Jan 6
Confidence? Crushed by a whore. Valentino and Vincent have entered the Writer Au! (on bsky)
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Confidence? Crushed by a whore. Valentino and Vincent have entered the Writer Au! (on bsky)
🔒What's With The Lock?🔒 (Final Chapter)
Maya Mason (bottom)🔒 x Reader Erotica Writer (top)🔑
Read Chapter 1&2 Here - I want to wear his initial - On a chain 'round my neck, chain 'round my neck'-T.S 🔐🔐
WARNING:🔐 BDSM / NSFW / Movie Shop Talk / Sorry for giving you guys blue balls for the ending / Kinky Talk / TOP AND BOTTOM ROLES / Power play / SAFE SANE CONSENSUAL / Maya is a service bottom / But also she just needs to be a good brat / Lock and Key explained because Apple won't do it / Fetish Talk /5k word count/🔑🔐🔑🔒🔑 18+
“Budget Cuts.”
You say your marital safe word in front of the studio heads. Only to hear the one person in the room who understands chuckle. Well, Maya actually snorts in laughter as your ass is sitting on the confrence table pouting.
“We cannot- afford et.” The nasal Saperstein practically is choking on his own spit.
The completely bruised Sal is laying on the floor with his nose bandage making his speech slurred. Sadly the wounds don’t cause him to stop being annoying.
“Bar fight my ass.” Quinn whispers and Patty lifts an eyebrow at her and she shuts up.
Quinn grinds her jaw but throws her hands up towards Matt who’s pacing.
“You can’t cut out the smut! It makes the book!” The young woman is too green in this business. Sorta like Matt himself, she thinks this is all about art still. The heart of a film, the beauty of humanity the heart and soul of the world. Blah, blah, blah - you don’t roll your eyes as much as you’d like to. No if you were being honest, you’d love to have the room clear out, and talk to Maya. Because you two could figure this out a hell of a lot faster than these guys.
“No! The tenderness makes eth” Sal says unable to make I’s sounds without too much ‘e.’ Kinda like the sick kids in the Campbell Soup commercials.
“You need both to make the story!” Quin argues back with too much passion, and you wonder if she’s written fanfiction for your books now. Patty checks her apple watch one more time then necessary.
Maya stands up and looks at the white board, stepping closer to see. But not obstructing your view of the chicken scratch and post it notes hung up. Only you are human, and your 50 year old wife is too sexy to ignore. So you lose all concentration for the whiteboard.
Your eyes fall to her ass in those designer jeans. Fuck, she was probably wearing that green thong today…
You miss what the room is discussing - instead your dirty mind imagines Maya’s ass cheeks in the air as you-
“Earth to Doctor Smut?” Quinn speaks to you and you come back down from your high to see Maya spin around, facing you, smirking, always understanding where your brain went.
Fuck you were worse than Sal, you just wanted to take Maya by the hair and force her onto your strap.
Maya makes a noise in her throat real time and you blink again before the engine in your brain seems to come back on.
“Cut the scene in half - but add the biting and ass checks. That’ll keep within the budget and not get a NC-17 rating. If you cut it too far they’ll think you are being a pussy. See if you can free a nipple while you’re at it. But the smut scene at the finale is too important to cut.” You offer, and Maya’s face morphs into absolute glee, and you can’t figure out why.
“Yeah….We know. Maya just said that.” Patty spoke, and your ears actually turned pink in embarrassment.
“Are you high right now?” Sal snidely asks from the floor - just like you had asked him at the houseparty. But it’s Quin who answers.
“She was lost staring at her wife’s thicc ass.” Her monotone choice of words mixed with the eyeroll has you turning to glare at her.
“Okay, fine, can we be done with this now?” Matt complains a little squeamish about talking about soft-core porn. You wouldn’t be surprised if he needs to go to the bathroom after this. Relieve some of his Jewish guilt into a hand towel.
“Matty, hey, grow a pair will ya? It’s sex,” Patty verbal won’t miss the opportunity to jump on the man. She’s got that maternal ‘I’ll put your nose in your soiled pants’ vibe about her.
Now you are picturing her and Quinn in a scene and you cringe. Not from being a prude like Matt, but because you realy don’t wanna know.
“It’s not our Mathew s’ ehs fault! Eh’s still a virgin.” Sal teases around his bandages and then giggles.
“I am not!” Matt crosses his arms over his chest. Then he turns to Maya for backup. She just shrugs, not about to confirm they’d had sex. It was far too embarrassing to relive the moment. He finished in forty-five seconds; he never even got it in. She doesn’t count it, but you sure as shit do.
“Are we good now?” You insert not wanting to talk about this either.
“When are you going to write a movie with furries?” Sal asks as you hop off the conference table.
“Are you asking because you want a furry film?” You step back into your heels and try to gauge what kind of HR nightmare you are wading into.
Maya rolls her tongue around her mouth as she stares at the white board still, you recognize she’s counting money in her head. Sorta like the cartoon Scrouge McDuck with gold stacked on his desk.
Matt shuffles over to her to ask something stupid. But she’s only half listening, carrying the 1 million in her mind. You know the face when she’s only half listening, and the person she gives that face to the most is Matt. The only mystery is how he hasn’t noticed she’s already solved the problem and is letting him run himself tired before she interjects.
Sal stands and takes his phone out to probably show you something but you are grabbing your bag ready to run.
You aren’t sure what Maya would do if she walked over to see Sal trying to show you furry porn. But the man wasn’t going to look good with more facial trauma.
Sadly, Sal’s too fast for you to get away from, probably from everyone in the industry attempting to move around him. He’s holding a brand new iPhone 17, you wouldn’t touch it, you’d rather lick the New York Subway handrails. So he holds it up with his shaking hand.
“My cousin says they’re very kind and-” Sals phone has saved full furry costumes.
“Listen Sal, I do often write for stuff I’m not even into. But I don’t know if I’m the right voice for the furries.” You say lifting your bag over your shoulder. Looking over the phone rim back at the bruised man's face.
“Woah you kinkshamin?” He looks horrified at the very idea. His attempt to say kink-sharming just kinda jumbles together. You’re almost proud he knows the term.
“Never, I don’t yuck your yum. I just know that I wouldn’t do their community justice, Id need to research more. But none of this is the point, the real question is; Sal are you curious about furries?” You use your therapy voice, your calm voice - non-judgmental, but gentle prodigy. You used it on Quinn at the award show. You used it when Maya was cranky as hell and you needed to wait for her to get it all out before punishing her.
It’s a mix between a grade school teacher's tone, and your aunt who needs you to not ruin another family dinner. You’ve perfected it, your eye only twitches a little when you have to give it to Saperstein.
Sal slowed his walk as you moved towards the door and considered this. His silence spoke volumes and your fingers dig into your back pocket for your own phone.
“You know there’s plenty of people in this town who have munches, you could get involved.” You offer, not sure how you are once again talking someone through kink positivity.
You don’t say that Matt is a furry, you hope they just figure it out together, that would be a cute workplace romance.
Sal opens his mouth but Maya’s faster as she comes behind you, taking your bag off your shoulders and carrying it herself.
What a cute service bottom, always being so attentive, you’d have to remember this later when you were fucking.
Maya’s eyes find Sal and he freezes, so she hisses comically at him and he flinches then walks away. You school your features, not wanting to laugh at how fast he scattered.
Maya uses her dump truck of an ass to push the glass door open and walk you out of the office.
“He still afraid of you?” Your lips curl at the entertainment. Your wife shrugs but looks a little too delighted herself to lie to you.
“I’ve been told without being told that as long as I don’t hurt him on company property on company hours, then it’s his word against mine.” Maya rattles off the legality of it all, and you chuff but open your phone to see missed emails from your editor.
“Sounds like a loophole for abusing authority, what a legal nightmare.” You respond, but you’re already deep into the email, not caring at all anymore.
Maya presses her body a little closer to yours as you both walk.
“Hey, I know you are already deep in the Outlook emai’s pussy, but before it has claimed your soul. But you have to eat, and I have got to use some of Matt’s shmoozing money to take you on a ‘work lunch,’ so what do ya say? I highkey could grab some sushi, or if you are feeling like phoritto, I saw an Insta reel with a gigantic- are you listening to me?” Maya asked and without looking up from your phone, you had walked on muscle memory through the studio lobby.
Maya opening doors as you stared down. Trying to figure out how to respond to your editor.
As they typed about the usage of ‘honeybutter,’ in the semen scenes.
“Mmhmm, highkey, work lunch, phorrito.” You list back, thumbs typing as you spoke. Trying to decide why food was the reason that it wasn’t liked or if the cum inflation is no longer in. Your mind goes back to the furry conversation and you ponder if you need to research it when you get home. Then IM your editor and ask about monster fucking, or furry erotic.
Maya’s hand falls to your lower back to guide you.
“You know you can’t just repeat keywords - that doesn’t work on me. If you’re not careful I’ll swipe that thing from you.” Maya warns, not as dumb as Matt. Your wife holds the last door open for you two to walk into the parkinglot.
You are adding a hyperlink to the bottom of your email when Maya grabs you by the back of your pants to stop you from walking in front of a Ferrari.
Your heartbeat doesn’t even raise as it whips by you.
“FUCK YOU NEPO COKE WHORE! WE’RE WALKIN HERE! GET YOUR HEAD ATTA YOUR BUSSY OR I’LL RE-ERRANGE YOUR TRUST-FUND NOSE!” Maya screams in fury, and you don’t even look up, as she hand signals some rather usavory gestures.
The guy honks and speeds off, either informed enough not to get out of the car to fight Maya. Or chicken shit and unaware of who the head of marketing is.
Either way your heart stays level, brain still trying to figure out how to respond to the email.
That is, until Maya moves her hand to your ass to guide you to step down onto the blacktop, then swipes your phone out of your hands.
“MAYA!” You don’t use your dominant voice, too surprised at her. But you try to grab it back only for the 50 year old to easily evade you.
“I know baby, I know, you gotta get back and finish your writing. But I also know from you staring at my ass like you are some kind of cartoon character salivating that you can’t figure out the next part. That’s where I come in, I’m the muse. I’m also the submissive Mommy who keeps you fed. So, shawarma, or sushi?” Maya pockets your phone, god she was good.
Her usage of submissive Mommy has your cunt clench, already wet from staring at her ass from before.
Maya checks both ways as she directs you towards her car.
“What happened to phorrito?” You pout as Maya opens the door for you and you scoot in. Maya chucks your bag into the backseat and then rounds the car.
Her music blares once she’s sat and pressed the button on her overpriced vehicle.
“You lost phorrito when you ignored me.” Her pretend pout is adorable and you kiss her bottom lip, once, twice, then Maya steals the third one for good luck.
“What a brat I have.” You coo at her, leaning back to buckle your seat belt.”May I have my phone back?” You aren’t really asking, but your love decides to ignore the understone of a command.
“It’s my bargaining chip, besides we have a wager that is left unfinished.”
“Maya-” You start, lowering your voice.
Maya makes an interrupting rude noise in her mouth and then slips on her shades.
“Lunch, Sex, then writing.” Maya backs out of her parking space, her sunroof opening to the L.A heat. The one that baked the cement enough to sometimes make it squishy.
“Sal’s right, bottoms are so predictable.” Your lips curled seeing the reaction you’d wanted from your wife. Offense making her shades droop down her nose just enough to play it up
“No one in the history of ever has uttered the words ‘Sal’s right.’ Not once, not ever - and you cannot ruin such a healthy streak.” Maya says, using her middle finger, she pushes up her shades.
Turning the car, checking for blindspots, but her right hand like glue to you falls on your thigh. It’s as though there’s an imaginary impression on your skin. One that makes her body fit with yours.
“Are you being a brat because you need something?” You say it evenly, almost like the question for Sal. But this has a promise of you making those needs come true.
“Yes,” Maya tells you, not lifting her face away from the traffic of the road. “Good thing I have no problem taking what I want.”
You roll your eyes now and reach into her glovebox to find a bunch of useless shit for her car. Before bringing out a pair of shades that cost more than you’d been offered for your first book deal.
Snapping them onto your face, you lean back in the seat and close your eyes. Maya doesn’t complain about your cat nap; she uses the buttons on her steering wheel to turn her music up impossibly higher. The ’90s R&B is comforting, brings back memories, you smile at Maya.
Years of marriage confirm this won’t bother you. In fact you find it comforting, as she weaves in traffic, her hand ontop of your thigh is warm and comforting. You eventually lay your hand ontop of her own, securing her claim.
Twenty minutes later Maya pulls into the parking lot on some overpriced hipster phorrito place and as you open your eyes and put your sunglasses back into her glovebox, you can’t help but feel the warmth from this tiny act.
“I thought I’d lost my phorrito choice?” You question but Maya just shrugs not about to get gushy about it.
“Must have taken a wrong turn.” She lies opening the car door and then comes to your side to open yours. She locks the car, and you walk with your hand behind your back, a little too coachella like. But your wife doesn’t let your finger be cold for long.
Lacing them together from behind your back as you step up to the front door and open it.
By the time you are both set down into the cramped and busy restaurant, Maya’s already hangry. Her hair whipping over her shoulder as she plops into the seat, cracking open the menu and scrunching her nose up.
It’s not the food she’s disapproving of, it’s a half true to say it’s the noise.
But you know how to fix it, you stand up making Maya look up. You round the booth and she scoots further inside for you to plop next to her.
“You do love me.” Maya says, and you chuckle, you like your MILFs physically affectionate, downright needy, and murderous, it seemed.
You eye the alcohol menu but instead grab the laminated food menu and sigh.
“You need a margarita.” Maya slid in the seat ever closer to you, thighs pressed against the other, Maya put her ankle under yours and your legs are wrapped.
“I do not.”
“Yeah, a big one with the salt on the glass.”
“You want me to forget I have an email in my inbox and lose my bra between here and home.” You say monotone as you flip the menu around.
“You get the classic, I’ll get the fruity one you want to try but you’ll actually hate. We’ll get salt on the rim like you like. After we’ll have car sex, then home sex, the alcohol will kick in, and you’ll take another nap. I’ll order dinner in, you can work as we watch the sunset, then bubble bath and anal. I don’t see why this is a bad plan?” Maya reaches across to see what kind of tequila they have on hand.
Kink and alcohol didn’t mix, but Maya and tequila tasted so good mixed on your tongue.
“They have your favorite,” Maya muttered, already deep in her devious master plan.
“Just because I lost my top-”
“In the middle of Folsom Fair, they should rename the Bay Area the Gay Area. I almost got into a fist fight with a dyke on a bike. Not that tequila, the other one…”Maya tilted the menu to her chest so you couldn’t see. Mason did love her games.
You look up and think for a moment back to tequila's long gone.
“Not Plaza’s, that just came out.”
“That woman liked you too much at the choice awards, no go earlier in our relationship.” Maya adds, and you think this reminder of jealousy has her needing to say ‘relationship.’
You turn in your seat a little to face her.
“Marriage or relationship?”
Maya’s grin spreads up her cheeks, making her eyes squint like she did when she’s already won.
“Now that’s the right question.”
“Am I going to black out?”
“You’ve only blacked out once, and I will never let you eat at Matt's ‘Old School Hollywood Party’ ever, ever, ever again. That wasn’t the tequila’s fault; she didn’t mix well with shrooms.” Maya defended her favorite brand and you quickly took three more brands off the list of possibilities.
How you two did love to play.
You brush your hair back and straighten your posture, causing Maya’s eyes to travel like a droplet of water down the stem of a margarita glass. You play dirty too, if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been able to keep up with your wife this long.
Before Maya’s drool can fall onto the table, a waitress comes over with a notepad.
Maya’s not looking at her, which is rude, but you do while your wife tries to figure out if she can unhook your bra and get away with it in this booth.
Still she’s got a crazy high intelligence, and so she holds up two fingers.
“Two margaritas, one fruity blended, one classic - top shelf.”
The waitress is too used to hollywood, she doesn’t look up from her pad as she asks.
“You want th-” she drones with her dark lipstick smacking, a little melted in the heat.
“Top shelf,” Maya repeats, not wanting her to give it away. You tilt your face to Maya to scowl.
“Behave.” You whisper but she’s ready to hump your leg in this restaurant.
“Extra salt on the rim, then two of your number 7s, extra dipping sauce. Can you make the first one with a side of brown rice?” Your wifes gaze turns to the uncaring waitress.
You know when your wife is trying to stay out of trouble.
With this much fun on the agenda for the afternoon, with you two playing hookie, she wants to get to the end of the rainbow.
Fuck you two were gay.
“I’ll be back with some waters.” She says placing the pen back behind her ear and leaving you.
“Manners, come on.” You try to joke but Maya’s body is rounding yours, and you try not to inhale her scent.
“Why is the email stressing you out?” She says, and you give her major points for cooling her libido and changing the subject. A waiter drops off your waters and sets down two paper straws. You fiddle with yours, needing a distraction as Maya forcefully fists her straw against the table making the recycled paper split, then shoves the straw in the ice water.
“I… Can we put this conversation on hold, tell me what Matt was asking you. Why were you punching the numbers?” You fidget in your seat, but place your hand behind your neck and try your best to block everything out but Maya’s voice.
“Okay,” your wife allows you to avoid the topic. Mason also pretends not be impressed by your ability to read her mind, even after all this time, it makes her happy.
“If we keep making his artsy movies, we’ll lose a quarter of the funding before we ever get to making the two kids movies. They don’t want to pump advertising for an arsy alien piece of shit that one of their college buddies is doing. Griffin doesn’t know about it. He wants the sex scenes from your film to stay. Letting Matt toss and turn over your intimacy scenes really is just to-”
“-Let him think he’s picking before you show him the numbers tomorrow morning. You timed it so that he could hit a soft ball before you sucker punched that the artsy film has no fan base and will tank. You need to either advertise it better, show Griffin and tattle, or get his buddy to re-cast or edit the script.” You finish, having listened to enough of Maya’s days to really get where she was working from.
You push the paper off the straw and sink it into the cold water, taking a drink as Maya spends a second enamored by how right you were for her.
You swallow the cold water and then put an elbow on the table casually and rest your cheek on your hand.
“So, why was Patty checking her watch?” You don’t miss a thing. Maya wants to put another ring on your finger right now.
“She’s taken a meeting with a director-”
“Kravitz.” You are just showing off now.
“Jesus, they shouldn’t even have me sign an NDA; they should make you sign it.” Maya chuckles at you, but you just raise your eyebrows.
Maya’s hand finds your knee as she draws anxious fingers up and down your thigh. It’s different from her hold in the car.
“You’re going to have a trailer ready by tomorrow?”
“Elevator pitch with some headshots, I said we needed a trailer - what do I know? I’m just the head of fucking marketing. But Patty and Kravitz don’t have a leading lady who will do it without a contract, no surprise.” Maya’s tension sits on her shoulders, you inhale slowly and think of her problem instead of your own.
“Can’t be a romcom, not arts, not horror-”
Maya’s about to ask why you think that when you give her a ‘i’m not dumb’ glare.
“Kravitz just did Blink Twice, you won’t be able to get her sequel - it’s already in the works. But they’re having a point of tension with the lawyers. So….”
“You are one scary writer.” Maya tells you but her pupils dilate and she’s leaning in to kiss you.
You smile broadly, loving the glow of her compliments.
“You are playing hookie on purpose.” You understand this plot better than your own book now.
“If I’m not there for the meeting, and I’m not there for Matt to get high with his old buddies and Sal. Then, when Quinn and Patty make a shot for this movie - I’m able to pretend to be Switzerland for Griffin.”
“Saving the day, making yourself indispensable-” You roll your eyes and list all the ways that her manipulations pay off. But Maya shook her head and sipped at her water.
“Saving the god damn studio from another film trainwreck. We’re still not out of the lawsuit over AI with Kool-Aid. End of the day Griffin’ll look at the bottom line, how much we made, how much we lost. Sadly marketing always get’s CC’ed on the emails, and I have to fire someone.”
You nibble on your top lip, so Maya knows you’re trying not to say something.
“Out with it, Mason.” Your wife likes using your shared last name to remind you that you are very married to her.
“Have you read Stranger In A Strange Land?” You ask already knowing from years of being together that she hasn’t. You’re purely questioning her it to move the conversation.
Maya lifts an eyebrow, so you continue.
“Movie rights would be low, book came out in 1961…But it’s a classic. They made 715 worldwide with Dune part 2….” You shrug, and Maya’s grin is methodical, slowly as she savors the idea.
“Matt is a nerd….” You put the two together.
Maya picks it up just as fast;
“Matty won’t want his friend to direct. He’ll actually take it seriously..it’ll be easily put together teaser of a monologue with some shiny lights…”
You shrug again like you didn’t think of something great that will cost her nothing to buy the title too. But if she makes into a two-parter like Dune, she could sell billions in merch.
Maya doesn’t get out her phone like she wants to, instead her eyes continue to study you.
“Book sales?”
“1961 to today…easily 25 million. One of the top-selling psyfi novels. An Avatar-like sex scene to stir up the angry Midwest moms. The book is considered a classic, you get a director and a score as annoying as the screechy Dune yell. You make an offensive actor make a claim. You’re back on top.” You say turning at the sound of the waitress bringing you over two margaritas.
You thank her but she’s already gone. Turning to Maya as she takes the fruity one that looks good but you won’t like.
She holds it in the air, a toast.
“To smut.” She says which makes you giggle but you lift your glass.
“To behind the scenes.” You smile at your gorgeous wife as her hair curls around her shoulders.
“To us.” Maya adds romantically and you can’t help but lean forward and kiss her.
You toast and the meal is brought out, you both talk about non work things. Your cousins wedding in a eight months, airline tickets to go see them.
Maya asks if wants to go to the opening of the new theater on the strip because they’re going to show classics next sunday. You both argue on why Hans Zimmer will not take Matt’s calls. Both of your reasons and stories very possible answers.
Maya starts to talk about this party coming up for a prequal to a zombie film that was based on a video game she can’t remember.
You listen to her, having finished your food you sip at your second margarita. Realizing that this is definitely your favorite tequila.
You're feeling a little too good for lunch, as Maya’s lips move quickly, her right arm moving animatedly as she speaks. But her left arm moves to your shoulder, bordering on the back of the booth, casually.
The body language is unmistakable, though. You’re here with Maya Mason, your wife. Her arm around you, stopping anyone from coming up to your table. This was a date, didn’t matter how long you’d been married or how rich and important you two were.
Maya Mason was taking you on a date.
You fiddled with the key, then you put the round metal bit in your mouth. The warm light flecked off of the object between your bottom lip, pressing the side, the jagged edge against the soft bit of your lip.
You flip it over again and your top lip trapped the key, your gold chain taunt from the back of your neck to where the metal bit sat against your mouth.
Maya stops speaking, her clit throbbing like it might explode as she envisioned you eating her out instead of playing with the key that went to the chain around her neck.
She doesn’t touch the lock, because she knows it’s there, just like she knows you’re wedding ring doesn’t come off your finger.
“Tell me,” Maya says, the command is laced with intimacy; she is so close you could kiss those gorgeous lips.
Maya’s safe, she’s your home, and just as NDA’s for her work don’t count in your marriage. Your fears aren’t allowed to stay between your own ears. Maya carries the bags, as much as she’ll carry your burdens.
You release the key, upset that you’d shown your hand so easily by touching it.
It would be silly to blame the tequila for the truth; you were dying to talk to Maya about it.
So you lick the side of the last bit of salt on the margarita and set it down. Folding your lips on top of each other like you could seal an envelope and drop this fear at the bottom of the sea.
But Maya’s eyes are gentle, she’s waiting for you - and you won’t lie.
“What happens if I run out of stories?” You say it so quickly it almost doesn’t register in your ears. But Maya’s already needing more information.
“What do you mean?” She counters, and you realize she’s not asking for herself but for you to follow the fear down to the dark places.
“What if I’m a one-trick pony. Sal talked about furries-”
“Don’t bring Saperstein into our lunch, or I’ll lose my lunch.” Maya jokes back, and it does lighten your load a bit.
“If I run out of tricks…I’m just….”
Maya waits for you to find an ugly thing to say, but decides quickly she won’t even let you say it.
“You just came up with a solution that no one in my marketing meeting at five am this morning, or the last six meetings this week, thought of. You write smut while we watch TV in your head. Just like you see me counting, I know you’re sitting there coming up with plot and fucking euphemisms like ‘Honey Butter Ejaculation.” Maya says and you can’t help but snort at how ridiculous that one was.
“Eventually the well will run dry, right?”
“Eventually, I won’t understand the latest trend, and they’ll come up with an app I’ll need a teenager to show me. I’m fifty years old in this game, I bagged a hottie with a body who likes to hurt me. Baby, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. You like writing erotica?” Maya tilts her head at the end to ask you.
You think for a second, but you don’t need to, because you know the answers.
“I love it.” You beam, it’s honest.
“Then you write, and I’ll give you more source material to work with.” Maya leans in slow so she can stare into your eyes. Your body melts into her as you push forward to kiss.
Her lips move against yours and the PDA is too much for a lunch spot.
You break the kiss but don’t move away, letting your forehead rest against yours.
“We’re gonna get the check-”
“No, bathroom…”You say against her lips. Your hand reaches out to the large lock against her chest. You’re going to steal her panties to gagg her from what you’re about to do.
“Not even the car?” She flirts, knowing that she’d take the charge and bend over the booth if you told her too.
“Bathroom.” You repeat as your hand travels to her stomach, fingers moving lower.
“Whatever you say boss.” Maya moans, but you stand up from the table and tilt your head to the bathrooms. Your wife stands quickly, then wobbles on her back leg to follow you.
A waiter rounds the corner faster than you realized and stops to see you both walking towards the bathroom.
You know what’s coming, because it’s the same thing that came from Quinn, from Sal, from strangers at the grocery store.
He points to your neck, then looks over at Maya’s as he’s standing in the way between you and your afternoon delight in the bathroom.
But not even Maya Mason can stop the twink from asking;
“What’s with the Lock?”
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Love in Botanical Terms
Pairing: Oda Sakunosuke x Fem!Reader (Writer AU)
Genre: Romance, Slow Burn, Fluff, Soft Romance, Neighbors to Lovers
Oda Sakunosuke's world was made of words.
He lived in them, breathed them, constructed entire universes from the twenty-six letters of an alphabet that, in his hands, became something close to magic. His apartment was a testament to this—bookshelves covering
every wall from floor to ceiling, manuscripts stacked on every available surface, notebooks filled with observations and half-formed ideas scattered across his desk like fallen leaves.
He was, by most objective measures, a recluse.
Not by design, exactly. More by default. The outside world was loud and complicated and full of variables he couldn't control, while his apartment was quiet and ordered and entirely his. He had everything he needed here—his books, his work, his tea, and Sora.
Sora was a grey tabby cat of indeterminate age and very strong opinions. He'd appeared at Oda's window one rainy November night three years ago, thin and bedraggled and utterly unimpressed with the weather, and had simply never left. Which suited Oda perfectly. Sora was excellent company—warm and present without demanding conversation.
Currently, Sora was doing what he did best: sitting in Oda's lap with complete disregard for the manuscript pages scattered beneath him, purring at a volume that somehow managed to be both soothing and slightly judgmental.
"I'm trying to work," Oda told him.
Sora yawned, revealing an impressive array of teeth, and settled more firmly into his lap.
"Right. Of course."
Oda set down his pen and reached for his tea instead. The afternoon light was fading, casting long golden shadows across his desk. Through the window in front of him, he could see the street below—the café on the corner where he occasionally ventured for coffee, the bookshop two doors down that he visited more frequently than was probably healthy, and the flower shop directly across from his building.
Petal & Prose, the sign above the door read in elegant handwriting. Custom Bouquets & Botanical Arrangements.
It had been there for about a year. Before that, the space had been a dry cleaner's that Oda had used perhaps twice. He'd barely noticed when it changed.
Until he noticed you.
It had started simply enough, the way most significant things in Oda's life started—with observation.
He was at his desk one Tuesday evening in early spring, struggling with a particularly stubborn chapter, when movement across the street caught his attention. The flower shop had been closed for an hour—he'd watched you flip the sign and lock the door at six, as you did every day—but the lights inside were still on.
Curious, he'd looked more carefully.
You were still there, moving through the shop in what he could only describe as deliberate communion with your plants. Not tending them in any businesslike way, but actually caring for them—kneeling down to examine leaves at eye level, running your fingers gently along petals, occasionally leaning in close to smell something.
You were wearing your work apron still, the green one with deep pockets that was perpetually dusty with pollen, and your hair was coming loose from whatever you'd put it in that morning. There was a smudge of soil on your left cheek that you clearly didn't know about.
Oda stared for considerably longer than was polite.
Then Sora headbutted his hand, demanding attention, and he looked away.
But the next evening, he found himself glancing toward the flower shop again.
And the evening after that.
It became a habit before he fully realized it was happening.
Every evening, after you'd closed the shop and sent your assistant home, you stayed. Sometimes for thirty minutes, sometimes for two hours. Always doing the same thing—moving through your flowers with that careful, focused attention that Oda found inexplicably compelling.
He started noticing details. How you talked to your plants (he couldn't hear the words, but the shape of speech was unmistakable). How you kept a specific notebook—dark green cover, always in your apron pocket—that you'd take out to write in after examining something particularly interesting. How you'd sometimes hold a flower up to the light from a specific angle, studying it with the same intensity he brought to a particularly good sentence.
"She's a scientist," he told Sora one evening. "Or something like one. She looks at flowers the way I look at manuscripts."
Sora regarded him with amber eyes.
"Don't look at me like that."
The cat looked away, apparently satisfied with whatever judgment he'd rendered.
The thing was, Oda didn't usually notice people. He was observant—professionally so, in the way all good writers were—but he noticed details in service of understanding human nature in the abstract. Individual people rarely captured his attention this completely.
But there was something about the way you moved through your flowers. Something in the quality of your attention, the obvious love you had for living things, that felt familiar in a way he couldn't quite articulate.
He wanted to understand it better.
So he did what he always did when he wanted to understand something better—he started writing about it.
The first poem was almost accidental.
He'd been working on a short story, struggling to describe a character who cared deeply about something most people overlooked, and he'd found himself thinking about you. About the way you held flowers like they were conversations worth having. About the particular angle of your head when you found something interesting in a leaf.
He'd written a few lines, just to capture the image. Just as a reference, he told himself.
He ended up with three pages.
He read them back and felt his ears go slightly warm, which was unusual. He wasn't prone to embarrassment about his own work.
A woman who speaks to living things,
who finds in petals what others miss in novels—
the whole world compressed to a single bloom,
patient and precise as winter stars.
She moves through her work the way water moves
through careful channels—purposeful,
unaware of watching,
which is the only way to be truly seen.
I have been trying to write this character for months:
someone who loves something so completely
it changes the quality of the air around her.
I didn't know I was describing a real person.
I didn't know I was describing you.
"Well," he said to Sora. "That happened."
Sora was unimpressed.
"It's observational. It doesn't mean anything."
Sora got up, stretched elaborately, and walked to the other side of the desk, where he sat with his back pointedly turned to Oda.
"You're a cat," Oda said. "Your opinions don't count."
But he kept the poem. Filed it in a folder on his desk, separate from his other work. Told himself it was research.
By the end of that week, there were three more poems in the folder.
The second came on Thursday, after she'd held a white peony to the window light and said something he couldn't hear but whose effect on her face he could read clearly—wonder, then satisfaction, then something that looked unmistakably like love.
There is a specific way she holds flowers—
not like objects, not even like living things,
but like something she is in conversation with.
I have interviewed writers, diplomats, criminals.
I have never watched anyone listen
the way she listens to a flower.
I wonder what they say to her.
I wonder if she would tell me, if I asked.
I wonder if I will ever ask.
I wonder why I am afraid to.
The third came on Saturday, after she laughed at something her assistant said and the sound reached him even through the glass, even through the street noise.
She laughed today and I missed the joke
because I was too busy noticing
the way her whole face changed.
I have written about joy for years.
I did not know it had that specific shape.
I did not know I had been waiting
to see it.
The fourth came late Sunday night, when the flower shop was dark and he was still at his desk and he realized he'd been looking at the empty window for twenty minutes without noticing.
The light across the street is off.
This is normal. This is how nights work.
I have never before noticed
the particular quality of a street
when one specific window goes dark.
I should sleep.
I am writing a poem instead.
About a window.
About absence.
About what it means that I notice.
He put all four in the folder. Did not examine what this meant. Told himself, firmly, that it was professional interest.
Sora sat on the folder and purred.
The flower shop smelled like spring had been concentrated and bottled.
You'd known this since the day you'd opened it, but you still noticed every time you walked through the door—the layered fragrance of dozens of different blooms, green and sweet and complex in ways that no perfume had ever successfully replicated. It was one of your favorite things about your work. The smell of it.
The other favorite thing was the silence. Not complete silence—there was always some ambient sound, the hum of the climate control, the occasional drip of water—but the particular quality of silence that existed among living things. Attentive and alive.
You'd been a florist for six years, a botanical enthusiast for considerably longer. Flowers had been your first language before you had the vocabulary to say so. You'd grown up with a garden grandmother who'd taught you the names and natures of everything that grew, who'd explained that plants communicated through chemistry and touch and light, and you'd never quite gotten over the wonder of that.
Petal & Prose was everything you'd wanted it to be. A shop that took flowers seriously. Custom arrangements based on actual floral language, real attention to the specific needs and aesthetics of each commission, a small selection of unusual botanical specimens for the clients who wanted something truly rare.
It was successful enough to be sustainable and small enough to still feel personal.
You were happy here.
"You're staying again?" your assistant Hana asked, pulling on her coat.
"Just a little while. I want to check the new shipment of ranunculus. They came in looking a bit stressed."
Hana shook her head with the particular fondness of someone who was used to this. "Don't stay too late. You were here until nine last night."
"I'll be home by eight."
"You said that yesterday."
"I mean it this time."
Hana gave you a look that communicated her skepticism clearly and left.
You turned back to your flowers.
The ranunculus were indeed stressed—too much handling during shipping, the petals slightly tight and the leaves wilting at the edges. You worked through the buckets methodically, trimming stems at an angle, removing damaged leaves, adjusting the water chemistry. As you worked, you talked to them in the low, conversational way you'd talked to plants since you were a child.
"You're okay," you murmured. "Worst is over. Clean water, good light, no jostling for a while. You'll open up beautifully, I promise."
You pulled out your notebook—the dark green one you kept for observations and ideas—and made a note about the shipping conditions. One of these days you were going to write a comprehensive guide to floral transport. It was a subject no one seemed to take seriously enough.
Through the window, the street outside was settling into evening. The café on the corner had its lights on, warm and golden. The bookshop was dark—it closed at six. The apartment building across the street had lit windows casting squares of yellow light onto the pavement below.
You'd noticed the man in the window across the street, of course. Hard not to, given that his desk faced the street and he was apparently at it at all hours. You'd formed a vague impression: tallish, dark-haired, solitary. Always seemed to be writing or reading. Sometimes had a cat in his lap.
You'd wondered occasionally what he wrote. He had the look of someone who thought carefully before putting things down—deliberate in a way that suggested the words mattered to him.
But you had flowers to attend to, and botanical mysteries were more immediately pressing than curiosity about neighbors.
You went back to your ranunculus.
The first time Oda came into your shop, you almost didn't notice him.
It was a Saturday morning in late April, busy with weekend customers, and you were elbow-deep in a bridal consultation when the bell above the door chimed. Hana was behind the counter; you left her to it.
The consultation took another forty minutes, and when you finally emerged from the back room, flushed and slightly fragrant with lily pollen, the shop was quieter. Hana was helping a woman choose between two arrangements, and there was a man standing near the display of seasonal flowers, reading the small cards you placed beside each variety.
He was reading them carefully. Not the quick skim of someone killing time, but the attentive focus of someone actually absorbing the information.
You recognized him after a moment—the man from the window across the street.
Up close, he was different from your vague impression. His face was more specific: a quality of stillness to it, thoughtful brown eyes, the slight dishevelment of someone who spent more time inside his own head than worrying about how he presented to the world. He was holding a small notebook and appeared to be taking notes.
"Can I help you?" you asked.
He looked up, and for just a moment something like surprise crossed his face. Like he'd expected you to be different up close.
"I'm just looking," he said. Then, like he felt this needed clarification: "I came in for flowers. Obviously. I'm not—I just wanted to see." He stopped. "That was poorly articulated. I apologize."
Despite yourself, you found this mildly charming. "It's fine. What are you looking for?"
"Something for my desk. I work at home and I've been informed that the lack of living things in my space is—" he paused, seeming to search for the right word, "—atmospherically deficient."
"Who informed you?"
"A friend. She's extremely opinionated."
"Well, she's not wrong." You moved further into the shop. "What kind of atmosphere are you going for? Calm and focusing, or something with more presence?"
He thought about this with what seemed like genuine seriousness. "I hadn't considered there was a distinction."
"There definitely is. Lavender and eucalyptus are focusing—they're atmospheric without demanding attention. But something like a peony or a gardenia is more present. They want to be part of the room."
"What would you recommend for someone who spends most of their time writing?"
"What do you write?"
He looked slightly startled by the question, like he hadn't expected it to be relevant. "Fiction. Occasionally reviews."
"Then something that rewards looking at when you're stuck," you said immediately. "Writer's block benefits from something visually interesting. Anemones, maybe—they have that quality of depth to them. Or Japanese ranunculus, if you like layered things."
"I do like layered things." He was looking at you rather than the flowers now, with that same attentive expression he'd had with the cards. "How do you know all this?"
"I've been interested in flowers since I was very small. And I've had a lot of time with writers. They're a significant portion of my clients." You smiled. "We're across the street from each other, by the way. I've seen you at your desk."
He went slightly still. "I've—yes. I've noticed your shop as well." He said this carefully, in a way that felt like it was an understatement of something. "It's—the evening light there is very good. Photographically speaking."
This was such a specific and slightly odd observation that you almost laughed. "That's a very particular thing to notice."
"I notice particular things. It's occupational."
"For a writer, I suppose it would be."
He bought the ranunculus—the stressed ones you'd nursed back to health, now fully open and extravagantly beautiful. He seemed pleased with them in a quiet way, holding the wrapped stems carefully, like he was aware they were living things.
"Thank you," he said at the door. "For the recommendation."
"Come back when they fade. I'll find you something else that rewards looking at."
He nodded, and left, and you went back to your work.
But you thought about him, on and off, for the rest of the day.
That evening, Oda sat at his desk with the ranunculus in a glass of water beside him, their petals fully open now, extravagant in the lamplight.
He should have been writing the novel. He wrote this instead:
She said: come back when they fade.
I will find you something else
that rewards looking at.
I have been looking at things my whole life.
Writing down what I see.
Nobody has ever offered
to keep giving me things worth seeing.
The flowers are on my desk now.
They are fully open.
She was right—they open slowly,
over days,
revealing themselves in layers.
I am starting to think
she was not only talking about flowers.
Come back when they fade.
I will.
I would come back for considerably less.
I would come back for nothing at all.
I think she knows that.
I think that might be why she said it.
He set down his pen. Read it back. Felt something warm and slightly alarming move through his chest.
"This is your fault," he told Sora.
Sora was asleep on the wrapping paper from the ranunculus, purring with the satisfied air of a cat who considers himself responsible for everything good that happens.
Oda added the poem to the folder. Did not examine why the folder already felt heavier than it should.
His name, you learned, was Oda. He told you this on his third visit, approximately three weeks after the first, as if he'd decided the acquaintance had reached the level where names were appropriate.
"I'm Oda. Sakunosuke." A brief pause. "Most people just use the family name."
"I'm familiar," you said, because by that point you'd looked him up. You'd felt slightly guilty about it, but curiosity had won. He had four published novels, two collections of shorter pieces, and a reputation as a reviewer whose opinions were taken seriously in certain literary circles. His prose style, according to the few reviews of his reviews you'd found, was precise and warm in equal measure—the kind of writing that was technically accomplished but never cold.
"You've read my work?" He looked surprised, then quickly neutral, like he was trying not to reveal that the surprise was pleased.
"I looked you up after your first visit. I read the first chapter of your most recent novel online." You'd read all of it, actually, staying up until 2 AM with increasing inability to put it down. "The gardening metaphor in chapter three was lovely."
Something shifted in his expression—something subtle and warm that he seemed to be attempting to keep contained. "Thank you. That chapter gave me significant trouble."
"I couldn't tell."
"Good. That means it worked."
He'd come back for new flowers—the ranunculus had faded, as expected—and you'd spent twenty minutes discussing options before settling on a deep blue delphiniums and white sweet peas, which you'd suggested would complement each other in the way that contrast and harmony worked together in good prose.
He'd looked at you with an expression you couldn't quite read when you said that.
"I hadn't thought of flowers that way," he said.
"In terms of prose?"
"In terms of deliberate composition. As if they're saying something."
"They are. That's the whole point of floral language—it's an entire system of communication. Flowers have been saying things for centuries. We just stopped listening as carefully."
He bought the delphiniums and sweet peas, and when he left, he paused at the door.
"Do you have a copy of the book?" he asked. "I could—if you wanted the rest of it. I have a spare."
"I'd like that," you said.
He came back twenty minutes later with a copy. It was a first edition, which you suspected he hadn't intended to give away, and there was a small mark beside the gardening metaphor he'd mentioned. Just a faint pencil line, the kind you make when something matters to you while you're writing and you want to remember why.
You ran your thumb over it and felt something you couldn't quite name.
Spring deepened into a warmth that felt like a promise.
Oda came to your shop once a week, sometimes twice. He always had a reason—new flowers for his desk, a question about something botanical, a book to return or lend. But you both knew, without discussing it, that the reasons were somewhat incidental.
What you were actually doing was talking.
You talked about books—not just his, but all books, the kind of conversation that leaps from one text to another and back, building a map of how you each moved through literature. You discovered that you both loved the same obscure nineteenth-century naturalist writer whose work nobody else seemed to have read. You argued about whether a certain famous novel's ending was triumphant or depressing (you said triumphant; he said the distinction was false) with the comfortable heat of people who trusted each other's intelligence.
You talked about flowers. He asked questions that were better than most people's questions—specific and curious and clearly building toward something, a framework of understanding rather than just collecting facts. He remembered everything you told him, referencing it in later conversations in ways that showed he'd been thinking about it between visits.
"The way you talk about botanical communication," he said one afternoon, watching you arrange a commission—deep burgundy dahlias with sprigs of rosemary, for someone who'd requested "something that feels like coming home"—"it sounds like you're describing a language you're fluent in that most people can't hear."
"That's exactly what it is." You tucked a rosemary sprig into the arrangement, pleased with the result. "Most people look at flowers and see pretty objects. But they're constantly communicating—chemical signals, physical responses to environment, adaptations that represent millions of years of conversations with insects and weather and soil. It's extraordinarily complex and we walk past it every day without noticing."
"Like background music that's actually a symphony," he said.
"Yes. Exactly like that." You looked at him. "That's a good way to put it."
He ducked his head slightly, and you noticed, not for the first time, that he sometimes did this when you said something that pleased him—a small, contained gesture, like he was tucking the moment away somewhere private.
You found it endearing, though you hadn't said so.
Meanwhile, in his apartment across the street, Oda was losing a battle he hadn't quite admitted he was fighting.
The folder on his desk—the one he'd labeled Observations (Misc.) in a fit of self-deception—had grown considerably since that first accidental poem in early spring. It now contained fourteen poems, three fragments, and several pages of what could only be described as notes on the quality of light at various times of day as filtered through flower shop windows.
He knew this was not normal documentation behavior. He knew this even as Sora sat on the folder with the judicious air of a cat who has seen everything and found it all predictable.
"These are just—" he started.
Sora blinked.
"They're technically exercises. I'm exploring a new form."
Sora began to wash his face, which was his standard response to what he considered particularly unconvincing arguments.
"She has an interesting way of moving through space," Oda said, with the defensive precision of someone trying to sound clinical about something that wasn't. "It's professionally relevant to understand how people inhabit their environments."
Sora finished washing his face and went to sleep.
"You're useless," Oda told him, not unkindly.
He opened the folder and read back through the poems. They were, he admitted with the unflinching honesty he applied to his own work, good. Some of the best things he'd written in years, actually—which was both gratifying and slightly alarming.
They were also unambiguously about being in love with you.
He'd managed to avoid this conclusion for some time through careful linguistic distancing—using "she" and "the florist" and "the woman across the street" rather than your name, as if the pronoun created sufficient abstraction. But reading them all together, their subject was unmistakable. So was the emotional state of their author.
"This is a problem," he told Sora.
Sora, asleep, offered no response.
The problem was not the feeling itself—feelings were data, and Oda was generally comfortable with data even when it was uncomfortable. The problem was what to do about it. He was not, by nature, someone who acted on feelings easily. His relationships had historically followed the path of least resistance, which meant they'd been few and brief and had generally ended with the other person noting, not unkindly, that he seemed more interested in observing life than participating in it.
Which was fair. He'd been more interested in observing.
He was, he realized with some alarm, not more interested in observing this time.
He wanted to participate. Wanted, specifically, to sit across from you in your flower shop and have exactly the kind of conversation they'd been having, but with the knowledge between them that it was something more than professional acquaintance.
He wanted to give you the poems.
The thought alone made him feel slightly ill with nerves, which was new and not entirely welcome.
He went back to his desk and opened a new poem, because that was what he did when reality became too loud—he put it into language until it was manageable.
Watching you work at evening,
light pooling amber on your hands,
I understand for the first time
why botanists believe in consciousness—
you move through living things
like a conversation half-finished,
always just about to say
the necessary word.
He read it back. Added two lines. Removed one. Read it again.
It would have to do.
Oda came to your shop on a Wednesday morning in early June with no stated reason for the first time.
He just appeared, as the bell above your door announced, holding a small paper bag from the café on the corner and looking like a man who had made a decision he wasn't entirely sure about.
"I brought tea," he said. "If you haven't—if you have a moment."
You looked at the tea, then at him, then at the clock. It was 10:30 AM. Hana wasn't in until noon on Wednesdays.
"I have a moment," you said.
You had, in fact, been thinking about him that morning—specifically about a variety of hellebore that had come in with the new shipment and whose particular shade of deep burgundy reminded you of a line from his third novel that you'd been rereading. This was not the first time a flower had reminded you of something he'd written, which you'd been treating as a coincidence rather than examine too closely.
He settled onto the stool you kept behind the counter for long conversations with clients, while you leaned against the worktable and accepted one of the cups from the bag.
"What are you working on?" you asked.
"A review. A debut novel—a young writer, very promising, writes about landscape in a way that's still finding its footing but has real potential." He wrapped both hands around his cup. "I'm trying to write something encouraging without being dishonest. It's a more difficult balance than it sounds."
"You take reviews seriously."
"More seriously than most reviewers, I've been told. Which is apparently a criticism."
"It doesn't sound like a criticism to me."
"No." He looked at you. "I don't think it is one, either."
The morning light was coming through the front windows at a low angle, illuminating the shop in a way that made everything look slightly luminous—the colors of the flowers deepened, the green of the leaves more saturated. You watched him notice this, watched him take it in with the quality of attention you'd come to think of as specifically his.
"You do this thing," you said, before you'd fully decided to say it.
"What thing?"
"When you're noticing something. There's a particular—stillness to you. Like you're trying not to disturb it."
He was quiet for a moment. "I suppose I'm afraid that if I move, I'll interrupt whatever it is. Some things only exist if you don't look at them directly."
"That's—" You stopped. Considered. "That's actually exactly how some flowers work. There are varieties whose full color only appears in peripheral vision. If you look straight at them, they shift to a different hue."
"Which variety?"
"I'll show you sometime. It's hard to describe."
"I'd like that." He said it quietly, and there was something in the simplicity of it that felt weighted.
You talked for another hour, covering the debut novelist, a variety of clematis you'd been researching, a chapter of his novel you'd wanted to ask him about for weeks, and the question of whether landscape could be a character in fiction or only ever a setting.
(He said character. You said setting with the capacity to become a character through relationship to the people in it. He went quiet in the thoughtful way he had and said: "I think that's the better formulation, actually.")
When he stood to leave, he hesitated at the door.
You'd noticed him doing this before—pausing at thresholds, like he was weighing something. You'd been curious about it, but hadn't asked.
Today he reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.
"I—" He stopped. Seemed to recalibrate. "I wrote some things. About the shop. About—" Another pause. "If you want to read them. You don't have to."
He held out the paper.
You took it, careful not to touch his hand, though you weren't entirely sure why that felt like it needed to be careful.
"Thank you," you said.
He nodded, turned, and left quickly—not quite running, but with the purposeful speed of someone who has done a frightening thing and needs immediate distance from it.
You looked at the folded paper in your hand.
You didn't open it until you closed the shop that evening.
You lived in the building adjacent to the flower shop—a practical arrangement that had started as economy and become something you loved about your life. You could hear the flower shop from your bedroom if you left the windows open; the faint smell of it reached you on warm evenings.
Your apartment was comfortable and well-loved: bookshelves covering one wall (you'd grown into a reader, partially through your acquaintance with Oda, partially through always having been one and just not having admitted it as an identity), plants in every window, a kitchen table where you did most of your living.
You made tea, changed out of your work clothes, and sat at the kitchen table with Oda's folded paper.
Even before you opened it, you could see that it was handwritten—the pen marks visible through the paper, the particular density of ink that meant he'd used a good pen and taken his time.
You opened it.
There were three poems. Each was titled with a date—the date of the day he'd presumably written it, you realized.
The first was dated late April. Early in your acquaintance.
A woman who speaks to living things,
who finds in petals what others miss in novels—
the whole world compressed to a single bloom,
patient and precise as winter stars.
She moves through her work the way water moves
through careful channels, purposeful
and unaware of watching,
which is the only way to be truly seen.
You read it twice. Then a third time.
Your face was warm. You weren't sure when that had happened.
The second poem was dated mid-May.
Evening light on green aprons,
on careful hands that know the name of everything—
I have been writing about landscape for ten years
and never understood what I was describing
until I watched you hold a stem to the window
and explain, to no one, why the angle matters.
You talk to flowers. I have started
talking back, on the page, to you.
I keep almost going across the street.
I keep finding reasons not to.
I am running out of reasons.
I think that is the point.
You set the paper down.
You picked it up again.
He had been watching you through his window. You'd known this in a vague way—you'd seen him at his desk often enough, had been aware of his window the way you were aware of all the windows on your street. But you hadn't known he was watching. Writing about it. Running out of reasons not to cross the street.
The third poem was dated just last week.
What I know about you: you keep a notebook
in your left apron pocket, always. You tuck your hair
back three times before it stays. When something
surprises you in a good way, you go still
before you smile—like you're deciding whether to.
You have talked to me about flowers
in a way that made me understand
that I have been lonely for a long time
without a vocabulary for it.
I am writing this in the dark,
the window across the street gone quiet,
and I think that you are the first person
I have wanted to tell things to
without also wanting to write them down.
(I am writing it down anyway.
Old habits.
I am working on it.)
What I know about myself, now:
I go to the flower shop
because you are there.
Only because you are there.
I am done pretending otherwise.
You sat at your kitchen table for a long time after that.
Your tea had gone cold. You hadn't noticed.
You read the third poem again. Then again. You kept stopping on the last four lines—I go to the flower shop / because you are there / only because you are there / I am done pretending otherwise—and feeling something in your chest that was warm and terrifying and enormous.
He knew. He'd known for a while, longer than you'd known yourself, and he'd been writing it down in the dark across the street while you slept, and he'd folded it up and put it in his pocket and carried it around for a week before finding the courage to give it to you.
You pressed the poems flat on the table in front of you.
Three poems. Each one more honest than the last. Each one a door he'd opened a little further.
Then, because you didn't know what else to do with the feeling expanding in your chest, you got up and went to the window.
His light was on across the street. You could see his desk from here, the familiar slope of his shoulders, the lamp making a warm circle around him.
Even as you watched, he looked up. Not at you specifically—just the reflexive glance outward that people do when they've been looking inward too long.
But his window faced yours. And your light was on, and you were standing in it, holding his poems with what you could only imagine was an extremely readable expression.
He went very still.
You watched him go very still.
You were smiling. You could feel it happening—that thing he'd written about, the pause before the smile, the decision to let it through.
You let it through.
Across the street, in the warm circle of his desk lamp, Oda Sakunosuke put his face in his hands.
Then, after a moment, he looked back up.
His ears were red. Even from across the street, you could see that his ears were red.
You laughed—quietly, to yourself—and went to bed with the poems still in your hand.
The next time Oda came to the flower shop, he brought more.
Not immediately—there were four days in between during which you went about your work with a persistent warmth in your chest and he, presumably, went about his work with the knowledge that you'd read what he'd written and smiled and he'd turned red like a teenager, which he was definitely still thinking about.
When he came back, it was a Thursday afternoon. He stood in the doorway a moment before entering, and when he did, his composure was carefully assembled in a way that suggested it had required effort.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," you said.
There was a beat of silence.
"I have—" He reached into his coat pocket. "There are more. If you still want them."
"I do," you said immediately.
He set three folded pieces of paper on the counter between you.
You looked at them, then at him. His expression was controlled but there was something in his eyes—something watchful and hoping, in equal measure.
"Would you like to stay?" you asked. "I'm repotting some orchids. It's good company work."
Something relaxed in his shoulders. "Yes. I'd like that."
He stayed for two hours. You repotted orchids and talked, and when he finally left, you unfolded the three papers at your kitchen table that night.
The first:
She saw me.
That is the whole poem.
I had more words but they are unnecessary.
She was standing in the light
holding the poems
and she saw me
and she smiled
and I put my face in my hands
because I did not know what else to do
with that much.
She saw me.
She is still there.
Both of these things are true
at the same time.
I did not know that was possible.
The second:
I have been writing about loneliness
without knowing that's what I was writing about.
I thought I was writing about solitude,
which is different—
solitude is chosen, comfortable, mine.
Loneliness is the shape of a chair
across the table that no one sits in.
Loneliness is the light in a window
you didn't know you were watching
until it went out.
I have been lonely
in a very specific shape
for a very long time.
The shape is changing.
The third, dated just yesterday:
What I want, if I am being honest:
To sit across from her
with something hot to drink
and nothing required of either of us
except to be there.
To watch her tuck her hair back
three times before it stays.
To be the person she talks to
about mycorrhizal networks
and whether a novel's ending is earned
and the particular quality of light
at six in the evening in late spring.
To be
the person she talks to.
That's all.
That turns out to be everything.
You pressed all three flat on the table.
You had been lonely too, you realized. In a shape you hadn't had words for until now.
When he left, he paused at the door as he always did.
"The window scene," he said, without quite looking at you. "Last week. I apologize if that was—"
"It wasn't," you said.
He looked at you then. "No?"
"No." You met his eyes steadily. "Read me the next one sometime. Instead of just leaving them."
His expression did something complicated—surprised and pleased and slightly panicked all at once.
"Alright," he said finally. "Yes. Alright."
He left, and you turned back to your flowers, smiling at a particularly fine specimen of Phalaenopsis that had absolutely no opinion on any of this.
Summer arrived properly in the second week of June, and with it, a shift in the rhythm of things.
Oda came more often. Not always with a stated reason—sometimes he came simply because he was between chapters and needed, he said, "a different quality of air." You suspected this was his way of saying he wanted company without quite being able to say so, and you found this endearing enough that you never pointed it out.
He brought poems. Not every time, but regularly—folded pieces of paper that you collected in the drawer of your kitchen table, which was rapidly filling.
Sometimes he read them to you, as you'd asked. He was a good reader—precise and unhurried, with an instinct for where the pauses should go. The first time he'd done it, sitting on his usual stool while you worked on a particularly intricate arrangement, his voice had been carefully neutral, like he was reading someone else's work.
You'd looked up when he finished, and he'd been watching you with that expression you were coming to recognize—the one that meant he was waiting for a response but would accept any response, including silence.
"The third line is the best one," you'd said.
He'd exhaled. "I thought so too. I almost cut it."
"You shouldn't cut the best line."
"I know. I almost did anyway. Good lines are terrifying."
You'd thought about that for a while afterward. Good lines are terrifying. You thought it applied to more than poetry.
One afternoon in mid-June, he read you a new one while you were conditioning stems. His voice was quiet, careful, the same as always—except you'd learned to hear the difference now between careful-and-professional and careful-because-it-matters:
I have been trying to write the word
that means: the particular quality of light
in a room where she is working.
I have been trying to write the word
that means: the sound of someone
who is exactly where they should be.
I have been trying to write the word
that means: I did not know
I was missing something
until I stopped missing it.
The word doesn't exist yet.
I am going to have to invent it.
I think that might be
what love is—
a word we don't have yet
for something we've always needed.
When he finished, neither of you said anything for a long moment.
"That last stanza," you said finally.
"I know," he said.
"Is that—" You stopped. "Is that what this is? For you?"
He looked at you with his honest expression. "Yes," he said. "I think that's exactly what it is."
You went back to conditioning stems. Your hands were slightly unsteady. You hoped he didn't notice.
He definitely noticed. He didn't say anything. He just stayed.
Another time, he left a poem tucked into the botanical reference book you'd lent him when he returned it:
She lent me a book about roots.
I read it thinking about her.
I read everything thinking about her now—
novels, case notes, the back of cereal boxes.
This is either
the beginning of something
or a serious cognitive impairment.
I have decided to consider it
the beginning of something.
I have decided
to stop being afraid of it.
You found it on a Tuesday evening and sat on the floor of the flower shop and laughed until your eyes watered.
Then you read it again, more slowly, and felt something warm settle in your chest like a plant finding good soil.
He was not afraid of it anymore.
Neither, you realized, were you.
Sora, meanwhile, had developed an opinion about you.
You met him for the first time on a Tuesday in late June, when Oda invited you up to his apartment to see a particular edition of a book you'd been discussing—a rare annotated copy that you couldn't quite believe he owned.
The apartment was exactly what you'd imagined from glimpses through the window and the shape of his personality: organized in the way of someone who needed to know where things were, every surface covered with books and papers but nothing actually chaotic, plants in the windows—your plants, you realized, all the ones you'd sold him over the past months, arranged with care.
Sora appeared from behind a stack of manuscripts, assessed you with the complete objectivity of cats, and then walked directly to you and put his head against your shin.
"He doesn't usually do that immediately," Oda said, with the particular tone of someone trying very hard not to make this into something.
"I have a good relationship with animals," you said, crouching down to let Sora smell your hand. "Probably the botanical smell. Flowers and animals generally have a history."
"Probably," Oda agreed, in a way that suggested he wasn't thinking about botanical chemistry at all.
Sora, apparently having made his decision, followed you around the apartment for the rest of your visit, eventually settling on your lap while you read the annotated edition at Oda's desk.
"He's never sat on anyone's lap except mine," Oda said, from the chair he'd pulled to the side of the desk.
"Does that bother you?"
"No." A pause. "I'm trying to decide what it means that it doesn't bother me."
You looked at him over the top of the book. He was looking back at you with the expression you'd come to think of as his honest expression—the one that appeared when he'd stopped trying to manage what his face was doing.
"I think it just means you're comfortable with me being here," you said.
"Yes." He said it simply, like he'd arrived at the end of a long calculation. "That's what it means."
You started visiting his apartment.
Not regularly—not yet. But occasionally, on evenings when the conversation in the flower shop had run long and neither of you wanted it to end, you'd find yourselves walking across the street together, and Sora would greet you like a fait accompli, and you'd sit at Oda's kitchen table with tea and books and the particular comfort of two people who have discovered they can be quiet together.
He wrote while you were there sometimes—not the whole time, but in the comfortable way of someone who trusts that their presence doesn't require constant performance. You read, or made notes in your botanical notebook, or simply watched him work.
You'd told him once, tentatively, that you found his writing process interesting.
"Why?" he'd asked. Not defensively—just curious.
"Because you think before you write. A lot of writers I've met either free-write everything or draft and revise constantly. You sit with something until you know what you want to say, and then you say it."
"I can't write what I don't mean," he said. "Even in fiction. If I don't know why something matters, I can't make a reader feel why it matters."
"What made you want to write love?" you asked. His novels were full of it—not romantic love exclusively, but love in all its forms, the deep specific attachment people form to things and places and other people.
He considered this for what felt like a long time.
"Because it's the thing I understand least," he said finally. "And writing is how I understand things."
You looked at him across the kitchen table, and he looked back, and you both stayed quiet for a while after that with your books and your tea and the sound of Sora purring between you.
July arrived hot and golden.
The flower shop was at its peak season—summer weddings, garden parties, the particular profligacy of people who wanted to celebrate the abundance of everything. You were busier than you'd been all year, and Oda, respecting this, adjusted his visits accordingly without being asked—shorter, better timed, occasionally bringing food when he knew you'd forget lunch.
"You didn't have to," you said, the third time he appeared at noon with a carefully wrapped bento from the good place two streets over.
"I was going that way," he said.
"You live in the opposite direction."
"I took a detour."
"Oda."
"It was a very pleasant detour."
You ate lunch together in the back of the shop, among the flowers and the equipment and the comfortable chaos of your working space, and it felt, in a way you were becoming less and less willing to ignore, entirely natural.
Hana noticed.
Of course Hana noticed. Hana noticed everything.
"You should just tell him," she said one morning, sweeping the workroom with the casual air of someone dropping a bomb.
"Tell him what?"
"You know what."
"I really don't."
Hana gave you the look she reserved for what she considered willful obtuseness. "He brings you lunch. He reads you poetry. He lets you hold his cat. His cat, who hates everyone. What exactly are you waiting for?"
"We're—it's complicated."
"It genuinely isn't."
"He hasn't—he hasn't actually said anything directly."
Hana stopped sweeping. "The man writes you poems about how lonely he was before he met you. That is as direct as it gets."
"In the poems, yes. In person—"
"Some people find it easier to say things in writing. You of all people should understand that." She resumed sweeping. "He's a writer. The poems are him talking to you. The question is whether you're going to talk back."
You spent the rest of the morning thinking about that.
The poems kept coming.
Some were short—four lines, sometimes fewer. Some were longer, more complex, building images over several stanzas. All of them were, in one way or another, about the experience of paying attention to you.
One was about the way you held flowers.
Careful as surgery and casual as breathing—
the same hands that strip thorns with one gesture
arrange petals with the patience of a season.
I have written about hands before
and never understood what I was writing about.
One was about your notebook.
You write down what you see
because the world deserves to be remembered.
I recognize this impulse.
I used to think it made me solitary.
Now I think it makes us
the same kind of person.
One was about a specific evening in early July when you'd stayed very late in the flower shop, working on a large wedding commission, and he'd been awake across the street and had apparently watched the light in your window until past midnight.
I should sleep
but the light across the street is still on
and somewhere inside it
you are doing something careful
with living things.
I am, I admit,
not writing about flowers.
That one made you sit on your kitchen floor for ten minutes because your knees had stopped working properly.
Akane, when you told her—your closest friend, who lived in the next arrondissement and had heard about Oda in gradually increasing detail over several phone calls—was somewhat more succinct than Hana.
"Oh my god, just kiss him already," she said.
"We've never—it hasn't—"
"He writes you POETRY. About watching you through his WINDOW. While his CAT is in his LAP. Do you understand how romantic that is? Do you understand that most people never experience anything close to this?"
"I know—"
"You KNOW? You KNOW and you're still just—what, exchanging books and having tea?"
"We have very good conversations—"
"I'm sure you do! And I'm sure he'd also like to KISS YOU. Based on the extensive documentary evidence you keep sending me."
"He's private. He doesn't push."
"Neither do you! That's the problem! You're both just—orbiting each other, being extremely meaningful at each other through flower arrangements and poetry, waiting for the other one to—" She stopped. "Oh. Oh, you're both scared."
You were quiet.
"You're both terrified," she said, more gently. "Aren't you?"
"He's—he's important to me. Already. And if it went badly—"
"What if it went well?"
You didn't have an answer for that.
"Tell him," Akane said. "Or make it clear enough that he tells you. Because you're both suffering unnecessarily and it's extremely frustrating to watch from a distance."
The day before you asked him to the botanical garden, he left one more poem.
Not in person—slipped under the door of the flower shop, in an envelope with your name on it in his careful handwriting. You found it when you opened up in the morning, before Hana arrived, in the quiet hour when it was just you and the flowers.
I have fourteen poems in a folder on my desk.
They are all about you.
I have been calling them 'observations'
and 'exercises'
and 'research'
and Sora has been judging me for months.
The truth is simpler than any of those words:
I wake up and think of you.
I work and think of you.
I look at my window at six in the evening
and feel something I don't have a word for yet
when the light in your shop is still on.
I have spent my whole life
watching things from windows.
I am standing at the window
and I am looking at you
and I am thinking:
what would happen
if I just
went across the street.
I am going to go across the street.
I think.
Soon.
I am almost ready.
You read it twice, standing in the doorway of your shop in the early morning light.
Then you took out your phone and texted him:
There's a botanical garden I've been meaning to visit. Saturday. If you wanted to come.
His reply came in four minutes:
Yes.
Just that. One word. But you stood there smiling at it for a full minute before you went inside to open the shop.
It was a Saturday morning in late July when you asked him to the botanical garden.
Not a date—you didn't use that word. You said you were going to look at the summer collection and thought he might find it useful for the nature writing he'd mentioned wanting to try, which was true and also a reason, and he said yes immediately, which felt significant.
The botanical garden was twenty minutes by tram, and you spent the ride in the comfortable conversation that had become your default—easy and substantive and punctuated with the particular silences that meant both of you were thinking rather than either of you having run out of things to say.
The garden was beautiful in late July. You moved through it with your notebook out—you were always making notes, documenting, cataloging—while Oda walked beside you with his hands in his pockets and that quality of attentive stillness that was, you had accepted, just how he occupied space in the world.
You stopped at a bed of flowering echinaceas—tall, architectural, their petals swept back like something in the middle of becoming.
"Echinacea purpurea," you said. "Coneflower. Native to North America. The seedheads are extraordinarily beautiful in winter—they dry to these dark geometric structures that look almost designed."
"You've seen them in winter?"
"I try to visit gardens in every season. Most people only come when things are in bloom. But the structure of a garden in winter is—it's like reading the bones of it."
He took out his own notebook. You noticed he'd started doing this during your conversations—writing things down.
"What are you writing?" you asked.
"What you said. About bones." He looked up. "Is that alright?"
"Of course." You watched him write, and felt something pull gently in your chest. "What are you going to do with it?"
"I don't know yet. Sometimes I write things down because they belong to a piece I'm not ready to start. And sometimes—" He paused, looking at the words he'd written. "Sometimes I write things down because I don't want to forget them."
You walked further into the garden, into a section of formal beds where lavender and salvias were in full flower, the air heady with it. There was a bench, and by some natural gravity you both ended up on it.
It was warm, and quiet in the particular way gardens are quiet—full of small sounds that add up to peace. Bees. Wind. Your own breathing.
Oda had his notebook open on his knee but wasn't writing.
You were looking at a bed of Japanese anemones—late summer, their white flowers open like small moons—and thinking about what Akane had said. About orbiting. About being scared.
"Can I ask you something?" you said.
"Yes."
"The poems. The ones you've been—" You stopped, recalibrated. "You've given me fourteen poems over the past three months."
"Fifteen," he said, quietly. "There's one more I haven't given you yet."
"Fifteen," you repeated. "And they're all—" You searched for the right word, and settled on honesty. "They're all love poems. Aren't they?"
The silence that followed lasted several seconds.
"Yes," he said. "They are."
Something settled in your chest—not surprise, exactly, but the particular relief of a thing being named.
"How long?" you asked.
"Since April, I think. Though I suspect earlier than that—I just didn't have the vocabulary for it until April."
"The first poem was dated April."
"Yes." He looked at you then, and his expression was open in a way you hadn't seen before—all the careful management dropped. "I've never been good at saying things directly in person. It's easier on the page. I thought—the poems were a way of saying something without demanding a response."
"What if I want to respond?"
His breath caught. "What?"
"I've read fifteen poems about how you feel." You turned to face him fully on the bench. "Or fourteen and a half, if you're keeping the last one back. And I've been—" You stopped. Started again. "I've been trying to figure out how to say something back without a notebook to hide behind."
"You can just say it," he said. His voice was slightly rough.
"I know. That's the problem." You looked at him—at the particular face you'd been looking at for four months, that had gone from stranger to familiar to something that felt essential. "I'm better with plants than with people. I always have been. People are unpredictable and you can't look up their requirements in a reference book."
"No," he agreed. "You can't."
"But I've been—I keep thinking about what you wrote. About the bones of gardens. About learning to see what other people walk past." You took a breath. "You see things. You pay attention to things that most people don't bother with. And somewhere in the past four months I realized that—"
"That?" he prompted, softly.
"That you're the person I most want to talk to. About flowers and books and everything and nothing. That I notice when you're not there in a way that I don't notice other absences." You met his eyes. "That I've been—" The word felt large, but it was the right word. "That I've been falling in love with you for at least three months and I've been too scared to say it because you're important and I didn't want to be wrong."
Oda was very still.
Then: "You're not wrong."
His voice was quiet and certain, the way his prose was quiet and certain—no wasted words, nothing that didn't mean exactly what it said.
"No?" Your voice came out smaller than you intended.
"No." He reached out—slowly, deliberately, giving you every opportunity to not want this—and took your hand. His hands were warm. They always looked warm in the poems but you hadn't known until now. "I have the fifteenth poem in my pocket. Do you want to hear it?"
"Yes," you said. "But also—"
"Also?"
You looked at him. The afternoon light was warm on his face, catching the lines around his eyes, the careful expression becoming something softer and more unguarded than you'd ever seen it. Sora was not here to offer his opinions. There was only the garden, and the bees, and your hands together on the bench, and four months of slow accumulation that had been building toward exactly this moment.
"Also," you said, "I think you could just kiss me."
He went slightly pink. Which you found, in this moment, completely irresistible.
"Alright," he said—the same word he'd used months ago, when you'd asked him to read you a poem instead of just leaving it. A word that meant yes, but I need a moment to arrive at it.
He arrived at it.
He kissed you softly at first—carefully, the way he did everything, attentive and unhurried. His hand came up to your face, warm against your cheek, and you felt the gentleness of it, the deliberateness of it, the months of wanting compressed into something that was trying very hard to be restrained.
You kissed him back, and the restraint lasted approximately three seconds.
Because four months was a long time. And you'd been patient—you'd been so patient, both of you, in your separate ways, waiting and writing and talking around the thing until there was nowhere left to talk around it—and now there was nothing between you but the warm July air and his hand on your face and the decision you'd both finally made.
His other hand found your waist, pulling you closer with a certainty that surprised you—Oda was always so careful, always so measured—and you went, your hand finding the front of his coat, and the kiss stopped being careful and started being honest.
It deepened into something that had been building since April. Since the first time he'd looked at you across the counter and written something in his notebook and didn't show you. Since the poems, the flowers, the evening visits, the specific quality of his attention that had made you feel—for the first time in years—completely and specifically seen.
You kissed him like you meant it, because you did. Like you'd been waiting, because you had. His hand moved from your cheek into your hair, slow and deliberate, and you heard him breathe in sharply when you leaned closer—
And something gave way in him. The last of the careful management. The writer's instinct to observe rather than participate. The months of holding back.
He kissed you the way he wrote—with everything, nothing wasted, every word in its right place. Thorough and warm and entirely specific to the two of you, to the garden, to July, to the particular afternoon that had started with a bench and ended here.
Your free hand had found its way to his jaw without your consciously deciding to put it there. You felt the warmth of his skin, the slight catch of his breath when you touched him, the way he pressed closer like he was afraid you might change your mind.
You were not going to change your mind.
When you finally separated, you were both breathing unevenly.
His forehead dropped to yours. His eyes were closed. His hands were still in your hair, at your waist, like he hadn't decided to let go yet.
You stayed there for a moment—foreheads together, breathing the same warm air, the garden going on around you as if nothing extraordinary had just happened. The bees continued their work. The anemones opened their faces to the sky.
You thought: this is what his poems look like in person. Careful until they aren't. Precise until they become something else entirely. Everything held back and then, all at once, given over completely.
He opened his eyes. Looked at you from very close.
The expression on his face was one you'd never seen before—not on him, not on anyone—something very quiet and very full. Like a room that has finally been given the right amount of light. Like a sentence that has just found its ending.
"I have been," he said carefully, still close enough that you felt the words as much as heard them, "quite extraordinarily happy these past months."
"And now?" you asked.
"And now rather more so." His thumb moved against your cheek—just once, just gently—like he was confirming you were real. "I should have done that much earlier."
"You were working up to it."
"I was being a coward."
"You were writing fourteen poems about it instead." You looked at him. "That's not cowardice. That's just a different language."
Something moved through his expression—warm and startled, like you'd said exactly the right thing without knowing it was the right thing.
"Fifteen," he said softly. "There's still one you haven't read."
You laughed—the startled, genuine laugh you felt rather than performed—and he smiled, small and warm and entirely unguarded, and kissed you once more. Softer this time. Brief and sweet and unhurried, like punctuation at the end of a very long sentence that had taken months to finish writing.
Like something that intended to keep going.
You sat together on the bench while the bees continued their work and the anemones opened their white faces to the sky and the July light went golden around you, and neither of you said anything for a while, because some things are better held than described.
"The poem," you reminded him eventually.
He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a folded paper.
"Read it later," he said. "Like the others."
"Will you be watching for my face again?"
His ears went pink. "Probably. Yes."
"Good." You leaned your head against his shoulder, and felt him go still—not the held-breath stillness of before, but the settled stillness of something arrived at. "I'll make sure to stand in the light."
He pressed a kiss to the top of your head—soft and slightly wondering, like he was still deciding whether he was allowed.
"You always do," he said quietly. "That's what I've been writing about."
I have been writing about love for ten years and never understood what I was writing about until I watched you hold a flower to the light and explain why the angle matters. You are the first person I have wanted to tell things to without also wanting to write them down.- Oda Sakunosuke
ty for reading!
/ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\ ₊˚⊹♡
your favorite author’s favorite author <3
Take Me to War
PT1 Friendly Fire
Streamer! Ellie Williams x reader
A writer, I think is someone who pays attention to the world. We are observers, it is in our nature to be off-putting and turn shallow things deep.
Premise: Your neighbour is becoming increasingly loud and you decide to do something about it.
PT 2 Here!
Two things I hate the most?
My neighbour and New York City.
They shared something in common, they never rest. I liked my quiet life in my small town until I was convinced that all of the greatest writers lived in the city, what a joke. I sold my virtue to move to New York and now my body burned with the shame of not belonging.
I worked as a journalist and in advertisement but it didn't fill the gaping mass that consumed me, I felt like a sellout so I quit to do freelance, and now I feel like even more of a sellout. Freelance is making me think that I hate ghostwriting more than I hate my neighbour and New York City.
It's like you do all of the work and get zero reward but I'm desperate to pay the bills and all that stuff I've been telling myself all my life 'I may never be a rich man but the rich man will never have me' well, the rich man most certainly had me. I was paid an almost criminal amount of money to pour my soul into art just for it to get stamped beneath a new name and make a gross income six times the size of what I sold it for.
I look for happiness everywhere but I do not find it. I search for it in things everyone seems to pry joy from; I go clubbing, walk in Central Park, and date around, but happiness doesn't seem to exist there for me.
I plead for it in my morning cups of tea with a spoonful of honey, the sunshine glittering in a puddle after a rainstorm, for a brief moment, it flickers in the light of my cinnamon-scented candle. The truth is I am almost comforted by my sadness and it is in my lowest moments that my creations are the most beautiful, it is like I am dead and I despise those who aren't for I enjoy the company of my silence more than anyone I have ever met.
It was my dream for my name to be above 'New York Times Best Selling Author' but instead, it is just my work beneath it and maybe that's why I'm so bitter.
Right now as I am trying to salvage the bits and pieces I was given by a washed-up pop star for her memoir my neighbour is screaming and laughing incoherently in their apartment, it makes me miss living in an actual house.
The noise usually started up when I would finish up my writing and get ready for bed, then it would go all the way through the night. The dumb fucker probably threw parties every single night; my roommate never faced an issue with this as she worked at a club and was usually working when the deafening noises would begin.
I on the other hand who lived in that apartment and worked from that apartment was always cursed to listen to the random thumps and spats of laughter that sounded all through the night. At least once a night when I'm sound asleep, I hear a bang against the wall and each time without fail, I'm brought awake with my heart thumping.
Trust me, I have retaliated.
On occasion when I'm sleep-deprived and at my absolute limit I'll bang on the walls, that only stops the noise for a minute. I've even complained to my landlord and that one week was heaven until it eased back to the clamour that I've almost grown used to.
Almost.
I still hate it.
I'm broken from my thoughts when my phone rings, it vibrates till it's almost at the edge of my desk and I feel for it; don't worry buddy, I wanna jump too. I read the caller ID and I almost wanted to gag, it was a woman from the publishing company who reached out to me and asked me to write Nicole Elliot's novel. Despite wanting to throw my phone against the wall to stop Noemi's constant checkups and get back at my neighbour while I'm at it, I answer the phone "Hey, Noemi!" I glance out the window where the winter sun has long set, leaving nothing but billboards, street lamps and neon signs to light up the New York night. Under the unforgiving lights I can barely make out the gentle snowfall.
"Hey," She draws it out and I can hear in her voice that she is smiling "I know it's a little late, just checking in, how is the draft coming along?" A loud thump sounds against my wall along with intolerant cackling "What's that?"
"Just some street noise," I dismiss "Anyways, the draft is coming along great, I'm a couple thousand words away from finishing it. I will of course send it to you and I would really love it if you could reach out to Nicole and ask for her opinion on it before I carry on with the final copy," I give a middle finger to my wall, even if my neighbour can't see me, it makes me feel a little bit more formidable "I did follow her outline, which was difficult but I think I salvaged it pretty well."
This time there is a yelp from my neighbour and what sounds like someone slamming their hands down onto a table, Noemi thankfully ignores it "You haven't been in touch with Nicole?"
My eyebrows furrow "She hasn't responded to any of my emails and she's been turning down all of our scheduled Zoom calls, so no, I have not been in touch with her."
"Weird," Noemi comments and there is a brief break of silence between us "She's been M.I.A on our end too," I could hear her scribble something down. "So can you get the draft to me by Friday?"
Two days? If I lock myself inside and don't see the sun then I totally can "Absolutely!" I do work better under a deadline.
"Great," She sounds almost relieved "We will hunt down Nicole, it would be nice to get her greenlight with this but whether or not she approves it, she has already signed off and it will be going to print."
"Okay," I fight the urge to respond with 'sick' or 'aight' because I'm an adult now and someone who is masquerading as a professional.
"Sorry, what was that you mentioned about an outline?" Noemi asks, she sounds more confused with each word "I wasn't aware Nicole made any-
She is swiftly cut off by a crash from the other side of my wall, when I say crash I mean it. It sounded like someone just bodied their car into drywall. My eyes went wide as I saw a crack splitting up my once pristine white wall. I hold my phone against my collarbone as I get up and pound my fist against the wall, giving it a kick for extra measure.
"Is everything alright?"
"Certainly," The nice thing about phone calls is that the person on the other end can't see your awkward habits or subtle outbursts (Or neighbours breaking through your shared wall). After I hit the wall, everything went silent for just a second before laughter sounded heavily from multiple people. "Noemi, thank you for sourcing me out to write this, I am really grateful for this opportunity I will send you that draft on Friday." I try to wrap up the call but she speaks up.
"Well, I've read your work and I was very impressed, I trust you will do well with this. Sorry to have called you so late-
"Thanks, have a nice night now!" I'm talking faster than I can even think, the only thing in my head is the fact that my neighbour is slowly deteriorating my wall.
"Wait-
Before Noemi can finish her sentence, I've hung up the phone. I'm leaning back in my cushy office chair, hands gripping my hair as I stare down the newly formed crack in the wall. I don't entirely like to be confrontational, even in school I hated drama, but I was beginning to think it was necessary.
I saved the progress I had made on the memoir and pushed myself up from my desk. I was clad in nothing more than a t-shirt and some plaid pants, it was my writing attire and in the moment I didn't care much to make a good first impression. It was fucking freezing the second I got up from my desk.
The moulding on my bedroom window was broken which allowed the frigid New York air to slip into my room and make me shiver with each breath. At my desk, I would usually have a throw blanket to shroud my freezing body but the moment I discarded it, I felt regret. I almost wanted to wrap myself in it to confront my neighbour but the pyjamas alone didn't help me look tough.
I did however shove my feet into some cow slippers and march right up to their apartment.
Apartment 2D stood in front of me, the pastel blue door making me angrier with every second that I looked at it. I rapped my knuckles on the wood and crossed my arms to stop me from shuddering.
My nerves built up as I slowly heard a door within the apartment shut followed by footsteps leading to the door. I would just ask them politely to quiet down and calmly work on a way to fix the shared wall that they are slowly ruining.
The door opens and staring me down is a woman. I had expected it to be a man to be truthful. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, the colour teetered on the verge of auburn and brown. The woman is clad in a black tank top and grey sweatpants, it's almost parallel to my outfit.
"You need to be quiet," I say the first words that come to mind "And stop assaulting my fucking wall."
She sucks a sharp breath through her teeth "Are you apartment 3D?" She asks to which I nod "I knew you would be stopping by soon." She has this sheepish and almost sardonic smile on her face and despite the amusement she's portraying I can see sadness brewing in her green eyes like a storm.
"I don't know what you're doing in there where you are up all night, I don't even have a clue how you sleep and work with all this time to spare to be a nuisance." I say and then swiftly feel the urge to backtrack "I'm sorry, that was a little rude, but mate, I can't sleep or work when you're being loud doing whatever you do."
"Fuck," She mutters looking back into her apartment and then at me "I'm sorry, I'll keep it down."
"What about the wall?"
Her eyes look me up and down, settling on my cow slippers "I'll find someone to fix the wall."
I press my lips tight together, looking dead into her eyes, scraping my brain for something else to say. It was almost like I wanted to fight. I had expected this to be a full-out conversation that ended in yelling but god she was pretty and she was telling me just what I wanted. "Okay."
"Okay?"
I regard her once more with what I assume is a cold glare before ushering back into my apartment and slamming the door behind me, the whole time, my neighbour watches me from her doorway.
That was the first night of uninterrupted sleep I'd had in a month.
-
I woke up earlier than I would've liked when my roommate Margot came home from work at 4:56 on the dot. She made sure to slam every single door and cupboard before throwing herself onto her bed in all of her makeup and musty clothes that had to endure whatever happens at a nightclub between the hours of 8 pm and 4 am, which I can't imagine is very clean.
Still, even though I was a little ahead of schedule I fell into my morning routine. It started with ignoring my phone, this was followed by a mug of Bengal spice tea with a teaspoon of honey and a splash of cream.
Sometimes I would curl up on the couch, though it snowed last night and I loved fresh snow. Freshly fallen snow absorbed sound, it was like soundproofing for the earth. There wasn't anything like the rare peace you could find in New York. I figured I would have my morning tea on the fire escape.
My peaceful image was destroyed the second I pried my window open and crawled through I was hit with the intense smell of pot. "Shit," I mutter, instinctively wafting the scent away from my nose.
"Sorry, man," I see my neighbour leaning against the railing of the fire escape, nursing a joint. It hadn't crossed my mind that I shared a level of the fire escape with her, I had never seen her out here but now the smell of weed that drifted through the damaged moulding on my window made sense, I had always assumed it to be Margot.
"Joint for breakfast?" I ask, half-joking. A dusting of powdery snow adorns each step and railing, creating a delicate layer of white that contrasts with the industrial gray of the metal though it looks like my neighbour has pushed all of the snow off the platform.
"Nah, for dinner I guess, it helps me sleep," She's in the same outfit from last night, except her hair is now loose around her face and she threw a hoodie over her tanktop.
I furrow my eyebrows "You've been up all night?" The slight tension from the previous night has dissolved completely.
"Yeah," She says it like it was a stupid question and it partially was but I hadn't stayed up that late since New Year only because I was the designated driver and was in charge of getting everyone home safe. "I don't sleep much, that's probably why I keep you up all night."
I mean, I'd let her keep me up in other ways "Honestly, I've gotten used to it, it's almost like white noise." I try to sympathize even if it isn’t necessarily true.
"Next time I'm loud, you have every right to bang on my door and chew me out." She takes a drag from her joint and I watch as the smoke escapes her lips, her cheeks tinted pink from the cold.
"Good to know," I glance behind her at the open window and all I see are purple LED lights cutting through the darkness of her apartment. "Now I know that we share a fire escape I'll just crawl through your window and yell at you that way," I joke, taking a sip from my snoopy mug.
This makes her laugh in the slightest, she crushes what remains of her joint on the cold railing and tosses the bud into the pot of a dead plant that's covered in snow and has lived on this fire escape long before I moved in; one time I just about removed it but I felt bad, it's like I was evicting it from its rightful home "Feel free."
"Am I allowed to ask why you're up all night breaking the sound barriers?" I ask, pulling my fuzzy robe tighter around my body to fight the bitter air. "Are you the leader of a cult? Would it be better for the world in the long run if I push you right now?"
The corners of her lips curl up into a smile once again "You've figured me out, just know I've got some big plans with Koolaid," She plays into my teasing.
"It was flavour-aid, actually." I don't know why I said that.
"What the fuck is flavour-aid?"
"Koolaid basically," Silence stretches between us "So what do you actually do all night?"
"It's a bit complicated," She says, of course, it was complicated. "I work from home," She couldn't do something normal, she probably did voice acting or ran a podcast or some weird shit like that.
"Sick," Don't worry, I made myself cringe when I said that too "I work from home too."
"Yeah, you said something about work last night, are you in marketing?"
I shake my head "I'm a writer," every time I tell someone that, I feel a twinge of embarrassment. I know it wasn't a noble career like my parents had hounded me over, but it felt noble to me. I had two absent parents and was raised by a pack of wolves, I would devour as much food as fast as I could because I didn't know when I would be eating next. I was far too emotional to be around all of the narcissists who preferred their own faces to my company, the only friend I had was the written word.
Since then I have been serving my soul up to strangers through word documents.
The thought makes me homesick for the arms that did not hold me and I truly expect my neighbour to make a mockery of me, the way others have. The way they've told me 'It's a tough industry but hang in there!' and pat me on the back like I'm a hopeful child clinging to her mother's skirts.
"That's really cool," She smiles while she gazes out to the skyline, I can see her perfect side profile and ski-slope nose "I wanted to be a writer, I thought myself to be a poet, and then I thought myself to be a scientist and wanted to be an astronaut. Now, I'm here."
"Where's here exactly?"
"Working things out, figure it out as I go," She shrugs like she is unsure of her answer.
I think it's beautiful how everything around me has been touched by human hands and carries so much history. For a quick moment, my mind wonders to those who built this building, the calloused hands that crafted the iron railing and now my neighbour who was leaning against it. "What's the end goal with this whole freefall thing?"
"To make it out alive."
"And your name?"
"It's Ellie."
-
That night Ellie stuck to being quiet as she promised. The next night was a different story. I was so close to finishing the draft of Nicole Elliot's memoir and was praying that the deadline would pass with no issue.
However, the noise began again. I was coming around to like Ellie and I didn't want to go yell at her again so I shoved my headphones in and turned up my playlist as loud as I could. There is no song I can blast in my headphones to drown it out.
She did say that the next time I was loud I could come and chew her out, I wouldn't do that; I would just knock on her door and quickly tell her that she was being too loud, and then we would both carry on with our respective work.
I stopped in front of the smooth door and raised my hand to knock. Ellie slips the door open just a crack, when she sees that it's me she opens the door. "Hey, Ellie."
"Hello," She smiles "To what do I owe the pleasure?" She had a very nice smile.
We both know the circumstances of my visit but I spell it out anyway "Dude, you're way too loud, it's disruptive and I'm working under a deadline."
"I know, I'm sorry." She looks genuinely apologetic.
"I don't know any office job that needs you to scream for hours on end," Alright, that blows what could've been a simple visit where she apologizes and I leave, I always had to add on.
"Right, sorry," She carries herself with so much confidence that it is like she is wearing armour made of gold though she has these subtle awkward tendencies of someone who has never been loved and was forced to improvise. "It's hard to explain,"
"Yeah, you've said-
"Do you wanna come and see?"
I'm taken a little aback and for a minute I think this is all a ploy for Ellie to lock me in her her apartment and kill me because she is sick of her neighbour banging on her door "What?"
"Well, you've asked a couple of times and if you have a minute I can show you."
I pause, mauling over her proposal. I think of my laptop on my spruce desk, open to the final pages of the memoir and I make up my mind "Alright, just not too long."
"If you say so," Ellie opens the door wider for me to move past her and then shuts it behind us.
Ellie's apartment is what I had expected from her even though it is surprisingly nice. She has a large L-shaped sofa in the living room adorned with throw blankets and pillows and a huge flatscreen with a coffee table in front of it. The layout is exactly like mine but inverted, her open kitchen has some odd knick-knacks that looked like they belonged on an Amazon must-haves list.
I don't go into her bathroom and the door leading to one of the rooms (What is equivalent to Margot's bedroom) is shut. The apartment itself is pretty sparse aside from little bits and pieces as she only moved in a month prior.
On the left side, I see that purple LED spilling out of what I assume to be her bedroom.
She walks in ahead of me and the second I follow in after her there is one question I have to ask "Ellie, are you a porn-star?" There are entirely too many computers in here. Her desk is set up with one of those fancy triple-screen PCs and she has a laptop placed seemingly randomly on a white loveseat that's pressed against the right wall.
There is one of those galaxy lamps that projects that trippy shit onto your walls and ceiling. The screen of her PC is facing our shared wall and I can see a huge hole where I assume that a loud crash from the other night occurred. Plastered all over the walls are posters from video games and movies, many of which I hadn't seen.
"What?" She sounds nearly offended "No," she grabs a folding chair from the corner of the room and unfolds it beside her black florid office chair. She sits on the folding chair and motions for me to sit in the office chair. "Come, sit."
I hesitantly sit in the chair "Are you going to attack me now?" I ask, getting defensive for no particular reason other than it was in my nature "Because I've read The Outsiders and I'm pretty sure I can fight."
She chuckles "I'm not gonna fight you."
"Because I'd win?"
She furrows her eyebrows but has this look of amusement on her face "Yeah, definitely."
"So what is this?" I motion around at all of her equipment.
Ellie puts one earbud in then hand me the other "Chat," She says, looking dead at the camera clipped onto her PC "This is my neighbour who came to yell at me for being annoying, she has every right."
"Who are you talking to?"
"I'm streaming," She said, clicking something on the screen so it changed, instead showing Ellie and I in front of the camera, I looked absolutely lost next to a rolling chat bar full of jokes that I didn't understand and people saying hello to me.
"So I was right," I turn my attention to Ellie "You are an internet person."
"Yeah, I'm an internet person but you weren't right, I don't do porn."
"Not yet," I shrug "Times are desperate," To this, the chats come in even faster than before. "So do you just sit here all night and scream at people?"
"I play video games and do challenges, sometimes I do just sit here and scream at them."
"That makes so much sense," I say "If there's any job that needs you to be obnoxiously loud and annoying, it's a youtube personality."
"Okay, well-
"So you're like Logan Paul?"
Her eyes go wide "No-
"What explains why your eyes are so bloodshot."
"You are a writer," She says it like it's a fact I wasn't aware of "You are in no place to judge, you probably spend as much time in front of a screen as me."
I nod "I hate to say you're right," My attention shifts to the hole behind me "Can you explain how playing video games put a hole through the wall?"
Ellie looks almost embarrassed, she doesn't say anything in response, instead, she just clicks something to screen share with us in a little box in the corner and then goes into YouTube. She types in 'Ellie Williams falls through wall' My eyebrows furrow as I read it, and she clicks the first video that pops up.
The video starts off strong; Ellie is cackling at something that her friend off-camera is saying, her friend then makes a comment that makes her laugh even harder and she throws herself back in her chair. This act breaks it, you can hear the chair snap beneath the pressure and Ellie just lets it happen as the chair crashes against the wall. Her eyes go wide when she realizes she's just put a massive hole into the wall and seconds later you can hear me on the other side banging my hands on the wall. Her eyes go wide and she stares at her friend off-camera, all of the laughter stops abruptly before her friend can't hold it in anymore and erupts in chortles, and the video cuts off.
My hand flies over my mouth to fight back the laughter I so badly want to let out. Ellie and I sit wordlessly, the only sound being donations on the screen and my giggles slipping through. Eventually, I manage to compose myself and look to Ellie, I don't have much to say except for "Oh my god."
A/N: Streamer! Ellie won the poll so here we are. As I was drafting out the other chapters for When I Was Your Girl, I decided that it is most likely to be discontinued unless I do a rewrite which will not be in the near future. I’m not rocking with the plot and there was a lot of mixed feedback, sorry if you were invested I guess, but you have this series to be invested in now!
Fanfiction Recommendation 295: on the same page (Good Omens)
on the same page - Chapter 1 - Chekhov - Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett [Archive of Our Own]
A great fic where well-known author, Aziraphale Z Fell has been friends with romance writer AJ Crowley for years, not that anyone knows. So, when he needs someone to pose as his husband, there is only one person to ask.
Fiyeraba Writer AU - Ch 2 Update!
Never Too Far Away (AO3)
Elphaba Thropp—reclusive literary genius, stormcloud in human form—would rather be literally anywhere than on a panel at OzCon. Especially one with Fiyero Tigelaar, the infuriatingly charming travel memoirist whose books about alpacas and soul-searching make her want to scream (and maybe, secretly, swoon). Sparks fly. Literary pretensions crumble. Glinda is this close to revoking their mic privileges. Or, Elphaba and Fiyero meet at a Literary Panel and flirt their way through the questions. Glinda tries to keep her cool. The groupchat goes insane. Tumblr and twitter explode. And two writers maybe fall in love.
Now featuring, group chats and tumblr cameos ( @onelittlemoon @fateyp @1fashionguru among others) - as if the fic wasn't chaotic enough already [if u want a cameo feel free to comment here & lmk]