mike wheeler was an antisocial jerk. you knew that. so why you even bothered with him is something you can’t explain.
⟢┊𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 1.9k ˎˊ˗
‧₊˚ ┊𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭: college!au, a bit ooc mike(less emotionally constipated i needed something to work with sue me), self indulgent bitchy reader, frat boy lucas crumbs, frat boy mike(barely), stuck up mean!mike, frat party, angst, kissing, not proofread
˗ˏˋ a/n: pls ignore the terrible collage i threw together..,, tumblr kept crashing when i tried to add another gif ˎˊ˗
you were never a big fan of mike wheeler, mostly because he wouldn’t let you be. he was a sophomore, some creative writing major who kept to himself. you only knew he existed because of his roommate, lucas sinclair. lucas was the golden boy, the one who actually talked to people, the one who made the mistake of dragging mike to every frat party he went to.
mike was always a fixture in the background. the guy standing at the beer pong table acting like he’d rather be anywhere else, or the guy sinking into the corner of a couch with a beer he never actually finished. you never understood why lucas bothered with him, but that didn't stop you from looking. you noticed everything. his..weirdo brown eyes, his nose that somehow matched his face perfectly. and those cheekbones.. you were fifty percent sure they were botox. they had to be. nobody was born with facial structure like that.
tonight was one of those nights, you only came because you’re tired of getting called a “hermit crab” by your roommate. and the slight chance of seeing mike there gave you enough reason to go, not that you two have ever talked, since mike has a habit of rolling his eyes every time your eyes catch each other, to which you try not to take personal but also.. what the fuck? you’ve never found out what his problem is, but you did learn not to take it personally since it seems he has a problem with half of campus.
the music inside was a wall of sound, some generic house beat that vibrated right through the floorboards of the kappa sigma house. your roommate, elise, was already comfortable, swaying with her drink, but you were just scanning the room. again. wondering how the hell do people find this enjoyable.
lucas popped up out of nowhere, appearing through the sweaty crowd with that blinding, energetic smile of his. he clapped his hands together, his energy defying the humidity of the room.
"hey! you guys made it," he shouted over the bass, slinging an arm around your shoulder.
"barely," you yelled back, laughing. "elise dragged me. she says i'm a hermit crab."
"she's right, but i'm glad you're here!" lucas grinned, then his face lit up with an even brighter, more conspiratorial expression. "you guys liking the setup? mike put the whole thing together. i finally talked him into rushing this semester, and he’s actually doing it, he’s a brother now!"
you felt your heart do this weird, stupid flip in your chest. "mike? mike wheeler?"
"yeah, he's just by the keg. hold on-“ before you could protest or fix your hair or do literally anything to prepare, lucas was already moving. he grabbed your wrist, pulling you through the throng of people toward the back of the room. and there he was. mike wheeler. he was wearing a flannel that looked like it had seen better days and holding a red cup with the kind of disdain usually reserved for a bad term paper.
"mike! hey, man," lucas yelled, nudging him. mike looked up, his dark eyes instantly narrowing, then softening just a fraction when he realized it was lucas. his gaze flicked to you, and that familiar sharp edge returned. he looked like he wanted to bolt.
"mike, meet the elusive hermit crab i've been telling you about. and, uh, you know elise," lucas said, oblivious to the tension radiating off mike like heat waves. "mike’s the man of the hour. organized the logistics for the whole night."
mike didn't smile. he just gave a stiff, curt nod, shifting his weight. "yeah..cool. hi."
"hi," you said, feeling entirely too self conscious. "the party’s... really loud. in a good way, i guess."
"it's..kinda terrible," mike muttered, taking a sip of his beer without looking at you. "too many people. the acoustics are actual shit."
"be nice," lucas laughed, clapping mike on the shoulder. "i'm gonna go grab a refill. try not to scare them off, wheeler."
as soon as lucas disappeared, the silence between you was heavier than the music. mike looked like he was about to disintegrate.
"do you want to get out of here?" you blurted out. "it’s kind of suffocating."
mike looked at you, really looked at you this time, his brow furrowing. he hesitated, then nodded. "yeah. yeah, actually. let's go."
you walked out the back door, the sudden drop in temperature making you shiver. the backyard was quiet, just the distant, muffled thump of the bass vibrating through the walls. you found a spot on the grass near the edge of the property, away from the smokers and the shouting. you sat down, and mike followed, sitting cross legged, his knees pulled up to his chest.
you watched him for a second. he looked..normal out here, less like the prick of campus.
you couldn't help it. the curiosity was itching at you. "so," you started, picking at a loose thread on my jeans. "may i finally know why you give me and the rest of campus such attitude? is it personal, or does someone shit in your coffee daily?"
mike choked on air, a startled sound escaping his throat. he turned to look at you, his eyes wide and shocked, before he let out a jagged, self deprecating laugh. he dragged a hand through his hair, messing up those curls even more.
"jesus," he muttered. "you don't pull your punches, do you?"
"you make it easy," you countered, giving him a small, challenging smile.
mike sighed, looking up at the sky. he looked small, almost vulnerable, and the image you had of him being this untouchable, mean jerk started to crack. "uh, well. no. it’s not personal." he scoffed, the sound quiet and sharp. "it’s just.. it’s hard, you know? new people, loud rooms, the whole social performance thing. it’s exhausting.. i guess i.. come off as a dick sometimes. i’m-i’m sorry."
you stared at him, surprised by the honesty. "you're shy? the guy who organizes fraternity parties is shy?"
"well, lucas pushed me into it," mike defended, his cheeks flushing a faint, endearing shade of red. "it’s definitely not personal. i swear. you’re... you’re not the problem. i’m the problem."
"you're not a problem, mike," you said, your voice softening.
he turned his head toward you, the moonlight catching the harsh, sharp line of his jaw. he looked at you for a long time, the silence no longer awkward, but heavy.
"i'm sorry," he whispered. "for the eye rolls. for being a..a hermit in the middle of a crowd."
"i forgive you," you said, leaning in just an inch. "but only if you promise to stop acting like you're above everyone."
mike let out a breathless laugh, and he was leaning in too now. "i'm not above anyone. i'm just...i don’t know, awkward."
he was so close now that you could smell the faint scent of beer on him. your heart hammering against your ribs, loud enough that you were sure he could hear it.
"you're not that awkward," you breathed.
mike didn't say anything else. he just watched your lips, his gaze dropping down, then back up to your eyes, asking a silent question. you didn't make him wait. you bridged the gap, your hand finding his arm, and then his mouth was on yours.
his lips were soft, surprisingly so. you knew he had a habit of biting his lip when he was stressed, and finally feeling that texture against yours was enough to send a jolt through your spine. his hand slid up your arm, his grip firm as his fingers settled at the base of your neck.
part of you wondered if this was just the beer talking, maybe this was just a weird, drunken fluke. but he wasn't pulling away. feeling brave, you decided to see how far this could go.
you traced the tip of your tongue across his bottom lip, a quick, daring invitation. he didn't hold back. he let out a low, broken moan that was muffled against your mouth, and his lips parted, accepting the contact immediately.
the sudden shift made your confidence spike. you didn’t hesitate to plant your hand into his curls, gripping them tight to pull him in closer, needing to feel the reality of him. mike seemed stunned, like he couldn't actually believe that you, the girl he’d been trying so hard to ignore, the one he’d been acting like a total asshole toward for months, were actually right here, touching him.
he melted into you, his guard finally crumbling.
the kiss turned ugly, fast. his teeth scraped your bottom lip, not out of malice, but rather pure need. he was crowding your space, his weight pinning you further into the grass, his body practically folding over yours.
every time he adjusted his head to get a better angle, his nose dug hard into your cheek. it was sharp, pressing against your skin with an intensity that you knew would leave a red mark by morning, a bruise you’d be tracing with your thumb tomorrow while you replayed this. you didn't pull back. you only shoved your hand deeper into his hair, forcing him closer.
his tongue pushed past your lips, meeting yours in a messy wet rhythm. his hands were everywhere, his left fisting the back of your hair, the other sliding under the hem of your shirt, his palm hot and rough against your skin. every breath he took was short, hitching against your mouth. he pulled back just an inch, his lips swollen, eyes dark and blown wide as he stared at you for a single heartbeat. then he dove back down, his nose bumping your face again, harder this time. he was relentless. you hooked your fingers into the back of his collar, tugging him down until there wasn't a millimeter of air left between you, just the friction of skin against skin and the sound of your own breathing.
then, because of course, the front door swung open, cutting through the silence with a loud metallic clang. bright, colorful light spilled across the lawn, forcing you both to squint.
warnings ! mild smut, p in v, unprotected sex, fingering, pet names, finger-sucking but briefly, aftercare, fluff, angst, love confessions, reader thinks about riding mike's nose, please ignore typos i'll fix them one day, happy ending :)
author's note ! as promised, here is the extended ending. i was not happy at ALL with the original ending for love's easy tears, but i'm glad that i took the time to write this instead of trying to come up with something better the same night i published pt 2. i am actively working on my requests! hope you enjoy :)
The trip had done exactly what you had hoped it would.
For the first few days, your mind constantly wandered to Mike. Every time Tara opened her mouth, you couldn’t help but imagine her lips pressed against Mike’s, a shared joint passing between them as they talked about real philosophical shit. You tried not to be heartbroken - as you’d repeatedly reminded yourself, Mike did have the right to sleep with her - but it was hard not to be upset at how easily Mike had swapped you out for another late-night rendezvous.
By the end of the week, something finally changed.
You laughed with your friends, stayed up too late talking about stupid things, and let yourself exist in a world where Mike Wheeler wasn’t the center of every thought. Even Tara’s mere presence stopped irritating you.
By the time you packed your bags, you felt almost normal again - a semblance of the girl you’d been before Mike.
As was always intended, you left a day earlier than everyone else. Vacations always left you burnt out, even when they were with people whose company you enjoyed. You inevitably missed your bed and the comfort of being alone.
The sun had set by the time you pulled up to your apartment complex and lugged your suitcase up to the fourth floor.
Someone was sitting outside your door. Someone who unfolded himself the second he saw you.
Mike.
His curls were longer than you remembered, a testament to the amount of time that had passed, and there were dark circles underneath his eyes. His complexion looked pallid.
“What are you doing here?” you asked, coming to an abrupt halt. The wheels of your suitcase struck the back of your heels.
Mike swallowed. “Your best friend, she, uh, told me you were coming home.”
“She called you?”
Mike rubbed the back of his neck, averting his eyes. “Yeah, she did.”
Anger bubbled up inside you at the betrayal, and you pushed past Mike, unlocking the door with a shaky hand and shoving your suitcase inside. Mike didn’t follow immediately, just stayed in the hall like a vampire who needed permission to cross the threshold.
Maybe he was a vampire. All he’d done was suck all the joy from your life.
“Can I come in?” he mumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“No, Mike. Go home,” you seethed, turning on the light. All you’d wanted was to come home, take a nice hot shower, and get cozy in your own bed. The last thing you wanted right now was to deal with this. “I’m done talking to you.”
“I needed to see you.”
“You could’ve waited like a normal person.”
“I did wait,” Mike stressed. “For days. You didn’t come over, so I kept calling you, and you didn’t pick up. I thought maybe something had. . . happened.”
“I was busy,” you said flatly. Mike looked pathetic standing in the doorway. “Fuck, just come inside.”
Mike obeyed, tentatively stepping inside. You could visibly see his shoulders slump, as if he was trying to make himself smaller in a place that didn’t belong to him. You shook your head and looked away, taking a deep breath and busying yourself with dragging your suitcase toward your bedroom. Mike trailed behind you like a lost puppy, keeping a reasonable distance between the two of you. There was a freshly-rolled joint tucked behind his ear, and you wondered if he’d already smoked one or if he was completely sober.
“What do you want?” you finally asked, exasperated. “Are you just here to annoy me until I sleep with you again? Because I’m not doing that anymore, okay? We’re done.”
Mike recoiled. “No,” he insisted, his voice crackling at the edges. “That’s not. . . that’s not why I’m here.”
“Then why, Mike?” you asked, crossing your arms tightly across your chest. You felt insecure standing in your bedroom - he’d never been to your apartment before, but Mike kept his gaze trained on you as you spoke.
“I want to apologize.”
“Yeah, you want to.”
“I’m here to apologize,” he corrected. “I want to fix everything.”
“What is there to fix?” you cried. “We were just hooking up, weren’t we? It’s not like we were exclusive or fucking dating!”
“I hurt you.”
“No, you made me sad, Mike.”
The word sounded childish on your tongue, but it was the truest way you could convey your emotions. You’d spent your entire college career coming up with clever ways to say simple things, but in that moment, the moment that truly mattered, it all boiled down to the fact that you were sad.
And it was almost as if Mike were the opposite, as if he didn’t know how to express real emotion outside of written words and thickened metaphors. As far as you’d observed, Mike was incapable of saying what he meant unless it was during sex. You thought back to him asking you to call him when you got home - had that been a plea to stay, and he just wasn’t able to say it? He bogged his own heart down with his inability to communicate, and it would be his ruin.
“I can’t even blame you,” you continued, tears welling in your eyes despite how badly you willed them not to. “You’re a fucking folk tale on campus, did you know that? A fucking celebrity. I knew who you were long before I met you that day in the library, and I still chose to sleep with you. I knew that you’ve slept with every girl you can get your hands on, half my roommates included, and yet I still went to your apartment. I want so badly to blame you, Mike, for how disposable you make me feel, but it’s really my fault, isn’t it? So, I don’t need you to come here and mindlessly apologize for something that isn’t even technically your problem, just because you think it’ll make me sleep with you again, or that it’ll make you feel better. Because it won’t make me feel better.”
Mike’s face crumbled at that. “I’m not here because it’s going to make me feel better,” he said eventually. “I feel worse, actually.”
Your lip trembled at that.
“I mean, shit, I didn’t come here to apologize so that you’d sleep with me again. I came here to tell you. . . to tell you how I feel. About you.” Mike tugged at his sleeves. “I know what people think of me, that I’m someone who just takes and leaves, and maybe I am that person. But I don’t want to be. Not with you.”
Mike drew in a shaky breath and ran a hand through his hair.
“I know you think I don’t care about you,” he continued.
“You kick me out every time we have sex,” you argued back.
“Because I don’t know how to do this,” he said, motioning between the two of you. “This is what I’m bad at - the emotions and the fucking feelings. I’ve spent so long keeping everyone at arm’s length that I’ve forgotten how to feel. Everyone thinks I’m some asshole who gets bored, and maybe sometimes I am that guy, but I am so fucking afraid of letting people get close to me. I’m so afraid of the pain that comes with relationships, but I still wanted it. I wanted someone to look at me and know me.”
You watched Mike’s eyes grow glassy, his voice breaking every few words.
“Casual sex is a much easier way to pretend you’re not lonely,” he continued with a humorless laugh. “For one night, I could pretend that I had what everyone else seemed to have, and I didn't have to get hurt in the process. Eventually, I just. . forgot how to feel anything at all. I just wanted to feel something again, so I kept chasing it, trying to fill that fucking emptiness I’d caused myself. I would’ve rather been a campfire story than a real person, the guy who didn’t care and never got attached, because then at least I had a reason for being alone.”
He scoffed.
“But you. God, you. How could I not fall in love with you?”
“Love?” you echoed.
“Yes. Love. That day in the library, I had been building up the courage to approach you for weeks. Years, actually. Yeah, we’ve slept together, but we’ve also read each other’s writing: terrible rough drafts and vulnerable, poetic bullshit. We have seen so many versions of each other - you knew me when I was a pretentious freshman who thought I was better than everyone else. What’s more intimate than that? Of course, I fell in love with you.”
Mike just stood there, breathing a little unevenly. He looked like he regretted saying it the moment it left his mouth, but more out of embarrassment at his vulnerability. But, he didn’t take it back.
“You kicked me out,” you said quietly. “Every single time.”
“I know,” he said urgently. “I know how it looks-”
“It’s not how it looks,” you cut in. “It’s what it is.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel expendable. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.”
“You slept with Tara.”
For the first time, Mike looked genuinely confused. “What? No, I didn’t?”
“She told me, Mike. Don’t lie.”
“No, I didn’t,” he assured, panicked. “Okay, yeah, I asked her to come over that night - after you didn’t show up - but I didn’t-” He shook his head hard. “I didn’t sleep with her. I thought that maybe if I. . . hooked up with someone else, I would realize that I was making up what I felt for you. I don’t know. But the second I kissed her, it felt wrong. She wasn’t you. It’s only been you since that first time.”
“She said-”
“I didn’t sleep with her,” Mike promised, taking your hands in his. “I kissed her, yes, I won’t pretend I didn’t, but I felt like shit after. The entire time, I was thinking about you. It will never be anyone but you.”
Your throat tightened. “That’s not fair,” you said weakly. You pulled your hands back on instinct, and he didn’t resist when you did. The loss of contact made the air feel colder, even after just a split second of his touch. “I have spent the last few months spiraling over you. One second, you were so sweet, and the next, you were acting like I was an inconvenience. How am I supposed to believe anything you say if you can turn that on and off so easily?”
“You don’t have to believe me,” he whispered. “But I need you to know. I need you to know that I don’t want to keep doing what I did before, even if you don’t choose me.” Mike paused and closed his eyes tightly. “All I want is a room up there and you in it.”
You sniffled. “Frank O’Hara.”
He smiled, just barely. “I’m not good at the part after,” he admitted. “I never have been. I don’t know how to let people matter to me normally. I always screw things up - I did screw things up - so I convinced myself that if I kept it physical, I could control it. Like, if we just kept hooking up, then I wouldn’t have to admit that I liked you so much it was actually making me miserable.”
“Mike-”
“Every time I told you to leave, every time I watched you leave, I wanted to go after you. So, I need you to know that I’m never going to ask you to leave again,” Mike finished. “I’m not going to leave.”
His voice cracked with the strain, and for a moment, the two of you just stared at each other. You imagined Mike taking in your tear-stained cheeks, perhaps really noticing you for the first time. At the same time, you took in his pink, trembling lips. In the grand scheme of things, the moment was insignificant - it didn’t matter to anyone but you and Mike, the two of you encased in your own tiny bubble. But you selfishly couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been waiting to say those words. How many minutes, how many hours, had he spent rehearsing this confession?
“What if I ask you to leave?” you whispered, wrapping your arms around yourself and staring at the carpet. “You say you won’t leave, but what if I ask you to?”
The silence was stifling, so jarring that it made your ears ring. You couldn’t bring yourself to look up and see his expression - those big, puppy-dog eyes that would make your heart melt. You wanted to stand up for yourself. You didn’t want to make a fool of yourself any longer, even if that meant losing Mike.
Three months ago, you would’ve rather trapped yourself in the humiliating hook-up agreement than even considered a world where Mike didn’t give you attention - even if it was for only a few hours. Now, you’d realized embarrassingly late that there were worse things than losing Mike.
“Then I’ll leave,” he said finally, his voice thickened with brimming tears. “If that’s what you want, I’ll go.”
You squeezed yourself tighter.
“I’m done being the one who walks away first, the one who tells you to walk away, but I. . . I care about you enough to want what’s best for you. And I realize that I’ve hurt you beyond belief, so I know that what’s best for you isn’t me. So, if you tell me to leave, I will.”
A shudder wracked your body, and you finally wrenched your gaze up to be met with the sight of his teary eyes.
“Don’t,” you said. “Please, stay.”
The words hung in the air between you, fragile as glass. Mike’s breath hitched, and something shifted across his face. Disbelief. Like he’d spent so many days (minutes, hours) preparing himself to hear the opposite that he didn’t know what to do with the answer you’d given him.
“Really?” he asked sincerely.
“Don’t act so surprised,” you murmured, swiping at your cheeks, angry at yourself for crying so much. “You can’t honestly believe that I don’t. . . feel the same.”
His eyebrows pinched together.
“Really?” he said again.
You couldn’t help but laugh a little. “God, yes! I’ve had a crush on you for like almost four years!”
“What? Why?”
“Mike, seriously. You said it yourself - we’ve read each other’s writing. You didn’t stop to think that maybe the intimacy that came along with that was two-sided? I’ve always admired your writing, especially your use of grief as a metaphor. You just do it so uniquely and I-”
Mike cut you off, urgently pressing his lips against yours, warm and familiar.
“Sorry,” he muttered against your mouth. “As much as I enjoy hearing you compliment me, I just, I had to kiss you.”
Mike’s hands caressed your sides, slipping under your shirt and waistband, seeking out each divot that remained untouched by anyone else. You’d come close to memorizing the feel of his fingertips, the shockingly gentle reverence with which he touched you.
And he kissed you like he was starving. Like you were the only thing in life that could possibly nourish and satiate him. And you let him, of course, but not for the same reasons. Not because you were holding onto the eagerness and counting down the seconds until you became unwanted, but because you knew that this was what it felt like to be truly desired by Mike Wheeler. That this kiss was the beginning of permanence.
“Is this okay?” he asked, kissing the corner of your lips.
“Yes,” you said, out of breath. “Yes. Please.”
“Okay. How do you want me?”
“Fuck. Shirt off first.”
You reached under the hem of his shirt, prepared to pull it off, when Mike suddenly flinched away. You recoiled violently.
“I’m sorry,” you gasped. “Is that not-”
“No, shit, I’m sorry,” Mike said quickly. “It’s just not quite healed yet.”
Healed?
His shirt and hoodie were soon discarded on the floor, exposing the flat, pale expanse of his torso. You let your gaze wander over his lean frame, prepared to see a new tattoo of some sort, but instead your eyes settled on his naval, punctuated by a silver barbell.
“You got it pierced?” you asked in awe, instinctively reaching out to brush at the slightly reddened skin of his stomach. His core contracted at your light touch.
Mike chuckled a little sheepishly. “Yeah, I um, got it done when you wouldn’t answer my calls. A bit of an impulsive decision, but it was better than shaving my head.”
“Never shave your head,” you insisted, reaching up to smooth down one of his unruly curls. “I like it. Very sexy.”
“You think so?” he asked, looking down between the two of you at the piercing. “It hurt like a motherfucker.”
“Poor baby.”
“Yeah, wish you had been there to kiss it better,” he said earnestly, his long eyelashes fluttering. Mike pressed his face into your hair and inhaled deeply, wrapping his long arms around your middle. “Missed you. I really did.”
You couldn’t bring yourselves to respond, knowing that, for the entirety of your trip, you’d been actively trying not to miss him. Instead, you pushed him backwards gently so the back of his knees hit the bed. He sat down on your mattress, brown eyes practically sparkling as you stood over him, his head level with your chest.
“Lie down,” you ordered. “I want to look at your piercing.”
Mike did as you asked, resting his head against your artfully arranged pillows. His dark curls contrasted with the lightness of your bedsheets, creating a halo around his head that made him look seraphic. His lips were reddened and full, slightly parted as you crawled onto the bed after him in just your shirt and underwear. He looked completely blissed out, cast in the dim light from your lamp. If possible, he looked even better in your bed than in his own.
You plucked the unsmoked joint from behind his ear and placed it delicately on your bedside table before leaning over Mike and pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the spot over his heart.
You continued down his abdomen like this, leaving glossy little marks where your lips touched his skin. You kissed at each tattoo, each blue-tinted vein, and at the jut of his hipbones. Mike writhed desperately beneath you, hips jolting slightly each time you looked up at him from underneath lidded eyes. Before long, his torso was scattered with lip-gloss kisses that sparkled in the lamplight.
Finally, content with your taunting ministrations, you hovered over the gleaming jewelry.
“I like it,” you decided, circling his naval with your fingertip.
“Well, I’m glad, I got it just for you,” Mike said, a bit breathless already.
You shook your head, a faint smile on your face, and began to kiss down the line of hair that led into his waistband. Mike let out a small gasp, dropping his head back further into the pillows.
“Enough teasing,” he insisted, pleadingly. “C’mere.”
You obeyed, swinging your legs on either side of his hips as Mike sat up and leaned against your headboard, your position a near replica of how it’d been that night the two of you smoked and discussed his tattoos. He hissed through clenched teeth as your stomach bumped his piercing.
The pain didn’t deter him from reaching between your legs, beginning to squeeze and pinch at your soft thighs. At the same time, you began his protruding collarbones. If you weren’t so desperate to feel him inside you, you would’ve been satisfied by just tracing the most mundane parts of Mike - you figured he felt the same, based on the way he was outlining the stretch marks that decorated your skin.
“Now you’re being the tease,” you said, grinding your hips down into him. Mike grinned cheekily at you, pressing his fingers against the center of your underwear.
Without breaking eye contact, he peeled the sticky fabric away and slid his middle finger inside of you with ease. Your breath hitched at the intrusion and the feeling of Mike slowly beginning to rub your clit with his thumb.
“I told you I wanted to take my time with you one of these days,” he explained, the eye contact between you absolutely erotic. Your faces were so close that you were breathing in each other’s air. “We have all night, don’t we? If I wanted you to sit on my face for the next three hours, you’d do it for me, wouldn’t you, baby?”
He finished his sentence by sliding another finger inside, stretching you out. You gnawed on your bottom lip, fighting the urge to collapse forward and rest your face in the crook of his neck. After a week apart from him, anything he gave you was a gift.
“I’d crush you,” you panted, although the idea was tempting. The thought of bumping your clit against his nose, chasing your pleasure, made you clench around Mike’s fingers.
Mike shook his head firmly. “No,” he said, not allowing you to argue. “We don’t have to tonight, but I told you, I wanna eat your pussy for breakfast, lunch, and-”
“Shut up!” you cried, face flushing as you pressed your palm over his mouth.
Mike was grinning as he extracted his fingers, pulling your bottom lip down to place them on the heat of your tongue. You let your own hand fall back to your side.
“You’re so cute when you get all bossy,” Mike said, entranced by the sight of you sucking lewdly at his fingers. He kissed you softly as he pulled his fingers out of your mouth, tasting yourself on your own tongue. He suddenly became serious. “I don’t, er, have a condom or anything.”
You took a deep breath. “Do you promise you haven’t been with anyone else?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then we don’t have to use one.”
“Are you sure? Because I can go buy a pack, or something. I’ll be quick, there’s a store just around the corner-”
“I know, Mike, I live here,” you said. “It’s okay. I’m on birth control, actually.”
Mike arched an eyebrow.
“It’s for my skin,” you explained. “Bad teenage acne. But it still does. . . what it’s supposed to. So, yeah, we don’t have to use one.”
“Only if you’re completely sure,” Mike said, kissing the inside of your wrist. You nodded.
“Yes. I’m completely sure.”
What followed was a scramble of movement from each of you, a desperate attempt to get naked as quickly as possible. It was comedic, truthfully. Mike almost hit himself in the eye trying to pull his belt out of its loops, and you got your shirt caught in your necklace as you pulled it over your head. It was giggly and sweet - Mike carefully untangling you, and you laughing in his face as he almost tripped over his pants.
Before long, you were up on your knees, lining yourself up with him. Coupled with the time the two of you had spent apart and the lack of preparation, you didn’t doubt that the stretch of Mike’s cock was going to burn. Holding onto his broad shoulders, you began to sink down onto him.
His eyebrows scrunched up in pleasure. “Fuck. You’re so tight.”
You’d never actually ridden Mike before. The two of you really only dabbled in the most basic positions and ones that allowed Mike to roll off you to reach for his joint dramatically. This angle was completely different, the length of him never-ending.
His restraint was impressive, but you could tell that your slowness was starting to break his resolve. You could sense the way he wanted to thrust up into you, but he let you stay in control. Your fingernails left little half-moon indents in his pale skin.
“Deep breaths, baby,” Mike urged, wiping away a stray tear. “Doing so good for me.”
Finally, he was all the way inside you, leaving you so full you could hardly breathe. Your thighs shook, and you could barely hold yourself up, giving in and collapsing into Mike’s chest.
His arms wrapped around you, cradling the back of your head as you breathe him in, lips pressed against his throat. To distract yourself, you lick and suck a faint hickey into his neck, one that will surely be gone in a day, but still there in the morning. Hopefully, just like him.
After a moment, when your head doesn’t feel all fuzzy anymore, you slowly begin to ride him. It’s almost painstakingly slow, your movements, but Mike matched your rhythm, rolling his hips in time with yours.
His arms remained wrapped around you, peppering sweet kisses against your hairline. However, it didn’t take long for the two of you to come in tandem; the feeling of being reunited after time spent apart was more overwhelming than the sex itself.
Mike took his time cleaning you up, kissing each spot where his own fingers left marks, even going as far as to bring you a glass of water before crawling into bed beside you.
Curled into his side, you felt undeniably safe. Undeniably taken care of. It was the feeling you’d been seeking for your entire life. Mike ran his hands along the curve of your hips, resuming the tracing of your stretch marks and tapping at each freckle and birthmark he stumbled upon. The smell of him was intoxicating.
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured into your hair.
You tilted your head up. “You’re acting as if you’ve never seen me naked before.”
“Not like this. This is different.”
“Different how?”
“I get to look at you,” Mike said. “Shamelessly admire you.”
His fingertips dragged down the side of your thighs, and you flinched. “That tickles.”
“See, I didn’t know you were ticklish there.”
“That’s not that interesting.”
“I think it is.”
“You don’t have to compliment me so much. I believe you, Mike. That you’re sorry and that you. . . like me.”
“Love you,” he corrected. “I’m glad you believe me, but I want you to believe me about this, too.” He brushed a thumb over your cheekbone. Gone was the weed-fueled gaze that you knew, replaced instead by wide-eyed adoration. “I’ve never met anyone as beautiful as you.”
You looked down again at the tattoo on his collarbone. “Liar.”
“It’s true,” he insisted. “Every time you showed up at my door, you were always prettier. I learned your laugh and the way you use your hands to emphasize a point. I noticed the crease between your eyebrow - the one you get when you think too hard - the first time you ever came over, and I’ve noticed it every time since. And I’ve even learned the way you talk. You’re always so quiet, I swear I didn’t hear you talk for two years-”
“Says you,” you deflected. “All you ever did was sit in the back and brood.”
“Yeah, but it was a mysterious, sexy brooding. Right?”
“I plead the fifth.”
Mike tilted your face back up. “I learned how, whenever you’re excited about something, you talk faster and faster until you can barely form a coherent sentence.”
“How charming of me.”
“I learned the difference between your polite smile and your real one. I learned how kind you are. I mean, you brought me a lemon bar after I mentioned it once. After all I’d done was be a total ass to you. I gave you a hundred reasons not to care about me, and you gave me a thousand reasons to fall in love with you.”
“I do care about you,” you whispered. “Despite it all, I do.”
“I want to be better. I’m going to be better,” Mike promised. “For you. I don’t want to be some. . . what did you call me?”
“Mythical creature? Local legend? Folk tale?”
“Yeah, that,” Mike laughed. “I don’t want to be fucking Bigfoot anymore. I want to be yours. I want this with you every night. I want to go to sleep knowing the first thing I’ll see in the morning will be you. I want to make you laugh, and I never want to make you cry ever again. I want to learn everything about you, and I want you to learn everything about me. I want to listen to The Cure with you and argue about our favorite songs, and I want you to make fun of my tattoos when I get bad ones. I want to be the person you call when something good happens. When something bad happens, too. I want you to tell me about your day.”
His voice had gone impossibly soft.
“I want. . . I want a life with you.”
The boy in front of you, tears shining in his eyes, looked more vulnerable than you had ever seen him. More vulnerable than he’d been when he was sitting outside your apartment, waiting for you.
“You really mean that?” you asked shakily.
“Every word.”
A laugh escaped you. “You know, three months ago, if you’d said all this, I probably would’ve passed out.”
“Good thing I waited until now.”
“You idiot,” you said fondly, kissing his lips. “I love you, too.”
mike is trying to keep his life in new york quiet and small. he isn't looking for anything, and he definitely isn't looking to be found. but working the same shifts as you is starting to make that routine impossible.
⟢┊𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 3k ˎˊ˗
‧₊˚ ┊𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭:mike wheeler x reader, post canon, nyc comic book shop era, slow burn, coworkers to lovers, grief, survivor’s guilt, mentions of character death (eleven), angst,eventual kissing, not proofread ˎˊ˗
mike didn’t come to new york for the literature degree, though that’s what he tells his parents on the phone every sunday. he came because hawkins felt like a place where everything had already happened. he was tired of recognizing people and pretending they were still the same. he needed somewhere that didn’t know his name.
the comic book store in the village is the only place that makes sense. selling graphic novels is muscle memory. he knows the canon, knows the arcs, knows how to talk to the nerds who need an escape. working the espresso machine in a white coffee stained apron is newer, a bit messier, something he had to force himself to learn, but the repetitive grind of it? it’s almost relaxing. it keeps his hands busy so they don't shake when the nightmares follow him into the daylight.
he thought he had it figured out. just keep his head down, pass his classes, and disappear into the crowd.
then there’s you.
you’re an nyu student too, majoring in psychology, which mike finds painfully ironic. he keeps waiting for you to analyze him, to figure out why he flinches when a door slams or why he’s always the first to lock up, but you don’t. you gave up on him months ago.
he remembers the first week. you had tried to talk to him, tried to make small talk during a dead hour, and mike, still knee deep in the instinct to push everyone away, had shut you down with one word answers and that cold stare he perfected in high school. he wasn't trying to shut you out, he was just so used to having his guard up that he didn't know how to drop it without accidentally acting like a total weirdo.
you took the hint. you decided he was just an arrogant, standoffish prick and stopped trying.
now, you just exist in the same six hour blocks, passing each other in the narrow aisles, working in a polite, hollow rhythm. you think he’s annoyed by you. you think every time he’s quiet, it’s because he’s wishing you’d go home.
you think he’s staring because you’re a nuisance, but honestly, he just likes having you around because you’re the only person in the shop who doesn’t drive him crazy. he goes quiet when you get close mostly because he’s busy overthinking everything he says, convinced that he’s just one bad joke away from looking like a total idiot.
it’s raining again, that miserable grey nyc drizzle that makes the comic shop feel like a submarine. the front of the store is quiet, just the muffled sound of traffic and the hum of the register. you’re behind the counter, trying to tally the day’s intake on a scrap of receipt paper because you lost your actual notebook, and mike is three aisles over, pretending to shelf graphic novels.
he’s not staring at you. he’s actually working. for once.
he walks over to drop a stack of returns on the counter. he notices the receipt paper, the ink smudge on your palm, and the frustrated way you’re tapping your pen against the wood. he stops.
"you're gonna get a cramp," he bluntly warns.
you don't look up. "my notebook is in my bag, which is in the back, and if i leave the counter now, the owner is gonna have a fit about 'unattended inventory.'"
mike shifts his weight. he looks at the register, then at the mess of papers. he reaches into his own pocket, pulls out a black, slightly battered notebook with a chewed up pen. he pushes them toward you.
"use this," he says. "it’s just full of scribbles and half finished lecture notes anyway."
you blink, finally looking at him. he’s not looking at you with that creepy gaze from last week. he’s just waiting for you to take the pen. he looks tired, actually. like he hasn't slept much.
"i can't take your notes, mike."
"they're not 'notes' if they’re just thoughts on why watchmen is still better than half the stuff coming out this month," he says, and for the first time, there’s a real dry smirk on his face. "take it. you look like you’re about to.. fight that calculator, or something.”
you take the notebook. it’s warm from his pocket. when your fingers brush his, he doesn't flinch. he just pulls his hand back slowly.
"thanks," you say, opening it to a random page. it’s full of dense, messy handwriting. some of it is class stuff, sure, but a lot of it is just random observations about the shop. 'espresso machine needs a new gasket, leaking again.' 'why do people treat the manga section like a library?’ 'customer in the red hat is back again..needs to stop bending the covers.'
"you write a lot," you murmur, squinting at a line about the guy in the red hat.
he shrugs, then turns back to the counter. facing the window instead of you.
" helps me remember stuff. don’t like relying on my own head for it."
you pause your math. "the guy in the red hat is bullshit?"
"he's annoying," mike says, matter of fact. "wants to talk about the price of every single issue. if i write it down, i'm ready for him next time. it's just logistics."
"i get that," you say, pushing the receipt paper away to write on his page. "i do the same thing with my class schedules, or i'd lose my mind."
mike turns back, leaning against the counter. he looks at you, then at the notebook in your hand. he doesn't look offended that you're reading it, just relieved you're not making a bigger deal out of it.
"yeah," he mutters, finally relaxing his grip on the edge of the counter. "it's just easier than dealing with it in the moment."
mike watches you write for a second, then looks back at the street.
"the coffee is getting cold," he says, nodding toward your cup.
"it was cold twenty minutes ago."
"fair," he mutters.
he stays at the counter. he doesn't go back to the shelves. he stays right there, close enough that you can hear him breathing, and for the first time, he doesn't look like he’s trying to be anywhere else.
by the four month mark, you’d stopped trying to figure out why he was the way he was, and he’d stopped acting like you were an inconvenience. it wasn’t some big change. the shop was just quiet, and you two were usually the only ones in it.
he still hovered by the register, and he still organized the shelves like the world was ending if a book was slanted, but the atmosphere had changed. he didn’t flinch when you walked behind the counter to grab a pen. he didn’t change the subject the second you brought up your life outside work. he just stood there, leaning on his elbows, reading or watching the street, and you were just... there too.
it was a habit by now. he’d buy an extra coffee on his way in because he knew you didn’t have time to go get one, and he’d leave it on the counter without saying anything. you guys just existed in the same space. it was just work, but it felt like you were actually working together instead of just occupying the same building.
you were currently crouched behind the new arrivals rack, trying to fix a leaning stack of graphic novels, when mike decided to play god with the radio again. he switched it from your lofi playlist to some obscure, high energy 80s track that he swore was "culturally superior."
"mike, i swear to god, if you play this one more time i’m going to hide your car keys," you called out from behind the shelf.
you heard the distinct sound of him leaning his elbows onto the counter, probably smirking. "they’re not keys, they’re subway passes. and it’s a classic, you’re just uncultured."
"i’m uncultured? you’re the one who spent ten minutes earlier trying to explain the plot of a comic to a guy who clearly just wanted to find the bathroom."
"he needed to know," mike shot back, completely unbothered. "it’s a crime to walk past that specific run without knowing the context. i was doing him a favor."
you rolled your eyes like you meant it, but didn’t bother hiding the smile.
you stood up from the shelf, dusting off your jeans. mike was at the counter, eyes locked on the street outside.
"staring at the door again?" you asked.
he didn't look away immediately. he just shrugged, one shoulder shifting under his sweater. "it's busy out there."
"it's a tuesday afternoon, mike. it’s dead."
he finally looked over at you, leaning back against the register. "people are unpredictable. better to see who's coming in before they actually walk through the door."
you didn't point out how weird that was. four months ago, it would have bugged you, but now it was just part of working with him. he liked knowing who was coming and going. that was just his thing.
"fine," you said, picking up the duster. "you keep an eye on the street. i'll finish the shelves."
he turned back to the window, but his shoulders weren't as tight as they usually were. he didn't say anything else, but he didn't rush you, either. he just stood there, waiting for the bell to ring, and for once, the silence between you felt pretty normal.
it started as a headache. a dull, persistent throb behind his eyes that only seemed to flare up when you walked into the shop.
for a while, it was easy to file you under “coworker.” functional. safe.
then it shifted.
he started noticing small things, how you laughed at bad takes, how you were the first person he looked for when he walked in. and that feeling didn’t sit right. it felt like something he wasn’t supposed to have.
every time it got too easy, his brain snapped back to hawkins. to leaving. to the fact that he got out and she didn’t.
he’d catch himself, on the subway, in line for coffee, turning to say something to someone who wasn’t there anymore.
after that, it was easier to keep his hands busy.
one afternoon, you were explaining a psych theory about attachment styles, and he was staring at you. he wasn't listening to the words; he was just listening to the way your voice sounded, steady, warm, entirely unlike the frantic, screaming noise that defined the most important moments of his life.
"are you even listening?" you asked, tilting your head.
mike blinked, his face flushing. he looked like he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. "yeah. attachment. right."
" you know, you’re terrible at lying," you said, crossing your arms. "are you feeling alright?"
"i'm fine," he snapped, his voice sharp . he walked past you to the espresso machine, his movements stiff and practiced. he wasn't fine. he was terrified. he was terrified that if he admitted how much he liked you, he’d stop being the person who was ready for everything. he’d start being the person who had something to lose.
he didn't know how to be a person who could just enjoy liking someone.
later that shift, you were shelving returns. mike stood at the counter, watching the reflection of the store in the window. he could see you working. he could see your patience, your kindness, the way you handled the books with care. he hated how much he wanted to turn around and help you. he hated how much he wanted to walk over, take the stack of books from your hands, and just stand in the silence with you.
he clenched his fists in his pockets. he had to keep it together. he had to keep this job, keep this life, and keep his distance.
"you're hovering," you said, your voice drifting over from the manga section.
mike didn't turn around. he just stared at his own reflection, looking for the kid he used to be, the leader who knew exactly what to do. he didn't recognize himself.
"just.. looking at the street," he muttered, his voice strained.
he wasn't looking at the street. he was looking at himself and not seeing anything that made sense anymore. he wanted to let you in. god, he wanted to. but every part of his history was screaming at him that letting people in was how you got hurt, and for the first time in his life, he wasn't sure if he was strong enough to survive the heartbreak of losing you.
the fluorescent light over the back aisle is flickering, humming at a frequency that’s making mike’s head ache. he’s on his knees, pulling graphic novels off the bottom shelf and sliding them back into place. he’s not doing it because he’s a perfectionist.. well, he is, but he’s also doing it because he’s annoyed. some guy in a windbreaker spent an hour shuffling through the x-men run and put half of them back out of order.
it’s 7:30pm. he just wants to go home.
you walk over, carrying a stack of returns, and stop when you see him on the floor.
"you're still doing that?" you ask. "it’s basically closing, mike. nobody is going to care if volume four is next to volume six."
"i care," he mutters, not looking up. he slams a book back into the slot, a little too hard. "it’s not that hard to follow the spine numbers."
you sigh, set your stack down on the nearby table, and crouch down next to him. "just let me take the top half. we’ll be out of here in two minutes."
he opens his mouth to tell you it’s fine, that he can do it, but you’re already reaching for the books. he pulls back to give you space, and the aisle feels suddenly very small.
you’re working in silence, just the sliding of cardboard against metal shelves. you reach for a trade, and he reaches for the same one at the same time. your hands brush, just a split second, skin on skin, and this time he jerks his hand back like he touched a live wire.
he doesn't move away, though. he stays exactly where he is, hunched over on the floor.
you turn to look at him, maybe to apologize for the bump, or maybe just to see if he’s still in one of his moods. but he’s already looking at you. he’s stopped working. his hand is still hovering in the air between you, suspended there.
he’s not looking at your eyes, his gaze drifts to your mouth, then back to your eyes, his expression is completely blank. he looks like he’s trying to figure out a puzzle he doesn't have the pieces for. his breathing is shallow, audible in the quiet of the shop.
it’s uncomfortable. just two people sitting on a dirty comic shop floor, staring at each other because the silence has become heavy enough to basically lean on. he looks like he wants to say something, but he’s too locked up. his jaw is tight. his shoulders are hunched up toward his ears.
he shifts, his knee bumping against yours. he doesn't pull away. instead, he leans forward. it’s an impulsive, slightly jerky movement,
like he’s already committed and doesn’t know how to stop. he closes the space. he stops a few inches away, hesitates, and then presses his mouth to yours. he doesn't know what to do with his hands, so they just kind of bunch up into the fabric of your hoodie. he’s not kissing you like a hero in a movie, he’s kissing you like he needs to know this is actually happening.
it lasts for three seconds before he pulls back, his face flushing dark red. he looks genuinely rattled, like he’s just realized he’s in the middle of an aisle in a public place.
he stares at you, his eyes wide and panicked, mouth slightly open. he doesn't say anything. he just looks at you, already bracing for you to completely pull away. his chest heaving as he tries to regulate his own breathing.
you don't blink. the silence is loud, filled only by the hum of the overhead light. mike is holding his breath, his hands still bunched in your fabric.
you look at the red creeping up his neck into his ears, the way his eyes stay locked on yours, searching for a rejection he’s already convinced is coming.
you don’t think. you shift your weight and lean back in.
mike lets out a short, sharp breath, like you knocked the wind out of him. he doesn't pull away. instead, he shifts, his knees pressing into the carpet. he grabs the back of your neck with one hand, his fingers hot against your skin.
he kisses back with a sudden, jerky intensity, like he’s trying to catch up to the decision you just made. your teeth click against his. he makes a muffled, frustrated noise in the back of his throat and adjusts his angle.
his other hand leaves your hoodie and finds your waist, pulling you so close there’s no gap left. you can feel the sharp edges of his keys in his pocket pressing into your thigh. he’s breathing hard, the air hitting your cheek in rapid bursts.
there’s no grace to it. he presses you back against the shelf behind you. a book shifts, falling off the stack and hitting the floor with a loud thud, but he doesn't stop. he just grips you tighter, his breathing syncing with yours. pulling you closer as if he’s trying to anchor himself. then, he freezes. he pulls back just enough to look at you, his hands dropping from your waist as if he’s been burned. he’s breathing hard, his chest heaving, his eyebrows pulled up in the middle, making his eyes look huge and lost in the dim light. he’s staring at you like he’s trying to solve a problem he doesn't have the answer to.
summary: johnny storm is on a mission to woo the newest addition to the space crew, who doesn't seem to like him very much. it almost works. almost. (10.8k words)
pairing: johnny storm / f!reader
contents: strangers to lovers, enemies to lovers, fluff, angst, grumpy x sunshine (grump!reader), johnny can't flirt to save his life, cw for very brief mentions of blood and gore, space sex, dry humping, smut 18+, mdni!!!
A long, long time ago, before bodies were ever invented, the atoms of all living things existed in the stars. Humans were, at their core, nothing more than an inherent act of defiant creation — just a bunch of tiny solar systems pretending to be people. At least, that’s what you preferred to believe anyway, ‘cause the comforting thought eases your worries about your own misgivings. Restless, removed, reclusive.
Because, of course, you can’t sleep when the stars are whispering your name. Of course, no one will ever know you quite as well as the moon, when it had known you long before man ever did. Of course, you’re so often filled with a celestial-like solitude when you were never meant to be in this world to begin with, and fell into it completely by happenstance.
The vast infiniteness of the universe reminds you, every day, of how small you are. And every day, it reduces you to a starry-night sort of silence.
Johnny Storm struggles to approach you accordingly. He knew you only distantly, like all heavenly bodies are meant to be known. All he knew of you was that you were a professor — the first of your kind, a colleague of Reed’s, and a scientist whose accolades had caught his sister’s attention. Such vague descriptions did little to capture your beauty, a youthful and quiet sort of charm. As lovely as the stars and perhaps as lonesome as them, too.
And how was he meant to talk to the girl with the galaxy in her eyes? It’s a question he hasn’t quite figured out the answer to yet. But he’s damn sure going to try.
“How well do you know him?” is the first thing Johnny thinks to ask, while the group of soon-to-be astronauts squeeze into their all-white ventilation garments.
You give him a deadpan look in return, clad only in a black tank top and a pair of spandex shorts, as you tug the skin-tight fabric up your legs.
You don’t know Johnny Storm all that well, just that he’s Sue’s younger brother and a pretty damn good engineer. But, in the few short days you’ve gotten to know him, you’ve noticed his strange penchant for covering his awkward tenderness with a feigned sort of arrogance. He’s obviously still getting used to this new world, and the subsequent attention that comes with being among the first people in space — aptly called the Saturn Five.
You figure he’s not yet accustomed to the sudden adoration from the public, and so he’s forced to improvise accordingly.
“How well do I know…?” you trail off.
“Oh, right. Yeah—” the blonde boy stammers, laughing softly at himself.
Your emotionless stare never wavers.
Johnny’s cheeks flare. “My— My brother-in-law, I mean. Reed.”
“Not well,” you answer in a detached monotone and drag the white sleeve up the length of your arm. “Mostly by reputation.”
Johnny scoffs and drags his garment over his freckled shoulders, lean torso straining against the fabric of his thin t-shirt. “And you still decided to show up?” he quips.
You don’t share his amused smile. You rarely ever do. Never, actually. Most of the time, Johnny can’t tell if you realize he’s joking or if you just don’t care.
Now, you just nod in response and answer his rhetorical question in a single word. “Yes.”
Johnny nods to himself, too, and pulls the silver zipper of his suit up his chest. “Yeah, no. I get it. Reed’s a pretty good guy, I guess— But I’m just here to make sure my sister doesn’t do anything, honestly,” he confesses in a breathy chuckle. “…What about you?”
“What about me?” you repeat with pinched brows, tugging on the other sleeve.
“What are you in for?” Johnny wonders with a playful squint in his light blue eyes — the exact color of the sky at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, or the color of the ocean at exactly 33 meters deep. “‘Cause I know it’s not just because you like my company, Doc.”
“I don’t know,” you shrug. “To change the world, I guess.”
“That’s all, huh?” he laughs.
You nod once. The zipper whizzes quietly as you drag it up to your neck. “That’s all,” you answer in a monotone before turning on your heel and walking away.
Johnny’s footsteps echo through the expansive launch facility as he rushes to catch up with you. He walks a little too close for your liking, enough for you to feel the warmth radiating from his pale skin and to smell the vanilla-tobacco cologne on his long neck.
His broad shoulder brushes yours with every quick stride down the white brick corridor, moving in extra close every time you pass by bustling scientists in lab coats or clunking machines that didn’t exist to the world a year or more ago.
“I wasn’t— I wasn’t prying too much back there, was I?” he frets with furrowed brows, ocean eyes swimming with concern as he ducks to look at you.
You don’t share his gaze as you hum in a detached tone of voice, “I don’t know. Were you?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Johnny sighs with a shrug. “Half-and-half, I guess— Prying and, for selfish reasons, genuinely concerned for your wellbeing.”
You stop suddenly in the middle of the narrow hallway. Johnny stumbles on his feet beside you. A group of doctors walk down the corridor, then — a gaggle of men with heavy glasses on their noses and clipboards in their weathered hands. He has to take an extra step closer to you to let them pass by.
His chest brushes yours at the dwindling proximity, which seems to affect him far more than it does you. The scent of your perfume makes him dizzy; something fruity, like a raspberry, maybe. Far sweeter than the way you glare at him now.
“Concerned about what?”
“Well, I just mean it’s— It’s one thing for Reed to rope all of us idiots into his crazy plan, you know? We’ve all known him for years, we already know he’s crazy,” Johnny laughs, only partly joking. “But you’re…”
“What? A stranger?”
“Normal,” Johnny corrects before shrugging. “Well, actually, pretty would’ve been my first choice, but… tomato, tom-ah-to, right?”
He flashes you a crooked pink smile then, which would’ve made any other girl swoon at his feet — a proven theory he’s tested at several bars since he became known as Johnny Storm, faithful member of the heroic Saturn Five. But you don’t even blink, totally unmoved by his charm (or lack thereof).
Johnny sighs and drops his head. He finally lets go of all the boyish theatrics he thinks for some reason he needs, which you’re grateful for.
“Look… If something were to happen to us up there, I think I could stomach that, you know— It’d be awful, obviously, but we’d handle it. Like we always do…” He trails off, button eyes round and full of a distant worry that sends him rambling before he can stop it. “But this… This is dangerous stuff, Doc. And Reed knows it. And he shouldn’t have recruited anybody else, but he did, and if something happened to you… I don’t think I’d forgive myself.”
You’re slightly moved by his admission, though you don’t show it on your face.
“Well, I guess, it’s a good thing nothing’s gonna happen up there.”
You turn to walk away again, and Johnny nearly trips over his own feet to stay in stride with you. “Hold on. Just— Just one more question, alright?”
“I’m going on this mission, Johnny Storm.”
“It’s not that—” he insists, voice breaking slightly at the use of his full name.
Even despite your not-so-subtle bitterness towards him, he thinks he hears something strikingly soft in your voice. It’s something almost tender, and perhaps only in his head, which gives his name a brand new meaning. You make it sound like everyone else has been saying his name wrong his whole life.
“I was just going to ask if you wanted to maybe hang out later, by the way, hypothetically,” Johnny rambles, talking wildly with his hands.
You notice his panicked gesturing from the corner of your eye, and how quickly he tucks his anxious fingers underneath his strong arms when he crosses them over his chest. He thinks he almost catches you smiling before you swallow it back down again a second later.
“I’m a little tied up here, actually,” you tell him, though it comes out too monotoned to sound like the half-joke you meant it as.
“Oh. Right. Yeah, me too…” Johnny nods, trying to play it cool despite his stammering.
You enter the main lab side-by-side for your daily check-ups. The rest of the Saturn Five are already waiting for you there. Ben, Reed, and Sue all sit next to each other on their exam tables, hooked to a series of buzzing machines which draw their blood into crimson tubes hanging at their side.
Johnny trails like a puppy behind you, brows raised and eyes glittering in a sheepish sort of look. “So, what about tomorrow, then?”
“Leave her alone, Johnny,” Sue calls across the room with a knowing smile on her face, always inherently gentle in her way, but still teasing like all older sisters are entitled to be.
The blonde boy gapes in response as he stammers, “I’m— I’m not even doing anything!”
“You’re bothering her.”
“I am not!” he argues instinctively, then flashes you a worried ocean-eyed look. “Am I?”
“I don’t know. Are you?” you shrug, as unenthusiastic as ever.
Johnny smacks his lips against his teeth. “Yeah, that’s not helpful—”
“She’s our lead astrophysicist, Johnny—” Reed reminds playfully from his wife’s side, olive skin growing sticky and pale as the nurse takes his blood. (He’s more frightened by needles than the unknown emptiness of outer space. It’s weird.) “—Which is code for: she’s way too busy for you.”
“Too pretty, more like,” Ben scoffs from beside the older man.
Johnny’s face screws in offense, which only makes them laugh harder at the stupid joke — even if it is sort of true. When you part from him to head to your own station, Johnny thinks he hears you laughing at it, too. A quiet, breathy sound that’s more of an exhaled breath than anything, but still a laugh nonetheless.
“Oh, really?” he huffs dramatically, ‘cause he’s been trying to get you to smile for three whole days now. “That’s what gets you?”
Your last night on planet Earth is spent talking to the moon, crescent-shaped and gleaming. It tells you not to worry, though not exactly with words. It just holds you in its gentle glow and reminds you that you aren’t leaving anything behind, that there isn’t anything new you could possibly discover in the vast infiniteness of space. Because the universe was your first ever home in truth, billions and billions of years ago, and now it’s calling you back.
Like a childhood room you only see on holidays, frozen in time like you never even left it.
That’s how Johnny finds you — at an ungodly hour of the early morning, standing in the center of the worn sidewalk, bathed in the neon hues of the bright city square that never sleeps. You drown in your cable-knit sweater, arms crossed over your chest and fingers tucked away in a feeble attempt to hide from the early spring chill. You keep your chin tilted towards the sky, and your eyes trained on something far away.
He wonders if there’s something up there only you can see. That’s how you tend to look at the world, anyway, like you’re keeping all of its secrets.
“Where do you think it ends?” Johnny blurts, always so wrapped up in his own head that he tends to continue inward conversations rather than start brand new ones.
You’re unstartled by the suddenness of his arrival, ‘cause you felt him behind you long before he ever had to announce it — consumed immediately by his palpable body heat, along with the minty aftershave and sea-salt bodywash on his skin from a fresh shower.
“Why do you ask such vague questions?” you snap in return, as harsh as the late winter chill.
It’s your basic primal instinct to be annoyed by his presence, like the rage is hardwired into you. The simmering embers of misplaced anger in your chest are quickly snuffed out by the rolling breeze of a lingering winter, which bites mercilessly at your cheeks and the tip of your nose. Something primitive in the back of your mind subconsciously wishes he’d come closer then.
When you turn to glare at the blonde boy over your shoulder, you find him donned in a fitting long-sleeve tee and a baggier pair of plaid pajama pants. His strong, shaven chin is tilted upward, and his sleep-swollen gaze is pointed to the sky like yours once, only it’s a lot more annoying when he does it.
Johnny laughs on a quiet, exhaled breath. “I mean, where do you think the sky ends and eternity begins?” he repeats, a question that has plagued him for some days now.
He’s tormented by the thought of a thin, black veil — one which separates the only home humans have ever known from an emptiness that goes on endlessly in every direction. Is space just dark and dead and doomed? his mind rages. Is everything worth marvelling at just here on Earth?
“100 kilometers above sea level,” you answer instantaneously. “Approximately, anyway.”
Johnny’s head snaps in your direction. “What?”
“100 kilometers above sea level,” you repeat like it’s obvious. “That’s where the Earth’s atmosphere separates from outer space—”
A laugh sputters suddenly past Johnny’s pink mouth. The boyish sound echoes through the empty city square, which is only filled now by your bodies and flashing neon signs.
A deep frown settles between your brows in return. “Why are you laughing?”
“I’m not,” he insists despite his chuckling. “I swear, I’m not—”
Your eyes narrow at him while his lighter ones glimmer with a newfound life. His cheeks flare a faint pink color from his poorly held-back laughter and the unforgiving late-night chill. He balls a pale fist in front of his mouth to hide how wide he’s smiling.
“It’s a fact—”
“No. I know, I just… I needed that, I think…” Johnny confesses before dragging in a much-needed breath; his first good one all night, maybe. “I’ve just been so in my own head lately, you know? With a bunch of existential stuff from the launch, I guess. I think I just needed to get out of my head for a second, so… Thanks—”
“I didn’t say it to make you feel better,” you snap.
Johnny smiles in the face of your glowering. “Yeah, I know that, too… I’m pretty sure you’re physically incapable of lying.”
“Okay, well, that’s just not true,” you scoff. Not because he’s totally wrong, but because you don’t need him thinking he knows a single thing about you — even if you have spent every day of the past year together.
“Really? Johnny hums with a knowing smile, crossing his arms over his toned chest as he takes a daring step closer. “Then tell me something nice.”
You swallow hard at the dwindling proximity between you. His body heat is all-consuming, swaddling you in a blanket of warmth and tenderness without trying. Whatever the sun is made out of, I think your soul might be made of it, too — those are the first words that rise like bile in your throat. Or your heart, maybe, and you’ve just got sunlight running like fire through your veins.
“Your eyes are very blue,” you observe in a monotone instead. “Like, the kind of blue where it starts to get a little scary if I look at you too long.”
Johnny’s plush grin widens. A big, boyish smile that moves everything inside of you — a flame that melts your body and turns your bones to ash, lighting up all the dark corners.
“And how long did you have to stare at me to figure that one out, Doc?”
“Why does everything have to be some kinda flirtatious remark with you?”
“Because sometimes I can’t tell if you’re flirting with me or starting a fight, so I just assume it’s both.”
“Well, I’m definitely not flirting with you, Johnny Storm—”
“Oh, definitely not…”
“—Flirting is for children. We have a job to do.”
“Right,” he nods in a playfully solemn voice, with a wide smile and a sparkling look in his button eyes. “It’s very serious.”
You shake your head and turn away, headed back towards the towering skyscraper that overlooks the entire city — where you’ll spend your very last night on Earth before you’re seeing it from a space shuttle.
“I hate you,” you grumble as you go.
Johnny’s shoes scuff the pavement as he trails slowly behind you. “No, you don’t…” he lilts under his breath as he follows you inside, blanketed immediately by the warmth of the Baxter Building.
The boy spends his last few hours on the planet pondering not what separates his world from the immeasurable cosmic, but rather how disturbingly thin the veil is between hating someone and loving them.
Nylon for the base. Spandex for mobility. Urethane for the pressure. Nomex for high temperatures. Mylar for the heat loss.
As Johnny helps dress you in the clunky blue and white space suit, you imagine each differing chemical coming together, resulting in a unique mixture that will (hopefully) prevent you from dying the moment you break through the atmosphere. All per Johnny Storms’ blueprint.
“How’s it fit?” the blonde boy wonders aloud from where he stands behind you, latching the last buckle around your back. He gives it one sharp tug just to make sure it stays in place, and you sway softly on your feet to keep your balance.
You nod once. “Good.”
“Better than the last one?” he asks with a smile evident in his voice, knowing that his first trial of spacewear was a complete and utter nightmare. It was too tight in some places, too loose in others, and failed not just one but two fire safety tests. That was about a year ago now. You’d like to think you have a little bit more faith in him these days.
“Anything would be better than the last one,” you scoff.
“Rude,” Johnny frowns.
You spin on the heel of your boot to face him and momentarily falter at how close he is to you. You take a sudden step back from him, like someone jerking away from an open flame. You turn away from his prying gaze and motion to his personalized suit still hanging on the display.
“Do you want help?” you offer unenthusiastically despite yourself.
“Nah,” Johnny declines, shaking his head and crossing his strong arms over his chest. His biceps strain against the tight fabric of his ventilation garment. “I got it. You go ahead.”
Your eyes narrow in a challenging squint. “You said it was a two-person job.”
“Because I wanted to help you,” he shrugs with his cheek tilted to his shoulder. “And I knew you wouldn’t have let me otherwise—”
“So you lied?”
“No, I… slightly misrepresented the truth in order to spend a little extra time with you…” Johnny corrects, blue eyes squinted as he carefully chooses each word. He smiles at the scowl you give him, “…Shoot me.”
“I’ve been meaning to, actually,” you deadpan and turn away.
You hear Johnny snickering behind you as you leave, like he finds something strangely sweet in the empty threat.
He likes it best when you’re mean — he thinks you’re gentlest that way, tender like a green and yellow bruise that’s still healing. The kind you dig your thumb into and revel in the pleasurable soreness you find below the skin. You’re like that, in a way. A delicate lover somewhere deep down in the bruising enemy you’ve decided to be.
Down the windowless corridor and through a set of heavy metal doors, you find the hangar bustling with unfamiliar faces and bulky cameras. The muffled chatter erupts into a thousand droning voices as you enter the room. A visibly anxious and already suited-up Reed Richards stands at the head of it, at the very center of the hounding press.
You freeze in place as the door clicks shut behind you. Your presence gains the attention of the media personnel across the hangar. You cower under their prying eyes and flashing cameras.
“What is this?” you wonder aloud, to no one in particular.
Reed hesitates for a moment, mouth agape and dark eyes wide, as his brain tries to figure out how to answer your question and the hundred others shouted his way. So, he just walks to your side instead, and the gaggle of journalists and photographers follow like so many ducklings behind him.
“This is Doc— Our in-house cosmologist and astrophysicist,” the older man announces as he stands at your side. He puts a gloved hand on your shoulder, almost apologetically so, like he’s trying to silently convey that he hates all this just as much as you do. His fake smile wavers slightly after having been plastered on his face for so long. “If anyone knows what’s waiting for us up there, it’ll be her.”
“I didn’t consent to this—” you deadpan, flinching at the blinding camera flashes.
Your protest gets buried under a barrage of questions shouted at you from every direction. Each member of the press is trying to be heard over the person standing next to them, who is trying to be heard over the person standing next to them. It’s an unforgiving cycle that fills the expansive room with chaos.
“How did the two of you meet?!” a newswoman questions into a bulky microphone from where she stands before a large news camera.
“At Colombia—” Reed answers, faltering briefly when the rest of the Saturn Five walk into the room behind him. Sue, Johnny, and Ben enter wearing their own customized spacesuits. The older man locks eyes with his wife almost immediately, who flashes him a sympathetic smile in return.
Johnny waits for you to look at him, too. He thinks he’s spent the better part of the past year just waiting for you to look at him. Because, most times, he sees you before he’s seen anything else in any given room.
Reed, realizing his sudden silence, stumbles over himself to continue. “Uh, Doc was giving a lecture on black holes, I believe it was, and I—”
“Cosmic radiation,” you correct bluntly.
“…What?”
“I wrote a book on the Black Hole Paradox, but I never taught the Black Hole Paradox,” you ramble in a detached monotone. “We met after a lecture I gave on cosmic radiation— specifically the idea that cosmic rays can penetrate the body and alter its molecules, leading to extreme genetic mutations, which can be passed down for generations.”
For perhaps the first time since security allowed the press into the hangar, silence fills the all-white room. You tend to have that effect on people. On everybody, it seems, except for—
“See what I mean?” Johnny says with a wide grin, relatively unfazed by the hundreds of cameras pointed his way. The lenses follow his every move as he walks to stand beside you, throwing a heavy arm around your shoulder. “Best damn cosmetologist I ever met,” he blunders unknowingly, but with a crooked pink smile that’s hard to say no to.
“Cosmologist,” you correct without taking your emotionless stare off the camera zoomed into your face.
You duck from beneath Johnny’s arm and shove through the crowd of media personnel, heading for the doctors waiting on the other side. The blonde boy takes the sudden attention with ease — he’s gotten all too used to it over the past year.
“She’s the prettiest one, too,” he jokes into the news camera, with a gloved hand cupping the side of his mouth like he’s telling some sort of secret. “But don’t tell her I told you.”
The fiberglass helmets are made of a thick polycarbonate, which Reed’s spent several years perfecting for this very mission. One of the many nurses slides it over your head and locks it into place. The amber-tinted visor, designed to reflect thermal radiation, paints the white building in so many shades of flaxen gold.
Johnny stands beside you — because he’s always somehow right beside you — and turns his heavy head to look at you when the doctor locks his helmet into place. The tinted glass dullens his ocean-eyed gaze and muffles his voice when he asks you, “Remember that date I asked you on?”
“Which one?” you deadpan.
“Any of ‘em?” he shrugs. “Is it too late to hash that out, you think?”
“Well, you can’t exactly take me out for coffee now, can you?”
A pink smile curls from behind his thick, glass visor. “Well, we get back in two weeks, Doc. I’ll have plenty of time to take you out for coffee then.”
“Trust me, Johnny Storm, you’ll be sick of me in two weeks.”
His laugh is muffled, but no less cherry-colored. “I’ve seen you every day for the past year, Doc,” he argues. “If I’m not sick of you by now, I don’t think I’m ever gonna be.”
It makes you frown. You don’t understand why he’s lying. ‘Cause you are, by nature, a rather demanding creature. You’re moody, cynical, and sometimes cruel. You’re at times totally untangible, and at others extremely unreasonable. You’ve intentionally made it very difficult to love you because you’ve spent many years not knowing men to be kind.
But Johnny — perhaps obliviously, and led only by his unbridled curiosity — longed to be close to you despite his inherent softness, and despite all your metaphorical barbs.
“Coffee, then?” you monotone without a glance his way, lest he see the vulnerability swimming in your gaze. “When we get back, I mean.”
Johnny glows at a moment’s notice. His button eyes widen in a not-so-subtle look of shock as his pink mouth falls softly agape. ‘Cause, sure, he’s been trying to get you to like him every day for the past three-hundred-sixty-five of them, but he didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly. Or at all, really.
He nods beneath his helmet, rapid and boyish, and smiles at you far wider than you think he realizes. “It’s a date, Doc—”
The comms built into your helmet hiss as they crackle to life. Johnny flinches as his sister’s voice comes through the faint static. “Comms check. Everybody sound off,” Sue instructs from his other side, flashing her baby brother a knowing look.
“Check,” Reed nods.
Ben salutes with two fingers pressed to his forehead, over his rounded glass helmet. “Check, check.”
A cameraman moves down the line as each of you speaks. The chunky gadget sits heavy on his broad shoulder as he squints into the rubber eyepiece of the viewfinder, zooming into each of your faces.
“Check,” Johnny says with a nod in his direction, always so painfully casual.
The cameraman settles finally on you. He looks at you through the lens as though it were a third eye, and your face screws with a subtle scowl. “Tell this man to get his camera out of my face,” you answer in a flat voice.
Sue’s pretty laugh sounds through the static. “Comms are live.”
The large hangar door whirs slowly open. Early morning daylight bathes the room in shades of orange-gold. The Excelsior towers before you, sleek and silver and shimmering in the soft sunlight. The five of you walk in a line up the steep tarmac, inching closer to what will become your new home for the next several days.
Reed reaches for Sue’s hand before they pass the threshold. “Good luck kiss?” he offers, already leaning in towards her.
“Maybe just one for the road,” the older woman grins.
Their lips pucker for a kiss, but their fiberglass helmets bump audibly together instead. They laugh about it, anyway, as the double doors to the shuttle part with a faint hiss.
Johnny turns expectantly to you then, eyes round and silently hopeful. Your scoff crackles through his comm. “In your dreams, space-boy,” you deadpan and walk on ahead of him.
“Ouch…” Ben winces playfully in response as he enters ahead of the blonde boy.
Johnny shrugs off the rejection with a slow nod. “Rain check, then.”
You still remember that strange liminal space between high school and university, where they called you overtly ambitious like it were synonymous with the word bitch. No one had been to space before, let alone a woman, and very few of your kind were able to break into the astronomy field at all. Therefore, no one was quite inclined to believe that you’d be the first among them to be truly successful.
Why don’t you just settle down? they huffed impatiently, like your life wasn’t just beginning. The best way for your kind to contribute to society is to be a mother— Everyone knows that.
That was, of course, before you were pictured on the cover of the Times with the rest of the Saturn Five — wherein you were described in print as ‘perhaps the most eminent female astrophysicist of our time.’
You were among the first of women to earn a degree in the field, and the first ever to receive your doctorate from the same university. You were the first female faculty member of Columbia’s astrophysics program — an assistant professor for some excruciating months, until it became rather grating to take orders from men four times your age. Sometime thereafter, and despite all the odds, you were the first female full-time astrophysics professor.
Such accolades inevitably caught Sue Storm’s attention. She liked your persistence, and Reed Richards liked your mind. And somewhere between then and now, you were recruited to become one of the first ever humans to experience the uncharted terrain of outer space.
As you strap into your seat on the Excelsior, you can’t help but wonder about who you’re living behind, and what those who doubted you must think of you now — if they marvel at what you’ve accomplished, or if they pity you still for trying so hard to break the mold.
“Final check and check, please,” Sue instructs through comms, from where she navigates between the two pilots.
Each of your voices crackles through speakers in return, and only then does Ben initiate the ignition sequence. You watch from behind him as he presses a series of buttons on the light-up panel, a pattern you’re unfamiliar with that he knows all too well. His weathered fists push a weighted lever, and the shuttle roars to life.
You feel the floors trembling beneath your weighted boots. Your seat shakes with it, too. Your gloved hands clutch the straps of your buckles in an unforgiving grip while a funny feeling rolls over your stomach. Not with fear, or worry, or excitement exactly — but the distant acknowledgment that your life’s going to change forever.
“We’re go for launch,” Ben announces to his co-pilot, who presses his own series of blinking neon buttons.
The whirring engine jerks suddenly as it lifts from its place on the ground. Four million pounds of pure steel propel suddenly towards the heavens with the burst of a golden flame. There’s a harsh pull and then a numbness, which turns into a heavier, emptier feeling as you break through the atmosphere — roughly 100 kilometers above sea level.
“Woo-hoo!” Johnny exclaims boyishly into his comms, arms raised above his head as the shuttle pierces finally through the dreaded veil — as he witnesses, for the first time in human history, where the bright blue sky meets an all-black eternity.
The gravity is slow to dissipate. It makes everything feel suddenly lighter — the cool air running through your suit, the heavy boots on your feet; your stomach, your heart, your mind. The dizzying feeling must be to blame for the absent-minded smile on your face, you think, ‘cause you look at Johnny then like you’re watching the beginning of the whole world.
A giddy laugh sputters suddenly like magic from your lips. Johnny and the stars sigh in unison. He’s been wondering ever since he met you what the sound of your laughter must sound like. Your smile is the only thing he’s dreamt of for the past year, the only thing, and he mourns it all over again when you ultimately turn away.
The Earth grows more and more distant. What once seemed so limitless, now looks so tiny against the star-speckled void of outer space. Everyone you’ve ever known, everyone there ever was, lived their entire life on this indistinct orb of green and blue. Every saint and sinner, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization. Millions of years of joy and suffering are contained within this brief smudge, swimming in a sea of never-ending blackness. A fleck of dust lost inside a bright sunbeam.
“You seein’ that?” Johnny wonders into his comm, to no one in particular, though he still hasn’t quite taken his eyes off of you.
You nod wordlessly for a moment, ‘cause you can’t believe how blue the world is from here.
It’s a rich, vibrant color that humans couldn’t recreate if they tried, ‘cause such a cerulean-cobalt shade cannot travel the entire distance from the sun to the land. Its molecules, instead, get scattered in the wind and the water, before reflecting in the more observable lighter hue that paints the sky.
But this? This deeper, dreamier, more melancholy blue — this blue that does not reach the Earth, this blue that gets lost on the way to the humans down below — holds the beauty of the entire world in its hand.
“It’s beautiful…” you murmur into the crackling comm, more speechless than the rest of them have ever seen you before.
You turn to Johnny then, who sits across the aisle from you, and wear the orbital golden sunrise in your gaze. Inside his, you find the same dreamlike blue that paints the depths and edges of the faraway Earth. The lost, untouched ultramarine swims now in his round button eyes as he stares unblinkingly at you.
“Yeah…” he nods within a breathless sigh, overcome by the ethereal infinite surrounding him — and the one sitting just beside him in the shape of a girl. “Beautiful.”
The routine you fall into in space is not quite unlike the one you had on Earth. You’re alone more often than not, hidden away in the observation room with your books and your journals, trying fruitlessly to make sense of the inherently nonsensical universe around you. It’s exactly how you’ve spent most of your life, really — the only difference now is you feel much more at home here, on the Excelsior and in the unpathed emptiness of outerspace, than you ever did on Earth.
Sue Storm is perhaps the only one of you who understands the importance of a real schedule. You and Reed, particularly, would work your circadian rhythms half to death if she let you. But, in an attempt to maintain a routine in an inherently timeless place, Sue insists on taking all of your meals at the same time every day, and in the same spot at the small kitchen table in the galley.
You sit between Johnny and Ben for at least an hour out of the day there, and catch up on plans or other miscellaneous discoveries found while on opposite sides of the shuttle.
The five of you exercise for one hour every day, before breakfast and after dinner, in order to keep the strength in your bones and muscles, which would otherwise be sucked out of you from the microgravity. The rest of the day is fair game and often spent with the five of you scattered about. Sue and Ben are usually navigating in the control room, Johnny and Reed are always finding something to do with their idle hands, and you can often be found on the observation deck looking for something new in the nothingness spanning before you.
And when the rest of the Saturn Five, at the end of a long day, return to their sleeping bags strapped to the wall — yours is the only one left empty. And Johnny knows immediately where to find you.
You drift like a dream in the dim cupola, a room made of so many fiberglass windows. The starry, black velvet universe sits just outside — an undreamt emptiness at your fingertips.
Your hair is tied back and out of your face. Your body is adorned in your nightclothes, a simple white tank top worn over a pair of red gingham pants. Your legs are crossed beneath you, as if you were sitting down, and you scribble something into a journal while a heavier textbook floats at your side. You’re a pretty girl dressed for a quiet night at home, observing Mars as casually as someone would watch their television.
Johnny knocks briefly on the ajar door before he enters. He’s already in his pajamas, too — an old t-shirt that clings to his lean torso and a pair of dark sweatpants that sit low on his hips.
“Sue wanted me to tell you it’s time for lights out, so… Lights out.”
You nod without looking his way, still slouched over the book in your lap. “Good night, Johnny Storm.”
His quiet laugh fills the silent room. “I think she meant she wants you in bed, too, Doc. You know how she is about the schedule.”
“Well, I’m busy, so…”
“You’re always busy,” Johnny scoffs, shutting the cupola door behind him as he maneuvers into the room with you.
The lack of gravity makes his bones feel lighter than air as it carries him towards you, cradling him in its cold and heavy hand. He lingers just behind you, warm with exhaustion and smelling of musky vanilla-berry shampoo as he peers over your shoulder. He can hardly make sense of your haphazard scribbles. Your pen whizzes across the page like something’s telling you’re about to run out of time.
“What are you writing about?”
You motion wordlessly to something at your side, as easily as a parent shrugging off a child. Johnny looks around until he finds a telescope — short, bulky, and likely worth far more than it looks. He plucks the weighty thing in his hands as it drifts by his feet. He falters with it for a moment, struggling briefly to determine which eye to close in order to see out of the damn thing.
With furrowed brows and a single squinted eye, he peers through the lens of the telescope. He doesn’t know how to focus it, or exactly where he should be looking, so instead he marvels at the big, blurry planet looming before him — looking much closer than it did just a moment ago.
“Planet,” he concludes with a slow nod, like it isn’t plain as day in front of you.
With a practiced and half-distracted hand, you contort your wrist slightly to focus the lens for him, all without looking up from your notebook. When Johnny peers through the telescope again, everything is more distinct — the blobs from before are now craters and rocks and ridges on the billion-year-old planet.
Within the shrouds of rust-colored dust and martian stars is something more distant but still well-defined — it’s rounded like a planet, but grayer and swathed in a heavy veil of ice.
“What is that?” Johnny murmurs incredulously. “Is it like a… A ghost planet or something?”
The words feel a bit silly as they spill from his mouth, but you nod in response anyway. “Most scientists would call that an exoplanet, but sure, yeah. A ghost planet.”
“I’m a scientist!” Johnny argues, boyish features screwed in offense — not because you’re wrong, but because he feels a bit like he’s earned the title after being in such close proximity to some of the brightest scientific minds known to man. You, for one. His sister, for another. And Reed, though he would never co-sign that out loud.
“You’re an engineer who plays dress-up in his sister’s lab coat—”
“That was one time!”
You look up and nod your chin towards the window. “Look at what’s around it.”
Johnny ducks his head and squints one eye to peer through the telescope once more. With untrained hands, he refocuses the lens to see a bit clearer — the indistinct clouds there turn into more defined specks, red and dull and dying.
“Uh… Rocks,” he confirms.
You bite back a grin and nod. “Sure. Rocks and stars and dark matter,” you explain further, growing increasingly giddy in a way that makes you already embarrassed at yourself. “It’s a planet— A fossil planet.”
“…Fossil?” Johnny echoes.
“You can tell by the colors of the stars around it that it hasn’t changed or merged with any other galaxies in at least a billion years,” you ramble, gesturing wildly with the pen in your right hand. You point out the window like the strange planet is right outside and not tens of millions of kilometers away. “Which means it’s essentially frozen in time.”
Johnny just nods along. He barely understands you if he’s being honest — ‘cause he’d much rather build things than observe them — but he likes hearing you speak, so he pretends you’re speaking the same language.
Until it’s his turn to talk, that is. Then his blonde brows pinch slowly together and his ocean eyes turn to sparkling buttons. “Wait, what’s so special about a dead planet?”
“Everything,” you answer like it’s obvious, hardened gaze glinting with a newfound life. “They’re like time capsules— They can tell us everything about what our early solar system looked like. How it changed over time, how after billions of years of inhability, Earth just happened to be perfect for human life, it’s—”
The dim lights above you click suddenly off, leaving just one row of amber auxiliary lights glowing overhead. A second later and the heat whirs slowly off, too.
The comfortable warmth gives way to a heavier cold. A shiver crawls up your spine almost instantly that you fight stubbornly away. It’s Reed’s way of conserving power, and Sue’s way of saying that everyone who isn’t in bed will freeze for the night.
Johnny deflates at the interruption.
He was just starting to get you to open up again, just like you did a week or more ago, when the Excelsior first launched and you looked at him like you were discovering something. Johnny wants you to find it again. Whatever it is.
“I hate when he does,” you scowl, dull eyes losing their previous spark.
“I guess it’s a good thing you have your very personal space heater to keep you company, then, huh?” Johnny croons with a lopsided grin. Your frown deepens, and he shrugs. “What? I run hot. I always have.”
“I’m busy. And it’s late,” you deadpan and turn away again. “Good night, Johnny Storm.”
You return to your work with an admirable ease, like Johnny isn’t there at all. Your pen darts across the page in a series of swirled and smudged cursive, sounding much louder in the sudden quiet. He lingers at your side anyway, inching closer despite himself, as though the microgravity were pulling him towards you. He doesn’t say a word; tries to move too much, tries not to breathe too hard, for fear of being noticed.
You do notice him, though. You can’t help but notice everything about him.
“You’re still here,” you observe distantly.
“Well, I don’t want you freezing to death out here, Doc,” Johnny scoffs like he’s doing you some sort of service. “Just let me stay— you know, for warmth. You won’t even realize I’m here, alright? Scouts honor.”
He holds up four fingers instead of three. You turn away again and say nothing. Johnny takes it as the invitation you mean it as, ‘cause you’re no stranger to telling him to fuck off when you really want him to.
You continue your scribbling while he lingers at your side, chest pressed against your arm as he peers over your shoulder. Through the messy cursive, he manages to make out, It’s possible this exoplanet once existed in our own solar system and was later ejected; check for any potential strange orbital movements—
Your hand freezes in place when Johnny’s warm breath fans over your bare shoulder. Each rhythmic exhale through his nose brushes your skin. It makes it hard for you to think, makes all the words in your head jumble suddenly together. You don’t know why.
“You’re breathing on me,” you blurt emotionlessly, neither angry nor pleased, just observant in a way he’s always known you to be.
“Sorry,” Johnny flinches back.
His round eyes swim with a darker shade of blue as they dart over your profile. He wants you to look back at him, even if it’s with malice. He just wants you to see him.
But you keep your eyes on the journal in your lap, even though you can’t figure out what to write anymore. The only thing in your head now is the sun in Johnny’s veins and the deep, Earthy blue in his eyes.
“It’s okay…” you mumble, still detached as ever, but with a white-knuckled grip on your pen. You swallow hard and wait for him to be close again, mourning when he keeps his distance. With a weary look over your shoulder, you repeat more firmly this time, “It’s okay.”
Johnny knows it’s an invitation, but for what, he doesn’t know. His unmanicured brows furrow as his tongue darts out to wet his pink mouth. “Do you want me to… to do it again or…?” he trails off.
The soft look in your eyes turns glacial in an instant. “Don’t say it!” you scold. “Do it, but don’t— don’t say it out loud. That makes it weird.”
You look away again, inwardly cursing yourself for being so vulnerable. Johnny purses a smile to the side of his mouth, lest he look too excited for your request to come closer. He curls his arm around you and keeps a softly calloused palm on the outside of your elbow, gently tethering himself to your side as you sway together in the zero-gravity.
You feel his warm fingers against your skin and flinch on instinct. You haven’t been touched with such gentleness since early childhood. You weren’t a stranger to man or their bodies, nor what their hands could do to yours, but something about Johnny made you feel different.
It was something about Johnny.
You hated that it was always about Johnny.
But you let him keep touching you, anyway — and, in his arms, you feel finally like you belong some place. His breath feels warm and familiar as it rolls across your skin. His chest feels solid and firm as it presses against your back. When he gets closer than he means to, and his chapped lips accidentally brush the curve of your soft shoulder, you tense like he’s burned you.
Johnny’s breath hitches, too. “Sorry,” he blurts again, wide-eyed and worried that he’s ruined something.
“I liked it,” you confess, as blunt with him as you’ve always been. “I think…”
“You think?” Johnny echoes, pink lips curling. “So, you’re not sure?”
“No,” you answer plainly and spare him only a brief glance from the corner of your eye. “So you should probably try again. Just in case.”
He doesn’t know how you do it — how you manage to torment him with your feigned ambivalence and reward him with your closeness at the same time. Johnny obeys you anyway, though, ‘cause it’s in his blood to bend to your every whim. He thinks if the two of you were sunflowers, he’d face you instead of the sun.
He smooths his plush lips slowly along the expanse of your exposed skin, from the edge of your shoulder to the junction of your neck — not quite kissing you, just caressing you with his mouth. His tongue darts out to wet dry lips, and the pink brushes just over your pulse.
You hum on an exhaled breath. And in the deathly quiet of outer space, it sounds almost like a moan.
Johnny falters briefly. “…More?” he whispers against your skin.
You nod wordlessly. You couldn’t get the words out if you tried. You just know you want him to kiss you. God, you don’t want him to stop kissing you.
The entire universe spins around you when his warm lips lock more intentionally on your neck. You go dizzy in an instant without the gravity to hold you down. It makes you feel like you’re going crazy — did love make people crazy? Did love turn people into unrecognizable versions of themselves?
You figure it must.
Because the girl who turns her head to catch Johnny’s lips with her own most certainly can’t be you. The girl who abandons her life’s work, who lets her pen and paper float aimlessly next to her, who turns away from the uncharted universe in front of her to hold desperately onto the blonde boy she couldn’t stand a year ago — whoever she is, is a stranger to you now.
Your fingers twist in his freshly cleaned hair, mussing recklessly at the satin blonde tendrils. Johnny’s hand trails down your body in the meanwhile. His warm, wide palms smooth over your bare arms and across your back. He cups the back of your thighs, urging them around his waist. You lick into his mouth and lock your ankles behind him, keeping yourself tethered to him as you float aimlessly in the heavy air.
“And to think…” Johnny pants when you part from him, smiling lips swollen and rosy. “You spent all this time pretending to hate me.”
“I wasn’t pretending,” you slur with his spit on your mouth.
“Really?” he hums. “‘Cause it kinda feels like you like me a lot, actually—”
His strong hands curl around the curve of your hips, pulling you impossibly closer. Your lap sits flush against his own. Something soft and firm presses along your inner thigh. “I could say the same about you, Johnny Storm.”
You shift slightly, and Johnny realizes how hard he is. His cock strains against his sweats and the tighter boxer-briefs he wears beneath them. Feeling distantly overwhelmed and half-embarrassed, his pale cheeks flare pink. “Sorry…” he grimaces.
“Don’t,” you squint, slightly demeaning but somehow still playful. “I like it… I think.”
You kiss him again, deep enough to steal the breath from his lungs, wet enough to feel your spit on his chin. You wrap your legs tighter around his lean waist until his stiffening cock is sandwiched between your bodies, pressed intently into your own warmth.
Johnny gasps through his nose. He almost thinks he can feel the lines of your clothed cunt against him, hidden folds embracing the most sensitive parts of him. It makes him wonder if you’re wearing anything under your thin pajama bottoms as your hips rock back and forth over his own.
Your mouth is equally as unforgiving. You kiss him like you’re searching for heaven in his mouth, like you can taste stars on his tongue. His lungs burn for air, but still he never parts from you. You’re killing him, with your mouth and with your hips, but Johnny throws himself deeper onto the blade, anyway. He pulls you that much closer, kisses you that much deeper — until he worries he might bleed out.
Your lips smack in protest when he parts from you. “We should stop,” he frets through panted breaths, eyes dilated and heavy-lidded.
“Please, don’t—” you beg and fall back into him again.
Johnny falters. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen you beg. He doesn’t think you’ve ever had to before. You never have to beg for anything; all you have to do is take.
A groan sounds deep in his throat when your hips grind over his own in a slow and practiced rhythm. “It’s gonna be too much,” he slurs against your mouth.
“What?”
“I’ll…” he sighs breathlessly and trails off. He can’t figure out the words to say without sounding like a total teenager; he only knows he should probably get them out before he bursts in his boxers and has to explain to Sue why he’s wasting water on a second shower.
“ I’ll cum,” he confesses finally, fingertips digging bruises onto your clothed thighs in a feeble attempt to stop your merciless movements.
Your lidded eyes dart over his form. His tousled blonde hair, his glazed-over ocean eyes, his flushed cheeks, his kiss-swollen mouth. He’s pretty and pathetic. You want to take care of him and ruin him all at once.
“I want you to cum,” you say. You plead. You command.
Johnny loses himself in your assurance. His slow and languid kisses turn sloppy — full of tongue and teeth and swapped spit. The fingers that once restricted you now fight to keep you close. His hands twist into the fabric of your pants as he guides your hips back and forth against him.
A pretty whimper sounds in your throat every time your clit catches the bulbous tip of his clothed cock, and the exhaled breath fans over his cupid’s bow.
His boxers dampen from his drooling pre-cum as he twitches in the confines of his underwear. He wonders if you feel it, too. He figures you must, if your erratic thrusts and choked back whines have anything to say about it.
“Johnny—” you whisper like a warning to him, voice breaking as your inevitable orgasm twists in your belly.
“I know,” he pants through rapid nods. “Fuck, baby— I know.”
He adjusts you on his waist with a pair of wide hands around your thighs. The harsh and sudden movement sends the two of you spiraling, spinning softly together in the open air like two orbiting planets. The new angle opens you wider for him, keeps your throbbing clit pressed intently to his aching cock.
Johnny feels the way your pussy pounds like a heartbeat for him as it rubs up and down his lap. A whine grumbles deep in his throat.
“I’m cumming,” you whimper against his mouth. Foreheads pressed together, eyes squeezed shut, nails digging crescent shapes into his shoulders. Your sensitive clit catches the ridge of his cock over his sweats, and you gasp. “Oh, fuck, Johnny— I’m cumming.”
The blonde boy holds you tighter. He curls one strong arm over your back and towards your shoulder; his other cradles the outside of your clothed thigh in a bruising grip. He keeps you spread open and pressed mercilessly against him while his hips rut with a sporadic sort of rhythm.
“C’mon,” he grunts in panted breaths against your chin. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon—”
You tense in his hold, trembling when you cum for him. Your thighs clench around his waist. Your fingers ball his thin shirt in your fists. Your face screws as you fight back a moan. A whimper rises and dies in your throat instead, as a warm feeling of honeyed release blooms in the pit of your stomach.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Johnny praises in vague mumbles while you twitch in his hold. His hips stutter as his boxers grow sticky with a premature release. “That’s it, baby… Shit. I’m cumming, too— Gonna cum so hard for you, baby. Fuck—”
His voice breaks with a pathetic whimper. He chokes back a louder groan and tilts his heavy head back towards the ceiling.
Through heavy eyes clouded with a lingering pleasure, you watch Johnny’s orgasm rack through his body. His chiseled jaw clenches. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. His skin flares a faint pink color.
Even through the layers of clothes separating you, you feel his cock twitching with each rope of cum it spits into his boxers. Johnny grunts through each one of them, hips stuttering against your own, slow to come back down again.
You just stay like that for a while — limbs entwined, twirling slowly, floating together in every sense of the word. Johnny buries his face in your neck. He presses wet kisses to your burning skin, while you keep your heavy eyes trained on the cupola. You blink slowly at the stars and distant planets there, forgetting until that moment that there’s a whole world out front of you.
An entire universe you spent your whole life dreaming about, gone momentarily forgotten in Johnny Storm’s arms.
“Do you think we’re the first astronauts to orgasm in space?” you wonder aloud in a distant whisper.
It makes Johnny laugh. The warm breath of it fans across your shoulder. His body trembles with it, too. “Yeah,” he scoffs. “You gonna write about me in that book of yours? See what other firsts we could do up here?”
He presses one last innocuous kiss to your neck before parting from you. He lifts his heavy head, lips curled into a crooked smile, and finds you scowling at him in return. “Don’t push it,” you deadpan.
“Sorry,” he grimaces, ‘cause he can never quite tell where the line is — how close you’ll let him get before you’re pulling away again. Apparently, cumming in his pants will only get him so far. “I still get to take you out for that coffee when we get back, though, right?”
“Yes,” you nod in your usual deadpan, though something about your detachment seems different now. Maybe because you’ve still got your thighs wrapped around his waist. “I plan on doing a lot with you when we get back.”
It sounds almost like a threat as it spills from your monotone mouth.
In a blink. In a flash of a bright light. In a searing storm of daunting blue and purple.
On the early morning of the dissent back home, you warned Reed of heightened solar activity. Johnny barely understood a word of it then, but he heard the distant worry in your voice when you told the older man about the strange eruptions of plasma pulsing from the sun, which you feared would disrupt the journey back to Earth.
“Our shielding isn’t strong enough, Reed— We can’t get caught in that flare.”
“We won’t,” he assured, voice strangely even for such an anxiety-riddled man. “You’ll keep an eye on that radar, and Ben will keep us outta the line of fire. We won’t get pulled into that magnetic field, Doc, I swear—”
“It’s not that I’m worried about.”
And you were right not to be.
It was strangely poetic, in a dark, sadistic way, how the thing you dedicated your whole life to learning about ended up killing you in the end.
You’d alerted Reed of the increasing cosmic rays coming in ripples from an aggravated magnetic field. And when Ben hit turbulence, worried that the ship wasn’t strong enough to take it on, the older man told the panicked pilot to push onward. Not because of his own hubris, but because there wasn’t any other choice. There was no going back then — either you laid there and took it, or you pushed the Excelsior to its limits and prayed you escaped unscathed.
Johnny only remembers darkness. And his sister’s screaming. And your strange silence. Then he remembers fire — a big burst of a bright orange flame that engulfed the shuttle as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, snapping in half just before plummeting into the Atlantic.
The Saturn Five did not return to the Earth the same way they had left it.
Ben’s lean, white body, for one, is now covered in bulky calluses that make him a hundred times stronger than the average man, totally unrecognizable from the human he was before. Reed reaches across the aisle for his slumped-over wife, and his arm stretches abnormally to fill the distance between them. Sue, seemingly subconsciously, disappears at random in a flicker of refracted light — as easily as someone turning off a light switch. Johnny burns from the inside out, glowing orange from the wildfire raging inside of him.
And you…
You didn’t return at all.
That’s all Johnny can think about when they’re air-lifted back to the Baxter Building. Press hound the halls outside while ANSA doctors scatter about, unsure of what to make of the suddenly superpowed Saturn Five. He paces back and forth all the while, clenched fists bursting into flame at random, ash burning on his tongue.
“We have to go back out there,” Johnny decides firmly, made stern with his sorrow.
He does not cry for you. His grief is made out of something much more discreet than that, as silent as blood spilling from a weeping wound. Your absence pierces him like a thread through a needle. The thought of finding you again is the only thing keeping him stitched together now.
“With what ship?” Ben calls to him.
“We can build another ship— We’ve done it before!”
Sue pushes through the doctors crowded around her, stumbling towards her baby brother despite the blood matted in her hair. “It wouldn’t do any good, Johnny,” she tries her best to calm him despite the tremor in her own voice.
“We can’t just leave her out there!” the blonde boy shouts, teary eyes wide and crazed. He gestures wildly with his hands, and Sue flinches at the flame he holds within them.
“Johnny—”
“We can’t!”
“Johnny, she’s gone!” Sue shouts over him.
She puts her pale hands to his chest, feeling his rapid heartbeat beneath her palm. Her mouth opens to speak, but the words die on her tongue when her fingers start to disappear on their own accord. She balls the fabric of his shirt into her fists and tries to focus.
“If the fire didn’t kill her, being sucked into the atmosphere would’ve, and you know it! It would’ve crushed her, Johnny—”
The boy shakes his stubborn head. “You don’t know that, Sue,” he chokes.
“But she—” Sue pauses to swallow down her own sob, then flashes her brother a more assured, glassy-eyed look. “But she didn’t suffer, Johnny.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know it. I do. It was quick. It was over before she knew it was happening—”
“Not that,” Johnny snaps and stumbles back. His pale skin glows a faint orange color under the weight of his rage. He softens only at the fearful look in his sister’s eyes. “We don’t know if it killed her at all, Sue…”
The woman sighs, almost sympathetically so. “Johnny…”
“Look at us, Sue!” he shouts, voice ringing through the white and blue med bay.
He gestures around him with fiery hands — at the personified rock that used to be Ben Grimm, at the abnormally flexible limbs of Reed Richards, at the rainbow waves of light dancing around his sister and turning her invisible at whim.
“How do we know that something didn’t happen to her, too? Something that might be keeping her alive out there?”
“There wouldn’t be enough oxygen, Johnny,” Reed comments with an apologetic sigh from where he slouches on an exam table. His words are weighed down with an obvious regret that paints his weathered face. “Even if something did happen, we only had enough air supply for the trip. She’d be running out of oxygen—”
“Don’t!” Johnny snaps with an accusatory finger pointed his way. Reed cowers under the flame in his hand, and the red rage in his dark eyes. “You don’t get to speak right now, Reed— ‘Cause what happened to us out there? That’s on you.”
“It’s on all of us,” Ben says in a feeble attempt to quell the palpable tension.
“It’s on you!” Johnny repeats and storms out of the room, despite the distant calls of his name.
The muffled chatter outside the med bay doors bursts into a symphony of a thousand voices when Johnny rushes into the hallway. He pushes past the press waiting there, dodging questions and camera flashes, as he makes a beeline for the elevator.
“How’s it going in there, Johnny Storm?” he hears a deep-voiced reporter ask.
“How do you think?” the blonde boy bites in response.
His non-answer succeeds only in producing a hundred more questions in return. The choir of unfamiliar voices turns into a buzzing sort of drone as he steps into the lift. Johnny squints at the never-ending flashes and incessant yelling that pervades his inevitable migraine.
“Care to make a comment, Mr. Storm?”
“What happened to Ben?”
“Where’s the Doctor?”
“Are you okay, Johnny Storm?” a younger newswoman, no older than him, calls from the front of the crowd. The only difference in her prying is that it seems almost genuine, as her made-up face screws softly with concern.
“Yeah…” Johnny sighs and presses the button for the main floor. The elevator doors ding as they close ahead of him. “I just… I had a date.”
to the brave souls who made it this far: thank you and i love you and i'm sorry for making you read something so long hahah. but i hope you liked it!! just know i'm giving all of you a virtual kiss on the forehead right now ily!!! (▰˘◡˘▰)
You intrigue Toph in ways she can’t explain. With footsteps too light, and a presence that sometimes slips strangely beyond her reach. Toph should keep her distance from someone she can’t always sense clearly.
Instead, she keeps gravitating toward you. Toph finds herself drawn to you with an intensity she’s never felt before—like the earth itself pulling her toward something fluid, gentle, and impossible to hold onto.
on a night back in hawkins, you decide to drop by an old not-haunt just to see how your old not-friend eddie is doing.
what’s the harm in that?
18+ MDNI┃7.2k
cw: fluff-fest with angsty undertones. reserved/wallflower reader feat. some deep-seated insecurity (they say write what you know, y’know?) and flashbacks to a shitty first kiss that is for sure most definitely not ripped directly from sarah lore 👀
eddie is the Flirtmaster Supreme, I made him too smooth for his own good, truly. r wears a dress, uses she/her pronouns, drinks alcohol, and smokes weed (badly).
You might have guessed Eddie Munson would wind up running the Hideout.
He’d worked there throughout high school, possibly even before then. It had only added to the shroud of mystery and intrigue surrounding him—a source of endless fascination for you and the rest of your former classmates.
Well, okay, maybe that was just you.
Back then he was a lowly barback, bobbing and weaving around the same group of drunks every night, clearing empties and wiping down sticky tables, attempting the Sisyphean task of keeping the bathrooms clean in exchange for his band being allowed up on their so-called stage.
Now he was acting manager and in the process of buying out the original owner so she could retire. He made a lot of changes already—not that you’d ever dared set foot in here during your tenure at Hawkins High back in the day. But you (rightfully) assumed it was your average hole in the wall, with barely any light coming through the dirt-streaked windows; all the walls papered so thoroughly with stickers and graffiti you couldn’t guess what color they were; furniture so rickety and shoddily built it fell apart if you so much as looked at it wrong.
The space was still divey, but he’d changed up some of the decor and added some light fixtures over the bar so people could actually see what they were drinking. He’d swapped out the older standing tables for black vinyl booths that lined the walls, leaving the middle open for shows.
He’d also managed to construct an honest-to-god stage in the corner with lights, and a sound system and everything. At present it was empty, but according to the fliers tacked up on the door quite a few bands were slated to play there over the next couple of weeks. His own included.
And it seemed the interior wasn’t the only thing that had been updated.
His height still afforded him the same gangly frame you remembered from high-school, but he’d filled out slightly with more muscle and a bit of softness around his formerly bony hips—which you were most definitely not checking out as he spun a bar key on his middle finger and slipped it smoothly into the back pocket of his black jeans.
You had fully been expecting just to slide onto one of the newly refurbished stools that ran along the side of the bar and drink in relative anonymity. Instead, you were stunned to find recognition in Eddie’s eyes as he turned to greet you and your name fell easily from his lips.
Like he’d been saying it for years.
“This is a surprise,” he said, leaning casually on his side of the bar.
Your mouth dropped open, but not to speak. You just blinked back at him in silent stupor.
His arms were turned out, his sleeveless tank showing off the sinewy muscles wrapped around them and the same tattoos you must have wasted hours of class time staring at. He’d cut it off at the bottom,its curled hem barely skimming the top of his handcuff belt, and your mouth watered at the thought of him reaching for something over his head to reveal a sliver of his pale stomach and the tantalizing patch of sparse hair that swirled just below his navel.
“You know me?” you asked, still blanched with confusion.
“‘Course I do.” He gave you a warm smile, deep dimples forming on either side of it. “I think I only passed Old McDonnel’s class because you let me copy your notes every morning.”
He paused and took a long moment to let his eyes wander appreciatively up and down your form. You felt your thighs press, grateful for the oak shield that hid your reaction from his view.
“Don’t you know me?” he purred.
Jesus. You thought you might slide right off the freshly re-upholstered seat under you.
“Oh– I…um,” you cleared your throat, “Yeah, of c-course I do. You’re Eddie. Eddie Munson.”
“Ding ding,” he grinned. “Remembering my name gets you a drink on the house. Whad’you like?”
He pushed off the bar and tipped his head at the rows of bottles lined up behind him, never taking his eyes off yours. They glinted like shards of onyx under the warm glow of the pendant lights.
“A rum and ginger?” you replied sheepishly, praying he didn’t think you were too lame for not going with the typical whisky. But Eddie just shot you a wink as he reached for a clean glass.
“Mm, something sweet with a little bite? Sounds about right for you.”
You’re glad to have a moment to collect yourself when he looks down to scoop some ice out of the bin, because you were not remotely prepared for this onslaught of charm. You also weren’t sure where he got the idea that there was any bite to you at all, but the implication alone makes your body buzz watching him pour out the liquor and then spray in your mixer with the soda gun.
He placed the drink down in front of you, bubbles effervescing as he set a lime on the rim and juices dribbled down its side. He then waited, expectant smile on his lips as he watched you take your first sip. Only when you had, giving an encouraging nod and a quiet thanks, did Eddie finally tear his eyes away, seemingly remembering the rest of the people in the bar existed.
In a flash, he’d done a quick check with the scant number of other patrons, closing out one’s tab and replenishing another’s drink before he returned to his spot in front of you.
“So, what brings you in?” he asked. “You moved, right? Haven’t seen you around.”
“Y-yeah, I left for school and just…stayed away,” you chuckled. “I’m here for my dad’s birthday.”
Eddie plucked a maraschino cherry from a jar he produced seemingly out of thin air and dropped it into your drink, giving you another smile as he licked sticky red juice from his thumb.
“Sounds festive,” he hummed, veins in his hand bulging as he screwed the lid back on the jar.
Fucking christ on a cracker.
Was he trying to kill you?
“Well, I guess…” you cringed inwardly at the words before they even left your mouth, “I guess it’s sort of my birthday too? They’re a couple days apart, but we always mash ‘em together.”
“Oh, shit. Way to bury the lede, sweetheart!”
Eddie leaned on the bar again, folding his arms under his chest this time so his eyeline was level with yours and he could lean a little further forward, edging his way into your space.
“It’s not a big deal,” you insisted. “I don’t really celebrate it.”
“Well, that’s no good.” He shook his head. “You’re definitely worth celebrating.”
Pure fire rose in your cheeks at his leading tone, and you felt your brain whirring trying to think of a response. Thankfully, a rumbly and disgruntled voice from the end of the bar called out for some attention and saved you from yourself. Eddie’s expression soured and his eyes rolled as he straightened up to full height.
“Wha-a-at?!” he brayed loudly, shooting you a sly wink when he caught your wide-eyed gaze.
Your panic turned out to be unfounded, the owner of the voice giving up a wry chuckle, evidently not phased in the slightest by this outburst. The older man huddled against the wall simply smirked and snarked about how he needed to ‘quit flirting long enough to serve some drinks.’
“Bah! You’re just jealous, Ray,” Eddie scoffed, flapping a hand at him that turned into a warning finger. “And I better not catch you trying to sneak her out from under me, alright? She’s mine.”
This time, it wasn’t just your cheeks that caught on fire. Your entire body was searing, engulfed by flames, tingling as if you’d been dunked in a vat of magma. And your mind was blank—devoid of any thought aside from those two words flashing like a neon sign on a loop in your head:
She’s mine. She’s mine. She’s mine.
It had to be a bit. Just an off-handed comment he threw around without giving any thought to who it was being prescribed to. Even so, you allowed yourself to bask briefly in the satisfaction.
It made something stir deep within your gut. Some slumbering giant who had lain dormant for so long you were certain it had fallen into legend. A creature you tended from a young age, only to seal it away in a cavernous tomb before it could grow too large to contain—strong enough to decimate whole villages in a single strike.
But now it was awake. And making itself known by the ache at the crux of your thighs.
“Can’t believe you weren’t going to tell me it was your birthday,” Eddie chuckled as he came back to you with a teasing smile. “You’re really racking up the free drinks tonight, huh?”
You sputtered on the sip you’d just taken of the cocktail in front of you.
“Oh, no, you don’t have to—”
He held a hand up to stop you, the other reaching blindly behind him to grab a bottle of rye he used to top off Ray’s drink. “Nope, uh-uh, don’t wanna hear it,” Eddie insisted. “It’s actually illegal for me to charge for a birthday drink. Unless, of course, you wanna see me in handcuffs?”
He leaned into your space again, lowering his voice for that last part.
His brow lifted in a suggestive arch, disappearing behind his scraggly bangs, and you felt like you might rip off a hunk of your stool you were gripping the seat so tight.
Was this real life?
Was Eddie Musnon…flirting with you?
The thought alone sets off a second heartbeat between your legs, practically throbbing.
Absolutely not, you answered yourself. He is a bartender and you’re at his bar. All he’s interested in is a good tip. Don’t be that guy at the strip club who thinks a lap dance ‘means something.’
“N…no,” you answered him meekly (also lying), “wouldn’t want that.”
Eddie nodded, still smiling as he grabbed a glass and started to dry it with a towel. Conveniently, remaining in the same spot in front of you.
“So, how’s the visit so far?” he asked.
“It’s good, um…just kind of strange being back,” you hemmed, hands wringing in your lap.
Eddie pulled his lower lip back with his teeth. A look you couldn’t quite name flickered in his dark eyes and he shrugged, his chin dropping to his chest as he watched his hands dry another glass.
“Yeah, well. You took off so fast after graduation I’m surprised you didn’t break the sound barrier.”
He kept his head bent, focused on his task, but he couldn’t stop his gaze darting up to watch you through the fan of his thick lashes. You felt your breath catch when your eyes met, and promptly looked away. You took another sip of your drink, mostly sucking air through your straw while you stared at the ice, and couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking of the same thing you were…
Graduation night. The bonfire in the woods. The rows of trucks and cars parked haphazardly along the edge of the forest with their headlights shining into the treeline as the class of ‘86 reveled in the bacchanalia of their newly minted freedom.
The last high-school party any of you would ever attend.
You couldn’t say what ultimately possessed you to go. Maybe you’d been emboldened by the fact that it was most likely the last time you’d ever see any of these people again. Maybe it was just good timing that your friend from yearbook had offered you a ride seconds after you overheard some jock confirm with Eddie that he’d be there selling that night. Maybe you wanted, for once in your entire high school career, to do something a little bit reckless and decidedly un-like yourself.
Or maybe it was just the pure, unbridled hope you might run into him there.
Eddie’s lips parted to speak again, but he was cut off by a group of younger guys who had come in and immediately started asking him about drinks and where the darts were for the dartboards.
And while he dealt with them, you found yourself drifting back into the memory of that night…
Clutching the ringed hand he offered as you clumsily tried to navigate the roots that sprawled on the forest floor; making your way towards the outermost edge of the party. Still close enough to the blaze to be scantly lit, but far enough that no one would notice you with The Freak, standing behind the thick trunk of a tall, imposing oak.
You leaned back against it, the rough bark biting into your bare back and snagging slightly on the gauzy material of your sundress. You had talked yourself into buying the revealing garment by reasoning that no one would ever even see the spaghetti straps and the nakedness of your arms and shoulders and collar bones under the bulky cover of your emerald green robe.
But now, with Eddie’s gaze drinking in the sight of all your gloriously exposed skin, you were oddly pleased you hadn’t had enough time to change in between coming home from the dinner with your parents and rushing back out the door when you spotted your friend’s car pulling into the driveway.
The firelight flickered, reflecting in his eyes that were as black as the shadowy woods at his back, and you literally felt every thought in your head being obliterated. You tried to will yourself to speak but couldn’t manage so much as a squeak, having used up all your boldness to approach him at the fire and ask if he had anything to smoke. Stomach tying itself into knots with every word.
With a slow smile, Eddie pushed back the curtain of his long hair and revealed the joint he’d tucked behind his ear. He held it out in a quiet offering, but you made no move to take it from him.
“I, um…I don’t know h-how,” you admitted, heart thumping relentlessly against your ribcage.
“That’s okay,” he said before placing the joint in between his lips instead. God, his lips…
Your pulse jumped, temples throbbing so hard you could scarcely breathe while he dug around in his jacket pocket looking for a lighter. He took a couple short, shallow puffs to get it going and a cloud of its earthy smell imbued your senses, blending with the sharper scent of the bonfire.
He then pinched it in the middle and held up the smaller end to your mouth.
“Just…take it slow,” he murmured, heavy-lidded gaze transfixed somewhere on the lower half of your face. “Don’t inhale too hard.”
You nodded, even though you barely registered the words he was saying you were still so deeply distracted by his lips, and the fact that your own were now so close to his fingers. Trembling like a leaf and desperately trying not to look like you were, you touched your mouth to the paper.
Oh fuck, mother bitch, that burned—
Tears immediately sprang in your eyes and you sputtered, trying to smother the cough as it burst forth and failing. It came out in a relentless string of dry hacks, your nose stinging and your throat tightening as you whipped your head sideways to avoid spraying spittle directly in Eddie’s face.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” he soothed, the tiny smile he was trying to hide coming through in his voice as he rubbed his hand across your back in a wide circle, coaxing you through your fit.
Not that you could even enjoy the sensation of his warm palm on your bare skin.
He kept it up, though, until you were able to catch your breath and stand up (somewhat) straight.
“So-sorry,” you wheezed, giving your chest a solid thwap trying to clear your throat.
“Nah,” Eddie waved off your apology, grinding the lit end of the joint into the bark of the tree before he placed it back behind his ear. “It’s really fine. Happens to the best of us. Honest.”
You felt yourself slump against the trunk in an attempt to hold yourself up. It was tough to say if the dizzy, floating feeling in your head was due to the singular hit you’d taken off that joint, or just a reaction to Eddie’s very presence. He’d stopped rubbing your back, but hadn’t yet moved away from you. Still standing close enough you were breathing in the smell of his cologne.
Slowly, his hand came up to the side of your face and he pressed the pad of his thumb to the skin just beneath your lashes, swiping away a stray tear that leaked from the corner of your eye.
In that moment, everything had seemed to slow practically to a standstill. No more breeze rustling the tree branches overhead, no more drunken teenagers stumbling into one another, no more beers sloshing out of plastic cups and splattering on the soft earth. The scope of the entire world had narrowed down to you and Eddie and the negligible number of inches between you.
“You want, uh…water? Or anything?” he asked, his thumb still idly stroking your cheekbone.
Your head shook slowly, barely conscious of the moment, your eyes never leaving his. He gazed back at you, soft and endearing, the corner of his mouth crooked up. Looking at you almost like he knew all the things you’d been thinking as you laid in your bed at night. Like he’d seen you touch your fingers to your lips in the softest, barely-there brush, imagining it was his mouth.
His shoulder shifted and you felt his other hand on your hip, gripping you purposely. Deliberately.
All at once, it was too much. The heavy pounding of your heart in your chest too rapid, turning from anticipation to terror. You felt like you were behind the wheel of a racecar whose speed had climbed too high without you noticing, teetering on the verge of spinning out of control.
Almost hearing the screech of tires, you slammed down on the brakes.
“I-I have to go.”
With the ghost of his hand’s warmth still on your cheek, you slipped out of the space in between the tree and his body. In short, uneven strides you stumbled back to the party and gripped your friend’s forearm as hard as you could when you found her, insisting ‘we need to leave.’
And seeing the wild, panicked look in your eyes, she didn’t dare argue.
You wished he kissed you that night. You thought about it for weeks afterward, reliving every step in your head, pinpointing every humiliating second.
It was a fool’s errand, honestly. From the moment you approached him, you should’ve known.
Eddie Munson had plenty of girls to kiss. Plenty of girls whose pits didn’t sweat and whose knees didn’t buckle at the thought of someone getting close to them. Who didn’t tremble with full-body shakes like a neurotic chihuahua when someone put a hand on their hip.
You and he weren’t even friends. You’d never had so much as a real conversation.
The best you could muster was a timid ‘you’re welcome’ whenever he’d returned your notes after copying them, or a small wave when your eyes unwittingly met his across the cafeteria.
He talked, sure. But he could talk to anybody. He could debate a brick wall if the occasion arose. Any time he’d spent making idle chatter with you was surely just an attempt to fritter away a couple hours of class time. And you’d hung on his every word, barely offering a pittance in return.
“Sorry about that,” Eddie grumbled.
He slid back into his place in front of you just as the door behind you smacked closed. The group of guys who came in left just as quickly, evidently unimpressed with his selection of Scotch.
Truthfully, you couldn’t say you were sad to see them go.
“You okay?” he asked, his head dipping to catch your eye. “You want water, or…”
Your eyes flicked up to meet his as he trailed off, his face clouding with some strange expression as his fingers drummed on the surface of the bar. His gaze was suddenly distant, almost as though he too was recalling the last time he’d asked you that. Impossible as that was.
“N…no,” you exhaled the sharp breath you were holding. “I’m alright.”
Eddie nodded, his head bobbing longer than was necessary as if to a song that only he could hear before he grabbed a pint glass and filled it with water anyway, setting it down in front of you.
Even without that group of guys to deal with, Eddie got annoyingly busy after that. Annoying to him, at least. He grimaced every time somebody called him away either for a refill or to order.
The bar wasn’t crowded, by any means, but there was a consistent flow of people who needed him, demanding the attention he seemed antsy to direct somewhere else.
You got down to the last of your drink, and just as you were debating whether you should commit to another, a new one had appeared in front of you, delivered with a wink and a smirk from a dark-haired blur as he moved past you on his way down to the other end of the bar.
Smiling around the straw, you snuck a glance at Eddie and found him already looking back at you while he counted out l change. Your neck twinged with the urge to turn away, embarrassed at being caught, until you remembered he was the one who’d been caught looking at you.
And he didn’t seem embarrassed at all.
The small rush petered out and Eddie came back to you, letting out an exaggerated ‘whew!’ as he dragged the back of his hand across his brow.
“That almost felt like work,” he groaned.
Maybe it was the rum going to your head, but you couldn’t help giggling at the terrible joke, a hand coming up to cover your face when a soft snort unwittingly escaped through your nose.
Your eyes met his again, twin pools of espresso just about twinkling at the sound.
The bar was much emptier now, and quieter too. It wasn’t like it had been loud before, but now its silence felt sort of daunting. The kind of silence that made you feel anxious about how to fill it.
Thankfully, Eddie was adept as ever at defeating awkward pauses.
“You know…there’s a bunch of stuff I never knew about you,” he said after a few minutes.
“Really?” you scoffed. “Like what?”
“I don’t know, lots of things,” he chuckled. “What about, like…your first kiss?”
Your fingers tensed around your glass. And you thought if you were a little stronger, it might have cracked open against your palm when every muscle in your face went still as stone.
You hated thinking about your first kiss.
Simply put, it was a mess. Brought on by a lethal mix of green apple vodka and your self-esteem at a record low. Sloppy and clumsy and too-quick. Over before you even had your bearings.
He just…attacked you. Pushed his face into yours, barely aiming. Like he was in a hurry to get it over with. Like you could’ve been anybody with a mouth and it wouldn’t make any difference.
It was a guy who was sort of friends with (and sort of wanted to fuck) your roommate. One you’d go with to parties or out to the bars. But he’d only ever engaged with you after he’d been drinking. Sober, you were lucky to get so much as a cursory greeting—assuming he got your name right.
The night it happened, you'd gone out with a big group and he’d been pestering you.
Not flirting, not as far as you could tell, just irking. Stealing sips of your drink, reaching behind you to pick up the hood of your sweatshirt and pull it up over your head, tugging on your sleeves, poking you, reaching behind his friend sitting in the middle seat of the cab to tickle your ear.
Then you got home and he started texting, asking for—no, telling—you to come over.
And to your credit, you tried to discourage it.
Begging him off with next time, some other time, another time. Because maybe if he could muster some of this enthusiasm when he was sober, you might find yourself a little more amenable to the idea. But then he hit you with the words you had no idea would still haunt you even years later:
honestly, it’s now or never.
You’d panicked. It had taken this long to find someone who was even willing to kiss you—who knew how long it would be before you could find another? Before you’d ever have another chance. So…you did it. Told him to meet you outside your dorm, and kissed him. And then he left. Because of course he didn’t just want to make out. But at least you had enough sense to shut that down.
You shook your head, mouth dry and your throat suddenly too tight for your words to get out.
“It, um…it was nothing to write home about.” you answered, staring at your lap.
Eddie, mercifully, either didn’t notice the immediate shift in your demeanor, or he simply elected to ignore it. “Okay, screw your first kiss,” he said daringly. “Tell me about your best one.”
Your fingers traced the edge of your glass, running down the ridges of the facets, freezing at his question. All ofthe air in your chest rushed out, leaving the cavity constricting as you struggled to breathe normally. The molten brown of Eddie’s eyes scanned over your expression, his features wrinkling with concern when he saw the pained look that came over your face.
“I don’t wanna do that,” you said quietly.
Something in your tone made Eddie’s gaze soften. He dropped down to his elbows, leaning in a bit closer and lowering his voice to a murmur. Something just for you to hear.
“How come?” he asked.
“Because I…” Your throat tightened in a thick, dry swallow and you had to take a swig of your drink before you could go on, “...because I’ve never really had a good one.”
The admission hangs in what little space there is between your faces. As soon as the words left your lips, you wished you could take them back. Suck them back into your lungs and rewind the whole evening until your feet carried you back out to the parking lot and over the gravel where your car was parked, back to your room at your parents house where you belonged.
“Never?” Eddie frowned.
And you can’t say if it’s the softness in his voice or the confusion in his eyes, but you keep going. Trying to shrug it off, trying not to sound so sad and pathetic. Broken and weary.
“They always kinda rushed it,” you said. “I didn’t get a chance to breathe or think, they just—”
“No drumroll,” Eddie finished for you.
His expression seemed to curdle like he’d just smelled something sour, his jaw ticking in a hard set frown. The veins in his arms stood out slightly as his grip tightened on the bar towel he’d been using to dry some glassware while you talked.
“That’s awfully disappointing,” he sighed, twirling the towel between his hands and then snapping it lightly against the edge of the bar with a soft tap. “Sometimes the lead-in is the best part.”
“Yeah, well,” you shrugged and swept the back of your hand across your cheek just to be sure you weren’t crying. “Clearly, I pick a lot of winners.”
Eddie chortled at that, his chest rising in a short puff. “Any of ‘em still live ‘round here?” he asked. “Gimme some names, I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Oh, no,” you shook your head rapidly, “this was in college. I never—”
You winced, cringing inwardly at what you’d been about to reveal: that you had gone most of your adolescent life without kissing anyone. That the thing most people had knocked out by the time they were pre-teens, you hadn’t managed until you were well into your twenties. And even when you did, it was always so dissatisfying. Lacking.
You let out a joyless laugh, glancing down at the drink in front of you. “I mean, nobody around here was ever interested, so—”
“Bullshit.”
“Huh?”
“I’m calling bullshit, sweetheart,” Eddie echoed himself, the sing-song words laced with a leading tone. “I know for a fact someone liked you.”
“Oh, really?” you scoffed in disbelief as you went to take another sip. “Like who?”
That devilish smile twisted up the corner of his lips again, and he tilted his head. “Me, for one.”
Your sinuses erupted with pain as you nearly shot ginger ale out of your nose. You blinked furiously and your hand shot up to cover your face.
“Yo—you what?” you sputtered, still half-choking.
“Always thought you were cute,” he shrugged. “Got a thing for smart girls.”
You felt your stomach drop, plummeting to the dingy floor underneath your feet.
Jesus. Were you really so pathetic that Eddie Munson had to dream up some imaginary crush just to make you feel better? This was a level of rock bottom you’d never imagined hitting. With a trembling hand, you reached for a napkin at the same time Eddie offered you one, your fingers meeting briefly when you took it, static crackling in the air and tingling where you’d touched.
You dabbed under your nose, still burning from the threat of fizzy ginger ale shooting through it.
“I wasn’t that smart,” you muttered, mostly to yourself. “Trust me.”
Eddie’s mouth popped open to respond, but he didn't get the chance. From the same spot he had not moved from all night, Ray’s voice cut through the low music playing over the sound system.
He said something about his chariot being on the way and having to cash out—assuming that Eddie actually wanted to get paid that night. The pair of them traded a few more friendly barbs you were starting to glean were par for the course for these two, and as Ray settles up it dawns on you.
Aside from him, you’re the only one left in the bar.
While you were distracted with Eddie, everybody else had steadily filtered out until it was down to just the three of you. And once Ray was gone, it would be just you and him. All alone.
Once he’d paid, Ray slid off of his stool and Eddie came out from behind the bar to help him over to the door. The two of them chuckled together as Eddie held it open for him and then pulled it firmly shut once they said their goodbyes.
But then, instead of returning to his side of the bar, he sidled up next to you instead.
You fought the instinct to jump when Eddie appeared at your side, the closest he’d been to you all night. His scent was even stronger, sweat and musk mingling with the aromas of bitters and liquor. It made you feel woozy, swaying on your stool like you’d taken a shot of 100-proof him.
“I need a break,” he said, nodding in the direction of the back door then tapping the pack of smokes rolled into his shirt sleeve that sat on his shoulder.
You blinked back at him mutely.
Was that your cue to get lost? If you weren’t here, would he be able to close up and go home? If he genuinely wasn’t going to charge you for your drinks, you had no tab to settle.
You could just tip him and go. Get out of his hair. God, his hair. His beautiful, beautiful hair.
“Oh…kay,” you said slowly, mentally flogging yourself for remaining in your seat when he was so clearly trying to get rid of you. But you couldn’t find the will to stand—not when you were being pinned down by his devilishly handsome smile and his penetrating, all-consuming stare.
He chuckled, letting his head fall to rest his cheek on his shoulder, his eyes shining as he smiled at you and then nodded at the back door again.
“Come keep me company, sweetheart.”
The back of the Hideout wasn’t all that different from the front.
Aside from the dumpsters and the wooden crates stacked next to them, it was nearly identical. And rather of an assortment of cars parked across the gravel lot, it was Eddie’s van pulled up next to the loading door, alongside the cinderblock structure.
A single flood light shone down on the two of you as he pushed the door open, brandishing his free arm with a flourish as though he was escorting you into a castle rather than an alley.
You giggled at the display, recalling how he used to do the exact same thing when you were leaving the one class you had in common—hanging back after the bell had rung so you and he were walking out at the same time, then scurrying ahead of you to grab the door and hold it before it closed.
Hugging yourself despite the balmy night air, your eyes darted about nervously, looking anywhere but at him, already mentally preparing an excuse for not taking a cigarette when he offered one.
Except Eddie didn’t even reach for his pack.
“So…” he said, spinning abruptly to face you, “I’ve been thinking about something.”
“Really?” you asked. “What’s that?”
“I just…” he sighed and tipped his head back, exhaling up to the sky. He brought his eyes back down and you swore tiny pieces of the moon had landed in them. “I think you deserve a good kiss.”
You stared back at him, speechless as you’d been when he recognized you the moment you came into the bar. Beneath you, your legs had started to tremble and you felt your breathing get heavier. Your shoulders tensed, thinking any minute you’d be hearing the blare of your alarm clock.
“Oh,” was all you could say.
Eddie licked his lips thoughtfully, taking a careful step closer to you. “And I,” he started with a thick swallow, “would really like to give you one.”
You felt your eyes widen, about ready to pop out of their sockets. The ‘YES’ you wanted to scream gets lodged so tight in your throat you think you might actually choke, mouth dropping open.
“Is that…okay?” he asked, tilting his head at you as he parsed your expression. It was more than okay. It sounded like a dream come true.
You took the deepest breath you could manage, chest shuddering with the effort, and nodded
“Okay,” Eddie said, letting out a breath of his own, as if he had been holding it. “Good.”
He took your hand in his and carefully brought it up to the nape of his neck. He helped you thread your fingers into his hair and encouraged you to grasp his curls firmly at the root. Your breathing hitched as his touch trailed over your knuckles and down your forearm to your elbow.
“Don’t be scared to hold on tight,” he burred low in your ear. “I like it when it hurts a little.”
Your grip tensed as his hands settled on your hips, squeezing gently as he backed you up to the brick wall. It felt gritty and cold against your back, but you couldn’t find it in you to care one bit.
Eddie’s hands squeezed again, sliding them up a little higher to your waist.
“Fuck, are you beautiful…” he murmured, his eyes flitting wherever they were able at such close proximity. The slope of your nose, the curve of your jaw, the graceful lines of your neck.
His voice was so soft, so adoring, you felt your knees liquifying. You wanted nothing more than to believe him implicitly, but you couldn't stop the little seed of doubt deep in your gut that quivered beneath the earth from peeking out through the undergrowth until it had sprouted.
“Really?” you whispered, hating how mousey you sounded. How timid and unsure.
He brought one of his hands up to cradle the side of your face. Your eyes fluttered closed, leaning in to the warmth of his palm, interrupted only by the cool bite of his rings that dissipated when they warmed to the temperature of your skin.
Still, you couldn't help but shiver when your eyes opened to find Eddie's gaze focused so intently on yours, squinting in a bemused sort of way.
“Do you honestly not know?” he asked you with a slow grin. “You really don’t see it?”
All you could do was shrug. You didn't think you were, like, hideous or anything. But you had never been particularly impressed by your looks. And no one had ever looked at you or acted like you were some ethereal being who'd fallen to earth just to grace these mere mortals with your face.
Well, at least not until now.
“Eddie, you…”
He shook his head, stopping your words on their way out of your mouth. Like somehow he’d heard the ‘don’t have to do this’ you’d been thinking.
“I know,” he whispered, close enough that his breath hit your skin in a soft puff. “I want to.”
He took a long moment, letting the edge of his thumb brush along the high points of your cheek. His gaze only grew more intense, his face inching closer as his eyes began to flutter closed. You felt your foot hovering over that imaginary brake pad, threatening to slam down on it just like it had all those years ago. But it never does.
You don’t let it.
His nose touched your face before his lips, its rounded tip pressing into the apple of your cheek before your mouth melds with his. It’s the softest, slowest, most tender kiss you ever experienced. He lets you have all the time in the world to think about it, to notice the ways his movements ebb and flow, his jaw and mouth all working together.
To feel the way his chest expands, taking the deepest breath of you he can and holding it inside his lungs like he can’t stand the idea of losing whatever part of you he just inhaled.
You have all this time to think, but your head has never been so empty. No, not empty. Quiet.
It’s as if sound itself ceases to exist. Not even your own rapid heartbeat pounding in your ears is enough to break through the pure peace of finally, finally getting to kiss Eddie Munson.
There’s no more cars whizzing past, speeding down the two-lane highway. There’s no more hum of the exhaust fan or relentless buzz of the bare bulb flickering over the back door.
There’s just…nothing.
Nothing but the feel of Eddie’s mouth tenaciously exploring yours, dragging every second out into a minute and savoring like it’s something precious—something he’s scared he’ll never get again.
He doesn’t dare pull back when your lips part with a quiet click, just stays right there with his face close to yours and his shaky breath expelling. It’s only as the world slowly leaks back into focus that you realize his fingers are trembling against your waist and his bottom lip is quivering.
“That was…wow.”
You can’t help but laugh gently at his words, dizzy with the elation that went straight to your head. His eyes flit across your face, his brows lifting in a silent request for more.
Your nod is shaky, but lacks no enthusiasm. And it’s all the permission he needs to dive back in.
He takes you faster this time, clutching you harder to pull you tighter against him. There’s a latent strength in his arms, a tension coiled in his corded muscles he’s working so hard to restrain.
Don’t, you wanted to scream at him. Don’t stop, don’t hold back, I want it all—
God, you wished you could will the words to leave your throat. They sat there, lodged firmly in your esophagus, practically cutting off air supply.
Eddie moved his hands upwards to cup your face, squishing your cheeks just a little as he cradled them tenderly in his calloused palms.
You hummed into his mouth, excited and anxious all at once, and Eddie sucks in a breath through his nose. Like he’s not gonna let something stupid like breathing get in the way of this.
You break apart just shy of your lungs bursting, the both of you panting heavily into one another’s mouths, trying to catch your breath. He blinks heavily, dazed and delirious as he asks,
“When’s your birthday?”
“Wh…huh?”
“Your birthday,” he repeated, still panting, “was it today?”
You tried to think—a Herculean sort of effort when you could still taste Eddie’s lips on yours—and finally sifted something from the primordial ooze he’d turned your brain into.
“N-no. It’s, uhh…” It took you a second to remember what day it even was. “It’s tomorrow.”
“Thank god,” Eddie grinned and breathed out in relief. “I want to take you out.”
“Out?” You blinked a couple times, brow pinching together. “Out…where?”
“Like for a date, out,” he couldn’t help but snicker. “Movie. Dinner. General revelry?”
Warmth exploded in the middle of your chest. “You…you’re not working?”
“Peg’ll cover for me,” he said assuredly. “If it’s for something important.”
“And I’m…” you looked back at him, hope shining in your gaze, “...important?”
He smiled at you again, eyes all peaceful and dreamy as he reached up to trace the side of your face, sweeping the tips of his fingers from your temple to the bottom of your chin.
“If you even have to ask,” he sighed and shook his head, “I didn’t do my job right.”
And then his mouth is on yours again, his hand sliding back to cup the nape of your neck, holding you in place as he kisses you deeply. It’s not, not a sweet kiss, but it’s not just sweet. There’s a little something more to it this time. Something dizzying and breath-stealing and…hot.
You feel his body press up against yours fully before he remembers himself, but the loss of heat and pressure makes you mewl pitifully into his mouth. No. Don’t. Stay, you want to beg.
Your hands moved out of their own volition and grasped fistfuls of his shirt, tugging him back into you. His laugh rumbles low in his throat and you can feel him smiling into your next kiss.
A smile that doesn’t dim one bit when you part.
“Should we, um…” you heard your own giggle, the twitterpated reaction semialien to your dazed and dopamine-addled brain. “Should we go back in?”
Eddie let out a tiny noise that sounded dangerous close to a whine. “What for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” you tittered, “just to be sure you’re not being robbed blind or something?”
You glanced at the door, imagining the bar filled with big disgruntled men ransacking the liquor on the other side, descending into chaos with no one to stop them. Eddie’s teeth flashed in a grin, dark chuckle stuttering in his chest, a mischievous edge to the sound you remembered well.
Normally hearing it right before he did something particularly devious.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he exhaled, letting his forehead rest against yours, “the door’s been locked and the sign’s been off since Ray left.”
big time snuggles for reading my lil indulgence 😌 this one is for the bad-kiss-havers, we deserve a re-do. love you, mean it!
robin buckley x childhood best friend!reader
the stars align after your rooftop gathering. Robin takes you by the hand and finds there's a whole other world to your presence.
foreword: for the sweethearts and girl kissers <3
cw: Robin x Reader, childhood best friends, sapphic/lesbian pairing, R wears a skirt, R referred to as ‘girl’ once, R is implied fat/plussized, R has breasts + a vagina, autistic4autistic vibe, pet names (incl. ‘Buck’ for Robin), weed and alcohol mention, hand kink, praise kink, flirting, making out, oral fixation, dry humping, thigh riding, oral (R receiving), soft service top Robin, body worship, overstimulation, aftercare, smut and fluff and feelings, MDNI
wc: 5.7k
Robin steals you away, after the sunset rooftop gathering draws to a close.
Tugs at your sleeve while everyone is hugging their goodbyes in the gravel lot of the Squawk and whispers, low at your ear- “Wanna stay behind an extra hour with me?”
With me, she’d said. Like it was a secret party and you’d been chosen.
Of course you said yes.
Scrunched your nose at her over your shoulder and delighted in her responding giggle. Followed her through the maze of the dark, quiet radio station while she led you with a brave face and a flashlight all the way to her favorite spot in the whole building.
Even after all these years and miles apart, the rhythm established between the two of you in high school has somehow transitioned seamlessly into your young adulthoods.
You fall back into it so fluidly- laughing at the same jokes, inventing new ones, striking up that familiar language that was invented around school bells and sleepovers and folded notes passed between fingers.
Robin is still finding ways to make you feel special, wanted- like maybe you’re still bumping hips in the two-pea pod of life. Even after all these miles apart, and all this time.
Another thing that hasn’t changed?
Robin’s hands are just as captivating and distracting as they were in your youth.
The shape of them, the way they twiddle in the air when she talks, black nail polish glinting in the lamplight- it’s like she’s mesmerizing you from the other end of the couch.
“-and technically, this is the greenroom, for, like, ‘radio guests of high esteem’, or whatever.”
Her fingers hook around the phrase, then flit back to toying with the rings on her right hand. “But I guess we never got anyone cool enough to actually put it to use, so… mostly Steve and I just used it to smoke contraband.”
“Oh my god.” You laugh at the idea, eyes dropping to watch the spin of the red garnet rock in a loop around her middle finger. “You didn’t.”
Robin gives you one of her turned-down grins, shrugging, going for innocent but missing it by a mile.
“What? There’s no smoke detector. It was a perfect room for lighting up some hash and coasting through a boring shift of ad reads and Steve’s questionable record choices.”
She shudders in mock horror, muttering something about too many Bee Gees as you laugh, again- this humor is easy, too. Comfortable and intimate.
Just like your sleepovers of long past, the ephemera of your lives come together again.
Your black kitten heels tangled in her combat boot laces, tipped over on the carpet by the door. Her earrings on the coffeetable- a longsword and, in proper Robin abnormal fashion, a tiny dinosaur- settled in the loop of your necklace you’d cast off earlier.
Your sheer tights are in a heap, too- you’d peeled them off the moment you were alone, feeling better with the cool air against your legs which are currently tucked beneath you. The tartan skirt you chose for graduation today has kept its pleats, spanning over your bare knees, just shy of too short which doesn’t really matter now that it’s just the two of you.
Robin’s hair is longer than when you last saw her. It falls over her shoulders in honeyed waves as she leans across the couch cushion separating your seats, whining playfully as she makes a grabby gesture in your direction.
“Come closerrrrr. I’ve missed you all night! Well, all year, really. We saw each other at Steve’s barbecue but that was last summer and it’s been too long and phone calls just don’t cut it and I’m gonna start singing Stayin’ Alive at you in the most off-key voice you’ll ever hear if you don’t get closer, right now-!”
“All right, all right!”
You giggle at her dramatics but obey the request, scooting towards the middle cushion and into the space of her waiting hands.
Apparently, Robin has gone away to college and learned how to be more assertive. To ask for what she wants.
There’s still that distinctive lilt to her words- all dorky humor, fast rambles, sentences that seem to cut in line and jump each other to get out first- but there’s something specific about it, now.
Something that makes your tummy flip.
Something that sends up a warning signal, because, oh, shit- you should definitely not be getting turned on by the way your childhood best friend is ordering you around, and pulling you into her side with those hands of hers like it’s where you belong.
“Better,” Robin sighs, happily, the leg of her denim overalls pressing fully against the stretch of yours. The frilled collar of her blousey shirt pokes at your upper arm. “You know what else is better? My palm reading skills. Here, I’ll show you-”
Robin picks up your left hand, settling your forearm across her lap while her pointer finger traces the lines in your palm. She hmms and deliberates, really hamming up her own focus for your benefit, until she seems to find what she’s looking for in the line branching from the webbing of your thumb.
“Ah-hah. See this? It’s your heartline. And based on the pattern alone, I mean, my god- something big is going to happen to your love life soon. Believe you me.”
You can’t help the laugh that escapes you, that shudders through your shoulders and bumps against hers, palm feeling itchy under the sudden attention. “Come on, Buck. We both attended Steve Harrington’s Flirting 101 seminar back in the day. I used this same trick on Jimmy Miller in ninth grade.”
“Did it work?” Robin asks. Gaze still fixed on your hand in her lap. The tips of her fingers petting and mapping the lines.
She’s not acting like a woman whose jig is up in the slightest.
You swallow down a shiver at the feeling of her touch. “No. But you already knew that. Are you flirting with me?”
You’d meant it as a joke, a light tease, but it comes out sideways. A bit too intense, too questioning.
Robin’s eyes lift to yours.
There’s something cosmic in those pools of blue. It reminds you of the surface of Lover’s Lake, how it looks at night reflecting the vastness of Hawkin’s starry sky.
“What if I was flirting with you?” Robin asks. Something cosmic but something cautious, too, like she’s charted a course that can’t begin without your permission. “Would that… freak you out?”
“No!” You answer much too quickly and now you’re the one verbally scrambling. “No, I mean- I mean it’s nice to be flirted with, I like it, especially if- if it’s from you, I just-”
The sentence dies in your throat when Robin’s touch trails further, up to your wrist, the soft pads of her fingers pressing gently to where your pulse beats erratically. As if she’s reading you as easily as a book.
“I thought-” you make another attempt at foisting off the wave of feverish thrill that threatens to flash through your body. “Is Vickie not, sort of, y’know… your girlfriend?”
In the last few months of phone calls with Robin, she spoke about Vickie less and less. You’d noticed, but hadn’t brought it up. For a number of reasons.
Robin’s still looking at you, even as her touch climbs your arm and settles into the ditch of your elbow. Her head shakes slowly, gently, a wistful smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Nope. Not since the barbecue.”
Air hisses through your teeth but even you’re not sure if it’s an expression of sympathy or a reaction to this new information. “That’s… shit. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Robin’s voice pitches lower, silky even with the rasp around her consonants. “S’okay, I don’t really think about her too much anymore. Got other people on my mind.”
You can’t bear to watch the path of her touch anymore so you shoot her a sidelong glance, taking in the fine slope of her nose in profile, the way her lashes sweep as she blinks down at your arm in her grasp.
She glances back up at you, fingers stilling, the awkwardness to her charm shining through. “Uhm. The other people- it’s you, if that wasn’t, like. Totally clear.”
Something between a gasp and a strangled hah escapes your throat. The heat of a supernova is expanding in your stomach, stardust dripping southwards and upwards and everywhichway, making your tongue feel foreign in your own mouth as you trip over the words, vaguely-
“And- Nancy…? You never- with her?”
Robin’s thumb slips to the side of your elbow, drawing you in closer, gravity realigning and unfolding as your blood sings hot for her, just beneath the surface.
“I had a crush on Nance, sure. But nothing like the one I’ve been harboring for over a decade for my best friend.”
The straps of her overalls have slipped down the gauzy neckline at her shoulders. She looks like a painting- one from an old French master of the arts that you’ve studied in class before; Bouguereau, maybe. All soft cheeks and long limbs and light buffed into every pore until she’s glowing with it.
Robin leans in close enough that you can see she isn’t wearing a bra underneath the thin cotton of her shirt. Your pulse is frantic for her touch, hand twitching in her lap when her rings kiss cold at your cheek.
She cups the side of your face, eyes half-lidded and dancing between the curl of your mouth and the soft shock of your lifted brows.
“Can I kiss you?” Robin asks.
You’re leaning in to close the distance before the question is over.
Your mouths meet and it’s so gentle, so tender that you could cry from it. Her lips are soft as a peach, a perfect fit as they slot between yours, closing over your cupid’s bow like it’s what she’s wanted to do all along.
“Robin-”
You breathe into her space and she takes it into her own lungs. Nose pressing to the side of yours as she kisses you again, this one hungrier, more seeking, the tip of her tongue testing the plush of your lower lip.
Your hand finds her waist and hers slides past your ear, holding you in place and to her as your tongues slide against each other’s. She tastes like sweet mint and the hoppy beer you’d shared earlier, and also like spit- like Robin.
The groan travels from the depths of you all the way to her lips that open to take it, to suffuse the noise against the wet waiting of her own mouth.
Robin makes a noise, too, answering like an echo for a canyon.
It vibrates through you, tightening your fingers around the denim at her waist. Robin doesn’t detach from your mouth as she tips you backwards, slow but insistent, shifting until your shoulders lie flat on the couch cushion and she can kneel at either side of your hips.
“Jesus christ,” you pant, feeling a little delirious as her hands run along the length of your sides, your own reaching to cross over her neck as she dips down to kiss you more. “Buck-”
This isn’t like it used to be, when the two of you would kiss for practice under the covers of adolescent longing.
Or maybe this is exactly like that. Maybe all that practice with the right person has finally paid off.
Robin says your name, an equal catch to her voice as she kisses it back into your mouth, and then she’s drawing back just far enough to ask- “Can I go down on you?”
You pet the nape of her neck, feeling nerves alight alongside the longing. Robin shifts a hand to brush just at the hem of your skirt, a suggestion of touch over the fat of your bare thigh, waiting for your answer before she goes any further.
Your head feels foggy with lust but there’s a hesitancy that refuses to budge, so you tell her honestly. “I- yeah, yeah, you can, it’s just- I don’t usually- I mean, I’ve never come from it. Oral. I mean. Um. I don’t know if…”
“It’s okay.” Robin is so soft in her reassurance, thumb sweeping over the skin beneath her palm. Dragging the tip of her nose up the side of yours like a nuzzling animal. “We don’t have to, at all, I just- I’d really like to taste you. And feel you. And- and make you feel good.”
A confession and a plea rolled into one.
Robin’s always been like this- mouthy.
Always talking or shouting or moving, in some capacity. Always seeking stimulation, always something shoved between her lips- gum, a hairclip, the eraser of a pencil, the ends of her own hair.
And now that perfect mouth- your best friend’s mouth- is moving down your body. Kissing between the valley of your clothed breasts, the bare skin of your stomach where the hem has ridden up, one brief press of her mouth to each of your knees-
you prop yourself on your elbows to watch, breath punching in and out.
Robin flips the pleats of your skirt up and you think her hands might be shaking but then you see the moment she sees you, the wetness seeping from your core, the patch that is surely stained a darker pink than the rest of your panties.
“Fuck,” Robin breathes. In awe. Fitting her thumb to the beat of your clit through the fabric and just holding the pressure there.
Your jaw slackens. She hasn’t even properly touched you yet and it feels so good, just the pad of her thumb where you need her most. You have to make a conscious effort to keep your hips level with the couch and not have them snapping up into the touch.
Robin kisses the inside of your thigh, trailing her mouth closer, grazing her teeth along that arch of bone that runs into your pelvis.
“Shit.” Your grip on the couch cushions sinks in. “Buck, please-”
“How come you’re so wet?” She asks, as if you hadn’t just begged.
Her hands are moving again, settling under the band of your skirt to take hold of the padding that spans your hips, fingers digging in when you whine. “Hmm? S’it all for me?”
“Jesus, Robin.”
Your curse is confirmation enough, and Robin grins, that clever, devastating mouth dipping down again, this time to fit right over the wet gusset of your panties.
You’ve been aching and dripping for her all day, really- it’s been building up since this morning, since she’d touched you for the first time in a year. Folding you into a big hug before the carpool caravan left, smelling like cardamom and parchment and fresh spring blossoms.
And now she was moaning into the space between your thighs like you smelled just as good, her tongue running up the seam of you through the fabric, eyes rolling backwards at the taste she discovers.
The breath leaves your lungs in a rush, then fills again with sharp, short gasps as she hones in on your clit, laving over it with the flat of her tongue.
Robin fits her lips over just the right spot and sucks hard enough to make her cheeks hollow. Your thighs tense and tremble at either side of her ears and then you can’t bear to watch any more, the crown of your head tipping backwards to the armrest while she pulls more noises from your throat.
“Taste so good,” she’s murmuring, in between long licks and pointed suckling. “So sweet, so good for me-”
Good is the word that fills your chest, that makes you ache even more- you like being good, if it means Robin will praise you.
“Gonna take these off,” she says, into the joint of your thigh, fingers tugging at the elastic of your underwear.
You lift your hips without having to be asked, and Robin kisses your knee again as she peels the fabric from your body, calling you perfect once more before stretching low against the cushions.
This time, Robin eases your thighs over her shoulders, your sock feet fitting to her low back. You don’t have time to wonder or ask if the weight of you is too much because Robin is already pulling more of you into her orbit, tongue darting out to wet her bottom lip as she stares openly at your pussy.
The intimacy has the potential to feel embarrassing, but- it just doesn’t.
Robin’s pupils are so blown there’s barely any iris left. They’re like two glittering voids that bend to consume, to take more of you in.
The heat of her mouth is finally, finally on the bareness of your skin, your wetness- there’s an obscene slurping when she laps at your entrance, and warmth courses through your body at the sound, at the feeling.
Her tongue explores your outer folds, paying each side equal attention- something that would strike you as humorous in its distinct Robin-ness, except your head’s too full of pleasure to make room for any emotion other than oh, fuck.
“Oh, fuck!”
Robin’s tongue sinks inside the tight, wet channel of your cunt, and it’s like she’s got your spine on a string; it pulls up from the cushions beneath your body, arching you further into her mouth, and in turn her tongue.
Her nose brushes against your clit and when you gasp, again, she learns to keep that pressure up with every forward movement of her head.
She’s working you up in a shockingly short amount of time, pleasure beginning to bleed into every fiber of your being. Your hands fly from the couch when Robin curls her tongue against the front of your walls, fingers burying themselves into the roots of her hair.
It’s like holding the sun between your thighs. The heat pours from her scalp to your palms, an exchange of energy on a loop.
The fingers at your hips dig in again; you can feel the indent of her rings and hope there will be marks leftover. Proof that you were touched, that you were worshipped, by this woman.
Robin’s tongue flexes, hits again and again at the spot that’s making everything swell into a chorus, your toes curling at her back, your fingernails biting at her scalp as you swear, as you beg-
“Fuck, Robin- oh, my god- please- like that-!”
She holds tighter and fucks her tongue into you quicker with brutal, perfect accuracy, and then you’re coming with a waving bend to your spine, a pleasure that crashes into you with the force of a falling star, streaking gold behind your eyes as they slam shut.
There’s a long, sonorous moan that spills over as she works you through the peak of it, as she moans in response, the vibrations filling you from the inside out.
The pleasure still spirals with each pass of her tongue but it’s verging on too much, too good, your stomach under her palm tensing and releasing with the feeling of overstimulation as she continues to suck at the new wetness that spills from your core.
“Okay- hah, Robin- tha’s good, s’enough- please-”
Your words slur and feel mushy in your mouth, weak in the aftermath as your thumbs push at her forehead.
“Wow.” Robin emerges from between your thighs with a smile, wide and obscenely wet, covered in your release from the chin down. “Holy shit. Good job.”
This makes you laugh, emotion pitching about like a boat in a storm; Robin’s palm is soothing on your tummy, thumb rubbing circles like she wants to capture the kinetic feeling of your joy.
“Thanks.” Your hands drop to cup her cheeks, and then Robin is untangling herself from the drape of your legs to crawl up your body for a kiss.
She tastes earthy and sweet as she passes the slickness of your own release back into your mouth. Breathing heavily into the kiss before resting her forehead against yours.
“That was- wow. So hot, and so- so pretty, and- you came, right? I mean, you- you enjoyed yourself-?”
You can’t help but laugh again, and Robin joins you this time, smiling against your lips as you reply- “Yes, Buck, I enjoyed myself very much. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Smith babes,” Robin says, sarcastic, and with a nip to your lower lip. “But really, they were all just practice. For you!”
“My god, you’re so suave now.” Your sarcasm comes out far too fond for any real bite. “Y’know, we used to ‘practice’, too.”
The feeling that rises in you isn’t jealousy, exactly- more adjacent to lurid curiosity.
How is she, with the college girls? Does she take them out for coffee? Bring them back to her dorm and touch them, like this, on her tiny twin bed?
You don’t have time to ask. Robin’s still looking down at you like you hung the stars, moony with awe as she murmurs, “I didn’t even put my fingers in you. And you- you came so hard.”
You feel squirmy under the intensity of her gaze, inhaling sharply at her words- “Yeah. I know. I want your fingers, next time.”
“These fingers?” She teases your bottom lip with the pads of her ring and middle digits, grinning and wolfish.
You could bite her. Instead you reach for her overalls, wiggling them down her shoulders until she gets the memo, sitting up to help your cause. Robin strips out of the denim and returns to your lap in just her droopy-sleeved shirt and a pair of baby-blue underwear printed with the word Tuesday.
“It’s Friday,” you chide, playfully snapping the elastic band at her skin as she fits a knee to either side of your left thigh.
“I know.” Robin wrinkles her nose in exasperation. Her hands plant just beside your shoulders, sinking more of her weight against you and the cushions.
There’s an uncoordinated bump of your noses and then she's kissing you again, strands of her long hair tickling at your cheeks, tongue lapping against the roof of your mouth.
Robin’s thighs are so soft around your own and with the next kiss, you prop your knee further up to slot more firmly between her legs.
“Oh, fuck, yes.”
There’s heat radiating from her core, sinking bone-deep into you. She goes clumsy with hunger, hips rolling forwards as her mouth fumbles another kiss to the side of your lips.
“D’you want- my fingers?” You offer, wondering if she’d prefer more stimulation.
Robin stumbles over the words to get them out faster. “No- no, no, please- honey, st- stay like this. Please. I wanna- I’ve dreamed about this.”
Her hips roll, your lashes flutter. “You dreamed about kissing me?”
“No- well, yeah,” Robin admits, breathily. “But I meant- your thighs. I dreamed about your thighs.”
You feel temporarily mute with surprise but manage to ask- “My thighs?”
“Yes, god, yes.” Robin chokes back another whimper, tip of her nose tracing down the side of your face to nestle into the crook of your neck. “Was thinking- about your thighs all day, during the ceremony- the rooftop, fuck, I- I thought for sure you’d noticed, that I was being so- so obvious-”
She pants ragged breaths into your skin, arms trembling while she holds her weight to grind against you.
“I was too busy looking at your hands,” you whisper in reply. “Always so distracting. Turning me on- seriously, Buck, you are so, so beautiful-”
Robin’s hips judder, her teeth skimming against the muscle of your neck. You can feel her eyes squeezing shut, eyebrows drawing together in the hollow of your shoulder.
You don’t ever want this to stop. You’re half helping her, half letting her simply take.
On the next motion of her hips your hands settle at either side of her jaw, and you gently coax her head from the comfort of your shoulder. Her hair makes a curtain around the both of you and while you love the feel of it and the smell of her rose petal shampoo, the urge to see her face is overwhelming.
You tuck the lengths of silky strands behind her ears and let your fingers slide into the roots, cradling her skull at either side. It’s so hot, so intimate and intense, seeing her like this- there's a deep flush of pink across her cheeks, orangey freckles over the bridge of her nose and under her eyes standing out in contrast.
“That’s it, Buck,” you whisper, encouraging. “Whatever you need. Take it from me.”
Robin whines again. Another grind of her hips and you can feel the wetness she’s spreading into your skin, even through the cotton barrier of her undies, a slick glide with every forward movement.
“You wore these- these goddamn shorts, in gym class-” Robin’s talking through the panting rhythm of her breaths, eyes flickering back in her head before they refocus on you beneath. “-red ones. Sophomore year. I’d go home and- and put a pillow between my legs, just like- like this- imagining it was you-”
“Fuck, Robin.”
You keep one hand in her hair while the other goes to the low neck of her shirt, tugging it down to expose the round of her breasts, shuffling your shoulders down just slightly to reposition your head.
When your mouth closes around the peak of her nipple, Robin cries out above you, working herself faster over the seat of your thigh. Your tongue laves over the stiff peak and you can feel the tremors it creates in her, a ripple effect in all the muscles of her legs.
Robin lets out this string of rasping ah, ah, ahs. The cushioned slope of her stomach nudges against yours with every down stroke.
Your teeth edge around the tender skin and Robin swears again, so raw and throaty that you moan in response. Her thighs are beginning to snap tighter around you, squeezing with every grind.
“Buck-” It comes murmured around the fat of her breast, nipple shiny with your spit as your grip in her hair draws taut. “Will you- I wanna see you, when you come- please-”
Robin doesn’t deny you this, even though you know she’d rather hide her expressions in the curve of your neck. She lets you lift her head and you get to see every minute detail, every tiny tremor and scrunch and line of her face that gives away how much she loves this, how much she’s getting off on you.
“Feels so- god- so good, baby-” She whispers, a broken sentence cleaved in two by a gasp. Her stomach tightens against yours in small, undulating waves. “I’m not- not gonna last- oh, fuck. Fuck. So close-”
Robin’s jaw is open around the shape of her noises, lips parted- on instinct, your hand in her hair slides to cradle her face, thumb pressing like a question at the corner of her mouth.
“Fuck,” Robin moans, taking the length of your finger against the wet pull of her tongue. Sucking the salt from your skin and groaning at the taste, the feeling of you inside of her.
You feel the dull flash of her molars against your knuckle, and then Robin is coming with the prettiest sound you’ve ever heard.
The sky-blue of her eyes rolls backwards as the heat between her legs intensifies, as her muscles lock in place and the orgasm spirals through her frame, shaking with the force of it.
Robin grinds herself against your thigh as you hold her in place with a single finger until every little bit of pleasure is wrung out, until there’s a line of drool coursing from her mouth and an equally slick path kissing at the skin of your leg.
“Oh my god.” Her voice is faint with exhaustion but tinged with humorous disbelief as her eyes shut again.
Robin makes as if to move herself off of you but at your noise of protest and coax of your arms, she lets her spent body collapse comfortably into yours.
Her nose tucks to the slope of your neck again, limbs rearranging in a cozy tangle as you hum happily with her full weight pressing into you from all sides.
In the afterglow, you’re pleasantly shocked to find that those sticky, strange feelings that usually accompany the comedown of sex just simply aren’t around this time.
Maybe it’s the familiarity you already had with Robin before this, or the way she seems loath to do anything but trace the outline of your throat with her lips in the quiet aftermath; whatever the reason, this moment feels like a perfect little pocket of time, shared with your favorite person in the world.
Robin is still holding onto you like you’re the only thing that makes sense. It’s easier to coast the dip of hormones with the sweet-sweat smell of her scalp and her breath coasting beneath the collar of your shirt that didn’t have a chance to get peeled off.
Robin sighs deeply, content and worn out. Then with a light flinch of realization, she groans. “Oh fuck.”
“What?” You’re already half-giggling at her tone, blinking lazily up at the ceiling while your hands stroke down the length of her back.
The side of her cheek squishes against your collarbone as she speaks, sounding mournful even as she slides back into her usual rambling way of speech.
“I owe Steve thirty bucks. He said I wouldn’t be able to wait a whole day to make a move on you and I said ‘What do you think I am, some sort of hussy?’ And then he laughed and I cussed him out and threw money into the mix and it seems my lack of will power has screwed me over yet again.”
“Screwed me, you mean.” Your hands have found the end of her shirt and slip beneath, feeling for the scattering of raised freckles at her low back. “How about this. We wait to tell Steve until tomorrow, after we’ve had sex again, and this time I’ll give you a bunch of hickeys so he can’t deny the proof.”
You feel the apple of Robin’s cheek round into a grin against you. “Neat. I love tricking Steve, it’s my favorite hobby. Well, besides my new one of having sex with you. My favorite girl. I don’t ever wanna move again.”
Her head lifts and re-affixes itself to your chest, the shell of her ear pressing firmly over your heart.
“-see, stuck. Like a limpet. Or maybe… something more sexy than a mollusk. I dunno. I just orgasmed so hard my brain melted. Please don’t ask me to explain any further because I literally, truly cannot.”
Your fingers find the half-inch scar raised parallel to the base of Robin’s spine, running over the twist of tissue with remembrance.
She’d been eight at the time, and had taken a fall from the low boughs of the sycamore tree in her backyard. A stick had snagged in her side with the impact, and after a trip to the emergency department Robin boasted three whole stitches to show for the whole ordeal.
You can still remember her toothy smile a week later, braids swinging as she pawed with clumsy eagerness at the collar of her shirt to show off her wound. In the familiar stretch of her freckly back, there was a row of neat black thread and two butterfly bandages.
Gravity had pulled, and you’d leaned in to kiss the edges of the sutures- as if pure magical will and childish intent could bring your girl healing with a single brush of your lips.
You use those same lips to kiss at the crown of her head now, smiling with fondness. “You don’t have to explain a thing, honey. Or let me go, for that matter- but I wanna see the stars one more time, before we leave.”
Robin kisses her way up your neck, over your jaw, movements sleepy but no less keen. Her lips press to yours again- once, twice- and the bands of her rings are cool against your cheek as she holds your face with expansive tenderness.
“Let’s go sweep some stars. But only if you promise to hold my hand the whole way.”
It’s a promise easily made and mostly kept, save for the moments you need to separate in order to clean up a bit and re-dress. There are more kisses stolen and given between the motions, more giggling and teasing and Robin’s sparkling gaze laid plain on the side of your face as you dip to wiggle back into your shoes.
Your hands interlace, and this time, neither of you let go. Robin leads you back through the station, palm warm against yours, taking the steps to the roof one at a time to make sure you’re following close behind.
There’s a brick wall separating the roof access door from the rest of the space, with a roughhewn wood bench built into its side. It faces the vastness of the night sky and has a perfect lack of armrests to be able to fit both you and Robin comfortably.
Robin pulls you into her chest, chin fitting snug to the top of your head as your arms automatically wrap around her middle.
The night is clear, and the stars are everywhere. Anywhere you look: pinpricks of light, clusters and constellations, the world holding steady as you hold each other.
You pour your thankfulness into the universe, for whatever stars have aligned to bring you and Robin together again.
afterword: thanks so much for reading! reblogs are never required but always so appreciated by me <3
best friends to lovers really is earth shattering sometimes 💞
This perfectly encapsulates Robin for me, especially s5 Robin. She’s always been smart and confident but it was the assertiveness. It made me sit up in my chair
My other issue is Robin could seduce me in 0.5 seconds flat.
“Come closerrrrr. I’ve missed you all night! Well, all year, really. We saw each other at Steve’s barbecue but that was last summer and it’s been too long and phone calls just don’t cut it and I’m gonna start singing Stayin’ Alive at you in the most off-key voice you’ll ever hear if you don’t get closer, right now-!”
- I wouldn’t survive her
Robin’s eyes lift to yours. There’s something cosmic in those pools of blue. It reminds you of the surface of Lover’s Lake, how it looks at night reflecting the vastness of Hawkin’s starry sky
- she’s drop dead gorgeous we get it. spare my heart please
She glances back up at you, fingers stilling, the awkwardness to her charm shining through. “Uhm. The other people- it’s you, if that wasn’t, like. Totally clear.”
- oop hold on tight everyone. tummy is about to flip
Jesus. Christ that kiss. Whew
This isn’t like it used to be, when the two of you would kiss for practice under the covers of adolescent longing.
- I’m squealing!!!!!!!!
You’ve been aching and dripping for her all day, really- it’s been building up since this morning, since she’d touched you for the first time in a year. Folding you into a big hug before the carpool caravan left, smelling like cardamom and parchment and fresh spring blossoms.
- I’m going to combust.
- Next on the agenda is to run up and smell her
to wonder or ask if the weight of you is too much because Robin is already pulling more of you into her orbit, tongue darting out to wet her bottom lip as she stares openly at your pussy.
The intimacy has the potential to feel embarrassing, but- it just doesn’t.
Robin’s pupils are so blown there’s barely any iris left. They’re like two glittering voids that bend to consume, to take more of you in.
- this is cruel. To enjoy it I’d have to survive it and thats getting impossible now. LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFULLY YOU DESCRIBE HER
It’s like holding the sun between your thighs. The heat pours from her scalp to your palms, an exchange of energy on a loop. / then you’re coming with a waving bend to your spine, a pleasure that crashes into you with the force of a falling star, streaking gold behind your eyes as they slam shut.
- A crime has been committed. poetically ate out and murdered.
How is she, with the college girls? Does she take them out for coffee? Bring them back to her dorm and touch them, like this, on her tiny twin bed?
- this is me I can’t help it I’m curious. I gotta know everything
“These fingers?” She teases your bottom lip with the pads of her ring and middle digits, grinning and wolfish.
- she’s too good at this. Robin, have mercy. Please
Robin strips out of the denim and returns to your lap in just her droopy-sleeved shirt and a pair of baby-blue underwear printed with the word Tuesday. “It’s Friday,” you chide, playfully snapping the elastic band at her skin as she fits a knee to either side of your left thigh.
- it’s not often that I audibly laugh when I’m reading but I was giggling and gaggling into my pillow.
- Underwear like that always reminds me of scary movie 2 lmao
Robin stumbles over the words to get them out faster. “No- no, no, please- honey, st- stay like this. Please. I wanna- I’ve dreamed about this.”
- add another tally to the tummy flip chart please? Brings it up to a thousand you say? good, good.
“You wore these- these goddamn shorts, in gym class-” Robin’s talking through the panting rhythm of her breaths, eyes flickering back in her head before they refocus on you beneath. “-red ones. Sophomore year. I’d go home and- and put a pillow between my legs, just like- like this- imagining it was you-”
- you wanna talk about romance. you wanna talk about longing. god confessions like that are my weakness
“Fuck,” Robin moans, taking the length of your finger against the wet pull of her tongue. Sucking the salt from your skin and groaning at the taste, the feeling of you inside of her. You feel the dull flash of her molars against your knuckle, and then Robin is coming with the prettiest sound you’ve ever heard.
- are you KIDDING ME
Maybe it’s the familiarity you already had with Robin before this, or the way she seems loath to do anything but trace the outline of your throat with her lips in the quiet aftermath; whatever the reason, this moment feels like a perfect little pocket of time, shared with your favorite person in the world.
- i wanna live here in the moment please
Her head lifts and re-affixes itself to your chest, the shell of her ear pressing firmly over your heart.
“-see, stuck. Like a limpet. Or maybe… something more sexy than a mollusk. I dunno. I just orgasmed so hard my brain melted. Please don’t ask me to explain any further because I literally, truly cannot.”
- cheesing so hard right now. I’m in love with her
If you’re doing the new girl au out of order I would looove to request Remus and reader having a lil make out during their secret relationship period thinking “okay we have this much time before Sirius gets home and this much time before James gets home” but then everyone starts coming home early
Thanks for requesting!
a/n: Please do not misconstrue my participation in the marauders fandom as support of JKR. If you’re new here and want to participate in the fandom, I encourage you to do so without participating in anything that would provide financial gain to her or her vile agendas
Marauders New Girl AU
roommate!marauders x fem!reader ♡ 1.2k words
The problem with kissing your flatmate is that it takes over your home life. There’s no escaping thoughts of him. You’ll be brushing your teeth, and the smell of him fresh out of the shower will leave you dribbling toothpaste out of the corner of your mouth, or you’ll catch yourself staring at his lips while your other flatmates sit between you on the sofa watching a film, or he’ll come into the kitchen to tell you that you’re home alone, and you’ll wind up boiling over your pasta water because you were too busy shoving your tongue down his throat.
Remus reaches over to shut off the hob. “That can wait until later,” he says, his voice gone raspy in the way that makes your stomach hug your spine, “yeah?”
“I wasn’t that hungry anyway,” you agree.
He smiles into your mouth, the material of your top bunching in his fingers. An embarrassing, needy sound sighs out of you when Remus presses you into the counter. “Sirius decided to join James and Lily at the cinema.”
“James told me that he—” You can’t think properly when he touches you like this. “—that he wouldn’t be back until late.”
“Which means we have time,” Remus finishes the thought for you. He gets his hands under your thighs, hefting you onto the counter in one strong motion. Blood rushes to your face.
The concept of time has never seemed more enticing.
“We don’t have to rush,” Remus goes on, kissing you more gently. Your cheek, your chin. “Are you sure you don’t want to eat?”
You shake your head quickly. “I can eat later.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.” You bump your nose into his, angling for his lips. “Remus…”
“Alright,” he soothes. His hand slips beneath your shirt, fingers splaying over your side as though to steady you. “Alright.”
Remus’ touches are slow and sure, but he trembles with each tiny sound from you. It fills you with a blooming pride to think that it’s you making him unsteady. Quiet, composed Remus, undone by a touch of your bare skin. You feel like a teenager, stealing kisses in spare moments and wondering whether you should let a boy take your top off, hoping you won’t get caught.
“Bed?” Remus rasps after a while. Your legs have tightened around him like a vice, like you’re worried he’s going to slip away. “Or sofa?”
You must look a bit startled, because he puts an inch between you, color rising to his cheeks.
“Not so—I don’t want to rush anything,” he tells you with an amused, breathy sound. His hand comes up to cover the crown of your head. “I just keep worrying you’re going to knock yourself on the cabinet.”
You laugh and duck down to kiss him. “Bed,” you agree.
“Yours or mine?”
“Definitely yours.” You hop down from the counter. Remus' hand slips behind you as though to keep you from going far. “Mine’s too messy.”
He huffs a laugh. “I’ve lived with Sirius and James for years. I’m used to mess.”
“I know yours is tidy, though,” you tease him.
“Actually, I think I left a cup on the nightstand…”
You laugh again, warm and giddy, curling your fingers in his jumper to tug him towards his bedroom. Remus smiles as he lets you.
You make it two steps before the door opens.
“Why would I want to go at eight on a Thursday?” James’ voice echoes down the hall. “Why would anyone?”
You look at Remus with wide eyes. He’s frowning in the direction of the front door as though he has a mind to scold your flatmates for coming home early.
“Because,” replies Sirius, sounding sour, “not everyone feels they have to be tucked into bed at ten.”
“It’s a weeknight, though. I’m surprised they’d even show anything that late on a weeknight.”
You walk Remus backwards quickly. His brows cinch as he steps into the pantry, just before you shut the door.
“That late is eight o’clock, James.”
You dash from the kitchen, throwing yourself onto the couch just as your flatmates emerge from the hallway.
“Some of us,” Sirius goes on, “would call that the beginning of the night.”
You pick up the book you left on the coffee table earlier. When Sirius glances over, it looks as though you’ve been reading the whole while.
“Oh, hi.” You blink up at him. “What are you doing back?”
James looks sheepish. Sirius heaves a long, dramatic sigh. “James bought tickets for the wrong night.”
“They want to start showing a film at eight on a Thursday,” James tells you. “Obviously I thought they were for tonight when I saw the time. Isn’t that insane?”
“That’s…uh, insane, yeah.”
Sirius narrows his eyes at you. “Why do you look like that?”
You open your mouth. Shut it again. “Like what?”
“All…” He waves a hand in your general direction, his mouth screwing up. “Ruffled. God, you’re not reading porn on our sofa, are you?”
“What?” You sit up, your voice climbing. “No! Jesus, Sirius, you’re—this is a romance novel.”
James looks like he might laugh, but Sirius only wrinkles his nose. “You’re a libertine. At least take it out of the common space. Isn’t Remus around here somewhere?”
“I don’t know,” you huff, standing from the couch and taking your book with you. “You’re disgusting. Fine, I’ll read in my room.”
You shut your door, opening your bedroom window spitefully in the hopes the pollen from the tree outside sets off Sirius’ hay fever. Serves him right. You try to open your book and actually read, but you can’t focus.
It’s a few minutes later that Remus opens your door quietly.
You sit up, nervous. “I’m sorry.”
“Mhm,” he says. “What was your plan, back in there?”
“I panicked,” you admit. “It was the first thing I thought of.”
“Shoving me into the pantry?” Remus pauses. All you can do is nod abashedly. “Well, James was rather surprised when he went looking for something for supper and found me instead.”
You cover your mouth. “No.”
“Yeah. We left your pasta on the hob, too, by the way.”
“What did you tell him about why you were in there?”
“I told him I was thinking.”
“No.” A giggle spurts out of you. You press your hand harder over your mouth, but they escape between your fingers. “Oh my god, did you really?”
“You think that’s funny, do you?” Remus asks, grinning as he crawls onto your bed. Your teeth click together when he kisses you. “I didn’t know what else to say. I’m not usually prepared to be discovered in a pantry.”
“I really am sorry,” you say helplessly.
Remus’ eyes roll. He cups your cheek. “I know we spoke about keeping this between us for now, but I don’t think we have to go to great lengths to do it.”
“No, I know.” You lay down, more letting yourself be kissed than kissing, hyper-aware of your flatmates in the other room. “I really just panicked. If it makes you feel any better, Sirius thought I was reading smut in the sitting room.”
Remus chuckles. “I heard that, yeah.”
“Were you laughing at me in the pantry?”
“Maybe a little.” He kisses your jaw, brushing his lips over the shell of your ear. “I won’t be your dirty secret,” he murmurs.
“I’m fairly sure I’m your dirty secret, if anyone is.” You match his volume. “If this happens again, I’ll let you shove me out the window so we’re even.”
Remus hums, considering. “No. I’m too much of a gentleman for that.”
forgive the version of you that didn’t know what to do and could not have foreseen what the right choice was, if there even was one. forgive the version of you that made a choice and regretted it.
