charm

CHAMPAGNE-FLAVOURED SPIT // BY CHARMTION

He bit his lip to look down at you as were, as he would not have you. He looked down at you and said, “Look at this little belly.” Gathered in his palm as he said it, stroked smooth beneath the weathered heat of his skin. Roughened by swords still, by tilts and tourneys, the faintest tinge of ink. He mapped the mound of it now, your belly, what he’d put inside it, and when you said his name he looked at your face, the candlelit blush of one turned cheek, lowered lashes and his name, his name always there on your tongue. A plum-stone, waiting to be spat. He smiled and you frowned. Impatient as he had made you, and hot, and so full already that to splay yourself like this across his desk had taken effort. Effort enough to colour your cheeks, to chase the candle-blush that lingered there. His hands on your skin made you hotter, writhe and toss another book onto the floor even as he made a low sound of admonishment. As if he was only your good-father, as if he was scolding his son’s beloved wife for the mess she had made, the mess she threatened to keep making, fingers grasping and he said again now about your belly, how you should not be stretched across oak but sunk into a featherbed, pillowed and soft. How he would not have you like this, daughter, how you would have to stop—and then he hushed you. Hushed you for the sound you had made to hear that word, to hear him threaten to cease, to send you off from his desk back into your husband’s bed. As if he could say it, as if he could send you back to sleep beside his son. As if he could do any other thing but this, sliding his hands full of what he had put inside you, sliding them full and sinking a bite into your throat that bled into a breath, a breath that hummed, “Look at what I’ve done. Look at what is mine.”

At work in three hours they’ll move around each other with familiar indifference. He’ll talk her through a procedure as if what exists between them maps the bounds of a teaching moment. As if he can’t still taste her behind the mouthwash clinging to his teeth. He’ll criticise something and she’ll bite back. Impossible not to, mint swilled round her own salt-picked mouth. Mint, salt; flesh, blood. The ward will roil around them like an undertow. She’ll feel the floor start to slip away from beneath her feet. Her hand will shake and he will hold it instinctively. Hold it steady as she makes the cut. His shoulder will brush against hers and she will feel it like a bruise, heat spreading with the ache. The blade still caged inside her fingers when he says, ‘Good job, Mohan. Good job.’ She’ll shake her head, say that she wasn’t steady. She wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t good. And he won’t soothe her, won’t squeeze her shaking hand. He won’t tell her to let it out like he did last night. He’ll tell her get a grip. You want this? You want to be here? (Yes, yes. Fucking yes.)

noooo, I’m meant to be winding/wrapping up my pitt fics but here you are—I said “Make me love myself, so that I might love you” // don’t make me a liar, ’cause I swear to God // when I said it, I thought it was true—making me want to write more!! 💫 I miss them already, but does anyone actually want to read (yet) another story featuring my off-brand psychosexual melancholia, I feel like probably not!! anyway what a beautiful edit, thank you for sending it to me to haunt my thoughts dreams prayers all evening. 🫶🏼 x

GLIMMERS // BY CHARMTION

The first call comes midway through month two. Burst of static somewhere along I-80 that Jack tries his best to absorb. Wrenched from the warmth of his bed and the dreams in his head and the heat in his hand it’s a struggle. A struggle to focus, to hone in sharp as he should on the words breaking through the speaker—oddly smooth, staccato—and it’s a kind of relief, hearing that tone, its rounded sharpness cutting cleaner as the static settles, some sort of star-tangled clarity hunted out under another sky. He’d expected something different, right, this first call home. He’d expected something slow and sad and shaky, something that’d strike alarm bells, set his heart thumping. He can hear the beat of it now, feel it: his heart, warm as his bed and his dreams and his hand. The hand not pressing the cellphone lightly to his ear. The hand that’s pressed to her skin, tattooed. Lapsed as she is against his sheets, sleeping as she always sleeps in his bed, haphazard on her stomach, the curve of her waist fitting into his palm. Life-line notching against a rib now, he strokes across her skin and he looks down at her sleeping in the semi-dark and he listens to Robby breathing into his ear, hears him falter, and when Jack says hey, hey, brother, hey, says slow down, says his name, that name, he watches the side of her face that he can see. Watches a frisson of tension pull across her cheek to hear it, the high bone there that he leans down to press a kiss to now. Lips there, the soap and salt of her skin, lips moving to soothe it away as she sleeps, as he speaks into darkness, into dreams. 

& as much as i know it's both inevitable and rude of me to stare, i just can't look away from the carnage, 💯!! thank you for summing up my feelings about this ship, this story, the general wreck of months/years they both circulate; mirror-glass might be gone by the end of the week but I just had to get it out of my system—so much toxicity, so much entanglement, weltschmerz, history repeating amidst cycles of half-healing, etc. etc. I mourn with you all the wasted potential. 🫶🏼 x

—in which Robby smashes up his own bike (I wrote this plot-point a couple of weeks ago, so I am aware it will probably happen differently in the show!) in the ambulance bay & Samira is the one to find him in the wreckage; cue that kind of weirdly apathetic anger between two people united in a shared & quiet rage, ooc bunking off on the T & winding up in a shitty Irish pub that is layered in their reluctant, spiky history 🫀 a kind of hashing it out via whiskey & warm bodies that functions primarily as a cathartic space for Samira to be angry, to be as mean as her goodness allows; cleaning up this man who mocks & hurts her, cleaning up his mess & saving another man they both respect from engaging with that mess, because she’s just good, she just is, an element Robby’s lost in himself, & is desperately trying to put out in her for some higher purpose unknown to anyone, even himself, but he’s the one crying (repeatedly) in this story, Samira never sheds a tear. x

trying to be cool & aloof on main failing miserably because reading this makes my knees go all swoony 💫🫶🏼 this ship is my favourite pitt ship to write; I love all its spikiness, its dynamism, the way it makes ppl absolutely seethe; scant softness to be found, broken mirror-glass; I love both inventing & attempting to tease out the barbs that lay between them whilst spinning along in shaded self-indulgence—so to know hollow places resonated with you is just!! ✨ thank you for sending me such luminous words, thank you for reading my stories, thank you for making me want to write more. x

FISH TANK // BY CHARMTION