murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. your job search has been fruitless, your fridge isn’t working, and your car is making a dying sound. at this point you’d like to be put out of your misery too.
salvaging a crumb of hope you stop by the diner nearby for your favorite pie.
“sorry kid, just sold the last slice to that gentlemen over there.” the waiter gestures in the direction of the booth
you slide into the booth across from the man dressed in all black swallowing the last of his coffee. eyeing the skull mask on the table and the k95 mask hanging off his ear you consider cutting your losses.
“did you finish robbing a bank?” you ask
“looking for a rich date?” he drolls
“i really wanted the last of that pie. i’m having a crummy week.” you muster a pun and a sugary smile
he barks out an unexpected laugh that practically startles you both. he sheepishly puts his mask on avoiding your eyes and walks away. the instant rejection on top of everything else is overwhelming. you start quietly crying despite how childish it seems, through puffy eyes you see a milkshake.
“chefs making y’ a new pie.” he mutters sliding a menu in your direction
when he offers a spoonful of his pie, your cheeks flush.
he’s orders fries with your meal just in case you want to try the fry milkshake combination he’s encouraging.
“is this a kink?” you’re acutely aware of how it must seem for someone with a soft body like yours round at the edges was weepy over dessert and now this stranger is trying to feed you a meal, an entire pie, and french fries.
his eyebrows dart upwards and you almost laugh at how expressive his face is even when half covered.
“y’ think i’m a criminal or a sex fiend ‘cause i’m buying dinner?” he teases
“no, i don’t know- sorry.” you mutter
“pretty girls don’t come up to me often. i tend to scare em off.” he thumbs the sugar packets
you’re entirely sure girls crawl into his lap no questions asked, his lips are so delectably pink you’ll be dreaming about them from a quick glance. his black shirt leaves nothing to the imagination and you’re dying to unbuckle the brass at the front of his jeans. he doesn’t reply focusing on a sticky part of the table.
“got a husband, boyfriend?” he asks
you shake your head chewing on the cherry from your melting milkshake.
“hoped so. makes sense since you car is crying out like that.”
you frown up at him and his posture softens.
“i can fix it.” he offers
you want to go home with him but he doesn’t ask. he says that he’ll fix your car by tomorrow and you shrug at the empty promise. you’ll probably never see him again.
the next morning your cars purrs instead of stuttering, there’s a brand new automatic start attached to your keys, and a little bunny with a bow in your favorite color sitting in the cup holder.
for a moment you’re relieved and sort of touched until you wonder— how’d he know where you live and how did he get your keys? underneath the bunny there’s a card with his phone number and a little drawing of a ghost.
slow burn // retired // roomate !! simon “ghost”’riley
⁃ everything you do has more color and intention than the sparse minimalist nature of his bedroom
⁃ after you get a stressed and a little weepy at a kitchen disaster he starts scrawling on the kitchen notepad which meals he made for you
⁃ after work you end up having dinner together it starts as watching trashy reality tv together on the couch (he pretends to be disinterested but is quickly sucked into the antics of 90 day fiancée, he watches it the same as a bad football game grumbling at the screen.)
⁃ there’s something achingly domestic about being with you he really tries to be a gentleman and all—
ignoring the squeaks of your bed springs from across the hall or your moan through the wall when you’re alone at night and he excuses himself at breakfast after an eyeful of your tiny pajamas that leave him incredibly hard
⁃ on the weekends you get into the habit of reading next to him on the couch as he lazily watches baseball (american sports make him sleepy, but the excuse to have you propped up against him makes it all worth it)
⁃ he notices you start to read in your room, joining him for dinner face flushed. you used to explain the plots of your current reads. he is softened when you begin leaving library books on his nightstand. but now he wonders why you’re pulling away, avoiding his eyes, and refusing to answer his questions.
⁃ a few days later he knocks on your door, overcome with anxiety he enters without pausing for your response. he catches you face flushed partially under the covers with a bodice ripper.
⁃ “i read it for the articles.” you quip
someone must’ve said that about playboy once right? he never mentioned anything about the vintage playboys scattered across your apartment. but you seemed embarrassed by this ??
⁃ simon can’t stand the idea that you’ve been pent up by yourself and he’s jealous that your imagination is fodder for your fantasies when he can give you the real thing.he finds himself buying a copy, longing to provide pleasure for you.
⁃ “how come you didn’t recommend me those books love?” he pries teasingly poking at you embarrassment
wondering if the interest is imagined when he sees you staring at him after he returns from running. or gazing at his mouth for a moment too long. ghosting over his knuckles as you take his dishes to wash (after all he cooks for you every day)
⁃ “i didn’t see you as the kind of man who has a taste for romance novels.”
the word taste has him reeling. seeing you shift your thighs searching for friction makes him desperate.
“love— if you read it to me, i would eat every word.”
he doesn’t want to make your nervous, overplay his hand.
⁃ he’s enamored when you read to him on the floor of the living room for a few days after dinner, you find yourself resting on top him instead of in the rug. he sits through chapters of exposition pining at your lilting voice.
I posted a snippet of my writing last week and I got so manny comments and notes, and got to meet so many people in the fandom, so thank you everyone for being so kind!
It was terrifying having so many people reading my stuff, but also encouraging. So I decided to give it a go again, but officially.
I have a wedding prompt for the fest, and it's where Simon and Baz have a promise of being each other's one plus in a busy wedding season, but I'm also exploring how that promise happens and how it gets going. My plan was to make them best friends but someone let me wondering... what if their dynamic was different. But I love some good best-friend-yearning since that's how I met by boyfriend.
Here are my six sentences then!
He didn’t know if he was allowed to undress at Baz’s front door without anyone giving him permission to do so. He was too angry and embarrassed to care if Baz didn't want him stripping down in front of him either way; his jacket and shirt were already off, naked legs wouldn’t hurt more.
“I don’t mind being single, Baz, and I don’t mind that people know either. Those old people who go to the bakery tell me what a handsome man I am and what a shame it is that I stay single everytime they show up. I mind that, apparently, I have a face that screams ‘in a loving, stable, long relationship’ that’s getting me all these invitations with a plus one.”
Maybe he should consider buying new jeans, these really are suffocating him. Why couldn’t he pull them down?
I love that Simon is Baz-dramatic level, telling him how disrespectful people are to him, while Baz is trying to be a good friend while having the love of his life casually undressing in front of him.
Hellos and giving this to tag and make new friends!
happy galentine’s day y’all, have some fluffy newsbians from this prompt list (ao3)
words: ~1100
It usually took thirty minutes, give or take, to get to Katherine and Sarah’s favorite bar in Queens from their apartment in the East Village. But, per Murphy’s Law, everything that could go wrong did go wrong in the planning of their Valentine’s date.
First in a long list of frustrations was the fact that Valentine’s Day fell on a Thursday, the morning of Katherine’s deadline for the weekly paper. So, knowing Katherine, the entire night prior, the day on which they’d wanted to celebrate, would be taken up by frantic writing, pacing about the apartment, and Katherine cursing her own procrastination. If they wanted to celebrate at all, it would have to be on Valentine’s Day itself.
Second was the location for their date. There would be no reservations left at any remotely nice restaurants, but that didn’t really matter to them. They wanted to do something special, of course, but they didn’t have to do something fancy or spend a bunch of money to enjoy each other’s presence. So they decided on a few drinks at their favorite bar, a pub near Queens College that Sarah used to frequent when she was a student. Nothing fancy, but still a fun night out.
“I am so sorry,” Katherine apologized as she stared ahead at frustration number three, the immense amount of traffic that had them at a standstill on the tunnel from Midtown to Queens. “I so did not expect it to be this bad.”
“It’s all right.” Sarah reached across and took Katherine’s hand. “I don’t mind being stuck in traffic with you.”
Katherine looked over at Sarah’s crooked smirk and couldn’t help but smile. She kissed the back of Sarah’s hand then said, “We might should’ve taken the train, though.”
“In retrospect, maybe.” Sarah sighed. “Seems like everyone in Manhattan had the same idea we did. Get out of Manhattan.”
Katherine chuckled and relaxed her grip on the wheel. “I’m sure the traffic coming into Manhattan is worse.”
Sarah nodded. A few moments passed in which the line of cars creeped forward a few feet, then Sarah spoke again. “Since we’re stuck, I made us a playlist.”
“A playlist?”
Sarah dug her phone out of her pocket and grabbed the aux cord. “Not for this purpose exactly, like I didn’t plan for getting stuck in an hour’s worth of traffic and say to myself, ‘I should make a playlist for while we’re stuck in an hour’s worth of traffic.’ But I did make a playlist.”
“What kind of playlist? If it’s not a stuck-in-traffic playlist?”
“It’s just…” Sarah blushed as she scrolled through her music. “Whenever a song reminded me of you, I added it to this playlist.”
Katherine’s jaw dropped sarcastically as if she were shocked by the cheesiness of it all. “Sarah Jacobs, that is the cutest shit I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sarah deflected.
“Like, I think I just got a cavity from how sweet that was.”
“Shut up! You know I’m a hopeless romantic!” she sassed back.
“Okay! Okay! Just play the music. I’m ready to cry about how cute we are.”
Sure enough, the cheese factor in the playlist was high, romantic classics like “My Girl” littered amongst modern first dance picks and ukulele-based indie tunes. Twenty minutes later they finally escaped bumper-to-bumper hell and were puttering through Long Island City at a normal pace, a sweet ditty called “I Do Adore” floating through the speakers.
They arrived at their pub just as the street lamps were coming on in the orange light of dusk. It wasn’t packed inside, much to their relief, and a five-piece band was playing in front of a small dance floor. The clientele was mainly young couples enjoying a low-key Valentine’s Day outing, some of them casually dancing to the band’s cover of “Stand By Me.”
Their normal table by the window was taken, so Sarah grabbed them a booth while Katherine got their drinks. Kath was tempted to splurge on a nice bottle of wine for the two of them, but she knew better than to stray from their usual order. Sarah was known to mainly drink liquor with the excuse that wine gives her a headache — “I’m not a grandma!” she’d always argue when Kath gave her grief about it.
They chatted over their drinks as the evening progressed and the band played on. They watched couples come and go, some in formal clothes like they’d just come from a fancy dinner and others, like themselves, who were dressed more casually.
“Alright, lovebirds,” the band’s lead singer said into the microphone, “we’re gonna take a break, but we’ll be here all night so if you’d like us to play a song for you and your loved one, we have a jar for requests up here on the stage.”
Sarah looked over at Katherine expectantly. “You want to request a song?”
She shrugged. “We don’t really have a song.”
“Well, do you want one?”
Katherine broke into a wide smile and Sarah was on her feet before she could respond.
“Don’t get too cheesy on me, you hopeless romantic!” Katherine called after her.
Sarah returned a minute later with a second round of drinks, a dopey grin on her face.
Katherine eyed her with a curious glint in her eye. “What did you do, Jacobs?”
Sarah didn’t respond, but shrugged as she continued to smile and fiddle with the cocktail in her hand.
The band played a couple of other requests once they returned, and Sarah looked hopefully over her shoulder at them every time the lead singer went for the request jar.
Finally, he came up to the mic and said, “This next song is for Katherine.”
Sarah had stood before the band had even played the first chord, taking Katherine’s hand and pulling her toward the dance floor. The guitar played a familiar riff, and Katherine’s heart melted.
“Something in the way she moves…”
Sarah pulled her in by the waist, holding her close as Katherine set a hand on her shoulder. They swayed in time, and Katherine whispered, “Good choice, babe. You did good.”
“Not too cheesy?” Sarah asked, a grin in her voice.
“Just cheesy enough.”
She laughed as Katherine kissed her cheek.
“Somewhere in her smile she knows that I don’t need no other lover…”
Katherine sighed. “God, I just love you so much.”
Sarah rubbed her thumb in circles on her back. “Now who’s the hopeless romantic?”
“Shut up,” Katherine chuckled as she kissed her.
They danced to their song like it was a moment frozen in time, a moment so pristine they both wished at the end of it that Sarah had picked a longer song.
- jean grey immediately experiencing love at first sight for the scrawny teenage boy struggling to carry her suitcase up the stairs but being too hard headed to accept help
- (as they become friends when scott’s being annoying she absolutely trips him with her teke)
- scott summers after all the childhood trauma, thinks jean grey’s friendship is the best thing that has ever happened to him
- jean grey 10000% being the one to lean in and kiss him first, scott summers is wrecked !! this naturally leads to scott “my wife is so much cooler me” summers as adults
- despite scott’s mask of self assurance and natural leadership, he confides in jean that he’s afraid this cocky bravado —- is sometimes just a show
- scott summers takes pride in being jean grey’s partner it’s such a badge of honor to love her, understand her, belong in her head
