend had appeared beside you after he slipped out of the department store, causing you to flinch. ‘Now we know the dress works.’

You’d huffed, trying to summon the effort to throw her a glare, but the rapid thumping of your heart had been making any and all anger difficult. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Well damn,’ she smiled slyly and shook her head with disbelief, ‘you should look for me a lot more often.’

And as the pair of you watched him walk away, you’d spotted a small tuft of blond hair peeking out between the brim of his hat and the collar of his leather trench coat, and cursed at how well it all took your breath away. You had to agree with her. 

“Not anymore. You know I love to hear about your wins, Benny, but not like this.”

“Aw, you flatter me.” You could imagine the way he was fiddling with his hat at this point, dragging a finger across the brim or perhaps readjusting it altogether. “Here I thought you were getting tired of my chess talk.”

“I wouldn’t have stayed on the call if I was. Plus, you get all cute after you’ve won a game.”

On the other end of the line, Benny scoffed incredulously. “Cute? Did you just say cute?”

You leaned your head back, biting your lip. “Yeah, you know, it’s adorable the way you get all excited when they give up.”

“Adorable? Excited?”

“Yep.”

“...You’ve never seen me play a single game, have you?”

Finally, he was back in town. He’d called and told you ahead of time that he was headed over from New York; that he’d signed up for a tournament and had arranged to stay at a local hotel, and that he was wondering if you could meet up somewhere. 

Somewhere.

Meet up.

Hotel.

As if he hadn’t been planning on staying in your apartment anyway. As if the plan was to share a couple drinks and a couple laughs, the way you’d done it so many times before. As if the second before last phone call you’d had with him hadn’t ended with him almost telling you he loved you—just before he broke himself off with a stutter and mumbled something about having to hang up. 

And now he was coming here. 

The conversation had fallen into a natural lull, and it was then you took note of how painfully hot your cheeks were despite the cold weather exuding from your window. Your fingertips were frozen, you realized, as you gnawed on your thumbnail. 

“Benny, I…” You dug your nails into your arm, eyes clenched shut. “I really miss you.”

His breath hitched.

The silence grew suffocating. 

Your heart thumped painfully, and the dress began to itch. 

Then he exhaled. “I miss you too.” He shuffled on the other end. “So fucking much, princess. Look out your window.”

“What?”

Your gaze darted outside. The sun was just setting, and the sky had grown more black during your call. The lone street lamp shining into the phone booth was the only reason you could see him. 

He was supposed to be waiting for a cab at the university—that’s what he’d told you, at least. 

Instead, in the foggy glass box, he raised his hand, fingers flashing in a short wave. 

“Benny.”

“I couldn’t wait.”

When your form disappeared from the window, he hung up. When you raced down the stairs of your apartment complex, he abandoned the phone booth. 

And when you burst through the front doors, he opened his arms, grunting as you collided with his chest, chuckling as the motion flung the damp hat from his head. 

“Now who’s excited?” he mumbled into your hair.

He was completely soaked from what must have been a two-hour walk through a thunderstorm. The damp sleeves of his leather coat began seeping through the dress fabric at your waist. Droplets from his hair dripped onto your cheek. 

Then he pulled away, tilted up your head with a lone hand on your jaw, and crashed his frozen lips against yours, as though trying to absorb whatever warmth you would give him. God, even his ring chilled you to the bone.

But you couldn’t bring yourself to mind. Not as you drew him up the stairs, back into your apartment. Not as you both shed layers upon layers, peeling back whatever separated the two of you, until it was solely skin on skin and nothing more. 

And when the steam of the shower obscured your view of him, he sought you out on his own, searching for you and curling himself around you, planting his lips against your throat as his fingers secured the softness of your hips. 

“Princess?” he mumbled into your skin, sweet honey dripping off his accent and soaking into your skin. 

“Hmm?” Your fingers danced along his scalp as you dragged them through the blond tufts, suds floating down the drain. 

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”