˗ˏˋ ♡ breezy ♡ ˎˊ˗

📚🐝☕️🫧🫀🕸️🪐🪻 25 || frank langdon lovebot 18+ mdni

[artificialbreezy]

♡ you can call me Breezy or berry // 25 // this is the life of a fangirl, babe

♡ frank langdon apologist | jack abbot’s controversially young gf

♡ masterlist

♡ 18+ mdni

♡ inbox is always open

please note: some fics have been reposted from my old blog

— Unless stated otherwise, none of the pictures/gifs on my tumblr posts or banner are mine. credit to all owners

©artificialbreezy I do not give permission for my works to be stolen, plagiarized, or fed into any AI.

[whatif-ialreadydid]

SLEEPOVER TIME

As the sun sets on our wild summer, it's time the girlies (all-inclusive) get together for JAMIE'S Y(2K) BASH

Pack your PJs, your favorite CDs, and your sleeping bags —not that there will be much sleeping!

WHAT: This is my event to celebrate 2k followers! Thank you all for the love and support, I'm so excited to keep sharing my brain with you freakazoids <3

Send me a request for the following characters:

THE PITT — Jack Abbot, Frank Langdon, Dennis Whitaker, Trinity Santos

THE BEAR — Michael Berzatto, Carmen Berzatto, Sydney Adamu, Richie Jeremovich

WHEN: Event runs August 15th - August 30th, so make sure you get your requests in before then

WHERE: Right here on @whatif-ialreadydid

Here's what you can request in my inbox:

💅 MAKEOVER MONTAGE send me your character of choice, and I'll make you a moodboard! Be sure to specify any sort of physical qualities (body type, skin/hair color) you want me to keep in mind

👙 SKINNY DIPPING send me your character of choice, any vibes you're feeling, and I'll write a baby blurb

📱 PRANK CALLS send me your character of choice, and I'll share some saucy sleepover texts

🪩 DANCE PARTY send me your character of choice, and any specific vibes you're feeling, and I'll make a playlist for them

Be sure to follow the tag #jamie'sY(2K)sleepover for any other details prior to the event (blurbs, moodboards, etc)

🩷 THANK YOU FOR 2K FOLLOWERS 🩵

Please note: I will be answering requests at my own pace, so I might not get to all of them

Requests will be OPEN until August 15th, and I'll post all sleepover content until August 30th

Other posts related to this event

🍭 What’s everyone bringing for the candy salad

[artificialbreezy]

this is so cute wtf

[sainteangel]

dean if they let him keep his jewellery

[livelovelaugh-777]

[mariasont]

SUMMER’S IN THE AIR AND BABY, HEAVEN’S IN YOUR EYES ✺

when you end up drunk and alone on a beach, pope drops everything to bring you home and tries very hard not to want more than he should.

bet u wanna MEET THE READER! ── .✦ °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

MASTERLIST | RULES | INBOX

PAIRING pope cody x bunny!reader

WARNINGS 18+ MDNI dark themes, obsessive behavior from pope, stalker like behavior (tracking location), morally gray relationship dynamics, pre-relationship pining, pope has thoughts of killing people, alcohol usage, drunk!reader, reader has shitty friends, sexual tension, implied nudity, reader wears a bikini and a dress, erection mention, inappropriate thoughts, caretaker!pope, coercive attachment undertones, boundary issues, reader is a ditz!, romantic if you ignore the psychological warefare

WC 2.9k

You were never the type to make friends easily. And you’d never been quite sure why, exactly. 

You were friendly. You smiled at strangers in grocery store lines and remembered people’s coffee orders and laughed when you were supposed to, even when you didn’t always understand the joke.

But somehow girls your age always seemed to know something you didn’t, some secret rhythm to being casual and clever and wanted in groups, while you lingered at the edge of things with your lip gloss in your pocket and your hands folded too neatly in your lap.

Most of the time, people liked you in passing. They liked your clothes, your laugh, the way you listened with your whole face. They liked you best in small, shiny pieces. 

So when a couple of girls you’d met in the boutique dressing room downtown, squealed over your sandals, asked for your Instagram, and invited you to their beach party, you said yes before you could talk yourself out of it.

You didn’t have any work to do for Smurf tonight and even though you aren’t really the party type, the thought of sitting alone in your apartment on the Fourth of July just seemed pathetic.

Now you’re standing on the beach with your bare feet half-buried in the cooling sand, drawing idle, uneven patterns while the tide breathes in and out somewhere ahead of you.

The party had spread out around you in noisy, glittering bits: someone laughing too hard near the waterline, music crackling from a speaker, fireworks popping somewhere down the coast.

You’re perched on the low wooden stoop of the lifeguard tower, knees tucked close, a melting liquor-infused red-white-and-blue bomb pop dripping steadily down your left hand and into the crease of your wrist.

With your right, you try to type Pope’s contact name into your phone. This is a much larger undertaking than you expected. Herculean, even. Pope was only four letters and, frankly, you have managed harder things. Probably.

But your vision blurs every time you look down, the letters doubling, then swimming apart.

Alcohol, you decide solemnly, is not the friend to women that those girls made it out to be. 

When you finally manage to find his name, it only takes two rings for him to answer.

The line crackles, wind and distance swallowing the first half of his greeting.

“Yeah?”

You picture him blinking at the ceiling, sheets still tangled around his hips, and at once feel terribly small for plucking him out of whatever peace he’d managed to find. 

“Oh. Hi, Pope.” Your voice comes out rounded at the edges by the cold and the awful, floaty feeling behind your eyes. “Were you sleeping? I hope you weren’t sleeping. Well, no, actually, I hope you were sleeping because you don’t sleep enough and that’s bad for your brain. I read that somewhere. Or maybe Smurf said it. Wait, no, Smurf said a woman sleeps better when somebody wears her out first, which I thought meant, like, exercise, but she laughed at me, so maybe not —”  

“Where are you?” Pope cuts in.

Something shifts on his end of the line: sheets, you think, then a rough little bed-creak, then breathing harder through his nose. 

“At a party,” you say, then hiccup, then wince like he can see it through the phone. “At the beach. I was with some girls, but I don’t… I don’t really see them anymore. So I thought maybe you could come get me? I was gonna walk, I promise, but I wore those wedges with the little bows, and they’re cute, but they hurt to walk in.”

There’s silence for a long second. You chew at your bottom lip to compensate.

“You telling me nobody’s with you right now?” His tone is ice-cold, all the softness ripped out. A door slams on his end. “Listen carefully to me, please. Stay put. Don’t talk to anyone. I’ll be there in ten.”

It takes him five. 

It might’ve taken three if he hadn’t spent the first two tearing through his apartment in a blind fury, shoving his feet into boots without socks, grabbing the wrong keys, then the right keys, then patting himself down for a phone already pressed hot against his ear.

If worst-case scenarios hadn’t kept unspooling in his head faster than he could outrun them. You on the beach at one a.m. You at a party with people you barely know. You drunk, which he could hear plain as day in every hiccupy little detour your voice took. 

You don’t drink. Which means your tolerance is low, your judgement’s lower, and you’re out there with fucking strangers. Strangers who might look at a sweet tipsy girl alone on the beach and see opportunity. 

He would kill someone for less. Anyone who touched you. Anyone who followed you. Anyone who smiled too long and stood too close and mistook all that sugary softness for permission.

He thought it while pulling up your location, that you don’t know he has, on his phone.

And he thinks it now while cutting across the beach, while fireworks split open over the water, while people move past him in flashes of red cups and flip flops and cheap cologne. 

Continues to think it until he sees you sitting where you said you’d be.

You’re wearing a tacky little red gingham sundress. One that makes you look a little like a holiday decoration someone forgot to bring inside. 

His boots sink and crunch in the sand as he gets closer, close enough to see the blue bikini straps peeking out beneath the dress where the neckline gapes. 

Your name comes out rougher than he intends it to when he calls out for you, scraped low from the back of his throat. 

You look up with a delayed little flinch, eyes unfocused before they find him. Drunk, his mind supplies. Too drunk. But then you light up, and the whole beach seems to tilt around it.

You hop down from the stoop, nearly catching your foot wrong in the sand, and he’s already moving, already reaching, already annoyed with you and everyone else and the impossible fact of distance. 

You crash into him with arms wide open, pulling him into a hug before he can decide whether to grab your shoulders or your face or shake sense back into you.

His body locks around the impact. 

Candied pears and vanilla rise from your hair, pretty and familiar, ruined slightly by the bite of vodka on your breath. 

He closes his eyes, lets one hand unclench, then the other. When he finally touches you, it’s with a restraint that feels violent, palms spread over your back, nose buried at your crown. 

Fine, he tells himself, breathing you in until his lungs hurt. You’re fine. 

When you pull back, there’s a lopsided smile on your face.

“Hi,” you say, like the two of you have bumped into each other at the grocery store and not after he drove through three red lights to get to you. Your fingers curl in the front of his shirt. “I’m so happy to see you. Like… sooo happy. I’m always happy to see you. D’you know that?”

Your lipstick has slipped into a red half-moon near the corner of your mouth, and his thumb twitches with the sudden need to wipe it clean before anybody else notices. Before anybody else gets to think about your mouth at all.

There’s also glitter freckling your temple like spilled sugar, catching the firework light in sharp little flashes, disappearing and returning every time the sky blooms over the water. 

He sees you in pieces: mouth, cheek, lashes, throat, the blue string at your shoulder. Each piece intact. Each piece his mind checks and checks again. 

His expression doesn’t change, his hands do. One tightens at your back. The other catches your wrist, careful around the sticky mess of what he assumes to be leftover popsicle drying between your fingers.

“Don’t say shit like that.” His eyes flick over your face again. “Makes it hard to stay mad.”

“You’re mad at me?”

“No.”

And he means it. Mostly. He’s mad you came here with girls whose names he doesn’t know, girls you must not know well either if you’ve never mentioned them before.

He’s mad the world keeps proving him right for wanting to keep you close. For wanting to shrink your life down to manageable dimensions: his truck, his apartment, Smurf’s house, the short walk between places where he can see you. It would be so simple, really, to make everything the size of his reach. To make himself the first call, the last stop, the wall at your back and the lock on the door both. 

“Good,” you sigh, shoulders dipping in visible relief. “Your mad face is scary, and I like your normal face. Let’s stick with your normal face.”

“Let’s get you —”

You barrel over him.

“And you have such a nice face, Pope.” 

Your sticky fingers rise before he can dodge, thumbs skating across the hard shelf of his cheekbones. He ought to flinch at the tacky feeling, should mutter about germs, but all he feels is the lightning of your touch detonating under his skin. Twenty-thousand wings beating stupid fast in his gut while the world shrinks to the warm smudge of your palms.

His eyes drop to your mouth again.

Bad idea. Bad, bad fucking idea. 

Christ he really wants to fucking kiss you. Wants to bend, gather the sweetness off your lips, swallow every sloppy little giggle you’re trying to hold back. He wills himself against it.

Because right now, you’re loose-limbed and glass-eyed, floating in the aftermath of other people’s bad decisions, and he refuses to make the next one.

So he breathes, counts to four, lets the want settle into a promise instead of an action: another night, another version of the two of you where you’ll remember exactly how it felt when he finally let himself kiss the innocence away. 

“Truck,” he mutters finally, voice stripped to the bone.

One arm bands around your waist to keep you steady while he stoops, plucks your abandoned wedges from the sand, and shoves them under his elbow.

You sway against him, and he has to half-lift you the last few steps to the passenger door.

The hinge groans and he sets you on the seat, then decides to buckle you in himself — click, pull, tug — because he’s not sure your coordination is cut out for it.

“Keep this on,” he instructs. 

“Okay, okay,” you whisper, smoothing the webbing flat against your dress. “I’ll be the best seat-belt wearer you ever saw.”

You offer him a solemn thumbs-up, eyes bright with earnest pride. 

Pope’s mouth twitches. Barely. So small it could pass for annoyance if anyone else saw it. 

Then he knocks the door shut with his hip and rounds the hood before the sight of you smiling at him through the window can soften him any further. 

He ends up taking you to his place.

The thought of you drunk and alone three blocks away is worse than the thought of you under his roof, he decides. For your own good, he thinks.

But the second you cross the threshold with bare feet squeaking on the laminate and humming some pop song under your breath he regrets it.

His apartment has always been plain enough to disappear into. Blank walls, old couch, a singular chair, curtains that don’t let in much light even in the middle of the day. It’s a place for sleeping. For nothing else, really. He doesn’t need much else. And even that, he doesn’t get much of here.

Bad for his brain, you had said. You were bad for his brain. All this worry you cause. The wrinkles that now overtake his face since he’s met you.

You belong where color has somewhere to go. In gardens gone slightly wild. On porches with chipped paint and too many potted plants. In bright, warm places where things climb and bloom and turn their faces to the sun. 

You don’t belong in the stale dark of his apartment, where everything feels like it learned long ago to survive without light. 

His regret multiplies tenfold when you reach for the straps of your dress.

At first, he thinks you’re just fussing with them, your fingers clumsy at your shoulders.

Then one slips down.

Then the other.

The gingham loosens around you in degrees, revealing flashes of skin he has no right to look at and every reason to turn away from. His jaw snaps.

The dress slips lower, a slow collapse of red cotton and white trim, and he catches pieces of you in the corner of his eye before he can make himself look away. A shoulder. The curve of your hip. 

What’s left is cobalt swim fabric and miles of soft body, the damp seat of your bikini practically winking at him as you wander deeper into the apartment. 

“Jesus,” he mutters, turning his back. “Put that back on.” 

You twist, one hand braced on the doorframe, and peer back at him over your shoulder.

“It was sandy, Pope. It’s driving me crazy — here, feel.” You scrape your nails along the back of your thigh like proof, then lift the leg toward him, all generous sweep of skin and reckless trust.

Pope’s head tips skyward as if the ceiling might hand down mercy. Wishful thinking.

“M’not touching you,” he grits out. “You can use the shower to wash off.”

Though he knows you’d probably hate the experience of using his shower.

There’s nothing in there except a military-grade bar of soap and some shampoo he stole from J’s bathroom months ago because his own had run out and he couldn’t be bothered to buy more.

There’s no soft towels. No good smells. None of the little things women seem to collect in bathrooms, the bottles and jars and razors and foamy stuff with names he never reads but still notices when they’re yours. 

You probably have all of that at home. A whole routine. Something sweet-smelling. Something you rub into your legs after, standing on that little bath mat in your apartment with one hip cocked and your hair dripping down your back. 

His cock twitches in his pants.

“Don’t wanna shower,” you mumble, already disappearing into his room. “Just wanna sleep.”

A moment later the triangle of your bikini top tumbles back into view, tossed to the ground with a wet thump. It’s followed by the matching bottom scrap that had covered so much less than it should. The mattress groans.

He can’t see anything else but the fabric on the floor, but that’s more than enough. Enough to picture the rest, and the implication that comes with it.

You.

Naked.

In his bed.

The floor tilts beneath him as adrenaline and hunger vie for dominance in his gut.

He exhales through his nose, forces every muscle into a calm he does not feel, and walks to the kitchen. One glass, ice-cold tap, aspirin bottle from the medicine cabinet. Keep your hands busy, keep your eyes forward, keep your thoughts off her skin. He repeats it to himself like a mantra.

He turns to walk down the hallway and when he gets to the doorway he pauses, counts three, then four, then five, as if numbers can blunt the sight of you warm and bare beneath his blanket. 

Before he can step inside, your voice floats out from the dark, soft and slurred around the edges. 

“Your bed’s really nice,” you murmur. “I thought it was gonna be hard because you’re all…” A pause. The blanket shifts. “You know. Like that. But it’s cozy.”

He clears his throat. “That’s great. You — uh — you decent in there?”

“I think so,” you say after a second. “Most of me is covered. Probably the important parts.”

The room is mostly dark enough that most of you are mercifully hidden, the blanket dragged high, the shape of your body blurred into soft suggestion.

But not all of you. Your bare collarbones catch the dim spill of light from the hall. One arm lies loose over the sheet, hair fanned wild across his pillow like the bed had been waiting all along for something prettier to happen to it. 

“Got you water,” he says. He sets the glass and aspiring on the nightstand without looking too hard, then straightens, spine rigid, refusing to let his gaze drift lower than your throat.

You look too pretty for a night like this, too soft for a bed that’s never held anything but nightmares and empty hours, and part of him hates that the first person to see you here, sunk into his pillow and sighing like you belong, is him. 

He forces his hands to his pockets. “Aspirin’s by the glass. Drink all the water. You’ll thank me in the morning.” 

He starts to turn towards the doorway, but your hand snakes out of the dark and closes around his wrist.

The blanket sags with the movement, sliding off your shoulders, and he lunges to catch it with his free hand, fingers splaying across the warm slope just above your breast. 

“Could you… maybe sit with me til I fall asleep? Please?”

He makes the mistake of looking at your face. One soft plea blooming in those eyes and every argument he’d rehearsed goes slack. A smarter man would draw a line right here. He’s not a smarter man.

“Five minutes,” he warns, easing himself into the chair beside the bed.

“Five minutes, promise,” you echo, voice sing-song as you shift.

You avert your gaze just long enough to settle onto your side, blanket clutched in one fist, then peek back through your lashes. Both hands disappear beneath your cheek, the coverlet resting scant inches above the peaks of your nipples.

Your eyes drift half-shut, lashes heavy against your cheeks. “Wish I could sleep in your bed every night.”

Pope doesn’t move.

A second later your mouth softens, your breathing evens, and he’s left alone with the sentence like a knife he has to pretend isn’t in him. 

A lone firework bursts beyond the window. Silent through the glass but bright enough to paint pyrotechnic petals across the ceiling, for an instant crowning your form in color.

Pope exhales, lets the echo of that light fade, and settles in to keep watch until morning.

MARIA NOTE this was my attempt a 4th of july fic and somehow there are no pool parties, no wholesome firework kisses, just bunny getting tipsy off hardly any alc and pope having to fight for his life in a sad man apartment. whoops. thank u 4 reading ily!!! 🌀🍓💌

YOU CAN FIND MY POPE CODY MASTERLIST HERE ⭑.ᐟ

[sugartalk-ing]

3. “i could never get tired of you. i want to be around you all the time.” with Trinity pretty pls

Trinity doesn’t even remember what started the argument. She just knows that somewhere between her showing up to your apartment just because she missed you and the time it took you to plate dinner, you were sitting at the table and Trinity was leaning against the kitchen counter clear across the room from you and neither of you were speaking. 

All she knows is that she won’t break first. Maybe she should just leave. What the hell is she doing here anyway? She hasn’t seen you in three days and she finally has a day off tomorrow, which is a Saturday; she had plans to sleep over and sleep in with you, either cook breakfast with you or take you to the brunch spot she and Mel went to last month. She was also looking forward to finally sharing a bed with you again – three days without seeing you, but even longer not sharing a bed with you since the last times she’d seen you it was only for a quick lunch or an early dinner. She just wanted to spend some time with her new girlfriend and now you two aren’t even speaking. 

So, what was she doing here? If she wanted to argue with someone, she would’ve worked an extra shift at the hospital. She should just leave. 

She glances toward you and immediately regrets it. Your eyes are cast downward and there’s a prominent frown on your face. Fuck. All the fight leaves her body when you spare a glance up and she notices the sheen in your eyes before they fall back toward the floor. You look so sad it turns something sour in her stomach. 

“Baby,” she mumbles, taking a timid step toward where you sat at the table. “I’m sorry.” She doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for or whether or not she should be apologizing at all. All she knows is she’ll do whatever she can to make the sadness seeping into your posture go away. Her steps falter when you shake your head at her. God, what the hell were you two fighting about? 

Maybe it was over you two not spending enough time together. She was pretty short with you on the phone the other day, maybe she hurt your feelings. 

“Are you sick of me?”

Trinity shakes her head to clear her inner-panic to focus back on you. Clearly, she hadn’t heard you right. “What the hell do you mean?” She watches you heave a sigh, her chest pinching at the shakiness in the exhale. She closes the rest of the distance between you two, dragging the other chair of your small dining table closer toward you so your knees touch. 

“I ruined our night,” you say, but your voice sounds so hoarse and it comes out in a whisper so Trinity has to strain to hear you. “I don’t know why I picked a fight, I don’t even remember what it was about.”

“I don’t either,” she tries to catch your eye, giving you a small smile. “Let’s just forget about it, yeah? Call it a night.” She slightly panics when your face crumbles, confused over what she could have said to garner that reaction. 

“It’s fine,” you say, pushing her hands away when she reaches out to cup your face. “I get it. We’ll just… we’ll see each other for Thursday trivia.”

“Woah, what?” Trinity watches you get up and collect the plates from dinner, walking over to your sink to start cleaning up. “You kicking me out?” She tries to joke, but the thought of her upsetting you so much that you don’t even want to continue your night together is almost enough to bring her to tears. But the last thing she wants to do is make you feel guilty on top of you already feeling shitty. 

“I ruined the night,” you groan out, your wet hands coming up to cover your face so Trinity can’t see you crying. “I get that you want to call this a night and go home.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she can’t help the soft laugh that escapes her as she reaches for your wrists, trying to pry your hands from your face. “I don’t want to leave. I will if you want me to, but I was really looking forward to pretending to watch our show and making out in your bed.”

“You’re not tired of me?” You finally relent and drop your hands, your red-rimmed eyes making Trinity’s heart drop to her stomach. “You still want to be around me?”

“You’re insane,” she says light-heartedly, leaning in to press a soft kiss to the corner of your mouth. “I could never get tired of you,” she promises, another kiss to the opposite corner of your mouth. “I want to be around you all the time. These last three days without you?” She murmurs, her lips brushing against yours lightly as she speaks. “Torture.” She finally, finally presses her lips against yours, fighting a smile when you sigh into her mouth. 

“All the time?” You mumble against her mouth, your hands coming up to grip her hips and pull her flush against you, caging yourself against the kitchen sink like there’s no other place you’d want to be. “Careful what you wish for,” you warn, letting your mouth wander as you trail kisses from her cheek and jaw, leading a path toward her neck, kisses slightly wet from your tongues brushing together in your previous kiss. 

“Trust me,” she groans out, grabbing one of your hands to tug you toward your bedroom, “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

[mariasont]

WHAT 2 year and 7k follower celebration event! WHEN june 7 - june 13 TAGS #mariassummerinsantorini & #mariaversegetaway

THE EMAIL ❀ PASSPORTS ❀ PLAYLIST ❀ MAIN EVENT POST ❀ LET THE GODS DECIDE YOUR FATE ❀ MOODBOARD

DAILY DOSE OF VITAMIN SEA

sunday ❀ airbnb listing - day 1 recap

monday ❀ what's in your suitcase?

tuesday ❀ which pitt character do you hook up with on vacay?

wednesday ❀ drunk texts

thursday ❀ build your drink

friday ❀ greek mythology match up

saturday ❀ rate my fit

UNPLANNED PIT(T) STOPS

airbnb rules

flight seat assignments leaked

claim your boarding pass

passport stamp reblogs

DRABBLES

— REBLOGS KEEP FANDOM ALIVE —

𖤓 fluff 𖦹 angst 𓇼 smut

MICHAEL ROBINAVITCH

𓇼 WATERMELON SUGAR robby makes eating watermelon look indecently seductive, and you’re convinced he’s torturing you on purpose.

𖤓 HELIOPHILIA one flimsy bikini, twelve ignored sun lectures, and robby decides to turn preventative medicine into a hands-on experience

𖤓𖦹 PHTHONUS during a midnight swim, robby watches you laughing in the water with whitaker and realizes just how ugly his jealousy can get.

FRANK LANGDON

𖤓 STRINGS ATTACHED (SOMETIMES) during a beach volleyball match, a wardrobe malfunction forces frank into an awkward rescue

𓇼 GUILTY PLEASURE you hook up with frank while his girlfriend is upstairs and the line between pleasure and guilt gets very blurry, very fast.

𖤓 GOOD AS NEW frank tries to impress you with a stolen rental scooter. it goes about as well as expected. at least he helps take care of the damage.

𖤓 BRACHYURA langdon discovers your weakness: being correct. you discover his: needing to argue with you about it

𖤓 MRS. LANGDON HAS A RING TO IT after a swim leaves your hair tangled, frank ends up helping you brush it in the bathroom.

𖤓 IF SELENE IS LISTENING frank coaxes an overtired tired, tipsy you into his lap and takes over the job of being your caretaker

JACK ABBOT

𖤓 DIAMOND CUT after your engagement ring causes a small injury, you seek comfort from your favorite doctor

𓇼 A VERY PUBLIC OFFERING you and jack finally get a second alone on vacation, so he bends you over the balcony and fucks you while everyone else drinks downstairs.

𖤓 HERODEON you set out to explore athens alone, only to end up with an uninvited travel companion

𖤓 RAIN ON BLUE STONE you get caught in a sudden rainstorm with jack

𖤓 TIGER SHARKS you lose your bikini top and decide to use jack as a human shield

𖤓 ANDROMEDA the girls keep trying to set you up on vacation. that is, until they find the senior attending in your bed and realize why you keep shutting them down

𖤓 LITTLE MISS PRIM-AND-PROPER when the crew discovers your secret tramp stamp, jack accidentally reveals he knows far more about it than he should

𖤓 MERLOT ON GRAY COTTON when your suitcase gets lost on the way to greece, jack abbot lends you clothes to get by. between nosy coworkers, spilled wine, and jack's teasing, the situation becomes much harder to survive than it should be.

𖤓 MISSED OPPORTUNITIES you're oblivious; jack's permanently flirting. turns out all you needed was a nudge (and a kiss).

𖤓 SISTINE CHAPEL you are trying to read on the beach. jack abbot is nearby shirtless. this proves to be a problem.

𖤓 VACAY-YOU on vacation abbot realizes the version of you from the er isn't the only one that exists

[mariasont]

YOUR BOARDING PASS HAS ARRIVED!

reblog to get your passport stamped!

this is part of my 2 year celebration: maria's summer in santorini 𓆉°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ to learn more, click here!

MARIA'S SUMMER IN SANTORINI MASTERLIST

[alierecss]

right where you left me | Dean Di Laurentis

summary: Dean DiLaurentis gives you the "I don't do relationships" speech, and you say okay and come back the next day to fix Tucker's cooking. Turns out the most dangerous thing you can do to a man like that is simply not need him.

word count: 11.5k

warnings: 18+ explicit sexual content, minors do not interact. situationship dynamics, brief angst, dean being cruel in a moment he regrets, dirty talk, slow burn, eventual fluff.

Daily calls with your mother had become more sparse over the course of your college years. They started daily and had slowly tapered to every other Saturday, which, in all honesty, was a bit of a shock given that she wasn't the type to loosen her grip easily. She had always been overprotective, and when you announced you weren't going to Texas University but to a college in Massachusetts, she had genuinely flipped her shit. Two years later she seemed kind of cool about it. Just texting. Sending random updates about your dog, like the Halloween costume from last year that you'd screenshot and saved.

You were sitting in your room in the sorority house, legs extended and resting on the desk, phone propped against your water bottle while you FaceTimed her and tried to paint your nails without smudging anything. The room was quiet except for your mom stirring something on the stove.

"So I ran into Olivia Tucker — you remember her, right? From church? She had a son named John," she said, not looking at the camera.

You had learned years ago that it was easier to say yes, of course than to endure five minutes of your mom describing a person like she was giving a statement to the police.

"Yeah, of course. I remember Mrs. Tucker."

"She mentioned her son John is attending the same college as you." She said it like she was reading off a notecard. Matter of fact. "She said he's playing hockey now."

Oh. That John Tucker.

"Yeah, I know who he is," you said, cleaning up the mess on your middle finger.

"Isn't that a big coincidence?"

"I mean, not really — he's like a year younger than me, right?"

"Yes, but you two used to play together when you were kids. At church, remember?" You did not remember. Your family went to church maybe twice a year. "Anyway, I gave her your number so she could pass it along to him. So you two could talk."

"Mom — what, that's not really —"

"She's probably not even going to use it."

She used it. Mrs. Tucker called three days later, and with the grace of a good Southern woman, she asked you to keep an eye on John — not in so many words, of course. She said he'd moved into a house with some of the other players and she just wanted to know he was taking care of himself. She didn't want you to do much. Just stop by, take a look around, report back. She'd handle the rest by phone.

What she did not tell you was that Tucker already knew about her plan.

He opened the door looking completely unsurprised to see you, leaned against the frame with his arms crossed and a grin that said nice try. He was, it turned out, perfectly capable of taking care of himself and, annoyingly, other people too.

Which is how you ended up here, almost a year later, sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen island in the off campus house, crying into an onion.

"I'm just saying, get a dicer," you said, keeping your eyes on the knife because you had to. "This is inhumane."

"A real chef doesn't use those kinds of things," Tucker said from across the kitchen, doing significantly less chopping than you were.

"Well, good thing you're not a real chef then."

He turned around, visibly offended. "What did you just say?"

You opened your mouth to repeat it — and then Garrett wandered in from the living room, grabbed an apple from the counter, looked at Tucker's side of the kitchen and then at yours, and pointed at you. "She's doing all the work," he said, to no one in particular, and wandered back out.

"He's right," you said.

"He's a traitor," Tucker said.

You opened your mouth to agree and then the sound of footsteps came down the hallway, and Dean came around the corner fresh out of the shower, towel low on his hips and water still tracking down his chest.

You sniffed, eyes watering, nose red.

Dean stopped. Looked at you. And then let out a slow, deeply entertained laugh.

"Well," he said, "I've heard a lot of reactions from girls seeing me like this. But crying might be a first." He tilted his head. "You alright there, sweet pea?"

"It's the onion," you said flatly. "Tucker's making me cut it."

"Sure." He was already turning toward the stairs, completely unbothered. "Whatever floats your boat."

He winked at you over his shoulder as he disappeared around the corner.

You looked back down at the onion.

Tucker was very pointedly not looking at you.

"Not a word," you said.

"I didn't say anything," he said, in the tone of someone who was saying everything.

The party invitation from Tucker arrived as a single text on a Thursday night.

party saturday, be here, i made a playlist

You were in the middle of your readings and you looked at the message for a moment before typing back: do I need to bring anything?

yourself and good energy

You put your phone face down and went back to your reading. Then picked it up again.

what time

nine but come at eight so we can hang before it gets loud

That was Tucker's way of saying he wanted to cook with you beforehand, which you appreciated more than you would ever tell him out loud because he would absolutely use it against you. You sent back a thumbs up and returned to your notes, and you did not think about the fact that Dean would be there, because that was not a relevant consideration.

You thought about it the entire rest of the week.

Not in a dramatic way. Just in the quiet, persistent way of something you kept putting down and finding in your hand again. You were honest with yourself about Dean, had been from the beginning. You knew what he was. Charming in a way that looked effortless because it mostly was, easy with people, the kind of person who filled a room without trying. You'd watched him for almost a year. You knew the way he talked to people, the way he leaned in when something was funny, the way he'd come into the kitchen sometimes when you were there and open the fridge and just stand there for a full thirty seconds like the answer to whatever he was looking for might eventually appear.

You knew that he'd noticed you too. That wasn't ego, just observation. The way his eyes would find you first when he walked into a room where you already were. The way he'd aim a comment at you specifically when he had a whole group to choose from. The way he'd said I've heard a lot of reactions like your reaction was the one that mattered.

You'd been sensible about it for a year. You'd made the choice, every single time, to not do anything about it. And you were fine. You were genuinely fine with that. You knew what Dean was, knew what it would be, and you'd decided the math didn't work out in your favor so you'd left it alone.

It was just that sometimes, quietly, in the back of your head, a voice said but what if you didn't.

You got dressed Saturday night and told that voice to shut up, and went to the party anyway.

Tucker met you at the door at eight on the dot, already in a good mood, which meant either the playlist was really good or he'd already had a drink.

"You look great," he said, holding the door open.

"You say that every time."

"Because it's true every time." He handed you a beer from the counter as you came into the kitchen, already comfortable, already home in the easy way the house had started to feel over the past year. "I was thinking we do something with the leftover rice from yesterday, I got peppers —"

"Tucker."

"What."

"We're not cooking. There are already people here."

He looked genuinely confused. "So?"

You took the beer from him and looked around the kitchen. Logan was leaning against the far counter talking to someone from the team, and Garrett was already in the living room, and the house had that particular pre-party hum to it, not yet loud, still settling into itself.

Dean wasn't in the kitchen.

You noted this the way you noted a lot of things quietly, without making anything of it.

Logan glanced over when Tucker handed you the beer. "You're here early."

"She's basically a resident," Tucker said, like this was a fact.

"I'm a guest," you said.

"Guests don't know where we keep the good knives," Logan said and winked, and went back to his conversation.

You spent the next hour in that easy pre-party mode, moving between the kitchen and the living room, talking to people you knew by name now, accepting a second drink from someone who was mixing them near the back. Tucker orbited you loosely the way he always did at these things, appearing at your elbow every twenty minutes or so to say something that made you laugh and then disappearing again. This was one of your favorite things about him, he was never clingy, never needed to keep you close, just checked in like punctuation.

Dean appeared sometime around ten.

He came down the stairs and into the living room and you saw him before he saw you, which felt important. He was wearing a dark green shirt, sleeves pushed to the elbows, and he had that easy unhurried way of moving through a room like it had already arranged itself around him. He said something to Garrett near the bottom of the stairs and laughed, and you looked away before he could look up.

So. He was here. That was fine. That was completely normal and fine.

You went to find Tucker.

The next hour you spent being very deliberate about not being obvious. You talked to people on the back porch when Dean was in the living room. You came inside when he drifted toward the kitchen. You were not proud of it exactly, but you were not going to stand around waiting for him to decide whether tonight was a night he felt like paying attention to you. You'd done a lot of things in your life. That was not going to be one of them.

Your friend Anna, a sorority sister, texted at eleven: how's the party

You typed back: fine. dean's here.

Three seconds.

oh. OH. okay. call me tomorrow.

maybe

that means yes. don't do anything I wouldn't do

You locked your phone and put it in your pocket and thought about the specific, limited list of things Anna wouldn't do and found it unhelpfully short.

The thing was, and you'd been over this, you'd been reasonable about this, you knew what it would be. A night, maybe a few nights, comfortable and uncomplicated and then done. Dean DiLaurentis didn't do anything that looked like what came after. You'd watched him long enough to know that too. And you'd decided that wasn't what you wanted, so you'd kept your distance, and that had been the right call, and it remained the right call.

You were in college at a party on a Friday night and you had been sensible about this for almost an entire calendar year.

The voice in the back of your head said but you knew that going in and it doesn't have to mean anything you don't want it to mean.

You told it to shut up.

It had a point though.

You refilled your drink. Stood near the back door where the air was a little cooler and the noise slightly less consuming. Watched the party happen around you. Thought, very clearly and deliberately: you know what it is. you've always known. that doesn't have to be the reason not to.

You were still working through the logic of that when you felt someone come to stand beside you.

"(Y/N). You've been avoiding me."

Dean. Not accusing, just observing, the same way he did most things, like he was simply noting a fact about the universe. He had a drink in one hand and he wasn't looking at you yet, eyes scanning the room like he'd just happened to end up here beside you, which you both understood wasn't true.

"I've been talking to people," you said.

"You've been talking to people on the opposite side of every room I was in."

"Maybe I just like that side of the room."

He looked at you then. Really looked, in that direct way of his that felt like being assessed and appreciated at the same time. The music was loud enough that the conversation existed in its own small space, just between you.

"You've been doing that for a year," he said.

"Has it been a year?" You kept your voice light.

"Almost." He took a drink. "I've been patient."

The word landed simply, without performance. Patient. Like he'd been waiting. Like the last year had been something he'd noticed too, kept track of, decided to let run its course.

You looked at him for a long moment. The party moved around you, loud and warm, and you stood in it and made the decision clearly, with both eyes open, which felt like the important part.

"Bathroom's upstairs," you said.

Something shifted in his expression, not surprise, just confirmation. Like he'd known, and now he knew for certain.

"Yeah," he said.

He followed you up the stairs without touching you, which felt somehow more loaded than if he had. You could feel him behind you the whole way, that particular awareness of someone close, and by the time you reached the top of the stairs your heart was doing something inconvenient.

The upstairs bathroom was at the end of the hall. You went in, he came in behind you, and you turned to click the lock and found him already there, close enough that turning around put you nearly chest to chest with him, close enough that you could feel the warmth coming off him before he'd laid a hand on you.

He didn't kiss you right away.

That was the first thing. You'd expected him to, he'd been patient for a year, you'd just told him where the bathroom was, you'd expected him to close the distance immediately. Instead he just looked at you, and the looking was its own thing, slow and deliberate, like he was taking his time now that he finally had you here and he wanted you to know it.

"You made me wait a long time," he said.

"You could have said something sooner," you said.

"I said something tonight."

"Barely."

Something shifted in his expression, not quite a smile, more like he'd just decided something. He reached up slowly and tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, fingers grazing your jaw, and the touch was so light it was almost nothing, which somehow made it worse.

"You're going to be like that," he said. Quiet. Certain.

"I don't know what you mean," you said, which was a lie and you both knew it.

He tilted your chin up with two fingers, not roughly, just — directing. Making you look at him. "Yeah you do," he said, and then he kissed you.

It wasn't tentative. It was a kiss from someone who had thought about this specifically, who knew what he wanted and had decided tonight was when he was going to have it, and you kissed him back and felt a year's worth of deliberate distance dissolve somewhere at the back of your mind.

He walked you backward until your hips met the bathroom counter and left you there, stepped back just enough to look at you again with that same unhurried attention, and you understood then that he wasn't in a hurry. That he'd waited this long and now he was going to enjoy it, and you were going to have to let him.

"Take your jacket off," he said.

You did.

He watched you do it. That was all — just watched, arms loosely crossed, completely at ease, like this was exactly where he'd planned to be tonight. You set the jacket on the counter and looked at him and he looked back.

"Good," he said, like that meant something.

Your heart was doing the inconvenient thing again.

He came back to you slowly, hands finding your waist, and kissed you again, deeper this time, one hand sliding into your hair and gripping, not painfully, just holding you exactly where he wanted you. You made a small sound against his mouth and felt him smile.

"There it is," he murmured.

"Shut up," you said.

"Make me," he said against your jaw, and then his mouth was on your throat and the option to respond coherently became briefly unavailable.

He took his time with your throat, your collarbone, the soft place below your ear that made your fingers curl into his shirt without your permission, and every time you moved to pull him closer he'd ease back just enough to remind you that he was running this. Not mean about it. Just clear.

"Dean —"

"I've got you," he said, against your skin. "I'm not going anywhere."

His hands moved to the hem of your top, pulling it up slowly, and he stepped back to pull it over your head and dropped it somewhere on the floor and looked at you again with that particular focus, and you had to actively resist the urge to cover yourself, because that was not what you did, but the way he was looking at you made you feel like you were already coming apart.

"You have no idea," he said quietly, more to himself than you, and then his mouth was on your collarbone and his hands were at your waist and you gave up on dignity entirely.

His hands moved to the button of your jeans, unhurried, and he looked up at you first — not asking exactly, just checking — and you nodded and he undid it and crouched down to pull the fabric down your legs with a thoroughness that felt like a point being made. He looked up at you from there, and whatever was on your face made him look deeply, quietly satisfied.

"You've been thinking about this," he said. Not a question.

"Don't," you said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't be smug about it."

"I'm not being smug." He pressed a kiss to the inside of your knee, which short-circuited something. "I'm just paying attention."

He stood back up slowly, hands trailing up the outside of your thighs, and lifted you onto the counter like it was nothing, stepping between your knees. You pulled him back in by the collar of his shirt and kissed him harder than you'd meant to and he made a low sound and kissed you back the same way, one hand flat against the small of your back pulling you closer.

"Tell me what you want," he said, against your mouth.

"You know what I want."

"I want to hear you say it."

You pulled back and looked at him. He looked back, completely unbothered, and you understood that he meant it, that he was going to stand here all night if he had to, patient as anything, until you said it out loud.

"Dean."

"I'm right here," he said pleasantly.

"You're so —"

"Tell me."

You told him.

"Please"

The expression that crossed his face was worth it. He kissed you once, hard, like a reward, and said good against your mouth, and then his hand moved and all the words you'd been planning to say next went somewhere inaccessible.

He knew what he was doing in a way that felt almost unfair, thorough, attentive, like he'd already decided exactly how this was going to go and was now simply executing. When you tried to rush it he slowed down. When you made a sound he filed it away and came back to it. The tile was cold at your back and his hands were warm on your thighs and his mouth was at your cunt and the things he said there were quiet and precise and designed specifically to ruin you.

"You've been driving me crazy," he said. Low, unhurried. "All year. You know that."

"Dean —"

"Every time you walked into a room." His hand didn't stop. "Every time you looked at Tucker instead of me. Every single time."

"That's your fault," you managed.

"I know," he said. "I know it is." Something almost rueful in it. "Doesn't change the fact."

When you finally came it was with your head hitting the mirror behind you and holding his shoulder and his name somewhere in the middle of it, and he stayed with you through the whole thing, unhurried, like he had nothing else in the world to do.

He gave you a moment. Then he pulled back and looked at you with an expression that you could only describe as thoroughly pleased with himself, which should have been annoying and wasn't.

"Don't," you said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to ask if you were okay," he said, which was such an obvious lie that you laughed, and the laugh broke something open in the room, and he grinned, a real one, unguarded in a way you hadn't seen before, and kissed you again before it could turn into a whole thing.

You worked his belt with hands that weren't entirely steady and he helped without comment, and then his hands were at your hips and he pressed his forehead to yours for just a second.

You watched him look for a condom on his backpocket.

"Yeah?" he said quietly. All the performance gone.

"Yeah," you said.

He pushed into you slow and you exhaled against his jaw, fingers gripping his shoulders, adjusting to the feeling of him. He gave you a moment, forehead still to yours, patient, present, and then he moved and everything else became temporarily beside the point.

It was charged the way it only gets when two people have been waiting too long. Not frantic but urgent, with a focused intensity that felt like something being resolved. His grip was firm and deliberate and you pulled him closer when he slowed down and he got the message and didn't slow down again. The mirror was fogging and somewhere below you the party was still happening and it was completely irrelevant.

"Look at me," he said.

You did. He held your gaze and something passed between you that neither of you named, and you felt it in your chest more than anywhere else.

"Months," he said again. Quieter now.

"I know," you said. "I know."

When he came he buried his face in your neck and went quiet and still, one hand flat against the small of your back holding you against him, and you held onto him too because it seemed like the thing to do, and because you wanted to, and those were the same thing tonight.

You stayed like that for a moment longer than necessary.

Then you both exhaled at roughly the same time, which broke the tension, and Dean huffed a quiet laugh into your shoulder.

You untangled carefully, straightened yourselves out. You hopped off the counter and turned to the mirror, fixing your hair, smoothing your top back into place. He leaned against the wall watching you do it, arms crossed loosely, shirt back on. His hair was a mess and he didn't appear concerned about it.

You met his eyes in the mirror.

"This doesn't have to be a thing," you said. Even, matter of fact. Not cold, just clear. You were giving him an out because you'd rather give it than have him feel like he needed to take it badly.

Something moved across his face. He pushed off the wall slightly. "What if I want it to be a thing?"

You turned around. "What kind of thing?"

He held your gaze. Didn't answer right away, which was an answer, and you'd known it would be, you'd known before you came upstairs, and still it took a small quiet moment to settle.

"Right," you said simply.

Not angry. Not hurt, or at least not visibly. You'd gone in with both eyes open and you'd meant it, and the math was what you'd always known it was. That was fine. You were fine.

You unlocked the door.

"Hey," Dean said.

You looked back.

He opened his mouth, closed it. Something in his expression that you couldn't entirely read. "Nothing," he said finally. "Never mind."

You nodded once and stepped out into the hallway.

Downstairs, the party had peaked without you. The music was louder and the living room was full and Tucker was in the kitchen, which is where Tucker always ended up at some point. He took one look at your face when you appeared in the doorway and turned to open the fridge and produced a beer, which he held out without a word.

You took it.

"Having fun?" he asked, very casually, eyes on the fridge.

"Yeah," you said. "Party's good."

"Cool." He closed the fridge. "I made queso."

"Tucker."

"It's in the pot on the back burner."

You looked at him for a second. He looked back, perfectly neutral, perfectly unbothered, and completely full of information he was choosing not to say.

"Thank you," you said.

"Don't mention it," he said. "Seriously, don't. I have a reputation."

You laughed despite yourself, and some of the tightness in your chest loosened, just a little.

Tucker handed you a chip.

You both stood at the stove and ate queso and said nothing about any of it, and that was, genuinely, one of the nicest things anyone had done for you in a while.

Dean came downstairs eleven minutes later, you weren't counting, you just noticed, and grabbed a beer from the fridge and leaned against the counter across from you, and the three of you stood in that kitchen like nothing had happened at all.

Dean looked at the pot on the stove. "Is that queso?"

"Made it myself," Tucker said.

"You absolutely did not."

Tucker looked at you. You said nothing, scooping queso onto another chip. Dean's eyes moved between you both and landed on you with something unreadable in them.

"Can I have some?" he asked.

"It's your house," you said.

He got a chip. Ate it. Looked at the pot. "That's really good."

"I know," you said.

Tucker stared directly at the wall and smiled at absolutely nothing.

It didn't have a name. That was the thing , it never got one, and neither of you tried to give it one, and somehow that made it easier to just let it exist.

It started simply enough. A week after the party, Dean texted you at eleven on a Tuesday night. Just: you up?

The second text was a trailer link. No context, no explanation, just: this.

You watched it once. Typed back: that looks pretentious.

i know. yes or no.

fine.

The house was quiet when you got there , Garrett's door closed, Tucker apparently out, and Dean was on the couch with a beer and the energy of someone who had been waiting without admitting to waiting.

You sat in the middle of the couch.

He pulled up the movie without comment.

It was pretentious and it was also actually good, and you told him so twenty minutes in when he glanced over to see what you thought. He said told you without looking back at the screen. You said you said it looked pretentious, which is not the same as saying it wasn't good. He said that's a very specific distinction. You said I'm a specific person. He didn't say anything for a moment, and then said: yeah.

Somewhere around the third act the distance between you closed. You weren't sure who moved, maybe both of you, gradually. His arm along the back of the couch and your shoulder under it and neither of you addressed it.

The movie ended and neither of you moved.

He found something else. A documentary, shorter, that turned out to be genuinely interesting. You watched most of it. Somewhere in the second half you were closer still his arm properly around you now, your feet tucked up beside you — and the lamp in the corner was the only light, and in here it was warm, and you were paying attention to about thirty percent of the documentary.

You woke up at two in the morning with a blanket over you that hadn't been there before. Dean was asleep at the other end of the couch, head back, completely unconscious. The TV was still on. You looked at him in the blue light of the screensaver, the line of his jaw, the stillness of someone actually asleep and felt the quiet weight of something you were not going to examine.

Then you got up, folded the blanket, left it on the cushion, and walked home.

You didn't text him about it. He didn't text you about it. Two days later he sent: you around tonight? and you said depends and he said on what and you said what's the plan and he said no plan and you said okay.

That was how it started.

By November it had a shape, even if it didn't have a name.

You came over two or three times a week. Sometimes it was a movie, sometimes it was just you in the kitchen making something with whatever was in the fridge while Dean sat at the counter with his phone and ate everything you put in front of him without comment except occasionally this is really good in a tone that suggested he was a little annoyed about it. Sometimes the whole house was there, Tucker loud and cheerful, Garrett and Logan drifting in and out, the TV on in the background and sometimes it was just the two of you and the house was quiet and those evenings had a quality to them that you tried not to examine too closely.

He texted you things that weren't questions. A link to an article about something you'd both argued about in passing. A photo of a sunset he'd apparently seen from the library roof, no caption. A voice memo once, at midnight, that was just him reading something in the flat unimpressed tone he used when something was genuinely getting on his nerves — listen to this, the message said, and you did, and you laughed, and he sent back a single: right?

You sent him things back. A recipe you thought he'd actually like. A clip of something that reminded you of a conversation you'd had. He always answered. Not immediately, not performatively, just he answered.

Garrett had noticed, in his way. He'd stopped doing double-takes when you were in the kitchen on a Tuesday night, had started just saying hey and opening the fridge like your presence was a given. Logan was less subtle, he'd caught your eye once across the living room when Dean laughed at something you'd said, and raised an eyebrow, and you'd looked away and he'd had the decency not to push it.

You talked to Anna about it on a Sunday afternoon in November, feet up on her bed, staring at the ceiling while she did her readings across from you.

"So it's a situationship," she said, not looking up.

"I didn't say that."

"You described a situationship."

"I described two people who spend time together."

"With benefits."

"Occasionally."

She finally looked up. "How often is occasionally?"

You said nothing.

"That's what I thought." She went back to her reading. "Are you okay with it?"

You thought about it honestly, the way you tried to think about most things. "Yeah," you said. "I went in knowing what it was."

"That's not what I asked."

You looked at the ceiling. "I'm fine," you said. "It's fine. I know what it is."

Anna made a small noncommittal sound that you chose not to interpret.

The physical part of it was easy in a way you hadn't entirely expected. Comfortable in a way that felt like it should have taken longer to get to. He knew what you liked with an attentiveness that might have been alarming if you'd let yourself think about it, and you knew what worked for him, and there was none of the awkwardness of newness anymore.

The only thing you were consistent about was the condom. Every time, without exception. Until one night in late November when Dean caught your wrist gently before you could reach for the nightstand.

"Why do you always —" He stopped. Nodded toward it. "Every time."

"Because I'm not stupid," you said. "You were getting around a lot before this and I don't know what this is and I'm not asking but I'm also not —"

"I haven't," he said. "Since the party. I haven't slept with anyone else."

The room went quiet.

"Oh," you said. A beat. "Me neither."

Something moved across his face that he didn't entirely manage to control. His thumb traced a slow absent line against the inside of your wrist.

"Okay," he said quietly.

"Okay," you said.

The air in the room changed into something neither of you was going to name. Then he kissed you, and it was different, slower, more careful, like something had been confirmed that he hadn't known he was waiting to confirm, and you let yourself feel it without examining it too closely, because that felt fair.

The first sign was the texts.

Not that they stopped completely, that would have been obvious, and Dean was too smart for obvious. They just slowed. A reply that came four hours later instead of forty minutes. A shorter answer where there used to be a real one. The voice memos stopped. The links stopped. You'd send something and get back a single word where there used to be a sentence, and you'd look at it and feel the shape of what was happening without being able to name it yet.

You told yourself it was school. Exams were coming, everyone was disappearing into the library, that was normal. You told yourself he was busy, stressed, in his head about the end of semester and the hockey team. You were busy too. You had your own readings, your own papers, your own life that existed completely separately from the off campus house and always had.

You kept coming over. Tucker needed someone to watch the game with and you'd promised him a recipe you'd been meaning to show him and you were not going to rearrange your life over a shift in text frequency.

But you noticed.

You noticed the way Dean would come into the kitchen when you were there and open the fridge and not look at you the way he used to. Not hostile, just absent. Like you were furniture. Like the awareness he'd always had of you in a room had been switched off at a source you couldn't locate. He ate the food you made without commenting on it. He answered direct questions. He didn't start anything.

You didn't push. That wasn't who you were.

But by the second week of December you were lying in your room at night doing the math and the math was not coming out well, and you were tired of pretending it wasn't.

You went over on a Thursday.

Tucker was at a class. You'd known that, you'd checked, because you wanted the house quiet, because you wanted five minutes of honesty without an audience. Garrett's truck wasn't in the driveway either. You knocked on Dean's door and he opened it in sweats and a Briar hoodie, textbook open on his desk, and the look on his face when he saw you was almost nothing, which was its own answer.

"Hey," you said.

"Hey." He stepped back to let you in, which you took as an invitation, and you came in and stood in the middle of his room and he closed the door and leaned against his desk with his arms crossed. Not aggressive. Just closed.

You looked at him for a moment.

"What's going on with you?" you asked. Quiet, direct. No accusation in it, just the question.

He shrugged one shoulder. "Nothing. Finals."

"Okay," you said. "That's not what I mean and you know it."

A beat. Something moved behind his eyes and then went still.

"I don't know what you want me to say," he said.

"I want you to say what's actually happening."

He looked at you. Then he looked away, jaw tightening slightly, and you recognized the particular quality of someone deciding something, not discovering it, deciding it, and some quiet part of you braced.

"I think this has run its course," he said. Flat. Careful.

You kept your face even. "Okay. What does that mean."

"It means —" He stopped. Started again. "I don't want this anymore. Whatever this is. I don't want it."

"Okay," you said.

He looked at you, and something in your steadiness seemed to irritate him, which you hadn't expected, and that was maybe the thing that cracked something open in him that should have stayed closed.

"I don't know what you thought this was," he said, and his voice had an edge now, "but it wasn't — I wasn't —" He made a short, almost contemptuous gesture. "You've been coming over here for months like you live here. Cooking, watching movies, acting like this is some kind of —"

"I never called it anything," you said.

"No, but you acted like it was something. You act like everything is fine and nothing bothers you and you're so —" He stopped, and the word he landed on was quiet and precise and clearly chosen to land: "You're so comfortable here. Like you belong here. And you don't."

The room was very quiet.

You looked at him. He looked back, and you could see the moment he heard what he'd just said, saw something flicker across his face that might have been regret but came too late to matter.

"You're right," you said. Your voice was completely level. "I don't."

He opened his mouth.

"I'm not going to make this into something," you said. "You don't want it, that's fine. I went in knowing what it was." You picked up your jacket from where you'd set it on the edge of his bed. "I hope finals go okay."

"Hey —"

"Good night, Dean."

You left. You closed the door behind you, not hard, just closed, and you walked down the stairs and through the front door and out into the December cold and you kept your shoulders straight the whole way home.

You didn't cry until you were in your own room with the door locked, and even then it wasn't for very long, because you'd known, you'd always known, and knowing didn't make it nothing but it made it survivable.

You texted Anna: you were right.

She called immediately. You let it ring twice, then picked up.

"I'm okay," you said, before she could ask.

"I know you are," she said. "Tell me anyway."

The hard part came later, at midnight.

You were lying in bed and you saw a link, a restaurant that had just opened, a tasting menu you'd been meaning to mention and you had his name pulled up in your contacts before you caught yourself. Thumb over send. The restaurant unremarkable and the gesture everything.

You put your phone face down on the mattress and looked at the ceiling for a while.

You'd known. You'd always known. That didn't make it nothing. It made it survivable, which was what you'd agreed to, and you were keeping that agreement.

The next afternoon you went to the off campus house.

Not because of Dean. Tucker had texted you at noon — i made something and i think i made it wrong, come look at it — and you'd said what did you make and he'd sent a photo that made you genuinely concerned for his wellbeing, and you'd said I'm coming over because that was what you did.

You showed up at three in the afternoon in your good boots and your coat, hair done, bag over your shoulder, because you had a study session after and you were not rearranging your life. You walked into the kitchen and Tucker was standing over something on the stove that smelled questionable and turned around with the expression of a man who needed saving.

"What is that," you said.

"I was trying to do the thing you showed me with the —"

"Tucker."

"I know."

You put your bag down and took your coat off and hung it over the stool and rolled up your sleeves and looked at whatever was happening in the pot, and Tucker stood next to you like a man watching a surgeon assess a patient.

"It's salvageable," you said.

He exhaled. "I knew it."

"Get me the garlic."

You cooked. Tucker hovered and passed things when you asked and made commentary that you ignored selectively and the kitchen filled up with something that smelled the way the kitchen was supposed to smell, and it was normal. It was completely normal. You were fine.

Logan came through at some point, stopped in the doorway, looked at the pot. "That smells good." Then he looked at Tucker. "Did you make that?"

"We're collaborating," Tucker said.

Logan looked at you. You said nothing. He grabbed a water from the fridge and left, which was exactly the right thing to do.

Dean came downstairs at some point, and you heard him stop at the bottom of the stairs, and you stirred the pot and didn't turn around.

"Hey," Tucker said, in the careful voice of someone being very casual.

"Hey." Dean's voice from the doorway. A pause. "What are you making?"

"She's fixing what I made," Tucker said.

You felt Dean's eyes on your back. You reached past the stove for the spice rack.

"Smells good," Dean said.

You said nothing. Not pointedly — just nothing. Tucker handed you the paprika.

Dean didn't leave. You could feel him still standing there, which told you something you set aside for later. You plated what you'd made, put Tucker's portion in front of him, put the extra in a container that you labeled with a piece of tape and a marker the way you always did, and started washing the pan.

"There's extra," Tucker said, to the room.

"I can see that," Dean said.

Tucker ate a bite. Made a sound of profound relief. "You're genuinely talented, you know that?"

"I know," you said, drying the pan.

You stayed another forty minutes, finishing your tea, going over the recipe with Tucker so he could try again, answering a text from Anna. Normal. Easy. The house the same as it had always been, Tucker the same as he'd always been, you the same as you'd always been.

When you left you said, "Bye Tuck, don't touch the leftovers until tomorrow, they're better the next day."

"Noted," Tucker said.

You pulled on your coat. Picked up your bag. "Later," you said, generally, to the room, and you walked out.

Dean stood in the kitchen after the front door closed.

Tucker was eating. Not looking at him. The kitchen smelled incredible and there was a labeled container in the fridge and the pan you'd used was clean and back on the rack like you'd never been there.

"She labeled it," Dean said.

"She always labels it," Tucker said.

Dean looked at the fridge. "For who."

"I don't know, Dean." Tucker turned a page in whatever he was reading. "Whoever wants it, I guess."

He couldn't focus in class the next morning.

The professor was talking and Dean had his laptop open and his notes half-started and none of it was going in because he kept coming back to the same thing, the same image, which was you standing at his stove with your back to him like nothing had happened.

Not performing like nothing had happened. Actually fine. The difference between those two things was something he understood logically and couldn't reconcile emotionally and it was making him insane.

He'd expected — he didn't know what he'd expected. Something. Some sign that what he'd said had mattered, that he had mattered, that the months of you being in his space and in his kitchen and in his bed and knowing how he took his coffee and showing up when Tucker texted you and falling asleep on his couch and leaving your chapstick on his nightstand —

You'd taken the chapstick. He'd noticed.

You'd taken it and labeled the leftovers and said later to the room and walked out and that was it, apparently. That was the whole thing. He'd said you don't belong here and you'd said you're right and you'd meant it, and that was the part he couldn't get past. You'd meant it not because you believed it but because you weren't going to fight him on it. Because you didn't need to.

You act like you belong here. And you don't.

He'd said that. He'd actually said that.

He stared at his laptop screen.

You'd been coming to that house since before he'd ever spoken a full sentence to you. Tucker's mom had called you, you'd shown up, you'd been folded into the house slowly and completely the way only people who actually fit somewhere ever are, Tucker texting you unprompted, Garrett knowing your coffee order, Logan moving over on the couch without being asked, and Dean had stood in his own room and told you that you didn't belong there and you'd looked at him like you were giving him the chance to hear what he was saying and he hadn't taken it and you'd left.

And then you'd come back the next day and cooked Tucker's disaster and labeled the leftovers and said later.

Later. Like you'd see them around. Like the house was still just a place you came to, unconnected to Dean, existing independently of whatever he'd decided.

Because it was. Because Tucker was your friend. Because you'd built something there that had nothing to do with Dean DiLaurentis and apparently had no intention of dismantling it on his account.

He wrote something down without reading it.

The thing was and this was the part that was sitting in his chest like something he couldn't shift, he'd ended it because it was getting too real. That was the honest answer, the one he hadn't said out loud to anyone including himself until approximately right now, which was not ideal timing. He'd felt it getting heavier and closer and more like something that had a name and he'd panicked, and when Dean DiLaurentis panicked he went cold, and when he went cold long enough he said things he couldn't take back.

You don't belong here.

He closed his laptop. Opened it again.

You hadn't fought for it. He'd said something genuinely cruel and you'd said you're right and you'd left, and the version of events he'd been running in his head where you'd be upset, where you'd pull back from the house, where he'd see the evidence of having mattered somewhere in your behavior, none of that had happened. You'd come back with your boots and your coat and your labeled container and your later and you were fine.

He was not fine.

That felt deeply, profoundly unfair, and he was self-aware enough to recognize that he had no one to blame for it but himself, which made it worse.

Wait, said something in the back of his head, quiet and inconvenient.

He picked up his pen. Put it down.

Wait.

He didn't finish the thought. He stared at his notes until they stopped meaning anything, and outside the window the Briar campus went on being cold and grey and completely indifferent to the fact that Dean DiLaurentis was sitting in class slowly understanding something he wasn't ready to understand yet.

The problem with ending things, Dean was discovering, was that it only worked if the other person let it end.

You hadn't made a scene. Hadn't texted him anything he had to respond to, hadn't shown up at his door, hadn't done a single thing that gave him something to push against. You'd just continued. Existing in the house, in the kitchen, in Tucker's orbit, completely unchanged, like Dean's opinion of the situation was one data point you'd received and filed appropriately and moved on from.

He ate everything you made. That was the humiliating part. Every single time you left something in the fridge he ate it, sometimes within the hour, standing at the counter in the kitchen alone like some kind of punishment he was administering to himself. Tucker never commented on this. Tucker never commented on anything, which was its own form of commentary.

You'd left soup once. Labeled, like always — back burner, twenty minutes, don't let Tucker have more than one bowl he'll eat the whole thing. Dean had read the label four times. Eaten two bowls. Stood at the sink washing the pot afterward feeling like a man losing an argument he wasn't allowed to be having.

Garrett had found him standing there once, staring at nothing, and said "you good?" and Dean had said "yeah" and Garrett had looked at the labeled container still on the counter and said nothing further, which somehow made it worse.

He started noticing everything.

The way you'd laugh at something on your phone and not share it with the room, just smile to yourself and put it face down. The way you always took your shoes off at the door and lined them up neatly to the left, always the left, and he'd started checking for them when he came downstairs, the presence or absence of your boots telling him things about the afternoon before he'd even gotten to the kitchen. The way you said Tucker's name — comfortable, fond, like a shorthand — and the way you had, at some point, stopped saying Dean's name at all. Not pointedly. Just it didn't come up. He wasn't who you were talking to.

He'd done that. He understood that he'd done that.

He just hadn't understood what it would feel like to have done it.

He tried, for a while, to be reasonable about it.

He made a list, mentally, of all the reasons this was fine. He didn't do relationships. He'd never done relationships. He had a plan for his life that had been in place since he was sixteen, and that plan had no room in it for whatever you were. Whatever you'd been. The comfortable weight of your presence, the evenings when you were in the house versus evenings when you weren't, the way he'd started coming across things during the week and thinking you'd have something to say about this —

That was the problem right there. That was the thing he kept running into.

He'd been having conversations with you in his head for weeks. Full conversations, with your actual responses, because he knew how you thought well enough to fill both sides, and that was, that was not the behavior of someone who was fine.

He talked to Garrett on a Tuesday night, which he never did, and talked around the subject for twenty minutes before Garrett said, flatly: "Just tell me what she did."

"She didn't do anything," Dean said.

A pause. "Then tell me what you did."

Dean stared at his ceiling. "I ended it."

"And?"

"And she's fine."

"That's it? She's fine and you are like this?"

"She's too fine," Dean said, and hated how that sounded.

Garrett was quiet for a moment. Then: "Dean."

"What."

"You absolute idiot."

January settled over Briar cold and grey and Dean settled into a particular kind of misery that he was too proud to name properly. He went to class. He did his readings. He played well enough at practice that Coach didn't get on him, which required more effort than it should have because his head was not where it was supposed to be.

You came over on Saturdays, usually. Sometimes Thursdays. Tucker had apparently taken to texting you about things that had nothing to do with cooking, Dean had seen the thread once, accidentally, and it was just the two of you sending each other increasingly unhinged videos with no context, a friendship that existed completely on its own terms, owed nothing to Dean, and was apparently thriving.

Logan had said, once, carefully, over breakfast: "She was here yesterday."

"I know," Dean said.

Logan looked at him. "Just saying."

"I know," Dean said again.

Logan went back to his cereal and didn't push it, which was the right call, and Dean appreciated it and resented it in equal measure.

He watched you from across rooms and told himself he wasn't doing that.

You never looked uncomfortable. That was the thing that was going to actually kill him. You'd come in, take your boots off, left side of the door, say hey to whoever was around, drift toward the kitchen with the ease of someone in a place they belonged, and it would be normal. Warm. Real. And Dean would be somewhere in the same house eating himself alive and you would be completely, genuinely fine.

He thought about the things he'd said. You act like you belong here. And you don't.

He thought about those words with a frequency that was becoming a problem.

It was a random Wednesday in late January.

Dean came home from a late class tired and cold and in the specific bad mood that came from hours with a professor who seemed to find his suffering amusing. The house was lit up when he got there, which meant people were home, and he could hear voices from the kitchen before he'd gotten his coat off.

Tucker's laugh. And then yours.

He stood in the hallway for a second with his coat half off.

"—absolutely not, that's not how that works—" Tucker, indignant.

"I'm telling you, Tucker, I watched you do it, that's exactly how you did it—"

"I was recovering, there's a difference—"

"There is no difference, the result was the same—"

Tucker said something Dean didn't catch and you laughed, full and real, the kind of laugh that meant you'd actually been caught off guard by it, and the sound of it hit Dean somewhere undefended and just stayed there.

He finished taking his coat off. Hung it up. Walked to the kitchen doorway.

You were at the island, Tucker leaning on his elbows across from you, some kind of card game between you that Dean didn't recognize. You had a mug of something and your hair was down and you were still smiling from whatever Tucker had just said, and Tucker was looking at you with the expression of someone who had won a point. Garrett was on the couch in the next room, feet up, barely paying attention, the way Garrett existed in the house like ambient weather.

"Dean," Tucker said. "Tell her that recovering from a bad move is a valid strategy."

"Depends on the move," Dean said, automatically.

"See," Tucker said to you.

"That's not what he said," you said, and glanced at Dean briefly,not long, not loaded, just a glance, the kind you'd give anyone and looked back at Tucker. "Your move."

Dean got a glass of water. Stood at the counter. The card game continued. Tucker accused you of cheating, you denied it with the specific serenity of someone who was absolutely cheating, Dean watched and said nothing and felt the sensation of standing outside something warm.

An hour later you started putting your coat on.

"Okay," you said, gathering your things. "Tucker. Rematch Thursday."

"Thursday," Tucker confirmed. "I'll win."

"You won't." You pulled your bag onto your shoulder. Looked at Tucker with something genuine and warm. "Bye, Tuck."

"Bye." Tucker was already looking back at his phone.

"Later, Garrett," you called toward the living room.

"Later," Garrett called back, not looking up.

You walked toward the door. Past Dean, close enough that he could have said something, close enough that the window was right there, and he stood at the counter with his glass of water and said nothing, and you pulled the door open and walked out, and the door closed, and that was it.

Tucker looked up from his phone.

The two of them sat in the quiet kitchen, the card game still spread out on the island, your mug still on the counter.

"She forgot her mug," Dean said.

"She'll get it Thursday," Tucker said.

Dean put his glass down. Picked it back up.

"She said bye to you first," he said.

Tucker looked at him for a long moment. Set his phone down. "Yeah," he said. "She did."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"Tucker —"

"I'm not doing this, Dean."

"I'm not asking you to do anything."

"Good." Tucker picked his phone back up. "Because I really, genuinely, am not getting involved."

From the living room, Garrett said nothing, which meant he was listening to every word.

Dean looked at the door.

"She left her mug," he said again, quieter, to no one in particular.

Tucker said nothing. Which was, as always, its own kind of answer.

He lasted four days.

Four days of your mug on the counter — Tucker had washed it and left it there — four days of picking up his phone and putting it down, four days of being a reasonable adult who had made a decision and was living with it, and then on Sunday night at eleven p.m. he put on his shoes and his coat and walked across campus to the Kappa house like a man who had exhausted every other option.

He stood outside in the cold and looked up at the second floor windows and felt genuinely insane.

He found a handful of small rocks from the landscaping border. Looked at them. Looked up at the windows.

He threw one.

It hit the wrong window. A light came on and someone looked out — not you, someone he didn't recognize — and he stepped back into the shadow of the tree until the light went off again.

He tried the next window. Nothing. The one after that.

The window opened.

You leaned out, hair messy, clearly pulled from sleep or close to it, and looked down at him in the dark with an expression that moved through several phases: confusion, recognition, disbelief. Before settling on something that was almost exasperated and almost amused and fully of course.

"Dean," you said, not loud. "What are you doing."

"I need to talk to you."

"It's eleven o'clock."

"I know. You weren't answering my texts."

You stared at him. "You texted me twenty minutes ago."

"You didn't answer."

"I was asleep."

"Can I come up?"

The expression on your face did something complicated. "You want to climb the sorority house."

"There's a trellis."

You looked to the left, apparently confirming the existence of the trellis, then looked back down at him. "Dean."

"Five minutes," he said. "I just — five minutes. Then I'll go."

You looked at him for a long moment, and he stood in the cold and let you look, because he'd run out of ways to manage how this went. You could close the window. That was a real option and he'd accept it.

You didn't close the window.

"The trellis is on the left," you said. "Don't break anything."

He made it up without incident, which he felt was frankly more than he deserved. You'd stepped back from the window to let him climb through, and he came in trying not to knock anything over and stood in the middle of your room feeling the full absurdity of the situation settle over him.

Your room was small and warm. Books on every surface, a desk lamp on low, a quilt on the bed that looked like it had been in your family for a while. It smelled like you, something warm, something that had been living in the back of his brain for months without his permission.

You sat on the edge of your bed and looked at him with your arms loosely crossed, not hostile, just waiting. Giving him the floor.

"I need to say something," he said.

"Okay."

"And I need you to let me say it without — I need to actually get through it."

"I'm not stopping you," you said.

He looked at you. You looked back, and there was something in your expression: patient, steady, not giving him anything, and he understood suddenly that you were going to make him do this himself. All the way. No half measures.

He took a breath.

"I said things to you that I can't take back," he started. "That night in my room. And I knew when I said them that they weren't — I knew they weren't true. I said them because I was scared and I was trying to make you leave and I wanted it to work so I made it as —" He stopped. Tried again. "I wanted you gone and I made sure you'd go and then you went and I've been —" He stopped again.

You waited.

"I've been losing my mind," he said. "For weeks. You keep coming over and cooking Tucker's food and laughing at his jokes and you left your mug on the counter and you said bye, Tuck and walked out like I wasn't standing right there and I —" He stopped. The words that needed to come next were the ones he'd been circling for weeks and he was done circling. "I'm in love with you."

The room was quiet.

"I'm in love with you," he said again, because it had come out steadier the second time and it was true and he was done with it living only in his head. "I have been for a while. I didn't know what to do with it so I — I did what I did. And I know that's not an excuse. I know what I said. But I needed you to know that it wasn't because you didn't matter. It was because you mattered too much and I didn't know how to —"

"Dean," you said.

He stopped.

You looked at him for a long moment. Something in your expression that was careful and real and not entirely closed.

"I know," you said quietly.

He blinked. "You —"

"I knew." You said it simply, without cruelty. "I've known for a while. I needed you to know it too." A pause. "And I needed you to say it. Out loud. To me. Without me making it easy for you."

He held your gaze. "Because you're not going to make it easy for me."

"No," you said. Not meanly. Just honestly. "I'm not."

He nodded slowly. That was fair. That was completely fair.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For what I said. You don't belong here — I knew that wasn't true when I said it. That's the worst part. I knew and I said it anyway."

You looked at him. And he watched something in your expression shift, not all the way, but enough, a small careful opening.

"I know," you said again. Softer this time.

"Can we —" He stopped. Tried to find the right shape for the question. "Is there a way back from this. Is that something that exists."

You were quiet for a moment that felt very long.

"Come here," you said.

He crossed the room and you stood from the bed to meet him and he kissed you carefully, like he was asking, and you kissed him back like you were answering, and it was nothing like the first time and nothing like any of the times in between, because those had all been about desire and this was about something that didn't have the same kind of ceiling.

His hands came to your face, gentle, and you let him, and he kissed you like he was trying to say the things that words hadn't been sufficient for the weeks of watching you from across rooms, the soup, the mug, the way your boots on the left side of the door had started to feel like something he needed, all of it, moving through the kiss like it had somewhere to go now.

You pulled back after a moment and looked at him.

"Say it again," you said quietly. Not a test. Just you wanted to hear it again.

"I'm in love with you," he said, without hesitating.

You looked at him for one more second. Then you kissed him again and this time you meant it differently, your hands in his collar pulling him in, and the tenor of the whole thing shifted from careful to something warmer and more certain.

He walked you back to the bed gently, and you sat and pulled him down with you, and he went willingly, propping himself above you, and looked at you for a moment. Your hair on the pillow, your expression open in a way he hadn't been allowed to see in weeks.

"Hi," he said, quietly.

The corner of your mouth moved. "Hi."

He kissed you again, slower this time, and his hands moved over you with a deliberateness that was different from anything before not performing, not proving anything, just present. Your shirt came off and his followed, and he pressed his mouth to your collarbone, your shoulder, the soft curve of your throat, taking his time in the way of someone who wasn't going anywhere.

"Dean," you said softly, fingers in his hair.

"I know," he said, against your skin. "I've got you."

You exhaled like something releasing.

It was slow and close and almost unbearably tender, the kind of thing that didn't have anything to hide anymore. He was attentive in a way that felt different now not just knowing what worked but wanting you to feel it, wanting you to know he was there, all the way there, not halfway out the door. You made soft sounds against his jaw and pulled him closer and he went, and you moved together in the small warm room with the desk lamp still on low and neither of you suggested turning it off.

When you came it was quiet and deep and you said his name and he held you through it with his face pressed to your temple, and afterward he stayed close, closer than strictly necessary, and you didn't move away.

When he followed he was holding your hand, fingers laced, which hadn't been planned and was completely true, and you held on.

Afterward you lay in the small bed in the quiet and the lamp was still on.

Your head was on his chest. He had his arm around you. Neither of you had suggested otherwise.

"You really threw rocks at my window," you said, to the ceiling.

"Small rocks."

"You hit Anna's window first."

"She didn't see me."

"She definitely saw you." A pause. "She texted me twenty minutes ago asking if I had a 'nighttime visitor.'"

Dean closed his eyes briefly. "Great."

You laughed, quiet, against his chest, and he felt it more than heard it and thought: there it is. there's the thing I've been missing.

He pressed his mouth to your hair.

"For the record," he said, "you do belong there. In the house. That was — I need you to know that was the opposite of true."

You were quiet for a moment. "I know," you said. "I always knew."

"You're annoyingly self-possessed, you know that?"

"You've mentioned it."

"Not a complaint."

You tilted your head to look up at him. Something in your expression that was warm and a little careful still, not closed, just real. This was going to take time, he knew that. He'd put something between you that didn't disappear overnight and you weren't going to pretend it had, because you didn't do that.

"Tucker's going to be insufferable about this," you said.

Dean thought about Tucker, who had said absolutely nothing for weeks and washed your mug and left it on the counter. "He already knows," Dean said.

"He's known for months."

"I know."

"He texted me two weeks ago," you said, "and said 'just for the record I think he's an idiot.' I asked who and he said 'you know who.'"

Dean stared at the ceiling. "I'm going to kill him."

"You're not."

"No," he agreed. "I'm not."

A beat.

"Garrett's going to say I told you so," you said.

Dean closed his eyes. "Did he tell you so?"

"He texted me a single thumbs up the morning after the speech. No context."

"I'm going to kill Garrett too."

"You're really not."

"No," he said. "I'm really not."

You settled back against him and the room was quiet and warm and your hand was resting on his chest and outside the world was doing whatever the world was doing and in here it was just this, finally, with a name on it.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," you said.

He pulled you a little closer. You let him.

[anxietyproblem]

[blueforwellsy]

thank god for belmont cameli.

[wistfulyears]

[bbuuunnyyy-deactivated20260708]

oh my god CUTE

[joenateuser]

BELMONT CAMELI Photographed by Mekhi Turner

[brutalizermp3]

Just My Luck - F.L

mdni • 18+ only

summary: Months into a dry spell and hours into a bad day, you get bailed on by yet another date. Lucky for you, your best buddy ‘ER Ken’ is always looking out for you, and eager to turn your day around.

tags/warnings: light angst, friends-to-lovers, smut, car sex, pet names (baby, beautiful), unprotected sex, accidental creampie, service top!Langdon (he talks u thru it i just know he does)

word count: 3.6k

A/N: seems to be kind of a theme in my fics lately…can we tell i want to go on a date. also can be read as either cheating or wholesome, family-friendly, god-fearing divorced!Langdon, depending on ur freaky inclinations. like marriage is not mentioned at all but i thought i would put it out there...bc EYE was thinking abt cheating #sorry #problematicfave

Just as you think things are looking up, the PTMC swoops back in to remind you; the other shoe always drops. Since the sun rose on this shitty, shitty day, you’ve already had to deal with mouthy elderly patients and two sets of parents bringing their children in, only to decide that your treatments aren’t whole grain or godly enough for their liking. You almost slipped in a small puddle of mystery liquid on your way to this very exam room. The clacking of your flailing lanyard is just the icing on the cake. 

On cue, Langdon strides in, surveying the room with his cold, vacant doctor-stare. When his eyes land on you, they crinkle at the edges. Not with joy, but in mockery. He approaches, tutting and saying your name. 

“We have got to stop meeting like this.” In one deft movement, he pulls back your lanyard and takes another look at the patient. Standing behind you, his breath fans against your neck. “Hold compressions,” Robby orders.

It takes a few more rounds but finally, the patient starts awake and you shudder with relief. You snatch your badge out of Langdon’s hands and he nods, giving you a mock-salute. 

“You're welcome.”

Shaking your head and biting back a laugh, you ignore him all the way to the lockers. “You’re lucky it’s the end of our shift.” 

“Oh yeah, and why’s that?” 

“Because,” you say, opening your locker’s door right in his face and shutting it with a snap. “If I had to be around you any longer, you’d be sitting in one of those beds.” 

“Ouch,” he teases, rubbing an imaginary wound over his heart. Your eyes linger on his fingers, on the dainty little beads of his daughter’s friendship bracelet. That final detail makes you shake your head, and walk a little faster away from the building.

“Somebody chasing you?” Langdon has to jog to keep up with you, hands in his pockets. 

“Sort of,” you answer, leaping over a suspicious puddle. Langdon glares back at it as if he means to give it a stern talking to. You chuckle. “You know, I think I can make it to the bus stop on my own.” 

“Sure, but then you'd have to go without my riveting conversation.” Even when he barely gets a laugh, Langdon remains undeterred. “So, what’s the rush?”

You grimace. “Have you always been so nosy?” 

“Have you always been so secretive?” 

“Touche, Clark Kent.” 

He grins at the nickname but continues shooting expectant glances. 

“If you must know.” You’re forced to pause at a traffic light, jabbing the button with your elbow. “I’ve got a bus to catch.”

“That doesn’t really answer the question, you get the same bus everyday.”

“Which you know, because…?” 

He pauses beside you, shrugging and looking around as if he expects a passerby to give him a good excuse. “I drive past this stop everyday. You’re hard to miss.”

“Again, I say: nosy.”  

He ignores you, scratching behind his ear. “So, you need a ride.” 

“I can wait for the bus.”

“Or,” he shrugs again, “I can give you a ride.” 

You swallow back the childish joke that’s just itching to jump out and readjust your bag, frowning at the twinge of pain in your shoulder. Langdon doesn’t miss a beat, holding his hand out.

“Let me take that.” 

“I’ve got it.” As you step forwards, he blocks your path, arms held up in surrender. 

“You’re not gonna let me help?”  

You’re not sure why he wants to. The understanding, you thought, was that this friendship runs on a delicate balance of familiarity and professionalism. Joking, jabbing, borderline flirting, is all safe if it’s happening behind the hectic walls of the Pitt. It's a stress tonic, it keeps morale high. What it doesn’t do, is cross any lines. 

Instinctively, your hand shoots up to shoo him away again, but you pause. You do need the ride. Already, tonight’s planned outfit is doomed to be void of accessories and your hair will have to forgo any of the styling options you dreamed up last night. There won’t even be time for a pre-date snack. You groan. 

“Sure,” you say, trying to tamp down the fluttering in your chest. 

Langdon even insists on helping you carry your bag upstairs. He takes your key, opens your front door for you, ushers you inside and offers to make you a tea, coffee, anything you want. 

“So, your date tonight,” Langdon starts, dropping your things on the sofa. “Is he…you know. A boyfriend, or what?” 

While he scoops coffee into a mug, you get to work. As you change, you rush between rooms, frantically, calling over your shoulder or yelling responses to each other. “Never met him. We’ve been set up. My friends think it ‘could be good for me’, or something.”

He waits for the coffee to brew in the living room, standing with his hands braced behind the sofa. “You disagree?” 

“I don’t need a boyfriend.” 

His gaze swivels as you hobble back and forth with curlers in your hair and one heel on. You wave a hand in his direction, decidedly ignoring that, if he wanted to, he could’ve left by now. 

Langdon nods, brow furrowing. “Do you want one?” 

You wave your hands again and keep staunchly quiet. Now, you’re strutting around in both heels, rifling through your sofa cushions to find a lipgloss you could swear was last seen in this room. Langdon watches in polite silence, presumably for as long as he can stand, before asking, “Do you need any help?” 

“I’m fine, Frank. Thank you. Ah ha.” Inexplicably, the lost lipgloss is strewn between an armchair’s fuzzy cushions. You pull it out and stride back to your room. Getting ready at  record speed, you messily unwind the curlers from your hair and flipping your head back and forth. When you leave your room, Langdon is still hanging around and you still have enough time for a budget-saving snack, in case the date is a cheapskate. 

“You want some ramen?” 

He blanches. “Ramen?” 

“I don’t know, something light. In case–” You’re interrupted by your phone buzzing from the sofa. Langdon looks down like it’s calling him names and you pick it up, scrolling frantically. There’s no real reason to be nervous, to be so sure that bad news is coming. Worrying can’t stop it, and it can’t protect you from the sinking disappointment when you open your messages and it’s staring you right in the face.

When you notice Langdon stirring, you cringe away from him. “What?” 

You grimace back at the phone, then roll your eyes. Neither seems to get rid of the weight of rejection, curdling acidic at the base of your throat. You roll your eyes again and force a laugh. “He’s not coming.” 

“What do you mean?”

You hold your phone up absently. “Uh, the guy, my date. He can’t make it or something.”

“Or something,” Langdon deadpans.

Shrugging out more forced nonchalance, you read straight from your phone. “Sorry, have to cancel, my buddy’s having car troubles and I said I’d help him out.”

“Sounds plausible.” 

A sarcastic response of your own sits on the tip of your tongue, but you’re interrupted by the kettle boiling. It’s just a distant, bubbling hiss, but the shock brings a spurt of tears to your eyes. 

“Hey,” Langdon begins. You shake your head and turn away, hands cupping your own face when he immediately starts to follow. 

“I’m fine.” 

“You’re crying.” 

“I’m not.” 

“Then turn around.”

You let out a growling sigh. Embarrassed, you face him and shrug, equal parts exasperated and expectant. 

It seems like he’s about to say something but, even when you turn your palms up and raise your eyebrows, he keeps his mouth shut. About twenty minutes ago, this was fun. Now, unreasonable as it may be, you’re starting to feel a little rejected. 

“Why are even you still here?” 

He slowly pushes up from the sofa, blinking rapidly. “I…Do you want me to go?” 

“No.” You groan, hands running down your face. 

“Should I get your coffee?” 

“No, it’s fine.” 

“Do you–”

You hold a hand up to silence him, trying to come up with a polite way to get rid of him. It would be easier if he wasn’t looking at you so wide-eyed and eager, if that strand of hair wasn’t hanging over his forehead, so primed to be romantically swept away. If he wasn’t being so nice. 

“What do you need?” he asks, finally. You groan again, shaking your head. 

“A day off,” you joke. Still aiming for nonchalance, you mutter the next one under your breath. “An orgasm. Or two.” 

Langdon’s face drops for a split second, expression buffering. Then, he blinks away his shock. “Let me take you out.”

“What?” 

“You wanna go out, right? If this guy won’t, let me do it.” 

Now it’s your turn to buffer, mouth snapping open and shut aimlessly. 

“I was already gonna be your ride there, right?” You don’t remember agreeing to that, but he’s not done. “I’ll take care of everything. I’m not sure where he was taking you but there’s this Italian place downtown–cliche, I know–you’ll love it.” 

As he talks, he runs a hand through his hair, grabs your handbag off the sofa and takes the first jacket hanging by your front door. He checks that you’re following and gives you a certain, reassuring nod. 

“Fuck that guy, alright? Let’s have the best goddamn night of our lives.”

As you’re pulling into traffic, thick, dark grey clouds threaten the humid kind of rainfall that ruins your hair and makes it hard to breathe. It may also be the tears threatening to fall. Langdon’s sweet, really, but it’s hard not to feel a little guilty. Beside you, he hums and taps the steering wheel, clearly pleased with himself for fixing yet another one of your problems. In truth, he’s only making them worse. Tonight sort of had an express purpose, which his presence makes impossible. You spend the entire car ride sending him awkward glances, hands fidgeting in your lap. At some point, you’re gonna have to tell him to go home. 

He pulls into a parking complex, practically abandoned by the time you get to a floor with availability. Booming thunder rolls in the distance as you stumble out, limbs suddenly gelatine. Langdon has to lend you an arm to keep you steady out of the car park. More thunder, and a swell of nauseating anxiety behind your sternum. Today’s stress–the week’s stress, if you’re honest, the last few month’s–is catching up with you, fast. Irrational apprehension seizes in your gut and you cling to Langdon’s arm. 

“We should go.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I don’t think this is a good idea.” 

He frowns softly, but doesn’t drop your arm. In fact, as you try pulling away, he only clings harder. “Hey, remember what I said? Don’t let that asshole ruin your night.” 

You shake your head. “It’s not about him.” 

Only, it is. Shaking your head some more, you let out a coarse laugh. You’re a doctor, for christ’s sake. You save lives and even when you can’t, you stare death right in the face. Bad days don’t paralyse you; they can’t. Normally, it’s because you get a little help: from friends, one-off dates or recurring flings, colleagues willing to vent over a few beers. All that, though, is precautionary. You’re not supposed to need help, or much of anything at all. The realisation of anything less is humbling at best. At worst, it’s humiliating and because you can't catch a break, this just has to be the worst case scenario. 

Langdon’s hands are cupped around your cheeks. Palms warm and broad, you only notice you’re crying when he lifts them from your face to rub your shoulders, where goosebumps are sprouting in the sudden chilly breeze. The barrage of questions you’re expecting never comes. Instead, he simply pulls you to his chest, wraps his arms around you and whispers against your temple. 

“It’s okay. You’re okay, I got you.” 

You bite back more tears but your shoulders still shake, though you can’t tell whether it’s your sobbing or a bout of shivers. Langdon runs his hands over your arms again, expression pinched. Rain trickles, then picks up, pattering against the cars at the parking complex's edge. 

“Chilly, huh?” 

“It’s fine, we, uh…” you pull away, gesturing vaguely. “We should…” 

“Go downstairs?”

You shake your head. 

“Go home?” 

“I don’t know, I think…I don’t know.” 

“How about we sit in the car?” he chuckles, “Let you figure it out somewhere warm.” 

Shut in the car, it actually does become a little easier to breathe. Langdon sits beside you, still cooing. 

“Alright, alright. I’m not your daughter.”

“Sorry,” he says, sheepish. “Force of habit.”

It gets quiet and you let it, relishing the steady hum of rainfall and whooshing wind. The longer you sit, the weather only gets more and more intense. Even if you wanted to now, you’re not going anywhere. 

“What are you thinking?” 

“Nothing.” You groan, shoving your face into your hands. “Tonight was supposed to go so differently.” 

“I know, I’m sorry. I really did want to fix things, though.” 

Your posture straightens and you fix him with an almost accusatory stare. “Why?” 

“I don’t know,” he fidgets, “it seemed like you were having a rough day.” 

“And you thought I needed you to fix it?” 

“Is there anyone else?” He asks the question to his hands, left thumb pressing into right palm as he massages his nerves away. 

“I don’t need anyone else.” Your breath hitches. “I don’t need anyone, period.” 

“But you could use someone. We all could, right?” 

“Don’t you have enough of your own shit to worry about?”

“Don’t you?” 

By now your shoulders and thighs are pressed together, both of you somehow shifted to the middle seat. You look up at Langdon, his pale blue eyes darting around your face. 

“So, I could use you.” 

“Yeah.” His hand is on your thigh and you don’t remember leaning closer, but his heartbeat beats urgently against your shoulder. “You could.” 

Without allowing yourself a second of rational thought, you lean even closer. A single movement of reckless abandon and your lips are smashing into Langdon’s, his arm curling around your waist and pulling you into his lap. 

“Is this a good idea?” you whisper into his mouth.

“Does it feel good?” 

You nod, rolling your hips onto his.

“Then let's think about it later.” 

He cups your face and kisses you again, softer this time, his tongue gently pushing through your lips. His hands caress a grounding pressure into your body. First on your thighs, then your back, then the back of your head as you grind into each other. You’re already desperate for him to undress you, but can’t tell how hard he is until he groans into your mouth, hips stuttering. 

“God, you know–I never thought it would happen like this.” 

Appalled, you pull away. “You’ve thought about this?” 

Langdon only pulls you back with more pressure. His kisses trail from your jaw to your neck. “All the time. Can I take this off?” He gently tugs on your dress, then shakes his head and slides his hands up your skirt instead. “Actually, keep it on. No sense in you getting all dressed up for nothing.”

You run your hands over his chest and his breath catches when your fingers hit his nipples. His hips grind further upwards, as if it hasn’t occurred to him he can fuck you for real. You send his question back at him, tugging on his jeans’ zipper and he groans. 

“Uh–I can’t.”  

“Why?” 

“I don’t, uh…” He gestures around the car, then at his crotch. 

“No condoms?” Avoiding eye contact, he nods. You giggle, grabbing his wrists to move his hands further up your skirt, when his fingers graze your underwear, you lean in. “I guess you’ll just have to practise some self control then, huh?” 

You urge him to slide off your underwear and you unzip his jeans. Pulling him free from his boxers makes his jaw hang open and his hands clench around you absently. 

“What–fuck–what do you like?” he asks, as you pump him up and down slowly. 

“Well, for a start, this.” You tease his tip against you, dragging him through your increasing wetness as he watches, jaw still slack. When his hips start to jut forward, you open your legs wider and press against him, so that he’s as wrapped up as possible without being inside you. Langdon’s breath hitches and his hips roll automatically, chasing more of your warmth. 

“Yeah? Just this?” He bites his lip and watches as you grind on his tip, then sink down to his balls, always sliding on just enough of his shaft to drive him crazy. “You want anything else? Want me to play with your tits?” 

You moan and he takes the hint, rubbing one nipple with his thumb and kneading around the other, getting torturously close, then massaging in the opposite direction. 

“Does that feel good? Want anything else?”

All you can do is whimper as his tip catches on your clit. You bite down on your lip, hips still working frantically, chasing as much of him as you can get. Langdon’s arms wrap around you more tightly and he bucks into you, straining with the effort of staying on the outside. 

“Shit, that’s it, right there. Fuck, you’re so wet, I–fuck–I could do this all day.” 

Still biting back moans, you bury your face against his neck and he tuts. “No, no, don’t do that.” He cups your face and brings it level with his, looking you straight in the eyes with his thumb catching your lip. “Lemme hear you baby, come on. Tell me how it feels.” 

You whine. “It feels good.” 

“Yeah?” 

Your back arches as you try to press even closer against him and you nod through another whimpering moan. 

“That’s it,” he coos. “Good girl. Take whatever you want. Whatever you need.” 

The more he keeps talking, the more empty you feel between your legs. You need him to fill you, to rock his hips into you until there’s no room inside you for this bad day, your hectic job and the way it shreds your nerves. Nothing but him. 

You aren’t sure how to tell him any of this, so you roll into him slower. Grabbing his face to give him deep, messy kisses, you let his tip slide further and further into you until he pulls back. 

“Are you sure?” Though his voice is full of apprehension, his eyes are blown wide and eager. 

“I need you,” you say against his face, hips never stopping. 

“Shit,” he moans, “yeah, okay, I’ll–fuck, yeah. Whatever you want.”

As you sink down onto him, he holds your hips in a steady grip, letting off a constant stream of reassurances. 

“I’ve got you, beautiful, just like that.” When he’s all the way in, he gets a little less coherent, but far more insistent. “That’s it, you’re–Oh, fuck. Fuck baby, just like that. Use me, baby, take whatever you want from me, I’m all yours.” 

Thick and hard, he fills you perfectly. As you ride him, a dragging pleasure builds, spreading like a fever down your thighs, up your back. It heats your face and draws long, whining moans from between your lips, panting interrupted only by you crying out Langdon’s name while he offers more encouragement. 

“Feels good?”

“Uh huh,” you moan. In response, he moans too. 

“I know, baby, I know.” He moans again, voice breaking as you clench around him. “See how I can make it better? How I can make it–fuck, baby–make it all go away.” 

You moan in agreement. This time, when you lay your head against his shoulder, he lets you. 

“You close, beautiful?” 

You nod and he brings your face closer so he can mutter in your ear. From his ragged breathing it sounds like he’s close, too. 

“Alright, baby,” he says, thrusting up harder into you. “That’s it, right there. Feels so good, doesn’t it?”

All you can do anymore is moan. He nods and brings a hand back to your tits to sloppily circle a thumb over your nipple.

“So you’re gonna come, alright? Come for me, baby, show me how good it feels. Show me–” he grunts, “how good it feels to drain my fucking cock, alright? Lemme feel it, baby, I wanna feel it. Show me how much you like using this thick fucking cock to get off.” 

His voice only gets more hoarse, talking you through your orgasm so fervently, he might as well be begging. 

Your orgasm crests and you don’t even have time to react; it simply ripples through you. Waves of pleasure curl your spine inwards and Langdon’s hands don’t cease on your nipples. He fucks you through it, thrusts haphazard as he reaches his own peak. His moans get breathy and strained as he cums, and when he finally floods you, he wraps his arms around you and stills, buried to the hilt. It takes a while for either of you to get out of the post-sex haze but when you do, problem-solving Langdon is back. 

“Shit, I shouldn’t–I can go to a convenience store right now, I’ll–” 

You giggle, gesturing to the rain still pounding outside. “It’s okay, you’re fine.” 

“Are you sure, I’m so sorry I wasn’t even thinking, I don’t–”

“Langdon,” you giggle and pat his shoulder, delirious. “Don’t worry. Let’s think about it later.” 

[miscling]

your erotica doesn't need to align with your principles. you can find something hot and not believe it should be the way of things. you can play out dynamics in kink that shouldn't be replicated societally. what gets you going is not an indictment of your character

[sophie-baek]

Dean Daddy Heyward-Di Laurentis

OFF CAMPUS 1.08 "The Line Change"

[thereaperskiss]

i miss Langdon it’s not funny anymore