Michael Olise x Fem!Reader
sy: a Halloween party, a pirate costume, and a hundred little moments that somehow keep pulling you and Michael closer together.
a/n: i hope you guys don't think this is too messy or completely random, i just remembered something and thought it'd be fun to write, even if it did remind me of someone i absolutely can't stand now... anyway, i really hope you enjoy it <3
sorry if there are any writing or translation mistakes
The car smelled of Priya's perfume and whatever coffee she'd insisted on bringing in a thermos as if they were heading somewhere that required emergency caffeine, which, considering they were on their way to help set up a Halloween party. The music was low enough for conversation and the windows were slightly fogged, and you had your feet on the dashboard because the pirate boots were going on only after everything was ready, not a second before.
Priya had been talking about Daniel for approximately fifteen minutes, which was a personal record for a car journey of this length, and you were listening with the genuine attention that the situation deserved because Daniel had apparently said something that required significant analysis and you were invested.
But conversations about Daniel inevitably circled back to you, and you had known this was coming.
"So," she said, in the tone of someone who had been building toward this, "what about your love life?"
"Jake is going to be there tonight."
Jake. You turned the name over for a second β the guy from a few months ago, the one you'd kissed at someone's birthday and then effectively ignored for reasons that had made sense at the time and that you couldn't fully articulate now. He was attractive. He had been good to kiss. You had simply not thought about him very much since.
"And maybe I'll give it another chance. He's so hot." You said it with the casualness of someone making a practical observation. "I don't know why I went cold on him. He was fine."
"He was very fine," Priya agreed, with feeling. Then, after exactly the kind of pause that announces a subject change "What about Michael?"
You turned to look at her.
"No," you said immediately. "Absolutely not."
"Because..." you gestured vaguely at nothing in particular, "I don't think I'm even his type. And honestly I genuinely cannot imagine us together. Like, I cannot construct that image."
Priya laughed β not the laugh of someone who disagreed, more the laugh of someone who also found it difficult to construct that image and was relieved to have confirmation. "Yeah, I don't know why I even asked."
"Because you're chaotic," you said.
"Because I love you," she corrected.
You rolled your eyes and looked out the window and thought, very briefly and with no particular intention, that you couldn't remember the last time you had really looked at Michael. He was just always there. In the background of group photos, at the edge of gatherings, someone you acknowledged with the specific familiarity of people who share a social circle without sharing anything more direct. He was fine. He was whatever.
You forgot about it by the time you arrived.
You were the main organiser of the Halloween party, which meant that you took it significantly more seriously than anyone else involved, which meant that the decorating process had the specific chaos of someone with a vision trying to communicate that vision to people who did not share the urgency.
"The cobwebs go in the corner," you said, for the second time.
"They look fine here," said Jade, gesturing at a completely arbitrary location.
"They look fine there if we're not going for a theme, which we are"
Michael arrived with another group about forty minutes into setup, which added both more hands and more opinions, and the space immediately got louder. You were on a stepladder trying to get a paper skeleton to hang correctly when he walked in, and you registered his arrival with the peripheral attention of someone with a task β present, noted, irrelevant to what you were currently doing.
He looked at the stepladder situation and said nothing, which was exactly the interaction you expected.
The dynamic between you had always been like that β never hostile, never close, just this mild frequency of low-level teasing and eye rolls and the occasional exchange that was more pointed than it needed to be, both of you seeming vaguely amused by the other in a way neither of you would have described as warmth but that functioned as something adjacent to it. He had a way of looking at you when you were being serious that suggested he was privately finding it funnier than he was letting on, which was irritating, and you had been told by mutual friends that you did the same thing to him, which you disputed.
At some point during the decorating, someone started putting up the printed photos on the wall β a whole arrangement of everyone who was coming, styled like a suspect board from a thriller, names printed underneath. It had been your idea. You were proud of it.
Jade tried to stick your photo next to Jake's.
"Absolutely not," you said, removing it.
"It's not fun, it's a forecast, and I'm not doing that."
You replaced it elsewhere on the board without looking too carefully at what you were putting it next to, went back to the cobweb situation, and didn't notice until an hour later that Michael's photo had ended up beside yours through a combination of the board getting rearranged and nobody paying close attention.
You noticed, looked at it for a second, and went back to what you were doing.
Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.
The thing that delayed you was minor but cascading β one thing leading to another the way things do when you're trying to leave the house, and by the time you actually got out the door it was an hour later than you'd planned and you had spent a significant portion of that time genuinely considering just not going.
It was your party. You had to go.
You arrived with the boots finally on and the costume finally complete and the general energy of someone who had committed to the evening despite everything, and the first thing that happened when you walked through the door was that Jade saw you and said, loudly enough for several nearby people to hear: "Oh thank God, she looks incredible."
You did not object to this assessment.
The party was at the right temperature β not too early, not yet chaotic, that window of a couple of hours in when everyone has settled in and the noise is good and the lighting is doing exactly what Halloween lighting is supposed to do. You moved through it with the awareness of someone who organized this and was now monitoring it, which meant you were doing a slightly different thing than simply enjoying yourself, but that was fine. This was the deal you made.
The dice had been your idea.
It was a large foam cube, each side with a different rule, and one of the sides read no costume = one shot, which created exactly the level of low-stakes consequence you'd wanted. You circulated with it through groups, watching people roll, collecting the reactions that ranged from delight to performative protest.
Michael's friend group was, objectively, the worst costumed cluster in the room. The effort had been minimal. You arrived at them with the dice and the expression of someone about to deliver a verdict.
"Right," you said. "Everyone's drinking."
There was the collective protest you expected, and then Marcus β who was both Michael's close friend and yours, a piece of social geometry that had always been slightly convenient β looked at you and then looked at Michael with the expression of someone about to say something deliberate.
"Hold on," Marcus said. "Doesn't she look beautiful tonight?"
The question was directed at Michael with a specificity that was not accidental.
It was a short look, the kind that doesn't linger long enough to be called a look, but it was direct in a way that a politely deflective answer wouldn't have required.
"Yeah," he said. "She looks beautiful."
You were already handing someone the dice and you kept doing that, kept moving, kept your expression exactly where it had been, because processing that sentence in real time in front of the group that had just heard it was not something you were going to do visibly. You moved on to the next thing. You were hosting. There were other people to check on.
The time moving differently, the room warming, conversations extending past their natural length. You were circulating, talking to people, doing the thing you did at events you organised where you were present everywhere and fully nowhere.
And somehow Michael kept appearing in your orbit.
It was the kind of thing that was easy to dismiss individually and impossible to dismiss in accumulation. He was at the drinks table when you went to get something. He was near the playlist speaker when you went to ask someone to change the song. When you came out of the bathroom there was a moment where the door was being held by someone, and that someone was him, and he held it with a naturalness that suggested he had simply been passing and noticed, but he also hadn't simply been passing because he came back to the space he'd been standing in before, and you were aware of both of these things simultaneously.
He caught you looking at him once, maybe an hour into the night.
Neither of you acknowledged it.
But there was a half-second where the usual vague amusement in his expression was something else β more direct, less performed β and then it was the usual amusement again and you looked elsewhere and tried to remember what you had been walking toward.
The pirate conversation started because Marcus opened his mouth.
You were in a cluster of people and someone had made a comment about Halloween costumes and their historical accuracy and then Marcus had said, with the confidence of someone who had thought about this zero seconds: "Pirates are honestly kind of overrated as a costume choice."
You turned to look at him.
"Like, they're not that cool? Conceptually?"
"They literally controlled the sea," you said, with the energy of someone who was about to make a full case. "They stole, they built their own societies outside of any law, they were essentially ungovernable. Conceptually they're fascinating."
"She just said pirates were ungovernable," someone said, to general laughter.
"They were," you maintained.
And then Marcus, with exactly the delivery of someone who had been waiting for this "Michael says you already stole his heart, by the way."
The group's reaction was immediate β laughter, a few delighted sounds, the social current that runs through any group when something unexpectedly direct has been said.
It came out a second late, with the particular quality of laughter that is covering something, and you were aware of that quality even as you produced it. You made a face at Marcus that communicated you are the worst and then moved away from the cluster with the purposefulness of someone who had somewhere to be, and the somewhere was wherever your girlfriends were standing.
"Something just happened," you said, when you reached them.
"Explain it to me," you said. "Because I don't understand what's happening."
They exchanged a look that you catalogued without examining too closely.
"I think you might," Priya said.
"I don't," you said, firmly. "I genuinely don't."
At some point in the evening your pirate sword disappeared.
You didn't notice immediately, but then you noticed, and then you located it: Michael had it. He was doing nothing particularly dramatic with it, just holding it, occasionally brandishing it in your direction when you made eye contact with him across the room, with the expression of someone who was enjoying having something of yours and was in no hurry to return it.
"This sword?" He looked at it with theatrical consideration.
"There's only one sword."
"It's a pirate sword, not a..." you reached for it, he shifted it slightly out of reach with the ease of someone who had about four inches on you in height and knew it, and the interaction had the energy of the decorating stage of the evening β the mild, familiar irritation that was not actually irritation, that was something that used the grammar of irritation but meant something else.
He gave it back, eventually. Put it in your hand with a straightforwardness that meant your fingers were briefly in contact with his, just for a second, just the exchange, and then you had your sword back and were walking away and could not have explained why walking away required slightly more conscious effort than usual.
The Cupid problem arrived in the form of Jade and Simi, who had committed to their costumes fully and were using the foam arrows with an enthusiasm that suggested they were having the best night of anyone present.
You were talking to a group near the edge of the room when Simi appeared and raised the arrow with a theatrical squint, directing it at you and then β slowly β at Michael, who was nearby.
"If Cupid hits you both," Simi announced, to the group, "you have to kiss."
"Don't," you said immediately.
"You're so boring," Simi said cheerfully.
"I am not boring, I just don't need Cupid interference in my..."
Michael said it quietly. Not loudly, not to the group β it was more like thinking out loud, but with the specific volume of someone who intended to be heard by the person it concerned.
"Just maybe not here in front of everyone," he added.
There was a beat of silence from the people nearby who had caught it.
He was looking back at you with that expression β the one that wasn't quite the usual amusement, the one that was more direct β and you found that you had entirely lost track of what you had been saying before Simi appeared.
"I'm going to..." you gestured vaguely at nothing and walked toward Priya.
"What?" she said, reading your face.
"He just said..." you paused. "He said he'd kiss me. Just not in front of everyone."
Priya was quiet for a second.
"It means that's interesting," she said, with a look that you understood and that you were not prepared to engage with yet.
The lights out here were orange and reflected in the water, and some of the party sound was muffled out here, and it was you and Michael standing at the edge and it had happened in the way things happen at parties when you stop tracking exactly how you got somewhere.
"I think Cupid hit us, actually," he said.
The delivery was easy. Like he'd said it before in his head.
"You're still on that," you said.
"I'm still waiting," he said. "Just for the record."
You looked at him. Properly, for maybe the first time that night in a way that wasn't quick or peripheral or managed β just looked at him, in the Halloween lighting, with the noise of the party coming from inside and the water next to you.
And you thought, clearly and without a lot of drama: why not?
You thought about Jake for approximately half a second and then didn't think about him at all for the rest of the evening, which answered a question you hadn't formally asked.
The kiss was not what you expected, which was the most surprising thing about it, because you hadn't expected to want it and then you did and even then you had anticipated something impulsive and quick, the punctuation of a party moment. Instead it was slow. Genuinely slow, the kind that takes its time because the person kissing you has decided there's no reason to rush. His hand came to the side of your face with a lightness that was careful, and the kiss itself was gentle in a way that had nothing tentative about it β confident and slow and full of something that you didn't have an immediate name for.
You stayed in it longer than you planned.
When you finally pulled back it was with the full awareness that the chemistry you'd been experiencing was real and not constructed, and that this was inconvenient information to be processing at a Halloween party near a pool while wearing a pirate costume.
"Okay," you said, which was not very articulate.
He was looking at you with an expression that suggested he had come to similar conclusions and was also processing.
"I'm going back inside," you said.
The rest of the night proceeded in a way that made linear accounting difficult.
You danced with Priya. You did a round with the dice. You found yourself in a conversation about something you couldn't later reconstruct. And then somehow you were near Michael again, and then you weren't, and then you were, and it kept happening with the quality of things that are happening on purpose but that neither person is fully admitting is happening on purpose.
He kissed you again near the kitchen, briefly, when you were alone for thirty seconds between groups.
He kissed you again by the staircase, less briefly.
He found your hair and neck fascinating in a way that he was not subtle about β his face close, breathing in, and at one point he pulled back and asked, very seriously: "What perfume is that?"
"I'm not telling you," you said.
He looked genuinely affronted in the way of someone who has been denied something they consider reasonable. "That's not an answer."
He made a sound of mild protest and then instead of asking again he simply stayed close, his face near the side of your neck, and you understood that he had decided to memorize it another way and this was somehow worse and also better than if he had simply kept asking.
During one of the later kisses, standing in the space between the back hallway and the main room, his hands moved β slowly, with clear intention, testing β lower than you were comfortable with for the context and the night.
He pulled back immediately, no argument, no hesitation, just a smile that was rueful and warm and completely unembarrassed about having tried. "Sorry," he said.
"It's fine," you said, because it was β the way he'd stopped, the way he wasn't making it a thing, was part of the same quality as the first kiss. Something that knew how to wait.
The party wound down the way parties do β the energy shifting, people leaving in clusters, the music dropping to background. Michael found you near the end.
The goodbye kiss was brief and thorough and left you slightly unable to account for the next thirty seconds, and then he was gone with his group and you were standing in the entrance of the house with the remnants of decorations around you.
Priya appeared at your shoulder.
"Michael Olise," she said.
She started laughing β the deep, helpless laugh of someone who had been storing this all night β and you lasted approximately four seconds before you were laughing too, the two of you standing in the hallway while Jade and Simi came in from the other room and saw your faces and started laughing before they even knew the specific reason.
"We told you," Jade said. "We always tell you."
"You have never told me anything about Michael," you said, with complete accuracy.
"We told you about men in general," Simi said. "The principle transfers."
You picked up a bin bag and started collecting things from the floor and tried very hard not to smile in a way that gave too much away, which was completely unsuccessful, and the girls knew it, and the evening settled into the comfortable aftermath of something unexpected having happened that was good rather than complicated.
Something had started tonight.
You didn't have a name for it yet. You weren't sure you needed one yet.
But his laugh was still in your head and his cologne was still somehow in the air and the pirate sword was leaning against the wall where you'd left it, and the photo on the suspect board β yours, next to his β was still where it had ended up, and you looked at it once while you were cleaning and then looked away and continued doing what you were doing.
Some things could be examined later.
