i keep trying to write something normal here and failing so we're just gonna be honest: this little corner of tumblr has become one of my favorite places to exist. genuinely.
for the new loves who wandered in recently — hi, i'm daisy 🤍 i write joe burrow primarily because apparently this is my life now, but colston loveland also lives in my brain rent free, and aj barner is on my list the second joe gives me five minutes of peace (he won't). mostly reader-insert, second person, a little soft a little feral depending on the day. i've got a few verses living rent free in my head and i talk to you all in my asks more than i talk to people in real life. that's not a joke.
100 one shots. i think about the version of me who posted the first chapter of Hide last may, terrified no one would read it. she'd lose it.
to the family — the ones who reblog, who send the unhinged asks, who scream in my tags, who've been here since Hide — i don't have words big enough. you made this what it is. mean it. 🤍
joe burrow x reader
wc: ~4.8k
a/n: first — i'm so sorry this took so long. i've gone back to the drawing board with this story more times than i can count, mostly because i really want to get the mental illness and chronic illness on the page honestly: depicted with care, not over-dramatized for the sake of a plot. she deserves that, and so do you. okay. that said — he shows up with no warning and no plan, which is the most un-joe thing he has ever done, and the weekend that follows might be the best one of his life. i loved writing this one. soft note that we spend most of the chapter inside one of her highs; i wrote it as carefully as i could, and if that's close to home for you, please be gentle with yourself. trust me on the rest. 🤍 also — i'm tentatively opening my requests back up, so if there's something you've been wanting, my inbox is open. reblogs + comments + tags genuinely keep this fic alive — come yell at me.
read from the beginning ✦
warnings: 18+ / mdni, sexual content, depiction of a hypomanic episode (bipolar), discussion of mental illness
Thursday @ 4:47 AM.
Every cabinet in the kitchen is open and most of what was in them is on the floor around you. You’re sitting in the middle of it with the label maker, because at some point around one you went looking for the good honey and decided the entire system was wrong.
It was wrong. You can see that now. Spices by cuisine instead of alphabetical, which makes no sense the way you actually cook. The glassware moved down to where you reach for it. Two shelves are done and they look so much better that stopping isn’t really on the table.
Weenie watches from the one clear stretch of counter, tail over his feet, unimpressed with the displaced cans.
“It’s an improvement,” you tell her.
She does not agree.
The sourdough you started is proofing under a towel by the window. The whiteboard across the room is full — content mapped through July, captions batched, the launch calendar redone into a shape so much cleaner than the old one that you photographed it to send Mica before deciding she’d like it better at a reasonable hour. Five emails to Harper sit in your drafts, written between two and four, all set to send at nine. You know how a 3 AM email reads.
Somewhere in there you’d also found the poppy post — hills outside Lancaster gone orange, a ranger account saying the bloom was fading, a week left, maybe less. You saved it. Filed it under soon.
At 6:30 the alarm goes off for the morning you actually planned. You step over the cans to shut it off. Patio, brass tray, candle, citrine. You take your pills from Thursday’s compartment with a glass of water, same time, no exceptions, the way you have every morning through every kind of weather your head has ever made. That’s the part nobody warns you about — you can do all of it right and the weather still comes.
You open the app while the kettle heats.
Sleep: 4 hrs. Third night.
Mood: elevated.
Energy: 9.
In the notes field you type, productive. feels good. watching it. And you are watching it. You made that deal with yourself at twenty-two, the one your mother never got to make — track it, take the pills, tell the truth in the gray box. The box doesn’t ask how the truth feels.
You pull a card with the candle lit. The Wheel of Fortune. Movement, momentum, things turning. You decide to take it as a green light.
The fog is lifting out of the canyon by the time you blow the candle out. Joe will call tonight after the facility — he’s in the offseason program now, voluntary workouts he treats as mandatory because he’s never once understood the word voluntary. The text you wrote him at 5:15 is still in drafts, set to send at seven, reading like it came from a person who slept.
You stand, knees stiff, and look at the kitchen. Everything out, every counter covered, half a system rebuilt.
Every light in the house is on. You don’t remember turning them all on.
* * *
Friday @ 10 pm
You hear the car before you see it — tires on the gravel, slow, the careful crunch of someone who doesn’t know the drive well enough to take it fast.
It’s almost ten. Nobody comes up your drive at almost ten.
You get to the front window in time to watch the headlights swing across the house and cut out. A black SUV you don’t recognize. The driver’s door opens, and a man steps out, and before the porch light even finds his face you know him — the shape of him, the way he shuts a car door like there’s no version of the night that requires hurrying.
Joe.
You don't decide to move. He’s barely cleared the front of the car when you hit him, and he catches you the way he catches everything, like he saw it coming a second before it happened, one arm banding across your back and the other already in your hair.
“Hi,” he says into the side of your head.
“You’re here.” You pull back far enough to look at him, both hands on his face like you need to check he’s real. He’s in a hoodie and a flight’s worth of travel and he looks unreasonably good. “You’re here. It’s Friday. You have lifting in the morning, you have—”
“I moved some things.”
“You don’t move things.”
“I moved some things.” He’s almost smiling. His thumb finds the corner of your mouth.
“Why? What happened, is everything—”
“Nothing happened.” He shrugs, the smallest version of it. “I had a window.”
You narrow your eyes at him. “That’s not a reason. People don’t fly across the country because they had a window.”
“It was enough of one.”
And there’s nothing to say to that, because it’s the most Joe sentence in the world and it cracks something open in your chest, so you kiss him instead, standing in the dark of your own driveway with the car still ticking as it cools, and he makes a low sound against your mouth and pulls you in by the back of the neck.
It’s Weenie who breaks it up. She’s come out the open door and is winding figure-eights around Joe’s ankles with the urgency of a cat who has been personally wronged by the duration of Joe’s absence, and when Joe crouches to her, she climbs straight up into his arms and starts the loud, ridiculous purr she saves for exactly one person on earth.
“Hi, buddy.” Joe stands with him, and Weenie tucks under his chin like he’s done it a hundred times. “She get bigger?”
“She’s emotional. Don’t encourage her.”
Joe looks at you over the cat’s head, and the porch light catches all the lit windows of the house behind you, ten o’clock and every room glowing.
“You’re up,” he says. Not a question. Just a thing he noticed.
“I’m up,” you agree, and take his free hand, and pull him toward the door.
* * *
You don’t make it far inside. The door’s barely shut before he has you against it, the cat exiled to the floor in loud protest, and whatever you meant to say about the flight, the workout he skipped, the bag still out in the car — all of it waits.
It’s past midnight when the house finally goes quiet. He’s on his back with one arm under you, the other lying heavy across his own chest, and you’re awake — of course you’re awake — tracing slow lines on his sternum while his breathing lengthens toward sleep.
“I’m running a little high right now,” you say, mostly to the ceiling. “I want you to know. Before tomorrow.”
He turns his head toward you. “High.”
“Up. The good direction.” You taught him these words on a patio in March; you can hear yourself handing them back. “You remember. Can’t sleep, too many ideas. This is that. The mild version of that.”
His hand comes up and finds yours on his chest and holds it there. “How long.”
“A few days. I caught it early.” You want him to have the whole picture, because the whole picture is reassuring. “Meds are on schedule, I’m logging it every morning, Ruby knows. I’m not white-knuckling anything. It’s just a lot of voltage at once, and I didn’t want you to land in the middle of it and wonder what you walked into.”
He’s quiet, working it over the way he works everything. Then: “That why the kitchen?”
A laugh gets out of you. “That’s why the kitchen.”
“The lights.”
“The lights.”
He nods, slow, filing it where it goes. “What do you need from me?”
And there it is — the question nobody thought to ask you for the first twenty-six years of your life, the one he asked the night you told him all of it and asks again now like it’s just the thing a person says. You turn it over honestly, because he’d hear a polite answer for what it was.
“Nothing,” you tell him. “This part feels good. I just want you here for it.”
You feel the breath go out of him, some watchfulness you hadn’t clocked leaving his shoulders with it. He presses his mouth to the top of your head.
“Okay,” he says. “Then I’m here for it.”
His hand stays over yours. His breathing goes deep and even under your palm, and he’s gone, just like that, a man who can fall asleep anywhere because he’s never once in his life lain awake doing math.
You stay exactly where you are. Wide awake. Lit up to the back teeth and happier than you’ve been in longer than you’ll admit to the gray box in the morning.
* * *
You wake him at five.
You haven’t slept, but that isn’t why. The light will be right for maybe two hours and then it’s gone, and so are the flowers, and you cannot lie in this bed one more minute knowing what the hills are doing ninety minutes north of here.
“Joe.” Your hand flat on his chest. “Joe. We have to go.”
He surfaces slowly, one eye, the side of his face creased from the pillow. “What time is it.”
“Time to go see something.”
A lesser man would ask where. A more reasonable man would ask why, or roll over, or say it’s five in the morning and mean it as an argument. Joe looks at you for a long moment in the dark, takes in whatever your face is doing, and then he scrubs a hand down his jaw and sits up.
“Okay,” he says. “Coffee in the car?”
You could cry. You don’t. You throw him his jeans.
You drive, because you can’t imagine sitting still in the passenger seat with this much current running through you, and he lets you, which is its own kind of thing — Joe folded into the seat of your car with a travel mug and no idea where he’s going, watching the canyon unspool in the headlights. You put the windows down. You put on the playlist. The dark goes blue and then gray and then the first real color comes up over the ridgeline behind you and lays itself across the road ahead.
And he talks.
This is the thing nobody knows about him, the thing that took you months to earn — that when Joe is somewhere he feels safe, the careful version of him goes quiet and the other one comes out, the one who reads everything and remembers all of it and will follow a thought to the end just to see where it goes. He’s been reading about the Voyager probes. The golden record, the one they bolted to the outside, sounds of Earth fired into the dark on the off chance that in forty thousand years somebody finds it and figures out how to listen. He thinks it’s the most insane and hopeful thing humans have ever done. You tell him it’s a love letter with no address. He thinks about that for a mile and says, “Yeah. It kind of is,” and the way he says it does something to you.
You take his tangent and run it somewhere stranger. He follows. You lose an hour and it feels like ten minutes, and somewhere in there you realize you’re both laughing and you couldn’t say at what.
Then you come up over the last rise and he stops mid-sentence.
The hills are on fire. Not red — orange, a living orange, miles of it, poppies packed so thick the ground looks lit from underneath, rolling out to the edge of everything under a sky going pink at the seams. You pull onto the shoulder and cut the engine and for a second neither of you says anything at all.
Joe gets out. He stands in the open door with the mug forgotten in his hand and just looks, and you watch him do it, this man who has a plan for every hour of his life standing perfectly still in front of something no plan could have produced.
“I can’t believe this just happens,” he says.
“It doesn’t.” You come around the car to stand next to him. “Most years it doesn’t. You need the rain at the exact right time, and the heat after, and even then it might not. Some years the seeds just sit there. Then everything lines up and you get this, and it’s gone in a week.”
He’s quiet a while. He reaches out without looking and finds your hand.
“How’d you even know about this?”
“Ranger account I follow — they’ve been posting the bloom for two weeks. I kept meaning to drive out and kept not doing it.” You look out at the orange. “Then you showed up at ten o’clock last night, and it felt like a sign.”
“A sign.” Not quite a question.
“Don’t start.”
“I didn’t say anything.” But he’s almost smiling, and his thumb moves over your knuckles.
* * *
You get back to the house sun-drunk and road-dusty, the day still loud in both of you, and you barely make it through the door before the laughing turns into something else.
It’s different tonight and you feel it in your own skin. The other times had their own weather — the desperate reunion kind, the slow reverent kind after you’d told him something true and terrifying. This is neither. Nothing’s running out, nothing’s being proven. You have too much of everything and you want to spend all of it on him.
You tell him so, mouth at his jaw, hands already dragging his shirt up his back, and he huffs a laugh against your temple and lets you take it off him. Then he stops laughing. He walks you backward through the house, unhurried even now, that patient deliberate attention you’ve learned is just how he’s built, his hands skimming up under your shirt like he has all night and intends to use it.
You don’t have all night in you. You have now, immediate and insistent, and you tell him that too — pull his mouth down to yours, get your hands at the button of his jeans, say I don’t want slow, not tonight — and he reads it the way he reads everything about you and gives you what you asked for. Your back hits the bed. He follows you down.
For a long time there’s nothing but the two of you and the dark and the windows open to the canyon, his weight settling over you, the rough catch of his breath when you arch up into him. He says your name like it costs him something. You take him in and lose the thread of every thought you’ve ever had, and when you start to move he matches you, one broad hand spread at the small of your back, holding you to the rhythm you set.
You don’t let it be only once. The current under your skin won’t let you, and he keeps up far longer than seems fair and then keeps going past that, until you’re both wrung out and laughing again — the giddy bottomless kind you’ve never once had in a bed before him, foreheads dropped together, him braced over you sweat-damp and grinning, saying give me a minute, and you don’t give him one, and he groans your name and you feel him smile against your collarbone before he gives in and pulls you back under with him.
It’s very late when he finally goes down for good.
You’re tucked against his side, his arm heavy across you, his breathing gone slow and deep and gone — the dead sleep of a man who flew across the country, got dragged to a flower field at dawn, and then this. His face is loose with it. There’s a sunburn coming up across the bridge of his nose from the fields. You watch him a while in the dark.
You are not tired.
That’s what you notice, lying there warm and used and happier than you can remember being — that your body has done everything it’s supposed to do to be tired and isn’t, that the current’s still running clean and bright like the day never ended. You could sleep. You should. He’s right here, solid and warm and yours.
You lie still for a long time, listening to him breathe, and the not-tired hums on.
* * *
The hallway color has bothered you for two years. You’ve known it since the day it dried — too gray, too cold, wrong for the light that comes down it in the afternoons — and tonight, lying awake and humming next to a dead-asleep man, the wrongness of it became the only thing in the world you could think about. So now it’s almost two and you’re three feet up a stepladder with a roller and a tray of the warm white you should have used the first time, drop cloth bunched under you, and the first wall already looks so much better that you can’t understand why you waited.
You don’t hear him until he’s in the doorway.
He’s in boxers and nothing else, hair shoved sideways from the pillow, squinting into the lamplight with one hand braced on the frame. He takes in the ladder, the paint, you, the half-done wall. A lesser-rested man might ask what time it is. He doesn’t.
“This the color you wanted?” he says, voice wrecked with sleep.
“It’s so much better, right? Look at it next to the old—” you gesture with the roller, flick a line of white onto the drop cloth “—it was practically blue. Who picked blue. I picked blue. Anyway, it’s also going to change how the art reads, which means I have to redo the whole gallery wall, which I’ve been meaning to do since I moved the—”
He crosses the hall, picks the second roller out of the tray, and starts on the bottom of the wall you can’t reach from the ladder.
You watch him for a second. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
So you paint. You keep talking because the talking won’t stop — the gallery wall, a thing you want to try with the next product launch, a dream you had two nights ago that you’ve decided means something — and he works the low part of the wall in long even passes and lets you go, throwing in a word here and there, mostly just there. The lamp throws both your shadows up the fresh white. He’s got a streak of paint on his forearm already and doesn’t seem to have noticed.
You’re mid-sentence about the dream when he says it.
“I love you.”
You stop. Roller against the wall, paint going nowhere. He hasn’t stopped — another pass, low and even — and he says it the way he says the score of a game or what time he needs to leave for the airport, like a thing that’s just true and that he figured you should have.
He looks over at you then. Paint on his arm, sleep still in his face. “Wanted you to know that,” he says. “Seemed like a good time.”
You come down off the ladder. You take his face in your hands, paint and all, and you tell him you love him too — and it comes out fast and total and unguarded, every word of it true, all of it surfacing easy the way everything is surfacing easy tonight.
He kisses you. Soft, unhurried, his thumb at your jaw. Then he picks his roller back up.
“Hold the ladder,” he says. “You’re going to fall off it telling me about a dream.”
* * *
Back in bed he’s under again before you’ve even pulled the sheet up, one arm finding you out of habit, the paint dried tight on his forearm where neither of you washed it off. You lie on your back and watch the ceiling go from black to the gray-that-isn’t-quite-gray that means four.
He loves you. He said it holding a roller at two in the morning and meant it the way he means everything, and it’s still there now, warm and enormous, no smaller than when he said it.
You should be asleep. You know that the way you know your own name. Three nights now: four hours, then two, then this. You know what your body is supposed to do with a number like that, and you know what usually waits at the far end of a stretch that runs this bright for this long. You know you should be a little afraid of it.
You’re not. Not tonight.
There’s a man asleep beside you with your love in his mouth and paint on his arm, and the canyon will go gold in two hours, and you already know where you’re taking him.
* * *
You have him at the Rose Bowl by seven, which is when the real ones go — before the sun turns the asphalt to a griddle and the good things walk off in somebody else’s arms. Joe came along on four hours of sleep and a gas-station coffee and no questions asked, and now he’s trailing you down the first aisle with his hood up and his hands in his pockets, unbothered, anonymous, just a big quiet guy carrying nothing yet.
That last part doesn’t last.
By the third vendor he’s got a brass candlestick in one hand and a folded kilim under his arm, because you found a rug and the rug found you and there was no real discussion about it. You’re good at this and you know you’re good at this — you can read a booth in four seconds, clock the one thing worth having, talk a price down while making the seller feel like they won. This morning you’re better than good. Everything’s bright and obvious and slightly slowed, like the whole field laid itself out for you to skim the best off the top.
You find him at the end of aisle nine. The painting.
He’s enormous and Victorian and gilt-framed and faintly disapproving, an oil portrait of some bewhiskered stranger nobody’s loved in a hundred years, and you have to have him. The dealer wants ninety. You don’t even haggle, which you’d notice if you were noticing things, and then the painting is yours and far too big for any sane person’s car.
Joe looks at it. Looks at you. Looks at the stack already in his arms.
“What’s his name,” he says.
“He doesn’t have one. He’s a mystery.”
He studies the painted face a moment, unimpressed. “He looks like a Gerald.”
“He’s not a Gerald.”
“He’s a Gerald.” Settled, apparently. He shifts the rug higher under his arm and wedges Gerald against his hip. “Where’s he going?”
“Hallway. Above the new white.” Which means rethinking the gallery wall again, which you’re already designing as you say it, out loud, fast, while you scan aisle ten for what’s next.
And Joe — arms full, a stranger’s portrait on his hip, a man who got out of bed in the dark for this — watches you go up on your toes to see over a crowd, and says it grinning, easy, no idea what he’s handing you:
“You’re moving a little fast.”
You laugh. “Keep up.”
He does. He always does. You don’t think about it again — there’s a booth of apothecary bottles two rows over and you’ve already decided you need them — and the morning rolls on bright and bottomless, Gerald looking out over all of it like he’s seen this before and knows how it ends.
* * *
Gerald goes in the hallway, leaned against the fresh white for now, presiding over the kilim and the brass and the bag of apothecary bottles you haven’t decided about. Joe packs the way he does everything, without fuss — the same small bag he came with, zipped in two minutes, set by the door.
Then there’s an hour to kill before he has to leave, and you find that you’ve sat down.
You don’t sit down, usually. Not lately. But you’re on the couch with your feet in his lap and the afternoon coming gold through the windows, and the bright obvious edge that’s run under everything for days has gone a little soft at the borders — the talking slower in your mouth, the next thing you meant to do not arriving the way the next thing has arrived all weekend. Weenie loafs on his chest. Joe works his thumb into the arch of your foot, and you let your eyes close and don’t narrate anything for whole minutes at a time.
“You’re quiet,” he says. Not worried. Just noticing, the way he noticed the lights on Friday.
“Tired, maybe.” It surprises you a little, the word tired — a stranger you haven’t seen in days. “Don’t get used to it.”
He smiles. He doesn’t push.
When it’s time it’s time. He shoulders the bag. Weenie protests from the back of the couch. At the door he turns and takes your face in both hands and kisses you slow, unhurried even with a flight to make, and when he pulls back he keeps his forehead against yours a moment.
“This was the best weekend of my life,” he says.
He says it the way he says true things — plainly, like a fact he’s reporting. No production. He means it down to the floor and you can hear that he means it.
“Yeah,” you say.
And you do mean it too — it was, for you, some of it. But underneath the warmth a small old thing turns over, the part of you that’s watched men fall for the lit-up version and go missing when the lights came down. He isn’t them. You know he isn’t. He saw the low day and he stayed. But the open joy on his face right now lands on the old bruise anyway, because the woman he can’t stop smiling about is the one with a clock on her.
You kiss him again so you don’t have to say any of that.
“Go,” you tell him. “You’ll miss your flight.”
“I’ll call when I land.”
“I know you will.”
He goes.
* * *
The taillights swing down the gravel and out, and the canyon swallows the sound of the car, and then it’s just you and the house and Gerald watching from the hall.
You stand at the window a while after he’s gone.
You don’t feel the floor drop. It’s never the way people picture it — no cliff, no curtain. It’s smaller than that. It’s the talking that’s gone quiet in your head for the first time in days. It’s that you’re standing at a window not doing anything, which you have not done since Thursday, and the not-doing feels less like rest than like a tide pulling out from a shore you can’t see yet.
You take out your phone. You open the app.
Sleep: 0.
Mood: high.
Energy: 7.
In the notes field the cursor blinks. Thursday you typed feels good, watching it. You think about Joe somewhere over the desert with the best weekend of his life folded up in his chest, and you think about who he spent it with, and you type the truth, because you always type the truth.
here it comes.
Then you go through the house turning the lights off, one by one, the way you never turned them on — kitchen, the half-rebuilt hallway, the bedroom last. You leave the hall light burning for Gerald.
You’ll call Ruby in the morning. You’ll tell Joe when there’s something worth telling. For now you get into a bed that still smells like him, and you lie down in the dark, and you wait to find out which way the wheel came up.
Joe Burrow… a name that would send shivers down your spine, you know the good kind? You see, the man was one of the biggest OF pornstars. He was everything you could ever desire in a man-muscular, standing tall at 6’4”, and a dick so big and girthy, it leaves you sore for days. He went by icedveinsafterdark across all platforms. The videos he made weren’t basic porn, it was art and the content was a wide variety of different styles. Sometimes he would be going solo or collaborating with other OF creators, but there was a rare chance that he would make a video with a lucky fan and just so happens, that day would be our main character’s lucky day.
Alex and her friends Yvonne and Jay were in downtown Cincinnati for brunch when she received the DM from the pornstar on Twitter. They were in mid conversation when her phone went off with a new notification.
“Alex, I thought we agreed to a no phone brunch,” pointed out Yvonne.
“I’m sorry but look at who just sent me a DM?” She replied, eyes filled with excitement.
“Alright, show us who and then it’s back to no phones.” Jay said.
Alex handed her phone to her friends and their eyes went wide.
“I know we said a no phones brunch,” said Yvonne. “But bitch you need to answer that DM right fucking now!”
“Yeah,” Jay agreed. “Girl, you got a pornstar dming you and not just any ordinary pornstar. You got Joe Fucking Burrow.”
“Oh but I’m a little nervous,” Alex hesitated. “I mean he’s like the most well known pornstar, especially from Cincinnati.”
“Alex, Jay and I are in happy relationships. This is the biggest opportunity and besides, he blurs the fans faces out so you don’t have worry about that.”
“Yvonne’s right, this is an opportunity you shouldn’t avoid. Look just DM him after brunch, I’m sure he had a reason.”
“Ok, I’ll listen to you both and DM him, now can we get back to brunch? My food is getting cold.”
Her two friends nodded and went back to eating.
-
When Alex arrived home, she immediately opened Twitter and went to her DMs and the first thing that greeted her was Joe’s message.
“What a flirt this man is,” said Alex. She was speechless. A pornstar was in her DM, calling her gorgeous. Her fingers hesitated as she tried to figure out how to respond to the flirty comment Joe made. After much though, she figured out what to say.
Did Alex read that right? Was her favorite pornstar asking her to be in a video with him? She was nervous but then she only lived once right? So she went back to typing.
Alex was available this weekend to make the video. Once she told him, Joe sent her the address of where they were filming and what time they will be doing the video. They were set for Saturday at 8pm where they would film at his condo in Downtown Cincinnati.
-
It was Saturday, and Alex was heading to his place a little early to have time to do any touchups. Joe had asked to wear something that was easily to slip on and off for the video along with clothes to put on after, preferably comfy clothes. Joe had sent an uber to come pick her up so she wouldn’t have to worry about gas at the moment. Not gonna lie, she was nervous about being in this video but she kept calm. Well what do you expect from someone who is about to get the best fuck of their life. The uber shortly arrived at the condo and standing there waiting for her was Joe. He was wearing a loose tshirt with grey sweat pants and Alex was already catching print from a distance. Once the driver made a complete stop, Joe opened the door and helped her out the car.
“Goddamn you even more gorgeous in person,” he blushed, already feeling himself get hard. “Let’s inside so we can get started.” They walked into the building and heading up the stairs to his room and the camera was already set up for filming and the NDA on the bed ready to sign.
“You nervous at all?”
“A little,” she said to the pornstar. “I mean I always fantasize about being in a video but now it’s happening.”
"That's understandable Alex, so before we get started, take a deep breath in and out a couple times to calm your nerves. Just let me know when you're ready."
Listening to Joe, she took a couple of deep breaths in and out while Joe began setting. When she was done, she let Joe know so they began filming. He set up the camera while she signed the NDA. Once every thing was set up, they started to film.
*camera begins recording*
The scenario was simple, Alex was going to pretend to Joe's friend and would help her get over a bad breakup.
"Sorry I had to vent all that shit to you," she said. "He was just a really fucked up guy."
"It's all good," he replied. "I had a few bad exes here and there."
"And what's even worse is that I'm having such a hard time getting over him because of how good he fucked me."
That's when Joe smirked and had an idea for her. "What if I help you get over your ex?"
"And how will you do that?"
"What if I can fuck you better than he ever could?"
"Fuck me better than you could?"
"Yeah, I mean what are friends for after all."
"That doesn't seam like a bad idea." She slowly reached her hand over to his pants and began rubbing his semi hard-on making Joe a little breathy. "I bet your bigger than him too."
"See for yourself." Alex slowly pulled sweatpants down just enough for his cock to spring out and boy was he huge in person.
"You could kill somebody with this thing," she playfully smirked before sliding his cock into her mouth.
"That's it baby," he beathed. "Take me in your mouth nice and slowly." As Alex began sucking Joe's cock, his hand reached over to slowly lifted her dress up and she wasn't wearing anything underneath. He slowly traced his fingers up her thighs until he reached her pussy slightly lubed with slick. "May I have your permission to touch?"
"Mhm," Alex mumbled, mouth full with Joe's cock. With her permission, Joe rubbed his fingers on her clit nice and slow.
"Damn, you're so big," she slightly moaned. "Way bigger than my ex." Alex swirled her tongue around the tip, licking his shaft, making Joe moan.
"Fuck, just like that," He exclaimed. "You suck this cock so good. Fuck I need to taste you."
Alex removed Joe's cock from her mouth and got up from the bed. She slipped out of her sun dress and that laid on her back. Joe followed suit and got his pants all the way off. “Spread your legs for me nice and slowly,” he demanded.
Doing as she was told, Alex spread her legs nice and slowly and Joe was mesmerized how wet she was. He slowly got in between her legs, kissing her thighs until he reached her pussy. “Gotta question for you baby, you a creamer or squirter?” He asked, his breath bringing shivers throughout her body.
“I’m more of a creamer,” she smirked. “But it takes a real man to make me squirt.”
“I guess we will find out today.” Joe’s tongue traced the lips of Alex’s pussy, making her shudder from his touch.
“Oh baby that’s nothing,” he smirked. “Let me show you how a real man does it.” Alex couldn’t hold her upper body up as Joe’s soft tongue swept circles around her wet cunt.
“Oh fuck yes daddy,” she moaned. “Your tongue feels so good on my pussy.”
“You like that?” He murmured. “Is daddy making your pussy feel good?”
Alex couldn’t get the words out due to the amount of pleasure Joe was bringing to her pussy, but Joe could tell that she was feeling good. He then brought two of his fingers up to her pussy and slid them in and out curling them, keeping his tongue nipping and kissing at her clit.
“Oh fuck,” she cried out. Her cunt was slowly gripping his fingers as she approached hitting her high. It didn’t take much for her to squirter all over his face. Alex’s body shuddered from the intense pleasure. “I guess you a better man than my ex.”
“I guess so,” he smirked. “And that was just the beginning. I need you to be face down, ass up for me.”
Following his order, Alex turned over, arching her back nicely for Joe. The pornstar then switched his camera to a first person view camera before moving further.
“Damn, just look at this ass,” he growled, giving Alex’s ass a smack. Oh that was gonna leave a handprint. “It’s so phat and juicy, smack, and this pussy, so pretty for me. How dumb was your ex to fumble you.”
He slowly rubbed the tip of his cock nice and slow before sliding himself inside Alex, making her moan out. “It’s not too big for you, is it?”
“No, it’s just about right for, ahhh.”
Before Alex could get another word out, Joe pistoned his cock in and out of her pussy making her moan into the pillow.
“Nah baby,” he pulled her hair. “Let daddy hear how good he making you feel.”
“Fuck, daddy,” she cried. “You fuck this pussy so fucking good.” Joe watched as his dick stretch her pussy wide because of how big he is.
“Fuck I could stay in the pussy forever,” he rubbed her clit. “Look at you, taking my dick so fucking well for daddy.” Cum began trickling down Alex’s thighs as Joe fucked her, the camera capturing all her lew expressions, which was going to be blurred out later on for when he posts on Onlyfans. She felt her body tingle once again as she felt the wave of her second orgasm coming.
“Oh fuck, daddy, I’m gonna,” she moaned.
“Shhh, I know baby,” he replied. “We’ll come together ok?”
The second wave of her orgasm was much stronger, he slowly came inside her pussy right after. It was a good thing Alex was on birth control. Joe dick slid out making a pop sound as his seed oozed out onto his sheets.
“So did that help with getting over your ex?” He deeply laughed.
“Yeah it did,” she replied. “And I would love to do it again.”
-
After finishing filming Joe helped Alex clean up, putting on her spare clothes and letting her relax before sending an uber to pick her back up
“Here’s some water and some snacks to help replenish your energy.” He said, holding out the stuff for her. “I always like to give people I working with snacks and stuff right after.”
“Thanks Joe,” she accepted the stuff. “So when should I expect the video to be out?”
“In a few weeks, I have to edit the stuff first before it’s published.”
“Will my privacy be protected Joe?”
“100 percent. I’ll also text you as well when it’s ready.”
“Sounds good Joe, thanks for this opportunity.”
-
Like promised, the video was posted a few weeks later and boy was it the hottest video Alex ever watched in her life.
Author’s Note: Apologies for the delay on this fic and many others that were in my draft. A lot has been going on in my life so I’m glad I was able to get this one out, anyways love y’all 😘💜
moon’s about to go dark. new moon tomorrow. this is genuinely not a starting day. do not start the thing. today is for finishing one (1) loose end and then lying down. you don’t have to bloom. it’s literally the day before. log off.
hii not sure if you’ve answered can i ask how sissy got her name? i’m reading it and it’s sooo good im just curious lol
hii bb!! 🥺 first of all thank you for reading, that means everything to me
basically, its just what her family's always called her. she's the baby of the family, and her big sister lauren basically claimed her the second she came home from the hospital. "sissy" stuck before she could even talk and it just… never went anywhere. by the time she's grown it's the only thing anyone who loves her calls her. which is why it means something when joe starts using it 👀
ok and on a real note — my grandmother's family nickname was sissy and i've always loved it. so it's a little bit of her in there too 🤍 felt right to give it to a character i love this much
Hi! I’m the anon who said I’ve been enjoying your astrology content lately 😊
I don’t know much about astrology but I was wondering if you could help me with a question.
I recently made a major life change that could go really poorly, but over the past week I’ve felt this tremendous peace that everything will work out. Could there be something in the stars leading me to that feeling?
oh I love this question. and yes — I think there really is.
right now, and for just a few more weeks, the planet Jupiter is sitting in the sign of Cancer. Jupiter is what astrologers call the great benefic — the planet of faith, grace, good fortune, the feeling of being looked after. Cancer is the sign of home, safety, being held. when Jupiter is in Cancer it's "exalted," which is just a fancy way of saying it's in the one place in the sky where it operates at full power. it's been there about a year and it moves on at the end of June — so we're in the last stretch of it.
so when you describe this tremendous peace landing right after a big leap, before you have any proof it'll be okay? that is exactly what this sky has been handing out. you're not making it up.
I'll be honest with you though — that peace isn't a guarantee about how it turns out. what I think it actually is: not a promise that nothing goes wrong, but a peace you'll be able to meet whatever does.
the sky is holding you right now. let it.
if you want to know what this looks like in your specific chart — your own timing, your own placements — my messages are open.
pairings: joe burrow x reader 🖤
wc: 3.7k
an: i missed them real bad 🖤 i know y'all have been on a younger reader kick lately and i do wanna remind you that sissy is younger too!!! i know i've gone and nicknamed her but this is still a joe x reader fic at heart, promise.
i hope you like this one — and be really really nice to me 🥹
masterlist
if you want to be added to the taglist let me know 🤍
Joe had exactly one job tonight, and it was to be unremarkable.
He was aware of how funny that was. He’d been the most recognizable man in every room he walked into since he was twenty-two, and no suit, however well it fit, was going to make him disappear into a hotel ballroom in downtown Cincinnati. But there was a version close enough. He could be quiet. He could shake the hands that wanted shaking, hold still for the photos nobody asked permission to take, and otherwise stand at the edge of the night and let it belong to her.
Which was the entire point of being here.
She’d told the firm three weeks ago. Walked into her manager’s office and said it out loud — that she was seeing a client, that it was serious, that she wasn’t going to keep pretending — and then went back to her desk and waited to find out what it cost. Joe knew what that had taken, because he’d watched her decide to do it over the better part of a month, watched her run the math on every way it could go sideways. She’d spent two years in that office building something out of nothing but being good at the job. And she’d put all of it on the table to stop hiding him.
So no. He was not going to be the story tonight. Not the famous boyfriend who put a hand somewhere it didn’t belong, or said something a little too sharp to a colleague, or did one single thing that let anyone in this room decide she’d gotten careless. He’d be the most boring man at the gala if it killed him. He’d promised himself that in the car.
She was across the room, and he let himself look.
This was a version of her he didn’t get much — not the one who fell asleep on his couch at nine, but the work one, faster, lit from somewhere. She had a glass of wine she wasn’t drinking and a way of leaning in when someone spoke that made them the only person at the party. He watched her do it to a senior partner twice her age, watched the man laugh at whatever she’d said and his wife laugh right after. She remembered names. She remembered the names of people’s kids. She’d told him once, half-asleep, that most of her job was just making people feel okay, and he’d thought she was being modest. She wasn’t. It was a skill, and she was the best in the room at it.
It was a strange place to feel proud, a party where he knew almost no one. But that was the word for it. He stood in his very boring corner and felt it.
———
Then a guy walked up to her, and Joe’s attention snapped to him and stayed there.
Around her age. That was the first thing. Early twenties, good suit, not trying too hard, the easy posture of someone who’d never once wondered whether he belonged in a room. He leaned in to say something meant just for her, and her whole face changed — not the work warmth she’d been handing out all night, but something quicker, a laugh that got out of her before she’d cleared it for takeoff.
Whatever he said next, Joe didn’t catch. But he caught her hand landing on the guy’s arm, caught her firing something back that dropped the guy’s head into a laugh, the two of them folding toward each other the way people do when the joke is old and shared and doesn’t need a setup. A bartender drifted past. The guy lifted two fingers without looking, said a word, and a minute later the bartender slid a drink down to her — not the wine she’d been nursing all night. Something she actually wanted. He hadn’t had to ask.
Joe watched her take a sip of it.
It was a few minutes before the guy noticed him. When he did, his face opened all the way up, and he crossed the floor with his hand already out.
“Mr. Burrow. Drew.” A grin. “I work with Y/N — Sissy. Everybody calls her Sissy, but you’d know that better than me.” The handshake was good. Warm, a little reverent. “Listen, the back half of last season — I was losing my mind every Sunday. My roommate thought something was wrong with me.”
“Appreciate it,” Joe said, and meant the reflex half of it.
“She’s the best one we’ve got, for the record.” Drew said it easy, like he was allowed to. “Don’t tell the partners I admitted the analysts run the place.” He laughed. Joe laughed too. On time. The right amount.
That was the problem. He was a good guy. There was nothing to hold onto. He was funny and warm and clearly thought the world of her, had just shaken Joe’s hand like it had made his whole year, and Joe stood there doing the right thing with his face and could not find one single thing wrong with him.
———
It was nothing. He told himself that.
And it was nothing — he knew it was. He’d watched her be exactly like this for the last hour with every person who came within range. The senior partner. The partner’s wife. The bartender. The kid working coat check. Him. This was just her. She’d flirt with a fence post. It was the first thing he’d loved about her, that warmth that didn’t check credentials first, the way she could make a whole room feel like it was on her side. He’d fallen for it standing in a hallway outside a conference room, watching her hand a man an out he hadn’t earned. He didn’t get to resent it now because it was pointed somewhere else for ten minutes.
So he told himself it was nothing. And then he kept count anyway. The hand on the arm. The drink the guy knew to order. The shorthand. The laugh that came early. He logged each one the way he logged a defense on film — filing it, building something he didn’t want to be building — and the harder he tried to stop, the cleaner the record got.
The worst part wasn’t the warmth. He could live with warmth. The worst part was that the guy spoke her language. When she told Joe about her work she translated it, flattened it into something he could follow from outside the fence. With Drew she didn’t translate. She used the shorthand and the acronyms and the names of people Joe had never met, and Drew kept up, fired it back, and the two of them stood there fluent in a thing Joe would always need subtitles for.
He took a drink he didn’t want. Pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek and stood very still.
———
The woman who cornered him by the bar was named Diane, and she had two glasses of wine in her and forty years of opinions about everyone in the room.
She loved her, and didn’t waste time getting to it — she talked about her the way you talk about someone you’ve decided to look out for, told Joe unprompted that the girl outworked everyone on that floor and got half the credit for it, and Joe said he knew, because he did.
“She came up with Drew, you know.” Diane nodded across the room to where the two of them were still talking. “Same analyst class. Started the same week. Those two have been attached at the hip for —” she tried to count it on her fingers, lost it, gave up. “Years. There was a stretch where half of us figured they’d end up —”
She caught herself there. Looked at Joe. Laughed and waved a hand like she was clearing smoke.
“Well. You know how an office talks.” She patted his arm. “Anyway. She did a lot better.”
She meant it kindly. Joe could hear that she meant it kindly. He gave her the smile that meant thank you and let her start a story about last year’s Christmas party that he didn’t hear a word of.
Across the room, Drew laughed at something with his whole body.
So it wasn’t in his head. That was almost a relief, the way finding the thing on the MRI is a relief — at least now it’s real and not something you invented to torture yourself with. Half the office had figured it. There’d been a version of her life sitting right there the entire time, the frictionless one, where she ended up with the guy from her own class who spoke her language and was her age and would never once have made her walk into a manager’s office and gamble two years of work on whether he was worth it.
That was the door nobody at this party would have blinked at. And she’d walked past it.
He should have felt good about that. Some nights he did. Tonight he stood at the bar with a drink he wasn’t drinking and felt more like a man who’d talked somebody into a worse deal.
And he couldn’t do a single thing with any of it. That was the part that kept circling back. If he let it show — if his face did the wrong thing, if he crossed the room and put a hand on her in the way that said mine to a room full of the people she had to sit across from on Monday — he’d hand every one of them the exact story she’d spent three weeks bracing for. See. She’s not serious. She just landed the client. The only way to protect what she’d risked was to stand here and feel it and let none of it reach his face.
So he did. He’d done harder things on television.
———
He didn’t see her cross the room. He felt the air move and then she was beside him, close, her shoulder against his arm, and her hand found his without any production about it — out in the open, in front of all of them, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
It wasn’t. It was the first time she’d done it in this building, in front of these people, and he knew exactly what it was. She was telling the room. She’d decided to.
“You’ve gone quiet on me,” she said. Light. To anyone watching it was nothing, a girl checking on her date. But she was looking at the side of his face the way she looked at a number that didn’t add up.
“I’m good.”
She didn’t believe him. He watched her not believe him. She held his hand a second past what the sentence needed, reading whatever was on his face, and he gave her as little of it as he could, because the alternative was telling the truth in the middle of her own party.
Whatever she found, she put it away. She didn’t push. That was the thing about her in a room — she always knew when the room wasn’t the place.
“I’ve said hi to everyone who matters.” Still light. Still for the audience. Her thumb moved once across his knuckles. “We can go whenever you want.”
He knew what that cost her. She’d been lit up all night, in the one room where she got to be the center of her own world instead of a guest in his, and she was offering to cut it short because she’d looked at his face for four seconds and done the math.
“You don’t have to leave.”
“I know.” She was already reaching for her clutch on the bar. “Let’s go say goodbye to Diane. She’ll be hurt if we don’t.”
———
The valet brought the car around. He got her door, then his own, pulled out into the Cincinnati night, and for the first few blocks she was still up there with the party — loose, pleased with herself, recapping.
“Okay, Diane is obsessed with you now. That’s permanent, by the way. You’ve got her for life.” She had her shoes off already, one foot tucked under her, twisted in the seat to face him. “She told me you’d be too handsome to be nice, and then you went and ruined it by being nice, and now she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She started planning the wedding. My wedding. Our —” she laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“Mm,” Joe said.
She kept going a minute longer, because that was her, because she could carry a conversation across a desert if she had to. Who’d asked about him. Who’d been too nervous to. What one of the partners had said about the Alo deal. He answered where he had to. Eyes on the road. Both hands on the wheel.
It took her about a mile to feel it. He caught it out of the side of his eye — the recap winding down, the smile going thoughtful, her head tipping the way it did when a number stopped adding up.
“Hey.” Softer. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m here.”
“You’re not, though.” She put her hand on his leg, just above the knee, light. “You’ve been somewhere else since the bar.”
The light ahead went yellow. He could have made it. He stopped instead, because stopping gave his hands something to do.
“It’s been a long night,” he said.
It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It was just nowhere near the truth, and they both knew it, and the worst part of being with someone who paid attention the way he did was that she’d learned how to do it right back.
She didn’t push. That surprised him, even now. She took her hand back, folded it in her lap, looked out the windshield, and let the quiet get big.
He’d have preferred it if she pushed. When she pushed, he had something to push against. This — her just sitting there knowing, waiting him out, not making him say it and not pretending she couldn’t see it — this was worse. He could feel her running the whole night backward, laying it down next to the way he’d gone quiet, watching the answer come up.
The light turned green.
“It’s nothing,” he said. Too even. "Just didn't love watching that."
She turned in her seat to look at him. “Didn’t love watching what?”
He didn’t answer. Her building came up on the right and he was grateful for it — somewhere to put his hands, his eyes. He pulled to the curb, put it in park.
She was still watching him.
“You and Drew.” He kept his eyes forward. “Diane told me the whole office had the two of you ending up together. For years, apparently. Would’ve been nice if somebody mentioned that before tonight.”
———
She didn’t argue with it. She got out of the car.
For a second he thought she was leaving the whole thing on the curb — him, the conversation, all of it — but she leaned down and looked at him through the open door instead.
“You coming up? Or are you gonna sit out here and be jealous all night?”
She’d said it. The word he hadn’t. Light, like it was almost funny, because to her it almost was — she’d had the whole thing solved since the bar and was just waiting for him to catch up.
He came up.
The elevator was quiet. The hallway was quiet. She unlocked her door, dropped her clutch and her heels inside it the way she always did, and turned around like she had something else to say —
and he kissed her before she could say it.
One hand at her jaw, the other at her waist, and he walked her back into the wall beside the door hard enough to take the air out of her. His hands weren’t doing the careful thing they did. He’d spent four hours keeping every part of himself still, and now none of him was.
She made a sound against his mouth, and then her hands were in his hair, pulling, and she kissed him back like she’d been waiting all night for him to quit being so good.
He pulled back just enough to get a breath. Kept his forehead against hers.
“I had to stand there,” he said. Low, rough. “All night. Watching him make you laugh. Knowing every person in that room figured he was the one who should’ve been taking you home.”
“Joe—”
“He knew your drink.” Quieter. Worse. “He knew your drink and I didn’t.”
She took his face in both hands and made him look at her.
“You know how I take my coffee. You know I can’t fall asleep with cold feet. You know I cry at the dog commercials and you have never once given me grief for it.” Her thumbs moved over his cheekbones. “He knows what I order at a bar. That’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”
He kissed her again, and whatever she’d just done to him, it didn’t come out gentle. His hands dropped to the backs of her thighs and lifted, and she wrapped around him like she’d done it a hundred times, and he carried her toward the bedroom — his hands deciding something his mouth still couldn’t.
———
He set her down at the edge of the bed and she had his tie loose before her feet hit the floor. He let her have it — the tie, the jacket she shoved off his shoulders, the buttons she was too impatient for. His own hands went to the zip down the back of her dress, and he didn’t bother being neat about it.
When the dress was gone he stopped for a second to look at her, and then he didn’t want to look, he wanted his hands on her and his mouth on her all at once, like touching enough of her fast enough might fix what the night had done to him.
He got a hand between her legs. She was already wet, already pushing up into his palm, and the sound she made went straight through him.
“He gets to make you laugh.” His mouth was at her throat, his fingers moving, her back coming up off the bed. “Fine. He can have that.” Lower. “He doesn’t get this.”
“Joe—”
“This part’s mine.”
“It’s yours.” She got a fist in his hair and dragged his mouth back to hers. “It was yours at the bar. It was yours all night. You absolute idiot.”
The rest of his clothes came off, and hers, and when he pushed into her, they both went still — her nails in his back, his face down at her shoulder. Then he moved, hard, and she took all of it and pulled him deeper with her heels.
It should have been enough. Her under him, around him, saying his name. It wasn’t. What the night had put in him wasn’t something he could work out of his system that way, and somewhere in the middle of it the claiming gave out and the thing underneath came up in its place. His rhythm broke. He put his face in her neck, where he didn’t have to watch her hear it.
“You could’ve had—” He stopped. Started over. “Everybody in that room, they all just—it would’ve been easy. With him. Same world, same age, nobody would’ve blinked. And you—”
He couldn’t finish it. He had the rest of it somewhere and it was too big to get through his teeth, and he made a frustrated sound against her skin and quit trying.
She went still under him. One hand came into his hair, the other flat between his shoulder blades, and she held him there a second, let him stay hidden, before she pushed him up far enough to make him look at her.
“Hey. Look at me.” She waited until he did. “Easy was never the thing I wanted. If I wanted easy I’d have taken it years ago — it was right there.” Her hand found his jaw. “I knew exactly what you’d cost me. I walked into that office and told them anyway. That wasn’t an accident, and you weren’t what was left when I ran out of options.” Her thumb moved over his cheek. “There was nothing better than you.”
Something in him gave way.
He kissed her, slower now, the urgency gone down into something deeper, and when he started to move again it was for a different reason — just to be as close to her as a person could get to another person. It built slow and then not slow at all, and when it took her he felt the whole of it, her mouth at his ear, his name going out of her like it was the last word she had. He went over with his face in her hair and her name coming out of him — the real one, the one only he got to use, the one she’d given him on purpose.
For a while neither of them moved. His weight on her, her hand still in his hair, the city going by the window the way it always did.
———
Eventually he rolled them, got his weight off her, and she ended up on his chest — the slow of his heart coming down under her ear, her fingers drawing something idle over his sternum, the streetlight coming through the curtain she never closed all the way.
“What was it, anyway,” he said.
“Hm?”
“The drink. The one he got you.”
She lifted her head to look at him, a smile already starting. “You are not going to let that go.”
“No.”
“It’s a French 75. Gin, champagne, lemon. I order it everywhere.” She propped her chin on her hands. “It’s on every cocktail menu in America, Joe. It’s not a secret handshake. Drew’s known me since my first week at that firm, and that is the single deepest thing he’s got on me.”
“French 75,” he repeated, like he was setting it down somewhere he wouldn’t lose it.
“You don’t have to—”
“I know.” He pulled her back down against him. “Gonna know it anyway.”
She didn’t say anything to that. Just worked her cold feet in between his calves the way she always did, and let him have the last word for once.
girlies i feel like we need some aj smut in this house… what do we think of aj and reader going to the ring ceremony together and he’s all handsy and googly eyed and the minute they get home he’s on her and he cracks her open 🤑🤑🤑
