Papaya

like the way shane was so down to try this out despite it still being a little uncomfy and new because their last sexual experience was SO good. and it IS good! like! it feels good and hot and fun.

because shane thinks they're PLAYING.

like ilya in the bathroom before was softer (still distant, still not the version of himself he was in shane's bed six months ago, but *close*) and nudged him in close and rubbed his fingers along shane's neck and kissed him and teased with him. so like. okay. the want is still there. the Us is still there. he didn't get what he wanted and then no longer had any interest.

which means shane goes into sex being like, "okay. we're trying out a new thing. we checked off vanilla regular sex last time. we're playing a new thing here, and i'm playing, too." (tiny shane smirk when he takes the power back enough to get ilya to give up his power game and fuck him, you will always be famous to me.) and it's good! he's horny as fuck, and ilya being bossy and a little mean is FUN.

BECAUSE he is operating under the idea of Other Ilya being under there, too.

like, okay, no missionary this time. straight to fucking him from behind. but that's okay! ilya did that last time, too, and then he curled up behind shane and snuggled him and kissed him after. he's not kissing shane's shoulders and checking in with him this time, but they're playing! and shane has more experience this time (one (1) time, but hey! counts!), so yeah. of course ilya would be more chill about not asking if he's okay every ten seconds.

but then?? it's over?? and ilya just?? immediately pulls out?? what?? that's not how this goes???

and then ilya sits NEXT to him on the bed?? but doesn't kiss him??? doesn't even??? look at him????

but they're not supposed to be playing anymore??? what happened here???

and then he fucks you but won't even touch you after

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!

Shane isn’t super into the idea. “My parents don’t have a VHS player.”

“Is literally right beside your knee, Hollander.”

“Well, it’s boring! Why do you want to see a dumb recording of me as a kid anyway?”

“Because it’s adorable?” Ilya says incredulously. “And you are adorable?”

“Oh, I forgot we had that!” Yuna exclaims, coming to sit on the couch with her glass of wine. “God, I miss those days. Shane was the cutest timbit.”

Timbit, Ilya mouths to himself, his fingers curling around the tape. This is Shane as a timbit? In all his tiny little hockey gear at the Bell Center? Ilya needs to see it. “Shane.”

Shane looks at him and sighs.

They put the tape in.

Ilya almost dies as the grainy screen resolves itself into an MC and a tiny Shane, dressed in his hockey gear. His helmet is crooked on his head, his stick tap tap tapping against it as he stares at the interviewer, determined. His cheeks are big and round and pink from the cold of the ice, and though Ilya cannot make out his freckles, he knows from pictures that they’re there. The MC crouches down and a packed Bell Center is visible behind them.

“And here we have number 24, Shane Hollander!” The MC says in heavily accented English. “Let’s give him a round of applause. Shane, how are you feeling tonight, are you excited to be here?”

“Um. Yes.”

“And how old are you, Shane?”

Little Shane closes his eyes for a moment, taking a big, deep breath before reciting: “My name is Shane Hollander and I’m a hockey player. I am three years old and I go to Glebe Co-operative Nursery School in Ottawa and my mommy and daddy are Yuna and David. And I’m three.”

The MC laughs a little. “That’s a great introduction, Shane, thank you. Do you have anyone here with you tonight, cheering you on in the audience?”

Shane’s eyes open, but he doesn’t break out into a toothy grin. No, instead, Shane—serious, no-nonsense Shane—nods and leans in to the microphone like he’s giving a post-game interview. “Yes, my mommy and my daddy.”

“And are they big Metros fans?”

“Yes.”

“What about you?”

“Yes, too. They’re gonna go all the way this year. They have all the pieces for a winning team.”

“That’s what we love to hear, Shane, we agree and we love the confidence. Can we expect to see you on the ice someday? Do you want to be a hockey player when you grow up?”

“Yes, I’m a hockey player.”

“Do you want to play for Montreal?”

“Yes.”

“Can we get some encouragement for the team from you, Shane? Maybe a Go Metros Go?”

This, Shane takes extremely seriously. Ilya watches him nod with all the solemnity of a general going to war, and then releases his own tiny, passionate battle cry: “Go Metros Go!”

“Shane Hollander, everyone, let’s give him another round of applause!”

I really like your writing. I've been around since chapter 4 of the first step of kintsugi (maybe, I think) and I tend to be more of a lurker but your Heated Rivalry AUs have been haunting me so, naturally, I had to spend a truly stupid amount of time making these.

I'm very sorry, Shane.

go out and fuck someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

go out and date someone you aren’t attracted to because a stranger on tumblr said to

You’re Not Allowed To Be Gay Anymore

what this post DOES mean

if you just ‘prefer’ to avoid majority black areas of your city

if you just ‘prefer’ to read, write, think, and talk about men

if you just ‘prefer’ to socialize with people you (perceive as) your assigned birth sex

if you just ‘prefer’ to exclusively watch white-directed movies, read white-written books, listen to white-authored music

if you just unconsciously perceive men as more authoritative/competent and ‘prefer’ to be spoken to by them