simon got the call from price the night before, the phone heavy in his hand and the words ringing is his ear. an impromptu mission that would be detrimental with his boots on the ground.
he went on the rest of the night as if he had never gotten that phone call, but the ache in his heart had said otherwise. he was slow and methodical, offering to cook you dinner, run you a bath and massage your feet with your favorite flick on.
and you knew your time was limited.
it was standard routine for simon to take care of you before he went away—he didn't want to leave you with more to worry about if he could help it. no words had to be exchanged either. you just held him a little tighter, slid open the shower doors, and let him in your space.
the morning of didn't come by any easier. he got up early—earlier than what either of you are used to in this blissful life you built.
simon rose out of the bed with a creak in his bones, joints popping with a stretch as he padded off to get everything together. his gear was always prepared in advance so he wouldn't have to spend his limited time with you packing instead of taking care of you.
he'd showered, gotten dressed, and had breakfast prepared that you could heat you when you wanted to start the day. he knew you slept in on days like these.
in twenty or so minutes time, he would walk out that door and not return until months later. run ragged and beat, and just happy to be back in your arms.
with the time he has left, he slipped back under the covers next to your unconscious body. hands slipped over your nightgown-clad skin, softness under his calloused hands. he would never forget the feeling for as long as he lived.
the touch of his hands were enough to rouse you, the words greeting you a deep rumble in your ear. "roll over." a soft kiss met your shoulder, and you did as he said.
the bedsheets rustled under your shifting weight, mixed with the metal buckle of his belt being undone and the zip of his jeans. you swallowed with anticipation, holding your breath as you always do on mornings like these.
half-asleep with his cock pressed against the right entrance of your pussy, barely slick with arousal. he didn't have time to pleasure you the way he usually does, and he always apologizes with sweet sorry's and kisses to your hair.
he takes his time splitting you on his cock, shallow thrusts that force the thick length of him deeper into your cunt. stimulating the sensitive bundle of nerves, he savors each breathy moan that breaks the silence of the room.
simon fucks you differently than usual. the hard, rough, and controlling man is replaced by a softer, gloomier counterpart. rather than pounding thrusts and bruising grips, he pushes deep and slow, hands gentle over your soft curves and sensitive skin with fleeting kisses.
and he always makes sure you finishes before him, ingraining the tightness of your pussy as it squeezes him upon release and the soft cry that you choke out. spilling deep inside you only after your second or third orgasm, he draws out the intense pleasure until he has to go.
the last few minutes are spent in his arms, exhausted and wrung out with a thorough, intimate fucking before he has to leave for real this time.
as the warmth of his body leaves you, you silently console yourself with the fact you may never see him again. your only hope of seeing his eyes again being the possibility of getting pregnant—if he never returned again.
Love LOVE the scene where Nada dumped Dream's ass and he immediately flooded his realm and stood dramatically in the rain bare chest with a slutty shirt. Read a fic where Matthew worry that Dream will nuke the entire realm if anything happens to Hob and it's more funnier now
Lucienne was truly gods strongest soldier this season because Dream literally made a new palace and then proceeded to go off on a million different side quests. every time he walked out those doors he came back with some new insane thing that Lucienne just had to deal with. he went to free Nada and returned with the key to hell. he went to find his brother and came back to announce a dead son.
and it's so so important to note that everytime he needed her she was there.
I can clearly remember the moment I first realised my mother and I were living on completely different planes of existence. I was 7 years old and I came home from my school's first track and field day having placed second or third in every event. the teachers had been making jokes all afternoon about how many times they had to call my name. my friends thought I was cool as shit. my enemies thought I was cool as shit too, come to think of it. I was proud as hell. so I get home with the entire front of my shirt covered in ribbons like I was a military dictator who'd awarded himself every medal, I walk into the kitchen and tell my mum all about my day, and she goes "oh, that must be disappointing not getting any firsts." and I'm like no?? first of all the first place ribbons are red and I don't like red. second of all look at me. there's literally nowhere left on my body for accolades. I am fucking Jacked of All Trades. how could this possibly be a disappointment.
When I read Chris Whipple’s Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles, the most powerful person in Donald Trump’s White House who is not named Donald Trump, one line stopped me cold.
["I’m not an enabler." - Susie Wiles]
I’ve heard that sentence before. I said versions of it to myself while working in the first Trump White House.
And here’s the hard truth that only people who have worked inside that White House truly understand:
[You cannot work for Donald Trump and not become an enabler at some point along the way.]
Not because you wake up wanting to be one.
Not because you abandon your values on day one.
But because the system is designed to test, erode, and eventually corner your moral compass until the question is no longer “Is this right?,” but “How bad will it be if I don’t stop this?”
Chris Whipple’s reporting lays bare something that too often gets obscured by palace intrigue and personality profiles: power under Trump is not about restraint, it’s about facilitation.
JD Vance says it plainly in the piece. Susie Wiles is not there to steer, influence, or manipulate the president “for the national interest.” She is there to facilitate his vision.
That distinction matters, because facilitation has a body count.
This is what happened on Susie Wiles’s watch: life-saving USAID programs were eviscerated, halting immunizations and aid that kept thousands alive; PEPFAR, credited with saving millions, was crippled; U.S. citizens and their children, including a four-year-old undergoing treatment for stage-4 cancer, were deported; hundreds were sent to a brutal Salvadoran prison on sketchy or nonexistent evidence; January 6 rioters who assaulted police were pardoned; presidential power expanded by whim, not law; the National Guard was deployed into American cities; political enemies, universities, and the press were targeted; and extremist actors were empowered to turn ideology into policy.
Going to church every Sunday does not negate the consequences of decisions that harmed people at home and around the world. You don’t walk out of a White House like this innocent, because innocence requires stopping harm, not facilitating it.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves Inside the Building
Every person who enters that White House tells themselves a version of the same story:
If I’m not here, someone worse will be.
If I stay, maybe I can mitigate the damage.
If I leave, I lose any ability to protect people.
I told myself those things.
COVID will haunt me forever.
Watching children being separated from their parents will haunt me forever.
Every argument I had in the Situation Room.
Every warning about what happens when you downplay a pandemic.
Every fight over domestic extremism after yet another mass shooting.
Every moment when intelligence screamed one thing, and politics demanded another.
And then there were the talking points.
Writing words you know will mislead. Defending decisions you know will cost lives. Trying to thread the needle between truth and loyalty, and watching the needle snap anyway.
You don’t walk out of that White House innocent.
Every single one of us who worked there knows the moments when our integrity, our sense of self, and our moral clarity were pushed to the brink.
Olivia Troye delivers a solid column here that busts Susie Wiles’ “I’m not an enabler” horse manure.
Cruelty doesn’t sustain itself. It needs someone reasonable to keep it running.
Yesterday, Vanity Fair published photographs of the Trump White House.
Not the usual photographs. The magazine has spent decades translating power into glamour. Dictators become statesmen. Executives become visionaries. Everyone leaves more beautiful than they arrived. That’s the deal. Access for airbrush.
Christopher Anderson refused.
More under the cut.
He shot them in extreme close-up. Clinical lighting. The kind a dermatologist uses to diagnose damage. Susie Wiles, chief of staff: steel-gray hair swept back, skin unretouched, pale blue eyes staring straight into the lens. Karoline Leavitt, press secretary: filler injection dots visible at the lip line, the work showing because no one asked the lens to forgive it. JD Vance, vice president: every pore visible, patchy beard, eyes fixed somewhere past the lens. Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff: hollow-eyed, gaunt, unblinking.
The camera looks exactly like what it refuses to do.
None of us would look good in that light. But the camera refused to do the work that everyone around these people does every day. It refused to translate. To smooth. To make the unhinged sound strategic and the cruel sound necessary.
Wiles sat for it. For almost a year. On the record. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess. On Sundays after church. While folding laundry in her DC rental.
She talked.
Trump, she said, has “an alcoholic’s personality.”
Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”
Musk is “an avowed ketamine user.” When he reposted a tweet comparing public sector workers to those murdered under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.”
On whether to pardon men who beat police officers nearly to death on January 6th: her team debated each case, but ‘if there’s a tie, he wins.
On prosecuting Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who won a $450 million fraud judgment against him: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”
She said all of this. On the record.
And the moment it saw daylight: “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House Staff, and Cabinet in history.”
Confess. Recant. Repeat.
There’s a word for this. It has a clinical origin.
In 1951, Lois W. (last name withheld per the anonymous tradition), wife of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W., started gathering the wives of alcoholics while their husbands met in the living room. They sat in kitchens. They drank coffee. They compared notes. And they realized they were all doing the same things.
Calling the husband’s work to say he was sick when he was hungover. Going without groceries because the money went to alcohol. Lying to the neighbors. Lying to the children. Lying to themselves. Shielding him from every consequence that might have forced him to change.
They realized they had their own sickness — the enabling pattern — and founded Al-Anon as a separate recovery program for themselves.
The psychology is consistent across seventy years of research. Enablers soften or remove the natural consequences of problem behavior. They believe proximity is control, that staying close means having influence. They often grew up in dysfunction and learned the caretaker role early. They tell the truth when they feel safe. They take it back when the system demands.
You might recognize it closer to home.
The parent who keeps wiring money to a daughter who swears this is her last time. The son who still drives four hours for Christmas dinner with a father whose jokes get crueler with every glass of wine. The wife who tells the neighbors he’s just stressed at work. The sibling who keeps the peace with a brother who’s found religion and now sees demons in everything. The friend who says she’s fine, she’s handling it, he’s getting better. The girlfriend who says you don’t see what he’s like when it’s just the two of them.
Millions of Americans have lost someone to this. Not to death. To the staying. The translating. The smoothing. The desperate insistence that what you’re seeing isn’t what’s happening.
Now look at what the staying produced.
On September 2nd, a missile hit a suspected drug boat. The boat capsized. Two men ended up in the water, clinging to the hull, no longer a threat to anyone.
Admiral Bradley ordered a second strike.
They died in the water.
Ninety-five people killed in these strikes since September. House Intelligence Chairman Jim Himes watched the video of that one. “One of the most troubling things I’ve seen as a lawmaker,” he said. “The United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.”
Legal experts have a simpler word. “The term for a premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is murder.”
A four-year-old boy named Romeo in the court filings. Born in Louisiana. Stage 4 kidney cancer. He was in the middle of treatment at a New Orleans children’s hospital when his mother brought him to a routine ICE check-in with his passport, as instructed.
They detained her. They flew the family to Honduras within twenty-four hours.
Romeo arrived without his medication.
“The family was held incommunicado,” his attorney said. No lawyers. No relatives. No one who could help.
He is five now. He is in Honduras. He has stage 4 cancer. He is an American citizen.
This week, Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk and posted that Rob Reiner died of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Reiner and his wife had been stabbed to death days earlier. Meanwhile, six hundred Americans lost their jobs for saying the wrong thing about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Civility, it turns out, is required in one direction only.
Wiles told Vanity Fair she was “aghast” at the USAID gutting. She couldn’t understand how they made that mistake with the deported mothers.
And she stayed. That’s the mechanism: staying converts moral shock into operational cover. The aghast one remains at the table. The cruelty continues. Now it has a conscience nearby, and the conscience didn’t leave.
Susie Wiles’s father was Pat Summerall. The voice of the NFL. An alcoholic.
She grew up staging interventions, helping her mother try to get him into treatment. He was sober twenty-one years before he died. But she learned the lessons long before that.
“Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she told Vanity Fair. “High-functioning alcoholics, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.”
She recognized Trump immediately. That’s not interpretation. She said it.
In 2016, he berated her for over an hour at his Miami golf club. Midnight. A poll he didn’t like.
“It was horrific,” she said. “He was ranting and raving. I didn’t know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry.”
She didn’t leave.
“I’m not an enabler,” she told Vanity Fair.
She said this in an article where she described enabling everything.
JD Vance answered the question she won’t. “She’s a facilitator,” he said. “The American people elected Donald Trump. Her job is to facilitate his vision and make his vision come to life.”
Facilitate. Enable. Translate. Smooth.
Not restrain. Not prevent. Not stop. Make his vision come to life.
At what body count does the adult in the room become the room?
The camera caught what the enablers exist to hide.
Christopher Anderson shot them without translation, without softening, without the deal. Every line visible. Every year of the work.
Name one enabler who believed they were enabling. They all think they’re managing. Mitigating. Being the adult. The one who stays because someone has to stay.
Here’s the question the enabler never answers: if your presence restrains the worst impulses, why do the worst impulses keep winning? If proximity is influence, point to the atrocity that didn’t happen because you were in the room.
You can’t. Because that’s not what the room needed you for.
The kitchen-table wives figured it out in 1951. The staying is the sickness. The translation is what keeps the thing alive.
Power doesn’t need believers. It needs participants. The ones who stay. The ones who explain. The ones who keep their eyes on the center while the edges burn.
Confess. Recant. Repeat.
The people in the water are still dead. Romeo is still in Honduras.
Look at the photograph. Wiles’s pale blue eyes, steady, still watching the lens.
Wake Up Dead Man does an excellent job at every turn of displaying the misogyny of the Catholic Church and I really can’t stop thinking about it.
The first thing we learn about Martha is that she runs EVERYTHING, and she truly does, down to feeding Wicks. She keeps the church running smoothly, she keeps Wicks alive and presentable for his entitled, hateful sermons. The church only functions with Martha there to make it so, and yet, only Father Jud seems to recognise how much she does for the church itself.
Simone funds everything. Out of the very few regulars that Wicks has whittled his congregation down to, Simone is the only person we hear of making such substantial donations, giving the church all of her savings for the promise of healing that Wicks cons her into believing that he can provide. Simone is seemingly the only person willing to give enough money to keep the church alive.
Vera raised Wicks’ heir for him, did exactly what her father wanted, and is given absolutely nothing in return by any of the three men she has devoted her life to. Cy is thrown at her, given no choice but to raise him, a boy who she first believes to be her brother who she later finds out has no connection to her at all. Motherhood is forced upon Vera no matter what affect it may have on her life. Vera’s life has always been used by the men around her as a tool for their own gain, yet even she knows she has not done enough to earn her father’s approval, only pleased with her, never proud.
And Grace, that poor girl, has been characterised as a greed driven beast who desecrated a church in a fit of shrieking demonic rage, shown against a blood red night sky. Grace, who was, in reality, a young single mother shunned by her small town, by her father who was no doubt turning her own son against her, who had her only chance to escape her prison of judgement stolen from her.
Her existence is what actually motivates Wicks’ sermons as a whole, the memory of “the harlot whore” ultimately the root of what drives him, raised on hatred and judgement that he inflicts upon anyone he can rather than the kindness and understanding he ought to practice and preach, the utter opposite of Father Jud. Arms up instead of out. Even somebody like Doctor Nat is only driven by his growing hatred of women after his wife left him.
Misogyny is so woven throughout the church that I think it makes it all the more powerful for Jud to rename the church after Grace. Perpetual Grace, not Fortitude against the twisted retelling of her existence, but preserving the one thing she was never afforded. It is only the women who find happiness in the end. Vera is free of Wicks, her father, Cy, all of the men who took her life and used it for themselves. Simone plays her cello again. Martha finds forgiveness, she finally lets go of the hatred that drove her entire life. Grace is given redemption and honour. Those poor girls
