So below you will find the links to my current series & future stories and blurbs & etc.... I'm very excited because now everything will be in one place and I am back to my Virgo organizing ways... Thank God.
For now I will only be writing for Joe & Ja'Marr until I get more comfortable with my writing skills
Yall are taking this too seriously. Itâs preseason. It doesnât count. Also preseason is time for the rookies to shine and make main roster. Literally thatâs what preseason is for and to work out any kinks/get current game tape to opponents. Chill tf out
Itâll be okay. Start worrying when itâs the actual season.
pairings: joe burrow x fem!reader đ€
wc: 1.3k
an: for the anon who was dealing with a bad one last week â i hope it's long gone by now. requests like this are exactly why i keep the ask box open, so never apologize for being specific. đ
this is a standalone, so no verse knowledge needed. just a bad tuesday and a man who doesn't ask questions.
masterlist
The headache starts at 2:40 on Tuesday, and you know exactly when because youâre looking at the clock, seeing how much more work you have left when Aaron says your name from the doorway and you turn your head to answer him.
Thatâs when you feel it really starting.
You finish the conversation. You say the words back to him in the right order, and he leaves satisfied, and then you sit very still in your chair with your hand at the back of your neck, pressing your thumb into the spot just under the bone where it lives, and you wait to see what kind itâs going to be.
Itâs the bad kind. It sets up behind your left eye and starts pulling.
You get another hour out of yourself. You dim the monitor as far down as it goes and answer the emails that canât wait until tomorrow, and every time you look from the screen to your notepad and back, the light does something to you that you can feel in your teeth. The plug-ins in the outlets along the wall have never bothered you before. Today theyâre making you nauseous. The fluorescents up there have a hum youâve never noticed in three years of working under them, and now you can hear it like itâs inside your skull.
At 3:55 you stop pretending.
âYou okay?â Cass asks when she sees you putting your laptop in your bag.
âHeadache.â
âA bad one?â
âYeah.â
âGo home,â she says, which you were already doing, but it helps to hear it.
The drive is twenty-five minutes, and itâs all west, straight into the sun, and you spend it with your jaw locked and your sunglasses on and your hand coming up to shield the top of the windshield every time the road crests. Somebody merges into you on Red Bank, and you have to whip your head left to check them, and you feel it all the way down into your shoulder blade. By the time youâre in the driveway youâre taking the turn into the garage with your head held like something that might come apart if you set it down wrong.
Inside you donât turn on a single light. Blinds down, phone face-down, the frozen gel pack out of the freezer and wrapped in a dish towel. You get horizontal on the couch with the pack under your neck and one arm over your eyes, and you stay there.
â
You hear the garage door before you hear him â the motor, then the mechanism, then the interior door and his keys going into the dish on the counter. Then nothing for a second while he registers that every light in the house is off.
âY/N?â
âCouch.â
He comes around the corner. You donât move your arm off your eyes, so you get him in pieces â the shape of him in the doorway, the pause there, the shoes coming off one at a time against the back of his heel. Heâs dressed for wherever you were supposed to be going. Button-down, the good watch.
He doesnât ask.
You listen to him move through the kitchen. The fridge opens and shuts. Ice, then water over it. He sets the glass on the coffee table by your head and doesnât tell you to drink it.
The couch gives at your hip where he sits down on the edge of it.
âHey.â
âHi.â
He takes the arm off your eyes, not fast, and holds onto your wrist for a second before he sets it down on your stomach. In the dark, his face is mostly outline. He gets a hand under the towel at your neck and checks the gel pack with two fingers, the way youâd check a pan.
âThatâs warm.â
âItâs been on a while.â
He takes it. Goes to the freezer with it, comes back, and you know heâs swapped it for the second one because you can hear the towel getting rewrapped, and then heâs sitting again, and he doesnât hand it back to you.
âTurn over.â
You open your eyes. It doesnât help â itâs too dark to see much of him and looking at anything is its own project right now.
âJoe.â
âBabe.â
âIâm not moving.â
âBaby.â Heâs already got a hand flat on your shoulder, not pushing, just there. âTurn over and let me get at it.â
You go over onto your front. It takes longer than it should, and he doesnât rush any part of it, one hand on your shoulder and the other coming to your hip. When you get your face down into the cushion and your arms folded up underneath you, he pulls the throw pillow out from under your chest and drops it on the floor because itâs got you at the wrong angle.
Then his hands are on the back of your neck, and everything else in the room stops mattering.
â
He gets down onto the floor. You feel the couch let go of his weight and then hear him settle beside you, and when his hands come back they come from above â one at the base of your skull, one flat between your shoulder blades, just resting there while he waits for you to get used to being touched.
His thumb finds the left side on the second try, and when he gets it you make a sound into the cushion that isnât a word.
âThatâs it,â he says.
He starts slow. He isnât kneading â heâs pressing, holding, letting the pressure sit until whateverâs underneath it gives up an inch. His thumb works the strip along the base of your skull one inch at a time and stops at every place you flinch, and he doesnât back off when you flinch. He waits there.
Somewhere in the middle of it, he takes the watch off. You hear it go down onto the coffee table, glass against wood.
His hands move down. Both thumbs on either side of your spine, then out along the tops of your shoulders, and when he gets to the left one he finds something that makes your whole arm go hot and you say his name into the cushion.
âThere it is. Breathe out.â
You do.
He leans on it. Slow enough that you can stay with it, hard enough that itâs not a question of whether itâs going to hurt, and it does, and then itâs less. He works that spot for a long time. Longer than feels reasonable. His breathing goes even with it, and yours follows, and the room is dark, and the only sound in the house is the ice settling in the glass by your head.
When he moves back up to your neck, his hands are warm from the work.
âOkay?â
âMm.â
âWords.â
âDonât stop.â
He doesnât.
â
His hands slow down, but they donât stop. Youâre somewhere past thinking. The painâs still in there â you can find it if you go looking â but itâs sitting further back than it was, and your whole body has gone heavy against the cushions in a way you didnât decide on.
âFuck, I wish I could fix this, baby.â A pause. His thumb keeps moving. âOr that you werenât carrying so much that it keeps happening.â
You get out something that isnât a word.
He goes back to your neck. He works the base of your skull with two fingers, small and slow, and at some point you stop tracking how long itâs been.
When you surface, the house is dark and quiet, and his hand is still on your neck, gone slack. Heâs asleep, sitting up on the floor with his head back against the cushion.
